Treachery

• For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
• The latest instalment, Nemesis, dealing with the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years, is the fourth of these series since the pioneering Labor in Power screened in 1993 chronicling the Hawke-Keating era.
• The Howard Years (2008) and The Killing Season (2015) followed examining respectively the Howard and Rudd-Gillard governments.
• By contrast, The Killing Season and Nemesis focus predominantly on the leadership wars that blighted Australian politics between 2007 and 2022.
• The most striking takeaway from Nemesis is that the Coalition’s decade in office from 2013 to 2022 was a time of abject irresponsibility.

The Abbott years

• It was a catalogue of swingeing cuts and broken promises (Abbott had pledged no cuts to health or education during the 2013 election campaign).
• The Abbott government never really recovered.
• Chastened by that result, Abbott then caused incredulity among colleagues by proclaiming that “good government begins today”.
• According to Turnbull, Abbott did not welcome the approach, telling him “to fuck off”.

The Turnbull years

• The public were relieved to see the back of Abbott and welcomed enthusiastically the ostensibly progressive Turnbull.
• Attorney-general in the government, George Brandis, refers to the Faustian bargain Turnbull had made to win the prime ministership.
• Dutton, the right-wing hard man who Turnbull scathingly describes as “a thug”, challenged for the leadership, losing relatively narrowly.
• A revelation about events during that febrile week is that Turnbull considered heading off his opponents by calling an election.
• The episode ends with Turnbull offering another pungent character assessment, this time of his successor: “duplicitous”.

The Morrison years

• It errs towards generosity to Morrison, not fully capturing why his leadership became a byword for inauthenticity, a prime minister whose obsession with the theatre of politics consistently trumped substance.
• The episode recalls many of the notorious statements made by Morrison, which by suggesting he was evading responsibility, was a bully or lacked empathy corroded his public image, especially among women voters.
• Asked about the comments, Morrison admits to poor choices of words.
• Nemesis shows that the COVID pandemic was both a blessing and curse for the Morrison government.
• Morrison then expended dwindling political capital by fruitlessly pursuing religious rights protections, causing ructions with Liberal moderates.
• We are left with the suspicion that once again Morrison is bending the truth.

A decade of banality and pettiness

• Participants in the documentary draw on classical allusions in making sense of the chaos.
• We are told, for instance, that the leadership feud between Abbott and Turnbull was Shakespearean.
• Yet what Nemesis exposes is the banality of these events and the pettiness of the actors.
• The post-Menzies Liberal triumvirate of Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon were respectively overwhelmed by the office, reckless and pygmy like.

Paul Strangio received funding from the Australian Research Council in the past.

• In the storeroom of a square-towered château in Burgundy, my genial hosts gestured towards a large, wooden chest of drawers.
• I pulled open a compartment and began sorting through bundles of old papers – house records from the 18th and 19th centuries.
• I was there, in 2015, on the trail of Théodore Leschenault, a botanist who had travelled to Australia in the years 1800 to 1803 with the expedition of discovery led by Nicolas Baudin.
• There was a register detailing his divorce from his young wife Marguerite due to their “incompatible temperaments”.

A collecting frenzy

• Sociable by nature, with a head of blond curls, he came from a wealthy legal family and had been imprisoned during the French Revolution.
• A child of the Enlightenment, with an anti-religious and empirical cast of mind, he hoped to forge a career as a botanist.
• When Leschenault went ashore for the first time on the Australian coastline in June 1801, at Geographe Bay in the south-west, he immediately went into a collecting frenzy, picking up so many shells, pebbles and plants he couldn’t carry them all back to the boat.
• Over the next two years, Leschenault collected thousands of plant and animal specimens as the expedition explored three sides of the continent.

Colonisation and slavery

• Some of the most unexpected passages in the new chapters relate to slavery and the effects of colonisation.
• While on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, he learnt about the fate of the island’s original Guanche inhabitants – which gave him reason for concern.
• Later, on Mauritius, Leschenault directly addresses moral questions around slavery.
• Perhaps they linger in some storeroom, awaiting their moment to re-emerge into the light …

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