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BOOK REVIEW
| Michael Roe, Albert Ogilvie and Stymie Gaha: World-Wise Tasmanians, Parliament of Tasmania, Hobart, 2008. pp. x + 274. $40.00 cloth.
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| As the title suggests, Michael Roe's book concerns itself with the careers of two Tasmanian identities, both state Labor politicians in the 1930s, but in an international context. Its chief focus is the 1935 trip to Europe made by Albert Ogilvie, as Tasmanian Premier, and John Gaha, as the Minister for Health. It reproduces verbatim the subsequent Record of Official Visit published in 1936 by the Parliament of Tasmania and rarely seen since. There is much of local interest contained in this account of two strange bedfellows – Ogilvie, a locally-born and educated lawyer, conscious of his Irish Catholic heritage; Gaha, a cosmopolitan and well-travelled medical practitioner, born in New South Wales of Lebanese parents, educated in Ireland, a Tasmanian by adoption from his mid-twenties. The latter remained self-confident, even insouciant, throughout his long political life in Hobart and Canberra (Gaha remained a parliamentarian until 1963 at the age of nearly seventy). The former, the more predominant of the pair both personally and politically, seemed perpetually unsettled and accompanied by controversy; driven by a compulsion to demonstrate his superiority, which he appeared to do with relative ease within his small community (Ogilvie became the Empire's youngest King's Council, in his mid-thirties). Premier Ogilvie often spoke in the late-1930s of Tasmania having cast off its 'inferiority complex'. Perhaps the comment denotes a personal transformation, in part brought about by the 1935 odyssey, which Roe recounts and analyses with his characteristic perception. This account of the strange partnership of Gaha and Ogilvie is of greater significance than one of two provincials loose on their European Grand Tour. The vitality of the 'devil's decade' ensured that, but so too did the quality of their observations following visits to Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Ogilvie's ambitions and prospects were also well beyond those of the island-state and this lends national, even international, significance to the unveiling of the neglected 1936 Record. |
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