In the words of one colleague, Sir Donald Bradman was 'quite right-wing'. Now evidence has emerged of Bradman’s intervention at an explosive moment in Australian political history.
Sir Donald Bradman personally intervened at the most explosive juncture of Australian political history, stridently advising then new prime minister Malcolm Fraser on how to dismantle the platform of his predecessor Gough Whitlam.
“A marvellous victory in which your personal conduct and dignity stood out against the background of arrogance and propaganda indulged in by your opponents,” Bradman, then 67, wrote. “And if I may say so, the charm and bearing of your wife came through with great credit to you both. Bradman has often been described as sitting above the back and forth of politics, and he described himself in the letter as “a non-political person”. But it is clear from this and other correspondence, particularly with his friend and former newspaper editor Rohan Rivett around this time, that Bradman chose deliberately to get involved in steering Australia away from the Whitlam era.
The letter was an unexpected discovery for Archer when she was searching through Fraser’s papers at the National Archives in Canberra while writing a book on the history of the term “dole bludger”. She found Bradman’s advice to Fraser among other, similar letters from the likes of Robert Holmes a Court and Lang Hancock.
“He’s taking that neoliberal perspective that government should only interfere with capital where it is needed to prevent fraud, which is a real shift away from conservatism and towards the neoliberal viewpoint. 1975 is quite early for that particular idea to be coming out.“Bradman obviously held those beliefs really deeply, and also his idea that this would mean, for him, a freedom from socialism if we could remove any regulations on capital.
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