M.A. (National Strategy) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

In this thesis I argue that food and drink were of central importance to Don Dunstan throughout much of his political and private life. The conventional view of Dunstan always proclaimed that his passionate interest in food and drink was merely peripheral to his life. Food and drink were simply an aberration, of the same idiosyncratic order of importance as his song and dance routine with Keith Michell, his piano playing, or his reciting poetry from the back of an elephant. These various accomplishments were merely confirmation that Dunstan was different from other politicians. I argue that Dunstan was indeed different, but that the difference was rooted firmly in his life-long love affair with food and drink. I argue that his fascination with food and drink drove much of his reform agenda, that it helped his day-to-day survival, and that it provided him with the means of expressing his ove for others. Dunstan's 1976 cookbook announced his arrival as a devotee of gastronomy and furthers my argument that he helped to introduce and establish a new Australian cuisine. After Dunstan left political life in 1979 he tried to establish himself in other spheres, but it was his almost obsessive interest in all of the aspects of a gastronomic life that triumphed. In the final decade of Dunstan's life his long love affair with food and drink became a full-blown passion. I argue that, with his long-overdue adventure as a restaurateur, he finally became the complete Don Dunstan. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of History and Politics, 2004.

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Thesis (Ph.D. (Historical and Heritage Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Abstract in English. Includes bibliographical references.

With the possible exception of Hofmeyr and Schreiner, there is no Cape statesman whose career raises more tantalising questions than that of John X. Merr1man. Last Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, doyen of Parliamentarians, brilliant orator, versatile administrator, veteran politician, his public life stretched across fifty-five years of south African History. He entered upon it before the grant of Responsible Government, the discovery of diamonds and gold, and the awakening. of Afrikaner Nationalism; he departed from it on the eve of the Statute of Westminster, the establishment of Iscor and the coming to power of Hertzog and Malan. His contemporaries looked upon him as a man of immense knowledge and olympian ability. In the eyes of many his position as leader of the largest and oldest settled community in South Africa, not to mention his role as heir to the Cape tradition, made him the natural choice as first Prime Minister of the Union he had helped to establish. He was not called to office. Barely seventy, in the full maturity of his years, he withdrew trom active political leadership in the country of his adoption. He is hardly remembered today. This thesis seeks to contribute something to an understanding of the man and an assessment of his qualities by a study of his formative years. It attempts both to reconstruct his personality and analyse the nature of his statesmanship - not only by an examination of the role he played in the years under review, but also by an assessment of the part he failed to play. For this purpose both the structure of Cape politics and the ramifications of the various problems that presented themselves have been explored in greater detail than might otherwise have been the case.

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