What happened to Harold Holt? A new novel puts his widow in the spotlight

Sydney Morning Herald

15 hours ago

Kim Wilkins' eyes mist up suddenly. 'I'm going to get a little teary. It's just, Harold Holt's been a bit of a punchline.
'So when I read Zara's memoir, and she talks about the day that he disappears, I finally got that this was a real human being with children, grandchildren and a wife who had loved him for 40 years.'
Dame Zara Holt's memoir, My Life and Harry, came out in the wake of the 1967 disappearance of Australia's 17th prime minister while he was swimming at Cheviot Beach in Portsea, Victoria.
Toowong-based novelist Wilkins read it after a friend in publishing told her about Zara during a discussion of overlooked women in Australian history.
'This woman was incredible, and I barely knew about her,' Wilkins says.
'She was clever and entrepreneurial, and a really talented designer. She was 19 when she started her first fashion house with her best friend.
'I read her memoir and I thought, oh, there's a novel in this.'
That novel is The Secret Year of Zara Holt, Wilkins' new book under her nom de plume, Kimberley Freeman.
Wilkins – let's call her Freeman for clarity – is a University of Queensland academic who has somehow found the time to publish more than 30 novels under two names.
Her new book covers the life of Zara, nee Dickins, from the night she met Holt at a college dance in Melbourne in 1927 until his fateful swim 40 years later.
Speculation about Holt's fate has ranged from a Chinese spy submarine supposedly plucking him from Bass Strait to assassination by the CIA. Some believe he faked his death.
Freeman weaves her own theory into her novel, based on what she learned about Zara and Harry's personalities and marriage.
'Harry obviously had commitment issues, and it's well known that he had multiple affairs, even after he and Zara were married.
'He was with his long-term mistress on the beach that day, but he was seeing many other women. No wonder he and [US president Lyndon B. Johnson] got on so well, because LBJ was exactly the same.'
Magg, Zara's fashion boutique with friend Betty James, showcased a prodigious talent for design – a collection of her outfits is held at the National Gallery of Victoria.
She also contributed to the war effort with innovative ideas while working for her father's food manufacturing business.
She had three children before finally marrying Holt, then a rising star in Robert Menzies' cabinet.
Zara would bring style to the role of prime minister's wife in the same way Jackie Kennedy added stardust to JFK's White House. Ultimately, she cut an equally tragic figure.
Holt came to power when Menzies retired, won the 1966 election and governed for 22 months.
His much-reviled 'all the way with LBJ' line outraged Australia's anti-Vietnam War movement. Still, Freeman did not expect to admire Holt's political career as much as she did.
'I'm a member of the Labor Party. And reading about Holt and Menzies blew my mind. That's not the Liberal Party that I see today.
'Holt got through things like the referendum for citizenship for Aboriginal people. He started to dismantle the White Australia policy. And the Child Endowment [Act] – Zara was so proud of that. Politics was very different back then.'
Freeman was born in Lewisham, a notoriously rough part of South London that birthed the likes of Alexander McQueen and Sid Vicious.
Another Lewisham native, Kate Bush, comes to mind when meeting Freeman, whose witchy sense of personal style features a lot of black.
Her New Zealand dad and Papua New Guinea-born mum moved to Redcliffe when she was a toddler.
Flunking out of high school to work at Big Rooster and sing in a covers band, she came into academia late after a stint in the public service.
Her first tutorial in Elizabethan literature 'took the top of my head off'.
'I did a double major in medieval and early modern literature. The medieval literature has really stuck with me. That's the stuff that really makes my engines run.'
She published her first Kim Wilkins novel in 1997 as an undergraduate. The Infernal, a reincarnation drama with witches, found an audience with the Anne Rice-Stephenie Meyer set.
'Under my own name, the books I write inevitably have something supernatural and dark and Gothic about them,' she explains.
'The Kimberley Freeman books, they're like adventure stories for women, and they're historical. They indulge my love of fashion from different periods, which is why I was so drawn to write about Zara.'
As Freeman, her 2008 book Wildflower Hill, a multi-era novel in the mould of A.S. Byatt's Possession, almost broke her big, with translations into 20 different languages.
'I used to write like a book a year, and now that I've slowed down a bit, I'm enjoying it much more.'
In writing about Zara's first marriage to a British army colonel, she had to invent most details as information was scarce. Zara's final marriage, to Macarthur MP Jeff Bate, is left offstage.
As for Harold Holt, Freeman believes the PM was caught up in his 'own mystique'.
'There was that famous photo of him with his daughters-in-law – they were all in bikinis, and he was in a wetsuit going spear fishing. And he looked like James Bond.'
As Freeman writes about them, the Holts are Australia's great prime ministerial love story. 'It's clear there were sexual fireworks, because they kept coming back together.'
They had a sentimental attachment to Bingil Bay, North Queensland, where artist friends John and Alison Busst lived, and where they eventually owned a holiday house.
Freeman admits her depiction of the Holts smoking marijuana there is sheer speculation.
'We don't know that the Holts smoked weed, but it was the '60s and I inferred that from the people that they were hanging around with. I just can't imagine that they didn't.'