Can poetry help our politics? There was a time in Australia when it did

April 5, 2026 — 12:30pm

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John Curtin spent the Easter weekend of 1945 at The Lodge. He had just three months to live. His health had been in sharp decline since the heart attack he had suffered the previous November. When he died on July 5 at the age of only 60, his death would be attributed to the strains of wartime leadership.

Most Australians would have gone to church that Easter Sunday morning. Curtin’s Labor colleagues were mainly Catholics, for whom Sunday Mass was a religious obligation; Protestant Australia was scarcely less devout.

The prime minister did not. Curtin had ceased to practice his Catholic faith as a young man. However, he did observe the Sabbath in his own private way. It was his custom to spend Sunday mornings reading poetry. For Curtin – a man of deep spirituality – this was his secular equivalent to going to church. While we cannot be certain, it is likely that that is how he spent his last Easter Sunday on earth.

Although glimpsed by some of his biographers, the depth of Curtin’s devotion to poetry was unappreciated until 2021, when Toby Davidson – not a political historian but a scholar of Australian literature – published Good for the Soul: John Curtin’s Life with Poetry. Dr Davidson reveals to us Curtin’s library; it included many volumes of........

© The Age