Good Blokes? Gender and political leadership in the Australian Labor Party

This chapter will explore a few performances of manhood within the Australian Labor Party since the 1960s. It is intended to evoke a current direction of scholarship on gender and political leadership as well as some possibilities for future research. I end the chapter with a brief discussion of the performances of manhood by two Australian Labor leaders one a highly successful prime minister, the other a failed opposition leader in the context of a specifically masculine leadership performance. The leaders concerned are Bob Hawke (prime minister, 19831991) and Mark Latham (opposition leader, 20032004). Both sought to embody and perform a larrikin masculinity. Only one of them succeeded. The reasons for these differences do not lie wholly in personality, capacity and context. I argue that Hawke was much more successful in the liminal nature of his performance of manhood, and in his capacity to balance different ways of being a man in the public sphere.