the 10 best books about the political campaign trail, chosen by experts
- Written by Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
Phantasmagorical policy promises, TV meltdowns, gonzo journalists … political campaigns were once the stuff of passion and high drama. We asked 10 experts to nominate their favourite book about the hustings hustle.
The Victory: the inside story of the takeover of Australia – Pamela Williams
Allen & Unwin
In 1998, independent MP Pauline Hanson was Australia’s most powerful alt-right populist. The Ipswich fish shop owner was dismissed as a bigot by the political elites, but backed by working-class voters unhappy with the major parties’ pro-globalisation, immigration and Indigenous policies.
Hanson launched One Nation’s first federal campaign after its shock 11-seat win in the 1998 Queensland election. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Margo Kingston, who defied mainstream pundits by arguing Hanson was a serious political force, was there for the ride.
Off The Rails is a taut, searingly honest, front-row account of the bizarre national campaign run by Hanson and her ambitious spin-doctor David Oldfield – a slow-moving trainwreck of ill-conceived policies, televised meltdowns, internecine betrayals and colourful interlopers (most notably, satirist Pauline Pantsdown) – in which Hanson “was completely out of her depth”.
Kingston’s analysis of class, gender and power in Australian democracy, and the media’s role within it, is a rollicking, provocative and incisive read. Hanson cut Kingston off after reading the book – but they reunited in my 2016 SBS documentary about Hanson’s return to federal parliament.
Anna Broinowski, Senior Lecturer, School of Art, Communication and English, University of Sydney
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 – Hunter S. Thompson
Goodreads
No book before or since has quite captured the adrenaline, energy and artifice of politics like Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Ethically, the book is a conundrum. Whatever rules of journalism it didn’t break, it bent. Yet it did so to brilliant journalistic effect, exposing and enlivening a shadowy process right at the heart of democratic practice: the election campaign.
Following the hopes of George McGovern from the Democratic primaries into a dreadful presidential race against the Republican Richard Nixon, Thompson pioneered a style of hyper-subjective reportage that somehow conveyed a larger objective truth through a series of humorous and gratuitous sub-stories.
For me, as a young reader fascinated by politics and journalism, it was a window into a world that was at once glamorous, squalid and thoroughly compelling. Peppered with Ralph Steadman’s creatively seditious illustrations, Thompson’s groundbreaking book changed political journalism and opened our eyes to the tricks, skulduggery and dark arts of high-stakes election campaigning.
Mark Kenny, Professor, Australian Studies Institute, Australian National University
Bulldozed: Scott Morrison’s fall and Anthony Albanese’s rise – Niki Savva
Scribe Publications
Despite the occasional kind sentence about Anthony Albanese, this book is really about Niki Savva’s conviction that Scott Morrison was a terrible prime minister, all ambition without substance. I imagine she was writing in hot anger when news of Morrison’s bizarre secret appropriation of five ministries became public. Then her anger hardened to ice.
Savva arranges facts precisely to condemn Morrison as an incompetent, controlling, chauvinist bully. Her credentials as a proper liberal conservative, with years in Peter Costello’s and John Howard’s offices, give her deep access, especially in the Coalition. The interview material is candid, attributed, and damning. This is so for the men (like Josh Frydenberg) who had thought Morrison a friend, but more intensely for the women, cut out of the loop by the blokey Christian dynamic of Morrison and his team.
Savva shows great journalism can be objective without pretending to be balanced. Her focused, feminist fury fries a hollow leader.
Robert Phiddian, Professor of English, Flinders University
My Hair is Pink Under This Veil – Rabina Khan
Goodreads
In politics, I’m not a woman – not of colour, not from any religion. To be taken seriously as a political scientist, I’ve learned to distance all my identities from my work. But Rabina Khan’s campaign memoir is a poignant reminder of visibility: not as a burden but as power.
Grounded in her experiences as a British-Bangladeshi Muslim woman in local politics, it is as sharp and subversive as the incident that gave the book its title. (Her answer, during a 2015 mayoral campaign, to a non-Muslim, white man who asked her hair colour – it’s actually black.)
Khan boldly affronts racism, sexism, and narrow ideas of leadership – while trying to reconcile her faith with British culture. She shows campaigning isn’t just strategy – it’s survival through conviction, without cutting off parts of who you are. The most radical campaigns begin in living rooms, mosques, and markets, with those who dare to be fully seen and are determined to create a fairer world.
