4★
“ As I write these words [April 2017], the environment for good public policymaking, both internationally and domestically, is as desolate as I can ever remember . . . But the presidency of George W Bush was, after all, followed by that of Barack Obama, and it may be that, like other bad cases of the DTs, this one too will pass.”

Ah, Gareth! You incorrigible optimist, you. Maybe the glass-half-full is the hair-of-the dog that will cure the DTs? I’m getting carried away, sorry.

An aside for interested Aussies: This is a “political memoir”, so only once, and only in a political context, does he mention Cheryl Kernot (a fellow parliamentarian with whom he had a notorious five-year affair, which he denied for years).

Back to the book. Evans declares not only his optimism but also his drive to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. My words, not his. And I’d say he’s not averse to the spotlight.

After years in the diplomatic and political fields, he’s now chairing the New York-based NGO “The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect”, meaning we must all prevent atrocities to people whether their own government likes it or not. http://www.globalr2p.org/

He’s managed to avoid what he once called a former politician’s “Relevance Deprivation Syndrome” by being as active as ever. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

He was a Labor politician for more than 20 years, and Australia’s Attorney General and then Foreign Minister from 1988-1996 during the famous Hawke-Keating era. High profile, highly influential, loved it!

He had a big picture view of the world and Australia’s place in it, so when first appointed Foreign Minister, he didn’t go forelock-tugging, cap-in-hand to the Mother Country, Europe, and the US. No, he made the rounds of the neighbourhood, the Asia-Pacific region, and only then did he visit the rest.

“It was also to make it clear that, as important as the US alliance was to Australia, I did not see the world primarily through that prism.”

There was a lot in the US that probably offended his strong sense of social justice. Back in 1965, when he went there on a trip for student leaders from the Asian region, he finally saw first-hand what he calls the “reflex prejudice” that his friends and companions lived with.

“I remember, for example, a doctor in Texas telling us over a family dinner, ‘If God had meant marriages between Negroes and Caucasians to take place he would not have made them black and us white’.

‘What about us and Asians?’ I asked, in deference to the interests of my travelling companions.

‘Well, that’s not so bad’, he said. ‘For a start, the kids are cuter.’

CRINGE! At least Gareth wasn’t the host, and he was just along for the ride, but it spurred him on to continue to campaign against racism and for Indigenous rights.

He studied, taught and practised law, got into politics, and simply wanted to change the world. Was that asking too much?

During the campaign proposing Australia add a preamble to the Constitution, (when he was in Opposition in 1999) he wrote a particularly good, inclusive one, but it never got off the ground. It should.

“Having come together in 1901 as a Federation under the Crown
And the Commonwealth of Australia being now a sovereign democracy,
Our people drawn from many nations
We the people of Australia
Proud of our diversity
Celebrating our unity
Loving our unique and ancient land
Recognising Indigenous Australians as the original occupants and custodians of our land
Believing in freedom and equality, and
Embracing democracy and the rule of law
Commit ourselves to this our Constitution.”

He may big-note himself sometimes (all right, he does), but he includes plenty of criticism and self-deprecating remarks.

“. . . one unnamed colleague was reported at the time as saying, ‘Who would have thought Gareth could produce an 83-word history of Australia? He once used qualifying phrases that went longer than that’”

He is also quick to say that sometimes you just have to let other people get the credit, and to that end, he quotes, in full, not his own many speeches about Indigenous rights, but both Prime Minister Paul Keating’s “Redfern Speech” and PM Kevin Rudd’s “Sorry Speech”. And he credits fervent political opponent Tony Abbott’s comment about Keating’s saying it “movingly evoked . . . the stain on our soul.”

He was active since his student days against apartheid and was Foreign Minister when the end was finally being negotiated in South Africa. He says his biggest joy during his career was meeting Nelson Mandela. I have to say, he is legitimately able to name-drop like almost nobody except a head of state.

