RHETORIC AND REMINISCENCE Graham Freudenberg, Political Memory and The Scribe

‘Friends and flukes have been the making of me.’ So says storied Australian Labor Party (ALP) speechwriter Graham Freudenberg in Ruth Cullen’s The Scribe (2018). Cullen’s documentary is a portrait of the man and his musings on the role that rhetoric has played in politics, with a brief incursion into how that might be changing. The result is a hybrid of sorts: a filmic profile of Freudenberg and an insider’s account of a few tumultuous decades in Australian politics.

Proclaimed by journalist Laurie Oakes to be ‘the greatest speechwriter this country has produced’,¹ Freudenberg – known as ‘Freudy’ to his colleagues – crafted words that were spoken by an assortment of ALP heavyweights, beginning in 1961 with then–federal opposition leader Arthur Calwell and ending in 2005 with the resignation of New South Wales (NSW) premier Bob Carr. As a teenager, the documentary tells us, Freudenberg read voraciously and, precociously modelling himself after nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (whose biography he read at age ten), he embarked on a journalism career with a grand plan of eventually moving into politics.

As he ‘never had the great hunger for a story that really makes a great reporter’, he notes in The Scribe, he made the shift across after hearing about a press-secretary job in Calwell’s office. He landed the gig, which initially involved just liaising with the Canberra Press Gallery, writing press releases and keeping up with information. But he quickly found himself writing the ALP leader’s speeches, even though doing so