Menzies Before the Liberal Party

After a brilliant career at the Melbourne bar in the 1920s and a period as Victoria’s Attorney-General, Robert Gordon Menzies eventually became the most towering federal parliamentarian ever seen in Australian politics. But until now, few books, even including Allan Martin’s magisterial two-volume biography (1993, 1999), have dealt in any length or clarity with Menzies’s childhood, personality and early adulthood.

The Young Menzies explores the formative period of Menzies’s life, when his personal and political beliefs, which helped make modern Australia, were being moulded. A number of contributors to this fine collection examine the context and origins of the ideas and principles that Menzies later put into powerful political practice when he returned to the prime ministership in 1949. It was these principles, Menzies claimed, to which he attempted to adhere for his sixteen more years leading Australia’s governing Liberal-Country Party coalition.

This review appeared…