Bernard Cohen’s satirical novel The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies (2013) begins shortly before the 1996 election with the titular character stepping ‘through a breach in time’ to help his successors win government. But while John Howard’s double-breasted jackets and headland speeches initially soothe this ‘large and benevolent plasmic entity’, the revenant Menzies soon becomes frustrated by the emptiness and the clichés of 1990s politics. He breaks out of the parliamentary corridors to lumber across an Australia he barely recognises, becoming ever more gigantic and spectral – pursued all the way by a writer trying to wrestle him onto the page.
The Menzies Watershed: Liberalism, anti-communism, continuities 1943–1954 by Zachary Gorman
Melbourne University Press, $50 hb, 288 pp
Menzies versus Evatt: The great rivalry of Australian politics by Anne Henderson
Connor Court Publishing, $34.95 pb, 235 pp
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