The Victorian Premiers: 1856-2006 edited by Paul Strangio and Bryan Costar (Secondhand Book)

SECONDHAND BOOK – EX-LIBRARY

There have been 44 premiers in Victoria’s history, from ‘Honest’ William Haines in 1856 to Steve Bracks 150 years later. This is their story – a compelling journey through a turbulent, occasionally anarchic, political landscape.

The fascinating cast of characters includes: The demagogic Graham Berry, whose Titanic struggle against the colony’s plutocratic upper house ignited the ‘mob’ – and fears that Victoria was descending into civil war; Tommy Bent, the roguish ‘can do’ premier whose development enthusiasms were unhindered by probities of office; the bohemian Tom Hollway, who conducted the State’s affairs from his suite in the Windsor Hotel; the ‘accidental’ leader Henry Bolte, who became Victoria’s longest serving premier; and Jeff Kennett, the larrikin metropolitan who turned the State into a neo-liberal laboratory in the 1990s.

The biographical and political portraits cover many of the most dramatic episodes in Victoria’s history: the precocious development of democracy in a fledgling colony turned upside down by gold fever; the bank crashes of the 1890s; the police strike of 1923; the great Labor split of the 1950s; the hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1967; and the social democratic adventurism of the 1980s, the Labor decade, and the financial collapses which brought it to a shuddering halt.

This carefully researched and engagingly written book will leave the reader in no doubt that politics in the ‘Garden State’ has seldom been sedate and its premiers rarely predictable.

Specifications:

Condition: Good – ex-library book, plastic wrapped, contains library labelling/stamps.

Publisher: The Federation Press

Year: 2006

Format: Hardback, with dust jacket

Pages: 418pp

ISBN: 9781862876019

$20.00

1 in stock