Intifar Chowdhury, Lecturer in Government, Flinders University
The Making of an Australian Prime Minister – Laurie Oakes and David Solomon
Amazon
In 1972, two Canberra press gallery correspondents, Laurie Oakes and David Solomon, combined to document the epoch-making election of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government. In The Making of an Australian Prime Minister (1973), the authors chronicle Labor’s turbulent renaissance under Whitlam’s leadership from 1967 onwards. The 1972 campaign, though, is the book’s star.
It was a landmark campaign in the dawning of the modern political era, from Labor’s use of market research (rather than relying on gut instinct) to the transformative exploitation of television as a campaign medium, to the presidential-style focus on the leader. Still, this campaign was light years from today’s small target, tightly choreographed, mostly soulless contests.
Whitlam’s launch speech contained a phantasmagorical 200 specific policy promises. The wider campaign had a raw, rambunctious excitement and messianic aura centred on the paradoxically cerebral Gough.
On the other side, Billy McMahon, the Liberal’s last-gasp, post-war prime minister, was a trier but out of his depth. A delightful footnote is that his campaign team included a young, ambitious John Howard, who manually operated McMahon’s clunky auto-cue machine, another innovation on the hustings that had the unfortunate effect of depriving his policy address of any hint of spontaneity.
Paul Strangio, Emeritus Professor of Politics, Monash University
The Boys on the Bus – Timothy Crouse
Goodreads
A young newspaper reporter, Tim Crouse, had just arrived at Rolling Stone when its publisher Jann Wenner sent his new star, Hunter S. Thompson, the self-styled Doctor of Gonzo journalism, to cover the 1972 American presidential campaign. Wenner needed Crouse to “babysit” Thompson, who returned the favour by encouraging Crouse to write about the journalists writing about the campaign.
Thompson’s dispatches showed how lively and readable political journalism could be. Initially sniffy about him, the established journalists relished – and resented – the freedom with which he described politicians.
Crouse wrote the first book-length account of how the boys on the campaign bus went about their work. It was not a pretty picture. There were some girls on the bus, such as Connie Chung and Sarah McClendon, who did some “of the toughest pieces on the Nixon campaign” but they were bullied in a “male chauvinist profession” that indulged in petty turf wars while willingly reporting what politicians said even when they knew they were lying.
Oh, and they missed the significance of the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up by the White House, which eventually led to an American president resigning for the first time.
Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University
The Making of the President 1960 – Theodore H. White
Goodreads
The Making of the President 1960 laid the foundation for election books; it became a bestseller, won Theodore White a Pulitzer Prize and was followed by three more campaign trail books, covering the elections of Lyndon Johnson and the two victories of Richard Nixon.
1960 was a very close election, in which John F. Kennedy beat Nixon narrowly – and, it is sometimes claimed, by illegitimate vote counting in Texas and Illinois. In his introduction, White warns politics is always uncertain and reporters “must make their judgements in haste on the basis of today’s report by instinct and experience shaped years before in other circumstances”.
The book is important as a reminder of a time when the lines between Democrats and Republicans were far more blurred than they are today. White’s judicious style would be replaced by the gonzo journalism of Thompson and Norman Mailer, but his books remain models of campaign reporting.
Dennis Altman, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow and Professorial Fellow, Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University
The Battle for Bennelong: the adventures of Maxine McKew, aged 50something – Margot Saville
Simon & Schuster
Bennelong has long been the very definition of a safe Liberal seat. Yet the last two times Labor has won government since 2007, they have won Bennelong. Bennelong’s most famous MP was former Prime Minister John Howard, who held the seat since 1974. But in 2007 (the “Kevin07” election), former ABC journalist Maxine McKew announced she was running against him for Labor.
It was a David and Goliath contest, irresistible drama for political tragics. Bennelong was the Holy Grail for the ALP, Margot Saville writes, “not just because they need the seat, but because they want to grind Howard’s face into the dirt”.
Saville’s chatty account of the campaign reveals the drama of a safe seat becoming a genuine, thrilling contest. Deftly moving between national debate and its local impact, Saville observes the relentless schedule of events, door-knocking and letter-boxing that comprise political campaigning. By the end, McKew’s hard-earned victory is sweet, even if it was short-lived.
Michelle Arrow, Professor of History, Macquarie University
Authors: Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra 
