Margaret Whitlam: A Biography

This was published 13 years ago

Margaret Whitlam: A Biography

Soon after Gough Whitlam won government in 1972, Margaret Whitlam agreed to write a weekly column for Woman's Day magazine, in the form of a diary. Predictably, her decision was attacked. Some thought her tone was beneath the dignity of a prime minister's wife. Others were outraged by her profiting from her position.

Whitlam was not deterred. Two years later, when she was earning professional rates as host of her own hour-long TV program, there were renewed complaints prompting her to give the TV earnings to charity.

These and other controversies surface in Susan Mitchell's biography. What does the public want from a prime minister's wife? Should her role be mainly official, as a courteous and decorative adjunct to her husband on public occasions? Or should she be "one of us", a link between the national leader and the people? If, like Margaret Whitlam, who was obliged to give up her own career (Whitlam trained as a social worker), how should she use her time and energies?


Whitlam saw her role as something more than "one of us". She accepted a full share of committee work and public appearances in aid of charities. Beyond that, in writing her column - often a narrative of the great occasions in official overseas trips - she believed she was giving vicarious experience to the less fortunate: "I came to represent all the ungainly people, the too-tall ones, the too-fat ones, and the housebound, as I had been, who'd never get the chance to go to China or Buckingham Palace, and who experienced it all through me."

There's a surprising lack of self-awareness in this statement. Why must her quite legitimate pleasure in travelling with her husband, and writing about it, be transformed into a gift to the deprived? No doubt generously meant, it sounds patronising. Yet the dilemma of being an adjunct to a public figure is real; and time has not greatly changed it. Today it is shared by the accident-prone Cherie Blair and by the reclusive professor of chemistry who is the husband of Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel.

During his time as prime minister and in the years following the dismissal of his government in 1975, Gough Whitlam has deservedly retained considerable public respect for the quality of his intelligence and the range of ideas he brought to his office. The combination of his dignified reserve with his wife's warmth and informality has done them both credit. Over the years a great deal has been written about this fortunate marriage.

What is left for a biographer? Mitchell did not have an easy task. She makes some attempt to seriously analyse the role of the PM's wife, by placing Margaret Whitlam in historical context and reviewing moments in political history, including the dismissal of 1975, from the wife's perspective.

Interviews give some new material. It is mostly trivia, but trivia can be revealing, provided it is well chosen. There are few rewards in Woman's Day: no one needs to know that at Windsor Castle, Whitlam felt a little too warm at night and had to remove "the pink silk comforter and one of the cream blankets from [her] downy bed".

Whatever Margaret Whitlam's shortcomings as a writer, her words do not drop to the depths of Susan Mitchell's banal and tasteless glimpses of her subject's sex life. "Meanwhile it had been open season in the Whitlam bedroom and Margaret was pregnant again." Not a well-chosen metaphor, even by tabloid standards. Mitchell's account of the Whitlam honeymoon wouldn't win Britain's Bad Sex Prize but it might get her a contract from Mills and Boon.

In a biography that draws heavily on Margaret Whitlam's early diaries, as well as her journalism and interviews given to the author, it is not always easy to distinguish point of view and tone of voice. It is clearly Whitlam's voice in a testy diary entry about her role while travelling with Gough in the 1974 election campaign: "... ironing the Shirt of the Day. Good Girl." But is it the author or Whitlam, or both, suggesting with a certain coolness that Gough "doesn't mind Margaret doing other things so long as his life isn't disrupted"?

In a splendid range of period illustrations, the photographs and endpapers in this handsome book do more justice to the Whitlams than does the gossipy text. In giving the book design its due, I feel like the gallery visitor who, confronted by a painting, said "Love the frame".

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