I’ll throw in a word about the environment. Regarding “the passage of the ‘World Heritage Properties Conservation Act’. Drafting that legislation, in which enterprise I was involved as the new Attorney-General, was about as much fun as a constitutional lawyer could ever have sitting down. We threw every weapon in the armoury at it. . .”

But it’s really the appalling international atrocities that have kept him fired up. All through the book are references to our responsibility to protect people, culminating in the organisation mentioned in the beginning.

We no longer say that a sovereign nation has a right to maltreat its citizens any more than parents have a right to abuse their children. We WILL intervene. Again, have a look at http://www.globalr2p.org/ [Disclaimer: I like this kind of initiative and am a member of Amnesty International, which is humanitarian while being non-partisan, and non-political.]

Evans has divided his memoir into sections about different areas of his professional life and interests, and I won’t attempt to list even the headings. I’ve just plucked a few things at random.

Suffice to say he’s done more than any half a dozen people you can think of, and if you’d like an interesting, readable history of Australia and its place in the world over the last 60 years, Evans is your man. He's a good writer and experienced lecturer who speaks in lists. The three things to remember, the four points that should be included, the five . . . and so on. Very readable.

(If you want the lowdown on the aforementioned affair, just google it.)

Thanks to NetGalley and Melbourne University Press for the review copy from which I’ve quoted.

‘This is an account of one person’s efforts, …’

In this political memoir, organised broadly chronological by particular policy themes, Gareth Evans reflects on his efforts during a long public life to try to encourage both Australia and the world ‘in better policy directions’. For those of us interested in Australian public policy, it is a memoir worth reading. It is interesting and informative as well and, at times, amusing. It is both wordy and well-written. Gareth Evans could never be accused of being a man of too few words.

‘My family being neither criminal nor rich, I grew up with practically no exposure whatever to the legal profession.’

For those too young to remember the Hawke-Keating governments (11 March 1983 to 11 March 1996), Gareth Evans served as Attorney-General (1983-84), Minister for Resources and Energy (1984-1987), Minister for Transport and Communications (1987-1988) and Foreign Minister (1988-1996). He was a Senator for Victoria from 1978 to 1996 and then the Member for Holt from 1996 to 1998. Since leaving the Australian Parliament, Gareth Evans has served as the President and CEO of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group from 2000 to 2009, and has been Chancellor of the Australian National University since 2010.

In this memoir, Gareth Evans covers ten themes under the headings of: Justice, Race, Enterprise, Diplomacy, Cooperation, Conflict, Atrocities, Weapons, Education and Politics. For each of these themes, he sets himself three goals: how he became involved with each, how he pursued each subject (covering both his successes and failures), and the lessons learned.

Is it incorrigible optimism to have a vision of effective international citizenship at a time when many countries are pursuing isolationist policies? At a time when reports of atrocities have tragically become commonplace? Perhaps it is, but ideals are important and need to be articulated so that they can be strived for. I was particularly interested in reading about the work of the International Crisis Group, and also in Gareth Evans’s experiences as a backpacker in Africa and Europe during the 1960s.

I found this memoir absorbing and thought-provoking.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Melbourne University Publishing for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

An Incorrigible Optimist should be renamed "A Warning about having too much Enthusiasm". Despite a multitude of failures and tragic situations Gareth Evans continues to justify his career in support of US militarism with the excuse that he is enthusiastic that the future will be so much more different from the past. He time and again and is still calling for outside military forces, namely Canada, Australia, the USA and the UK to intervene in the internal affairs of countries around the world. Why? Because these countries are experiencing catastrophic internal conflicts. While he makes it sound reasonable he omits in this four hundred page oeuvre the simple fact that the countries that are going to invade to stop a crisis are more than likely the ones who caused it in the first place. If he really wanted to stop such crisis he would aim at a different objective. That countries profit from preying other countries seems to be something of no significance to him. That said, this book is important. Gareth Evans gives the clearest defense of the Third Way politics that has so roundly been discredited in the wave of populism that is globally now on the rise. Why the success of Trump he might ask? The answer is the failure of such people as Gareth Evans.