The Curious Diplomat

Lachlan Strahan’s The Curious Diplomat lands with the kind of unhurried confidence only a lifetime in the diplomatic trenches can produce. It’s a memoir that doesn’t so much lift the veil on Australian statecraft as tug it aside with the faintly amused precision of a man who has spent three decades watching the great and the ghastly attempt to steer a middle power through a world that no longer plays by the old rules. Strahan’s postings spanned India, Germany, South Korea and the Solomon Islands, giving him a panoramic vantage point from which to chart Australia’s ambitions, anxieties and occasional diplomatic pratfalls.

What strikes you first is Strahan’s tone—measured, dry, occasionally laced with a historian’s sly grin. He writes about the machinery of diplomacy with the clarity of someone who knows where all the gears are buried and which ones grind down junior officers like stray gravel. From covering the icy rigidity of North Korea from his base in Seoul — including a mid‑winter visit to Pyongyang during the DPRK’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non‑Proliferation Treaty — to the fluorescent exhaustion of UN corridors, Strahan renders these spaces with a journalist’s observational patience and a novelist’s capacity for scene.

And then, of course, there are the prime ministers—Rudd thinking in concentric circles of global order; Abbott radiating the energy of a man simultaneously negotiating policy and his own impulse to charge into a burning building; Turnbull performing statesmanship like a TED Talk with a diplomatic passport; and, briefly, Albanese in the early months of his government, navigating a global landscape where every handshake feels like the start of a hostage negotiation. Strahan dealt with them all, along with every foreign minister from Gareth Evans to Penny Wong, each a character study in anxiety, ambition and carefully modulated threat. This is where the memoir truly sings: in its cameos of power. The small-room moments. The heat shimmer of a briefing gone sideways. The way an ally’s smile can tell you more than a communiqué ever will. These vignettes are the book’s pulse—little jolts of candour in a genre usually embalmed in officialese.

Yet Strahan is not writing a triumphalist account of Australia bestriding the Indo‑Pacific. He’s chronicling something far more interesting: the steady, uneasy recalibration of a nation caught between the gravitational pulls of Beijing and Washington, between the fantasies of sovereignty and the realities of influence. The episodes dealing with China’s rise, India’s unease and the Solomon Islands’ security tilt read like dispatches from a world edging toward a new, untested equilibrium.

What elevates the memoir is Strahan’s curiosity—the quiet superpower that threads the narrative. It’s the curiosity of a diplomat who has seen enough to know certainty is usually a form of laziness. It’s what lets him observe the violence against Indian students, weapons negotiations, climate diplomacy and the MH370 search he helped coordinate with both emotional clarity and professional detachment.

There’s a moral-of-the-cycle lurking beneath the anecdotes: that diplomacy isn’t a chess match between nation-states but a long, occasionally chaotic group therapy session for political systems at war with their own illusions. Strahan’s gift is showing that the real work—Australia’s real work—happens in the margins, where good intentions meet the gravitational weight of history and the clockwork of competing interests.

The Curious Diplomat is a memoir that resonates with the low-frequency tension of a man who has had a front-row seat to Australia’s strategic adolescence. It’s witty without being glib, revealing without being reckless, and—most dangerously for Canberra—honest without broadcast permission.

If Sam Guthrie in The Peak gave us a fictionalised glimpse of insider dread, Strahan gives us the real thing, wrapped in charm, precision and the unshakeable suspicion that Australia’s place in the world is only as stable as the next carefully phrased phone call. In other words: essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered what diplomats actually do—and for anyone who suspects the answer might be far more than we’re comfortable knowing.