Here is an excerpt that I happen to like because I have met several of the ex Prime Ministers referred to in this paragraph.... But the action is not about these guys. It is set in the near future. And boy, is it dark!
You have to consider what sort of Prime Ministers we had in the seventies and eighties. Now they were identities. Gough Whitlam - so enraptured and radical that he outraged half the nation to the point of civil uprising, and moved the other half to a fervour of worship so profound they deify him to this day. And Malcolm Fraser, the man who toppled him - conspiring to freeze Parliament and then plotting with the Governor-General to depose his rival, the greatest constitutional crisis of the century. The nerve that took. The cunning. And the Bob Hawke, a raucous cockatoo of a man, a squawking dwarf with charisma to burn - and anyway, how could you not love a PM who once held the record for downing a yard glass of beer? And then finally, Paul Keating, the arch manipulator, an oily, stylish, backroom brawler dressed in designer suits, with a mouth that was both patrician and straight from the sewer. A man who was capable of the sneering remark that his own country was 'the arse-end of the world. And meaning it.
