On Being a Co-Author

When Rossini died some 140 years ago, Verdi decided that the least he could do for his hero was to write a requiem for him. He talked it over with other composers, and they decided to co-author it, to co-compose it.

They finished the job, but Verdi was so dissatisfied with the result that he refused to allow it to be performed in his lifetime. It was not performed until about 100 years after his death—in Manhattan.

That is the story of many attempts at co-authorship. Peter Costello is no Verdi or Rossini. Nor am I! But you still may think it remarkable that we ever managed to co-write these memoirs—and allow them to be published!

The Costello Memoirs is in part a personal statement, an autobiography, and good autobiographies—not celebrity autobiographies written by ghosts—good autobiographies are almost always the heart-felt work of one person only. In some circumstances co-authorship is possible, however difficult and touchy. Not perhaps as difficult as, say, co-authoring a poem or co-composing a concerto. That’s almost impossible. But difficult and rare just the same.

But The Costello Memoirs is not only autobiography. It is also political history, or journalism and polemic—where co-authorship often works well.

A year or two ago I co-authored a biography of the economist and Quadrant editor Heinz Arndt (with Selwyn Cornish and Peter Drake). It is a life-and-times story—not unlike The Costello Memoirs. The co-authors of that biography collaborated easily. That emboldened me to take on collaboration with Peter Costello.

How did it happen? The story of the book begins early this year when several of Peter’s friends, colleagues and family, including me but more particularly his wife (my daughter) Tanya, were urging him to place on record his account of his momentous years in public life from, say, the dramatic or melodramatic Dollar Sweets case through to the electoral catastrophe of November 24, 2007. It would be an insider’s story and a contribution, a major one, to political literature. Louise Adler of Melbourne University Publishing added her authority and enthusiasm to the idea.

But Peter wasn’t so sure. He felt a certain modesty. He had written many speeches and addresses over the years of several thousand words but never anything longer. He had never written a book. To turn out 140,000 words in a few months was a big ask.

This is where I came in. Louise Adler thought I should be able to help. I had written a few books. I had spent some years in state and federal politics and knew something of the splendours and miseries of parliamentary and ministerial life. I was an admirer of Peter Costello. We trusted each other. So we talked over Louise Adler’s suggestion and decided to give it a go.

We had first to settle on some ground rules. I do not mean anything signed and sealed. You don’t need formality when you have trust. But we agreed on a rough division of labour, a timetable, and a program of meetings in Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra whenever we needed more than telephones, faxes and e-mails.

We soon fixed on the main themes. That was the easy part. Then we wrote, discussed, debated, edited and re-wrote each chapter as we worked our way through the narrative. You will be able to pick out a paragraph here and there and say that was obviously written by Costello and that by Coleman—especially if you have an ear for that sort of thing, but it won’t always be easy.

The co-authorship worked. Peter had few complaints about my part in the final draft. And I did not even consider quibbling about what Peter had to say about his term as a governor of the IMF, or amending what he had to say about personal matters. These are his memoirs, not mine.

I did not want to emulate that famous German scholar who edited the prose works of Goethe, the great poet. At one point in one essay, Goethe wrote: “With her, for the first time in my life, I really fell in love.” The scholar immediately added this Teutonic footnote: “Here Goethe was in error.”

There were some unresolvable differences of opinion. I am a true-believer federalist who does not share Peter’s centralist hostility to the states. I also have more reservations about the republic than he has: I am a paid-up member of Les Murray’s republican branch of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy. But these and other points of continuing disagreement are small details in the big picture the book paints—the Age of Prosperity and Peter Costello’s role in it. I had no wish or reason to press these disagreements.

In any case he was persuasive enough for me to reconsider my own positions on some matters. For example, Peter supported the Reconciliation Walk and an Apology to the Aborigines for their dispossession and related grievances while I was sceptical about the lasting value of such gestures.

But I came to see merit in his argument that some symbolic gestures such as an Apology have their own potency, especially when combined with practical measures, such as the Northern Territory Intervention. I commend chapter 11 to you, the one titled “From Mabo to Mal”.

I should add I have read with some bemusement headlines and stories in the press about poison pens and revenge attacks. I’m here to say that this is tendentious, wrong-headed and wrong.

As a co-author I know what I wanted to do and I know what Peter wanted to do—that is, state facts, correct errors, and present Peter’s point of view—fairly and where possible in a good-humoured way. Any poison or revengefulness is in the eye or the mind or the pen of the beholder.

There were indeed some occasions in early drafts where I expressed myself more caustically than Peter thought just and reasonable—in judgments on the government’s defeat in November last year. He persuaded me to temper my language. And please note that whatever criticisms the book makes of John Howard, it is also generous to him, some may say over-generous. For example, in an interview quoted in the book, Peter Costello describes him as—“with the possible exception of Sir Robert Menzies”—Australia’s greatest prime minister.

There were some other difficulties. Peter and I had some problems with prose style. Politicians and writers are chalk and cheese. I used to be a politician but I have spent twenty years purging myself.

A good writer is allergic to obscure language, but a good politician knows that there will be times when obscurity, whether instinctive or calculated, will be useful. It helps buy time and keep options open until the right moment. It is sometimes an essential tool. You get into the habit of it.

This sometimes made for a certain tension, but Peter Costello, in prose as in politics, is not predictable. His style—and fluency—changed during the writing of the book. In the beginning he would provide notes—rough, detailed notes—which I would add to other raw material and transmute into a chapter or two. But he quickly developed the writer’s knack. He soon began delivering chapters that called for minimum input from the co-author.

There’s no doubt that history will judge Peter Costello as a Treasurer rather than as a stylist. But in the course of our co-authorship he became a writer, a good one. He will not be as diffident as he once was when he signs up with Louise Adler for the next volume of his memoirs, whether they be about federal politics … or some other calling. And he won’t be looking for a co-author.

A couple of weeks ago when we were launching this book in Canberra, one critic—the novelist and clairvoyant Thomas Keneally—prophesied that The Costello Memoirs will not be read in 300 years’ time. He may be right. But in the meantime I recommend it to you. Peter and I are proud of this book. We await your sentence.

Peter Coleman delivered this speech at a Quadrant dinner in Sydney on October 20. Peter Costello also spoke at the dinner. The Costello Memoirs was published by Melbourne University Press in September.