There then began a reign of terror, in which no senior public servant, of whatever department, no matter how remote or distant from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, was safe from the occasional telephone call, as often as not in the middle of the night, on Christmas Day, or while on annual leave. It would be the prime minister, who would get brusquely to business, and without apologies for disturbing a person's sleep or other activities. He would want information, perhaps further and better particulars of some comment made in a brief going up to cabinet, perhaps some quick lateral advice on some issue which had arisen while the world, and the public servant (but not the prime minister) had been asleep. He was up and awake, and attending to the public interest, as least as he saw it. So why should not the apparatus of government be?

On one occasion, he had two senior advisers, Tony Ayers and Jim Scully at the Lodge early in the morning, helping him decide how he should respond to problems with the Western Australian premier Sir Charles Court about export controls, during a visit by the West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. Fraser asked Ayers to ring Sir Rod Carnegie, for his views.

Ayers: Prime minister, it's four o'clock in the morning.

Fraser: I'm sure he won't mind talking to me.

Carnegie was dragged from deep sleep to take the call, and did not immediately seem to mind, although one of those present, said he would like to have been a fly on the wall at the Carnegie household when the phone was put down. Back at the Lodge, it was at about this time that Tamie Fraser herself got out of bed to sympathetically make a cup of tea for the two stranded public servants.

Another public servant, dealing with an very early morning call from Fraser, expostulated, "Prime minister, it's Christmas Day!"

Fraser (gruffly): Yes, well...Happy Christmas, then.

A person to whom this conversation was related spoke of himself getting a call, on the same subject, about 10 minutes later. This time, though there was no apology for disturbing sleep or the holiday, Fraser began by saying, "Happy Christmas".

On one occasion, Fraser urgently wanted some advice from Sir Arthur Tange, the crusty and himself famously rude old Secretary of the Defence Department (who had also had Fraser as his minister until, in 1970, Fraser resigned in anger about being undermined by John Gorton). It was a Saturday, but Tange was not at home, or at the Commonwealth Club, and someone thought that he might be at a farm he owned at Yaouk. The farm was not on the telephone.

Fraser rang the police station at nearby Adaminaby, asking if a constable could be dispatched to drive to the farm to tell Sir Arthur that the prime minister wanted to speak to him urgently. The officer told him, icily, that the NSW police were not his messenger boys.

Fraser then required the RAAF to provide a helicopter to fly to the farm, but, on its putting down, Sir Arthur was not to be found. Poking about in the vicinity, riding on a tractor, was a rather grizzled yokel in dirty and dusty overalls, and the pilot walked to him saying that he was looking for white-haired old gentleman called Sir Arthur Tange. Did the serf know where he was to be found?

The yokel said, "I am Sir Arthur Tange," and, on being told that he was required at the Lodge, decided that he would not bother to change clothes, "as a privilege of rank". Malcolm Fraser did not appear to notice.

The diabolical times for calls, apart from the middle of the night, were on Saturday mornings, and when the prime minister was home on his property at Nareen, and it was raining. Unable to move about bullying his farm employees, he would think of matters of state, of bullying public servants, and of the files piled up on his desk.

It was not good management. For one thing, a public servant who receives a call out of the blue from the prime minister is apt to get a bit flustered, and asked (indeed ordered) to get some information as soon as possible is likely to drop everything to attend to this task. This often had the result of holding up other work, producing the paradoxical consequence that the issue Fraser had been trying to hurry up was actually delayed.

When Fraser had been Defence minister, he had had the same tendency to call up officials whenever a thought struck him. It never occurred to him that he should wait, although, at this stage, the number of advisers and officials he could call was of far more limited breadth. Tange told him, in writing, in no uncertain terms, to desist.

"I have observed the frequency with which, in extensive consultation with me and other senior advisers, you have expressed a sense of urgency about a large number of matters and that you wish to see them brought to fruition," he wrote. "I am convinced that detailed ministerial supervision and requests from explanations and reports, while doubtless seeking to satisfy the requirements that you believe you have, aggravate the delay by distracting senior officers from substantive work. Indeed, this is a matter of fact and not of opinion. It is a matter of fact, and not of ministerial authority."

Tange was by no means the only public servant who could address Fraser like that, but the chances of its much affecting the Fraser style were slim. Fraser liked and argument, and, if a natural bully, usually warmed to people who stood up to him.

He had about him a somewhat aggressive style of wanting to test every part of an argument before he adopted it, leading some to think that he was flatly opposed to a proposition he was in fact leaning to. Instead he was rehearsing the arguments, and learning, or absorbing, the counter-arguments. In this sense he did not mind being contradicted, even if he often disconcerted by the aggressive manner of his questioning, and a tendency not only to want to know what an official thought, but the complete provenance of an idea. One felt that one was being pinned, pushed, tested, and to the limit -- and, because of Fraser's impatience, never given much of a chance to explain.

There were, and had been others. Gough Whitlam called Billy McMahon "Tiberius with a telephone", but this was because McMahon was forever plotting with other political insiders, rather than his relationships with his advisers. Kevin Rudd, likewise, drove public servants mad with constant requests (if invariably through others) for further and better particulars. At the time of asking for advice, it would have seemed urgent, but, in fact, the very request for advice tended to suggest that Rudd was equivocating, finding it hard to make a decision, and looking for an excuse to defer it. Public servants would frequently find that advice and information urgently gathered was not read for many months, sometimes at all.

Modern invention reinforced the menace of Fraser. It was during his time that the facsimile machine went into common use, and there were few as adept as Fraser in manhandling such a machine to require fresh information or make his views known in triplicate. The facsimile, which, like the photocopier, and, probably the electric typewriter, transformed modern politics, is now hardly used by anyone, but was a potent weapon in its time.

People tend to blame Fraser's predecessor, Gough Whitlam, for the explosion of ministerial advisers and minders, particularly those drawn from outside the public service. Yet the tendency did not become a fixture until Fraser effortlessly picked up on the Whitlam precedent, and developed his own formidable political staff, including formidable advisers such as David Kemp, Petro Georgiou, Cliff Walsh and John Rose. Dr John Hewson was also seriously irritating Treasury, and its secretary, John Stone, by being John Howard's economic adviser.

Stone once, famously, bitterly attacked the plethora of Fraser-era advisers, calling them "meretricious players who flit across the prime ministerial stage", and of the "incapacity of governments to discern the pits they dig themselves when short-term political expediency comes to hold sway over longer-term economic principle."

Stone attacked, as "remarkably self-serving" a paper by Professor Hewson on the role of minders, in which public servants were set up as straw men acting "as if governments are an unnecessary interference or hurdle between them and the 'right' policies, or running the country 'correctly'."

Fraser understood the difference between close political advisers and independent advisers from the public service. He may well have sorely tried both, but, most, including most public servants, who worked closely with him, prospered, even well in the successor Hawke governments.

Still, there was a cop invited, as much on the grounds of his height as his brains, to become one of Fraser's bodyguards. He declined, saying, "I would never take a bullet for any politician."