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My Story by Julia Gillard (Bantam Press, £25)

If you stick Julia Gillard’s name into Google, the first autocomplete option that appears is “misogyny speech”. In 2012 the then Australian prime minister — the first woman to hold the role — was accused of sexism by Opposition leader Tony Abbott. She responded with a catalogue of Abbott’s own sins: “I will not be lectured about misogyny by this man.”

Her cri de coeur has been watched 2.6 million times on YouTube. It has its own Wikipedia entry. And in her new autobiography, the photo caption simply states “that speech”.

The only surprise is that it took so long for Gillard to have her J’accuse moment. Sexism had long been a theme of Abbott’s policy critiques. “Are you suggesting to me that when it comes from Julia, no doesn’t mean no?” he said, echoing decades of rape-denying rhetoric. “Even if you are the single most powerful person in your country, if you are a woman, the images that are shadowed around you are of sex and rape,” Gillard notes.

The best parts of the book are on gender. In fact, they should be required reading for anyone who says feminism’s work is done. Her appearance is perpetually scrutinised. Visiting Japan after the tsunami, she was photographed in Minamisanriku, a ghost town where a boat sits on top of a building. A comment in the press the next day ran: “[Gillard] desperately needs a makeover. It wasn’t the carnage behind that gave me the horrors, but the woman standing in front of it.”

She is chided as “deliberately barren” — “[As a female politician] If you do not have children then you are characterised as out of touch with ‘mainstream lives’. If you do have children, then, heavens, who is looking after them?” Gillard, “a childless, atheist woman living in a de facto relationship”, always seemed an unlikely candidate for the top job in Australian politics. But the book doesn’t do enough to flesh out who she really is beyond a potted biography.

For a non-Australian audience, this is a book to skim rather than scrutinise. But there are interesting reflections and amusing anecdotes too: on the perils of minority government, the treatment of indigenous Australians and how schools probably picked out their red-headed pupils to greet the country’s most famous “ranga”. Gillard is either a naturally engaging writer or blessed with a good editor — intense media commentary she faces is “like when [a] chicken in the coop gets pecked so hard she bleeds and then all the others turn to peck her to death”. Is there enough here to sustain anyone but the Aussies? Not quite. But I hope Gillard is contemplating book number two: a version of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In for women in politics.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £20, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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