2019 Seymour Biography Lecture: Public Life, Private Man: Writing the Biography of Alfred Deakin

National Library of Australia

Public Life, Private Man: Writing the Biography of Alfred Deakin The core challenge of political biography is to answer the question, ‘why politics?’. What inner need did it fulfil, and what emotional and psychological resources were mustered for its accomplishment? These questions are harder to answer for Alfred Deakin than for less complex political leaders. Deakin was a gifted orator and successful politician who was a father of federation and Australia’s most significant prime minister until the Second World War. Yet he was also a deeply private man, with an intense intellectual and spiritual life, who wondered often if politics was the right path for him. The 2019 Seymour Biography Lecture was delivered by emeritus professor and political historian Judith Brett, who will discussed the tensions and synergies between Deakin’s public and private lives. In 2017, Brett published The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, the final addition to her trilogy of books on the history of Australian Liberals. The first full-length study of Deakin in more than 50 years, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin went on to win the 2018 National Biography Award. Brett’s prior publications include Robert Menzies' Forgotten People, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard and this year’s From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting. The Seymour Biography Lecture is supported by Dr John Seymour and Mrs Heather Seymour AO.