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WHAT SOME REVIEWERS SAID
“Summers’ is the most substantial and detailed work with, for example, the fullest blow-by-blow explanation of Bill Hayden’s slide from power.”
Bob Carr (then a journalist, currently Premier of New South Wales), The Bulletin, April 12, 1983
“Perhaps that was where the intuitions of a woman went to the heart of the matter. Anne Summers perceived the direction in which the river of our public life was flowing, and had no difficulties in giving an account of what she saw.”
Manning Clark, The Age Monthly Review, July 1983
“Read Anne Summers if you want to know all that happened.”
David Barnett (Malcolm Fraser’s press secretary), The Age, April 6, 1983
“… the best and most perceptive analysis of the 1983 elections, how Malcolm Fraser lost and Bob Hawke won his mandate for reconciliation.”
The Australian Financial Review, March 29, 1983
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EXCERPT:
"On election night as the votes were counted the tension in the Labor ranks was insidious. The campaign trail confidence of party officials became uncertainty and fear of last-minute miscalculation, or gross betrayal by the voters. The early figures were encouraging of Labor, but the results were slow to be posted. Labor officials receiving telephone reports from scrutineers at polling booths were at least an hour in front of the results being posted on the huge board in the National Tally Room at Canberra’s showground. Even with these on-the-spot reports the outcome was tantalisingly slow. For more than an hour Labor sat on eight seats, then nine. Ten. The eleventh seat refused to fall until just before 11pm. Labor’s pollster Rod Cameron of ANOP suddenly called fifteen seats. But it was another hour before the official figures confirmed this and Labor could begin to claim victory. Hawke watched the results in his room at the Lakeside hotel and went to the ABC Studio to a small dignified pres conference to thank Australians for his victory before going to a tumultuous welcome at the National Tally Room.
In Melbourne the tension amongst the Liberals was similarly enervating. For them the waiting was different. They were waiting for the polls to be wrong, waiting for evidence of an election-day miracle. They too waited for the eleventh seat to fall. Fraser would not concede until he was actually beaten. The planned party for campaign workers faded into nothing in the wake of the shock at the size of Labor’s win. Even those who knew it was coming found it hard to believe the numbers."
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