Jim Cairns’s biographer Paul Ormonde talks of family honour in keeping the father’s desertion secret and speculates on what might have happened had he come back to the family from the war.
What if he returned?
On Biography
On Writing Jim Cairns’ Biography
Paul Ormonde talks about his reasons for writing a biography of Dr Jim Cairns, Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia during the Whitlam Government 1972-195. Paul’s book, A Foolish Public Man was published in […]
James Ford Cairns (1914 – 2003)
Missing Believed Killed
Jim Cairns confronts evidence that his father deserted and hands the military record to his biographer Paul Ormonde. Cairns tells Gough Whitlam in Parliament about the news and Whitlam is profoundly moved. Related posts: War […]
James Ford Cairns (1914 – 2003)
Pride Before the Fall
Jim Cairns’s sureness of self enabled biographer Paul Ormonde to get unusually close to him, a relationship that tripped Cairns up when Ormonde discovered the true fate of Cairns’s father, shrouded for years in family […]
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