Launching 'The Curious Diplomat'

Launch of Lachlan Strahan, The Curious Diplomat: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Diplomacy (Monash University Publishing, 2025), Hill of Content Bookshop, Melbourne, 20 November 2025

I knew from skim-reading the electronic draft of The Curious Diplomat a few months ago – before agreeing to blurb and launch it – that this wasn’t a short book. But nothing quite prepared me for the thump with which the final print version of Lachie’s book landed on my desk.

• I couldn’t help but recall the Duke of Gloucester’s response on being presented with a volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: ‘Another damn’d thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Gibbon.’

But let me say immediately that the joy of Dr Strahan’s book, like Mr Gibbon’s, is that it is big not just in quantity but quality. As I said in my blurb, and I mean it:

This is as good as it gets in describing the reality of mainstream diplomatic life, with all its challenges, frustrations, periodic excitement and occasional exhilaration. The writing is lively, informative, fine-grained and absorbing – and an especially interesting read for anyone contemplating an international career, or fascinated by its workings.

Lachie Strahan served Australia with real distinction in multiple postings in Canberra and around the world in the course of his diplomatic career – beginning in 1993 when I was Foreign Minister, and winding up in 2023, having survived in between seven more Foreign Ministers, from Alexander Downer to Penny Wong, and eight Prime Ministers, from Keating and Howard to Morrison and Albanese. In total, roughly 12 years of light and 18 of darkness…

Lachie’s experience, appropriately enough for the quintessential generalist that he was, was remarkably diverse. It covered, as we’ll hear, bilateral overseas postings in Germany, Korea, India and the Solomon Islands, with a recurring preoccupation with China, and with multiple plunges along the way into multilateral diplomacy in the UN and elsewhere on everything from the labelling of mineral water to climate change, human rights, and chemical and biological weapons control.

Diplomats are supposed to know how to write, and some of them have actually been known write memoirs that are readable. But too often the ones that are most readable are the least substantive, and vice-versa. The charm of Lachie’s book is that it is both highly readable and chock-full of substance.

• Perhaps not surprising from the author of three other highly-regarded books, on the history of Australian responses to China, on criminal law in Papua New Guinea (which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s History Awards) and Justice in Kelly Country (shortlisted for a Prime Minister’s Literary Award).

But let’s hear from the author himself, beginning at the beginning.

[Interview followed, with Lachlan responding to following questions:

1. How did you get to decide to embark on a diplomatic career? How relevant was your family background, and the course of study you chose? And how did you navigate the selection process: did you have a sense in the early ‘90s that the Department was still basically a private-school boys club, or were things changing?

2. Your first posting was in Bonn, the ‘small town in Germany’ now capital of a newly reunited country. How challenging was your first professional experience there, and how did you manage to juggle that with personal life as a young husband and father?

3. As must happen at least some of the time with any diplomat with a pulse, there will be times when you find yourself in real policy disagreement with the government you are serving. You had that experience very early on in your career, when you were involved in Bonn in the lead up negotiations for what became the Kyoto Protocol— and suddenly found yourself dealing, after Howard replaced Keating in 1996, with a government sceptical about the whole issue and willing to play a spoiling role. How did you cope then, and how should diplomats cope?

4. Back in Australia in 1999, you found yourself on the China desk, tasked among other things with managing the communication of Australia’s human rights concerns to a country, then as now, hypersensitive on those issues? Here (and again much later in your career when you were actually in charge of Australia’s overall human rights diplomacy), how did you navigate that particular jungle path, and how generally do you think Australia should do so?

5. After the China desk, you then had your major multilateral immersion as head of the Chemical and Biological Disarmament section in Canberra. You conclude that chapter by writing that ‘Sometimes it’s your friends who cause you the most heartburn in diplomacy.’ Please explain.

6. The next overseas posting for you, in 2002, was to the Republic of Korea as political counsellor. That also involved dealing with the North. Could you give some impressions of that?

7. Your next big job, after more desk time in Canberra, was as Deputy High Commissioner in India, from 2009 to 2013. What really stands out from your time there?

8. After a heady couple of years in the Department of PM&C under Tony Abbott as PM, which we’ll come back to in a moment, and another extended period running the DFAT Multicultural Division (which included a stint in Geneva) there was finally your most senior overseas post as High Commissioner to Solomon Islands, from 2020 to 2023. This was a very bumpy ride, which you describe as ‘both the most testing, and rewarding, of all your posts. Can you give us a quick sense of that experience?

9. Let’s cut now to the gossipy chase. You worked under multiple foreign ministers and, for a time, directly with prime ministers too when you went across to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Present company excepted, who appalled you most, and impressed you most? Did anyone surprise you?

10. You write very early on about the impact of John Howard’s ‘night of the long knives’ after he won the 1996 election, sacking six highly-regarded permanent heads, including DFAT's Michael Costello, for their perceived lack of ideological compatibility with the new government. I have described myself the impact this had on public service culture generally as reminding me of that old line that ‘a husband is what’s left of a lover after the nerve has been extracted’. DFAT in particular struck me as being for many years thereafter as being a department with its nerve extracted, cautious to a fault, with both junior and senior officers preoccupied with backside-covering and reluctant to provide any advice that challenged the prevailing orthodoxy. Is that an exaggeration?

11. Looking back over all the highs and lows of your own diplomatic career – and thinking about the kind of role Australia should aspire to play in today’s ever-changing world -- would you recommend it as a career option for the best and brightest of the current generation?]