Thrown shoes, sabotaged launches and exposed affairs: the drama of Australian political publishing

The most striking example of performance politics in Joshua Black’s entertaining book comes when an audience member at a 2010 taping of the now-defunct ABC show Q&A throws a shoe at former prime minister John Howard. (It echoed a famous moment two years earlier, when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at then US president George W.

Bush.) Howard, who laughed it off, was on the show to promote his memoir, Lazarus Rising .

Performance Politics is informative and interesting, but has a somewhat misleading title.

Black’s use of the term “performance” is so broad it becomes almost meaningless.

In his introduction, he claims “performances are ephemeral”, but the bulk of his analysis is based on a discussion of book publishing and television documentaries.

These are not usually regarded as primarily performative.

Review: Performance Politics – Joshua Black (New South) It may be more accurate to read this book as an account of what Black, citing historian Melanie Nolan, calls life writing.

It is scrupulously researched, involving more than 40 hours of interviews with 46 participants: “politician-authors, publishers and editors, collaborators and journalists”.

Historians, Black writes, need to understand both knowledge and emotion.

In this sense, politics today is perhaps less changed over the centuries than Black suggests.

Indeed, he offers examples of performative politics from the 19th century, involving street marches, “burning effigies and torchlit oratory”, which seem to deserve the term more than the appearance of politicians on morning television programs.

Late in the book, Black tells us that after the 2025 elections, a third of parliamentary time was devoted to “’political theatre’ for its own sake”.

Certainly, much of parliament’s time is clearly performative, whether it’s Pauline Hanson appearing in a burqa in 2017, or Lidia Thorpe refusing to swear allegiance to the monarch in 2024.

One of the clearest moments of parliamentary performance came when Liberal Tim Wilson used the vote to recognise same-sex marriage to propose to his partner in the gallery.