Good to see the names of another 11 writers added to the Circular Quay Writers’ Walk in Sydney. But can anyone explain why there is still no plaque for the great Christopher Koch? Surely it is not because of his conservative politics?

Media reports that Tony Abbott may not move into Kirribilli House in Sydney will please Heather Henderson, Sir Robert Menzies’s daughter, who in her just published memoir A Smile for My Parents complains that it was never intended to be a prime ministerial residence. Her father had restored it intending it to be an official guest house for VIP visitors to Australia. Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi of Japan stayed there. So did Lee Kuan Yew, Harold Macmillan and Richard Nixon. But in recent years it has been used as a home by Australian prime ministers. Heather Henderson writes: ‘I regret it. I regret also that we now have no official guesthouse for foreign dignatories.’

When John Howard launched Ricky Ponting’s autobiographical At the Close of Play during the week, the two old captains claimed to have more in common than (as Ponting overgenerously put it) their bowling action. Both had been ‘punted’ more than once, Howard most spectacularly at the close of his career. Like Howard in Lazarus Rising, Ponting in At the Close of Play also writes freely about some of the scandals of his career, including ‘Monkeygate’. (‘There was a lot of hypocrisy. I don’t think we should have caved in.’) But if there is one field where Ponting has the edge on Howard, it is poetry. Tugga (Steve Waugh) encouraged inspirational poetry by the players. Several tried out for the position of team minstrel. The Punter’s winning contribution began: ‘Every wicket we take, every run we score / Is never enough, we must want more.’ It ends: ‘And if we win for our great land, we then will sing / Underneath the Southern Cross I stand.’ It may be, he concedes, pretty ‘ordinary’ as poetry, but after Australia won the World Cup at mid-afternoon at Lords on 20 June 1999, it sounded ‘beautiful’. ‘I was,’ Ponting records, ‘a member of the best team in the world!’ About 8pm, when night was falling, the still celebrating Australians picked up their drinks in the dressing room of the Lord’s Pavilion, marched down the stairs, through the glorious Long Room and across to the pitch. ‘There was hardly a soul there, some of the stands had a ghostly feel to them… it was truly magnificent.’ The Punter put the World Cup trophy down where Boof (Darren Lehmann) had square-cut the winning four, climbed on Moods’s (Tom Moody’s) broad shoulders and started chanting his poem. The others ‘raucously, joyously’ joined in. Their chants echoed across the famous ground. ‘I was on top of Moods and we were on top of the world.’

If you want an insider’s view of the dramas, scandals and tensions of the Australian film industry, you can’t go past Sue Milliken’s recent Selective Memory. A Life in Film. Memoirs by actors or directors are common enough but this is one of the few written by a producer — one whose skills, as Bruce Beresford puts it in his foreword, ‘are held in awe by everyone in the Australian film industry.’ She has produced masterpieces like Black Robe, and milestone films such as Odd Angry Shot, Fringe Dwellers and Paradise Road (and only one shocker, Les Patterson Saves the World.) She has also done the hard yards in government funding agencies and on deputations to ministers of the Crown. Her summing up of politicians and their appointees is frank and personal. She found Minister Bob Ellicott ‘such a nice bloke… fairy godmother to the industry.’ But John Howard as Treasurer was ‘mean-spirited’ and Senator Chris Puplick as federal shadow Arts Minister was ‘very full of himself’. (‘I won’t be taking advice’, he said, ‘from anyone.’) Peter Collins as Arts Minister in New South Wales was ‘accessible, informed and enthusiastic.’ But Premier Bob Carr showed zero interest in film: ‘New South Wales has struggled ever since to compete with more entrepreneurial governments of Queensland and Victoria — and indeed South Australia and Western Australia.’ She also paints a discouraging picture of the Gonski Reports. After the Howard government came to power in 1996, it appointed David Gonski to review the film industry. When he finally granted Milliken (and Cathy Robinson of the Australian Film Commission) an audience at his office, ‘we sat like primary school students in front of the headmaster’s desk.’ The outcome of the Gonski review was ‘less money for the Australian Film Commission and the introduction of FLICS, the Film Licensed Investment Scheme — a time-wasting, money-wasting flop!’

Getting back to Heather Henderson’s A Smile for My Parents, this may be a good moment to recall her father’s standing in the world at large. Mrs Henderson does not mention President Nixon, but in his book Leaders, published a few years after Menzies’s death, he recorded his impressions of world leaders. He recalled General MacArthur’s ‘masterful monologues’, President de Gaulle’s ‘eloquent pronouncements’, Premier Zhou Enlai’s ‘flashes of poetry’ and Prime Minister Yoshida’s ‘self-deprecating humour’. The ‘style and substance’ of their ‘lively and profound conversation’ evoked immense respect. This is one of the ways that a successful leader ‘establishes his power and exercises persuasion.’ President Nixon summed up: ‘Yet if I were to rate one postwar leader above the others in this category it would not be one of the legendary European or American figures. It would be Robert Menzies.’