David Solomon’s ‘Footnotes’ reveals the stories behind Australian politics and journalism – including the moments that never made it into print.

Being appointed press-gallery bureau chief and political correspondent for The Canberra Times was daunting for a number of reasons, chief among them the roll call of those who had gone before.

Gay Davidson, the first woman to head a parliamentary bureau, under whom I’d been lucky enough to work as a cadet; Eric Walsh; Jon Gaul; and two quite different Tonys: O’Leary and Wright.

But casting the biggest shadow was David Solomon.

Some years after my stint in the House and by then a practising lawyer, I got to ask High Court Justice Stephen Gageler (now the Chief Justice) at a conference how he thought knowledge of the Court now, with instant publication on its own web site and judgment summaries, compared with the days when media outlets had their own High Court correspondents.

I started to recall some of the names: Verge Blunden, from The Sydney Morning Herald, Bill Goff at AAP …

“David Solomon!” His Honour intervened, with a raised judicial eyebrow that silently said, “Why in heaven is counsel running a good case but not starting with his best point?”

The Solomon shadow grew bigger again when asked to review his latest book, Footnotes: there on the cover are pictures of just some of his previous 11 books, in their various editions.

So, no pressure.

Footnotes, Solomon explains, grew from a few pieces that the long-time journalist could not ignore: the release of his ASIO file and the release of the Palace letters.

The former revealed that the organisation had had issues with two of Solomon’s very deliberately chosen three referees when he was being vetted for continued access to top secret information while in the office of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

The supposedly dodgy referees were the gallery institution Laurie Oakes, who ASIO would not interview because, it said, he went berserk at the mention of its name, and Lionel Murphy, then a new High Court judge and only months earlier the first law officer of the land – but also, of course, the man who famously raided ASIO.

The other “impeccable” referee was a colleague and acquaintance stretching back to university days: Jim Carlton, then general secretary of the Liberal Party in NSW and later of course, a senior Fraser Government minister.

The hard-fought release of the Palace letters allowed Solomon “to make sense of the conversation I had with Sir John Kerr before he became Governor-General about his Prime Ministerial ambitions and how, in my mind, that helped explain the dismissal of the Whitlam Government”.

The chapter demonstrates there really was no end to the leonine drunkard’s stupendous vanity: he had believed, at different times, that he would be leveraged into, if not invited to take, the leadership of both the federal Labor and Liberal parties.

Footnotes tells the chilling tale of a truly “ground-breaking story” that never ran – Liberal Party plotters in the week before a federal election declaring they would overthrow a Prime Minister even if he won.

The election was 1969, the Prime Minister John Gorton and Solomon’s proprietor Rupert Murdoch.

As Solomon tells it: “What convinced me that the plotters would carry through with their plans … was a conversation I had with one of Gorton’s most supportive ministers two days before the election.

“He had invited me to lunch specifically to tell me that Gorton knew about what was happening, but was optimistic that he had the numbers to remain as Prime Minister.”

Bureau chief Solomon filed for the Friday – election-eve – edition of The Australian, confident of the Page 1 splash with such a huge yarn.

Instead, he got a call from editor Adrian Deamer, killing the story. No issues as to sourcing and accuracy. The piece could damage the Coalition’s chances at the poll.

“He didn’t mention the Australian’s proprietor," Solomon writes, but “Murdoch’s editors almost invariably reflected his wishes.”

Sadly, that has only intensified over the next 57 years as Murdoch’s “small collection of newspapers” has grown and mutated.

Other highlights of Footnotes include how:

• Solomon was almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of the University of Canberra (you’ll have to get the book).
• He was the catalyst for the iconic play The One Day of the Year, after narrowly surviving a Sydney University Senate vote proposing he be “sent down”.
• He became just the fifth person to be awarded a Doctor of Letters by the ANU, after having originally being urged to be “a supplicant for the degree of Doctor of Laws”. Behind the move was just some of Solomon’s previous books on the intersections of law and politics.

The first chapter of Footnotes is the master at work: “A New Political and Electoral Landscape” covers Australia’s mightily shifting parliamentary line-ups over the past two elections.

The insights are sharp, everything is evidenced and it still rattles along as a read.