Crikey’s own Margaret Simons, along with her co-author Malcolm Fraser, took home a double at last night’s NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, thanks to their book Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs. Simons and Fraser won the $40,000 Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction as well as the Book of the Year Award, worth $10,000. For a full list of other winners from the night, go here.

Probably not a good time to write for Crikey, when your brain is addled with too much champagne, too little sleep and too much excitement. Hard to get anything more coherent out than “wow”. And “wow”.

Well, wow. And wow.

It seems like half a lifetime ago that Louise Adler, of Melbourne University Publishing, rang me and asked if I would be interested in working with Malcolm Fraser on a book. I thought “that would be interesting”. And I guess last night’s awards are more than anything else a confirmation of what all journalists know. That the right thing to do is to follow your curiosity.

We had our moments, Malcolm and me. I remember one long day spent in his Melbourne flat arguing about the Vietnam War. I had bought a box of books to back me up. He started the conversation (politician that he is) by saying he didn’t want to rely on books, because they were unreliable.

And so we went at it, ding-dong argument for nearly eight hours straight, broken only by Tamie compassionately offering a sandwich.

At the end, I was exhausted, and so was he. But he is 30 years older than me. I felt more than a skerrick of sympathy for his cabinet ministers who had to go the rounds with him when he was 30 years younger.

But we had an agreed draft, and we were laughing together.

And that is how it was. I’d interview him, and spend hours in the archives, blessed by special access to the cabinet records of his time, and his personal archive at the University of Melbourne.

Then I’d write a draft chapter and we’d talk it through. Seriously collaborative. Sometimes seriously combative. Neither of us wanted me to be a ghost writer. Malcolm made it clear at the beginning that he wanted someone to take him on and ask him questions.

The process ended, on my side, in increased respect and affection. Not because the man is without fault, not because I agree with him on everything, not because he made no mistakes. He made quite a few.

But he is not a hypocrite. He has courage, and he has convictions.

I learnt many things, not least that one should be slow to judge politicians and what they are trying to do. For this one, at least, there were layers of motivation, thinking, discussion, behind almost every decision, and the headlines of the day rarely reflected the complexity or the motivation.

Malcolm is right. The world has changed more than he has. His liberal ideas on race, social justice and human rights were there from the very first speeches, made by a passionate 24-year-old over the local radio station to the Western District of 1954.

Writing this book with Malcolm was seriously fun. That is, very serious fun. Malcolm laughed like a drain last night when he read the judges’ comments — which included the judgment that his biography was “surprisingly engaging”.

“Why the surprise?” he said, archly.

He knows he was never loved — not like Hawke or Whitlam.

My highest aspirations are that the book leads people to reflect, not only on what they think they know about Fraser, but also on the nature of political leadership, and on the present and the future.