Missing the Mark
Without McGowan, things just aren't the same.
I walked past Mark McGowan on the street in West Perth last week. He was wearing a baseball cap and dark aviator shades, and looked slightly peeved that I obviously recognised him despite his disguise. I doubt he recognised me — although we have been at brief intervals public antagonists, he can’t have spent nearly as much time thinking about me as I have studying him. For a character who lived in my head for several years, crossing the street with a female companion to head to an elite eatery in what passes for Perth’s political district was an understated way to finally come face to face for the first time.
Mark McGowan left a great hole in my life. I remember the sense of emptiness that descended as soon as I heard he was set to retire about an hour before he announced it at a press conference in mid 2023. The only enigma the man ever really possessed was the mystery surrounding the first surprise of his career — quitting out of nowhere, officially citing exhaustion. Was it the pay-off waiting in the form of industry consultancies and boards? Was there a tap on the shoulder? Was it the fact that the AC/DC tribute act that had catapulted him into the pandemic on such a high in 2020 had fallen so flat in Freo three years later that the empty streets must have struck even this deeply literal man as some kind of sign?
Even those riddles weren’t enough to soothe the ache. McGowan had always been there — along with the editor of The West Australian newspaper, Anthony de Ceglie, he had been the great constant ever since my first foray into political campaigning in 2019. You knew where you stood with McGowan. A fixed point of reference with completely predictable responses.
The late-stage state capture in WA is such a formless, shifting, pervasive thing that pinning anything down is most of the challenge. Mainstream media are either so immersed in the swirling ether of local interplay, or, in the case of those outside WA, so shut out by the implicit omerta that in both cases it’s easier to just forget it’s even there. Unpacking it is the mission that partially inspired this website, a job that remains clearly incomplete. McGowan, though, gave some form to the void. In him was personalised the infernal genius at the heart of the WA Labor machine. The paper thin ego. The glass jaw. The almost impregnable surface tension maintained by an army of media-obsessed apparatchiks. The steely grip on the public narrative as though it held the secrets to eternal life.
When he stood up at that mid-morning press conference, his wife next to him beaming like the Cheshire cat that got the cream, all those certainties fell away. As with The West, where the vacuum of not so much leadership as narrative direction or ideology has left an unmoored feeling, the legacy is more a sense of wistful longing for an era when tinpot dictators did what they said on the tin. If anything, the themes that characterise power in WA — the morphless interchangeability of the two major parties, the competitive obeisance to the big companies, the small-minded platitudes and complacent reassurance of the public — are even more present in his successors. But the form is less distinct. There is a haze around the edges of Roger Cook’s profile that makes him shimmer slightly as though his mind is slightly in another world.
McGowan was back this week. Firstly, it was a few photos of him trailed by a press pack through the halls of Optus stadium after scoring front row seats to the Labor launch event. Then it was an extremely well-lit and post-produced photo of him eating chips with the new Premier that landed on the front page of the paper — normally The West Australian only want to use their own photographers, but Labor have obviously got some solid press photographers among their 100 campaign staff this election. The headline (“Beer with me, I’m chipping in to help a mate”) was about as substantive as his contribution got, but a photo for socials is really all it takes to transport us back to simpler, more certain times with the devil we knew.
The front page of Saturday's The West Australian. pic.twitter.com/Z5VZnHOIgB
— The West Australian (@westaustralian) February 28, 2025
Because McGowan, if nothing else, was a political leviathan. The speccy navy guy who was known as “Sneakers” a lot longer than he was called “State Daddy” may have been little more than an interlocutor for the same big business interests parsed through the Labor party apparatus, but at least his line read was convincing. He knew his cues, and you could guarantee the same outcomes if you fed the right inputs into the press. He was a machine that killed nuance, and for that he should be thanked. A comic book hero — legs planted, hands on hips and flowing cape covering up the bag men making off with the lot — who got away with it right until the end. In WA there’s no twist in the tale and, as I watched him disappear behind the plate glass and take off his cap, there was no tell of any secrets that might be hiding behind the well-lit images whose release he still commands complete control of. If he does have anything left to hide, it’s probably as predictable as the rest of his career.
This week, Gerard joined Serious Danger podcast to discuss the upcoming WA state election. He and Emerald Moon covered Mark McGowan's legacy, Basil Zempilas's ambitions, the gas lobby's influence, and the 2025 Fremantle Civil War (Green v Teal). Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
