John Curtin remains an iconic figure in Australian political history. Were there ever to be an Australian equivalent to America's Mt Rushmore – the monumental sculpture on the South Dakota mountainside that features the faces of four American presidents carved in stone – Curtin would arguably be the first face hewn from the rock. Alone among 20th century Australian prime ministers, with the possible exception of Gough Whitlam, he has become a venerated leader. The words chiselled into the simple obelisk that sits atop his grave in Karrakatta Cemetery, Perth – His Country was his Pride, His Brother Man his Cause – proclaim a simple and moving record of his service to party and nation, as if the visitor or passer-by is being summoned to honour Curtin: Australian patriot and tribune of the people. As the Westralian Worker put it following his funeral in July 1945, ‘Every Australian who believes in his country has lost a friend’.

That he died in office has only added to the Curtin mystique: a politician who put ideology aside to lead the nation in war; an alcoholic who turned sober; a timid, nervous individual who became master and commander; and ultimately, a leader who became a casualty of the war itself. In the speeches of his admirers and adorers, the transformation in Curtin is easily transferred to the nation – in changing himself, so runs the myth, he changed Australia. Hence, the continued attachment to the idea that the 1940s represents a golden age in Australia: inaugurating a new departure in its relations with the world and the assertion of a more authentically robust national image. Curtin's record as an Australian ‘nationalist’ remains the most powerful impulse sustaining his place in the collective memory. The assumption that he not only initiated Australia's exit from its British orbit but also founded the alliance with the United States – establishing ‘nothing less than a charter for the next half-century’ to quote Bob Hawke – has a tenacious grip on the Labor imagination. And it is likely to stay that way.