AustLit

'Harold Holt has been the subject of only one biography and a significant amount of conjecture. The former is arguably the result of a lack of personal papers that might flesh out the life of Australia’s 17th prime minister; the latter is certainly thanks to the bizarrely banal circumstances of his disappearance and presumed death in 1967. Stories of Chinese submarines and suicide so occluded the real question posed by these events that Holt’s first biographer, Tom Frame, felt it necessary to spend a litany of pages debunking them. Why Holt decided to ignore his health problems and enter waters that were notoriously dangerous for even the fittest of swimmers has always been hard to fathom but—in what speaks to the opportunity that biography provides—Ross Walker’s Harold Holt: Always One Step Further offers a convincing and artful answer.'  (Introduction)