B.A. Santamaria, Aeolian Australian

Last September a new biography of Bob Santamaria, Santamaria: A Most Unusual Man by Gerard Henderson, was launched by Tony Abbott, who was then Prime Minister. Abbott said:

B.A. Santamaria has been dead for seventeen years, held no public office, and claimed to have failed in all his principal endeavours … Why is a long-dead “failure” still fascinating? Why did our nation’s leaders regularly seek his counsel …? If his life was a failure, it was a magnificent failure that changed and improved our country and hundreds, if not thousands, of its leaders … He [was] the extra-parliamentary conservative conscience of both parties, upbraiding Labor for its socialism and the Coalition for its heartlessness—and why not, as political parties, no less than individuals, are often improved when someone they respect calls them to account …

Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, called “Bob” by his school friends, was born in August 1915 in Melbourne, the first of the six children…