Mungo MacCallum's Australian political anecdotes

Mungo MacCallum - the noted satirist and political correspondent - has collected the best of our political anecdotes from European settlement to the 1990s. In doing so he presents a wry and engaging snapshot of the key political players who, while upbraiding one another and generally outraging the electorate, have stamped a unique kind of humour and larrikinism on our political life. There are 315 anecdotes in Mungo MacCallum's collection, most of them dealing with national politics and all drawn from published sources - histories, memoirs, documents and biographies. The anthology opens with a graphic account of the landing at Botany Bay in 1788 and closes with an indomitable Paul Keating in 1993. These are anecdotes about all the legendary political figures - Phillip, MacArthur, Wentworth, Parkes, Deakin, Cook, Lang, Hughes, Menzies, Curtin, Chifley, Evatt, Whitlam, Gorton, McMahon, Wran, Bjelke-Petersen, and Hawke. No other collection of anecdotes offers such an historical coverage of our politics. Along with less familiar witticisms, skirmishes, and aphoristic barbs, we are offered all the famous or notorious events that have long amused readers - Governor Bligh putatively cowering under his bed; Billy Hughes incensed by the Rockhampton Egg; countless brilliant quips from the Little Digger; Ben Chifley refusing to don a dinner suit in London; Evatt and the Molotov Letter; Gough Whitlam bucketing Paul Hasluck on the floor of the House; immortal transcripts of Bjelke-Petersen's pronouncements; and Keating playing Placido Domingo. This is a collection for all lovers and loathers of Canberra and its political culture. It will inform and entertain students of our politics and general readers, especially those who have always suspected that politics is less lofty and altruistic than is often claimed.