J.A. Lyons, the tame Tasmanian

The Tame Tasmanian examines the neglected career of Australian prime minister, Joseph Lyons. A dramatic story of a quest for peace set in the turbulent 1930s, it involves many well-known, and many less well-known but equally important, figures. Of particular interest is the examination of the vital role Lyons played in the Anglo-German negotiations that occurred during the Czech crisis of September 1938. These negotiations culminated at the last minute in the Munich conference of October 1938, which seemed to contemporaries to have secured peace for Europe. The leading British scholar of appeasement in the immediate post-war period, D.C. Watt, suspected that Lyons had played a significant role in the brinkmanship that led up to the Munich conference, but confessed to a lack of evidence. David Bird assembles and scrutinises documentation to demonstrate that Watt's suspicions were well-founded - cables, telephone transcripts and private notes from Australian, British and European sources show that distant Joseph Lyons motivated Neville Chamberlain to make his "last last" attempt to draw Hitler back from the precipice of war. The age of telephone diplomacy had arrived and Australia's