Politics / Australian History
Book Details

Your Most Obedient Servant

B.A. Santamaria Selected Letters: 1938-1996

Patrick Morgan (ed.)

Bob Santamaria was involved in Australian public life from before World War II until his death in 1998.

Opinion

No student of Australia’s political, intellectual and social history should miss these fascinating letters, and the insights they give into one of the nation’s most powerful public minds . . . Editor Patrick Morgan has done Australian history a great service.

-- Hal Colebatch, West Australian, 12/5/07

Morgan argues that our judgements of Santamaria were based “only on the tip of the iceberg”, and that publishing the letters reveals much more.
Barry Jones,The Age, 10.2.2007

About this Title

B.A. Santamaria was one of the most controversial Australians of our time. His sphere of influence ranged across the nation's political and social landscape. Santamaria, an ardent anti-Communist and devout Catholic, was fiercely intelligent and a natural leader, polarising the community into loyal followers and committed opponents.

This collection of letters spanning sixty years shows facets of Santamaria's personality and activities that have not previously been disclosed. The letters are both personal and professional and in them he speaks frankly on matters of the state, the Church and family and he is revealed as a person more subtle in his views than his public persona would suggest.

His correspondents ranged from prominent politicians, including Malcolm Fraser, Bill Hayden and Clyde Cameron, religious leaders, including Archbishops Mannix and Pell, to influential media and social commentators such as Kerry Packer and Phillip Adams.

In the 1940s Santamaria created the Movement in Australia, an anti-Communist organisation, and these letters reveal that he also operated the Movement for decades throughout Asia. He was a key figure in the tumultuous split in the 1950s of the Australian Labour Party and subsequently had much influence as a public commentator on his television program Point of View and his weekly column in the Australian.

Santamaria had a strong social conscience and spent much of his time helping the underprivileged, and although he began as an advocate and champion of the Catholic Church, he spent much of his last decades opposing some of its activities.

By the 1990s B.A. Santamaria was the only person still active in politics who had been involved in public life before World War II and in the immediate postwar years. The letters offer a rare glimpse into a mind that was preoccupied for more than six decades with world events and ideological controversies.

About the Author

Patrick Morgan is a Victorian writer and academic who has published an award-winning regional history, edited texts on Austrian literature and written regularly in magazines such as Quadrant on current affairs, including on the connections between religion and politics.

B.A. (Bob) Santamaria (1915-98) was employed for his whole working life of six decades by four organisations: Catholic Action, the 'Movement' to oppose Communist union influence, the National Catholic Rural Movement and the National Civic Council. He was educated at St Joseph's and St Kevin's Christian Brothers Colleges, and at the University of Melbourne. In 1939 he married Helen Power; they had eight children (five daughters, three sons) and lived their married life in the Melbourne suburbs of North Balwyn and Kew, with a holiday house at Mornington. His wife Helen died in 1980, and he married Mrs Dorothy Jensen, his long-time secretary, in 1983. He died on February 25 1998 at the age of 82 and was given a State Funeral.

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978-0-522-85274-5