A premier's challenge

Susan Wyndham writing in the Sydney Morning Herald , May 3, 2008

THREE weeks after his election as premier of NSW in 1995, Bob Carr spent Easter at home in Maroubra with his wife, Helena. He remembers it well: "Beautiful weather, autumn sunlight coming in the window, a diary free of commitments, nothing to do but read and go and snorkel at Clovelly for a break … I wasn't overwhelmed by the job because I'd spent seven years preparing for it."
What did he read that long weekend as the future of the state pressed at his front door? He settled into Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert's 19th-century portrait of a bourgeois woman's adultery, romantic delusion, social pretension and - a phrase that lodged in his mind - "the general mediocrity of life". So began a new phase in both his political and his intellectual life.
Books have been Carr's compensation for what he considered a crummy 1960s education, heavy on woodwork rather than Latin. As a history undergraduate, journalist and younger politician, his reading was, by his present standards, "lazy - dominated by current affairs, political biography, American politics and contemporary fiction, often disappointing. A constant, nagging self-criticism was that I should read more of the canon and serious works. But I didn't know where to start, and they all seemed so clunky and unfriendly, those classics."

During his premiership, Carr found himself by "an interesting psychological quirk" making a start on the classics as a respite from the job. One Christmas holiday he travelled with a volume of Proust. With a few hours free on a weekend he would sink into another hefty work of literature. Critics saw this preoccupation with books as an effete distraction, fiddling while NSW burned. But for Carr it was mental relaxation, a source of sanity and wisdom.

For the rest of the story and for more about Bob Carr's book being published this week go to the SMH website.