Writing in Hope and Fear: Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia

WRITING IN HOPE AND FEAR WRITING IN HOPE AND FEAR Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia JOHN MCLAREN Victoria U...

Author: John McLaren

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WRITING IN HOPE AND FEAR

WRITING IN HOPE AND FEAR Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia

JOHN MCLAREN Victoria University of Technology

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 lRP, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia ©John McLaren 1996 First published 1996 National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-publication data

McLaren,John, 1932- . Writing in hope and fear: literature as politics in postwar Australia. Bibliography. Includes index. 1. Australian literature - 20th century - History and criticism. 2. Politics and literature - Australia. I. Title. A820.9358 Library of Congress cataloguing-in-publication data

McLaren, John D. Writing in hope and fear: literature as politics in postwar Australia /John McLaren. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Australian literature - 20th century - History and criticism. 2. Authors, Australian - 20th century - Political and social views. 3. Politics and literature - Australia - History - 20th century. 4. Australia - Politics and government - 1945- I. Title. PR9609.6.M375 1996 820.9'994-dc20 95-51531 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0 521 56146 9 Hardback ISBN 0 521 56756 4 Paperback Transferred to digital printing 2003

Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

vii ix

Prologue: The Trials of Robert Close and Frank Hardy

1

1 Modernism and Nationalism: Jindyworobaks, Angry Penguins, Meanjin and other Weird Creatures

14

2 Literary Conflicts and Failed Vision: Overland and the Realist Writers Groups

33

3 The Community of Overland: Lambert, Morrison, Waten, Hewett and Martin

55

4 Conspiring for Freedom: The Australian Association for Cultural Freedom

77

5 The Mission of Quadrant James McAuley and Voices from the Right

95

6 Cold War on Writing: Attacks on Writers and Struggles for Funds

112

7 Proprietors at War: New Journalism in the Lucky Country

127

8 New Little Magazines: Religious Prospect and Secular Dissent 9 Opening the Pages: The Subsidized Journals, 1964-72

141 158

10 From Rhetoric to Eloquence: The Generation of '68

178

Epilogue

201

Notes Index

210 235 v

To Shirley, for constant support and love, and to Laxvrence David Bruce for hope for the future

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of work over many years, and many people have contributed to the development of the ideas in it. In particular, I would like to express my affection and gratitude to the late Stephen MurraySmith, founding editor of Overland, scourge of bigots and bullies, and friend and mentor to three generations of writers and scholars. Others who have given particular and detailed assistance include my colleagues Phillip Deery, Val Noone and Allan Patience; Geoffrey Serle and Laurie Clancy, who both read earlier versions of the text and made invaluable comments; Erik Lloga, who as research assistant has checked and corrected innumerable details; Lou Sweetland, who helped to generate the idea in the first place; Nita Murray-Smith, Max Marginson, Jennie Barrington, Brian Matthews, Jane Arms, Bruce Bennett, Veronica Brady, Don Grant, Patrick Morgan, Ken Goodwin, Helen and Chris Tiffin and Iain McCalman, all of whom have discussed the project at various stages; Peter Coleman, who has given valuable advice on sources and granted a formal interview; Donald Home, John Morrison, Dorothy Hewett, David Martin, the late Ian Mair, the late Judah Waten, the late Ted Hill, the late George Seelaf, who all gave me interviews. I would also like to thank Graeme Powell and the librarians at the special collections room at the National Library of Australia, the librarians at the State Library of Victoria, particularly the La Trobe Library, the Mitchell Library, the Fryer Library, the Battye Library, the Library of the University of Western Australia, and the Harry H. Ransom Humanities Research Center Library at the University of Texas, Austin. My gratitude is owed also for institutional support to my university, the Victoria University of Technology, to the Australian Research Council for a small grant, to the Humanities Research Centre at ANU for accommodation and support, and to Geoffrey Bolton and the Australian Studies Centre at the vii

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

University of Queensland for accommodation. I would also like to express my gratitude to the staff in the Footscray campus office of the Faculty of Arts, particularly Barbara Shields, and to the staff at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU. Permission to quote from published and manuscript sources is acknowledged to the following: Judith Wright McKinney; Thomas Shapcott; Tim Curnow of Curtis Brown, for the estate ofJames McAuley, for quotations from the essays; Richard Tipping; Penelope Buckley; UQP, for the estate of Michael Dransfield; John Forbes; David Martin; Dorothy Hewett; John Jenkins; Vera Deacon; Vic Williams; the estate of Frank Hardy; Bruce Anderson, for photograph of moratorium; Barbara Mobbs, for the Estate of Patrick White; Leonie Sandercock, for quotations from Ian Turner and access to the correspondence; to Peter Coleman, for access to AACF papers; Donald Home; Mona Brand; Ray Verrills; Nigel Roberts; John Tranter; Robert Adamson; the Estate of Frank Dalby Davison.

Abbreviations

AACF Australian Association for Cultural Freedom ALP Australian Labor Party CCF Congress for Cultural Freedom CPA Communist Party of Australia

ix

PROLOGUE

The Trials of Robert Close and Frank Hardy

On St Patrick's Day, 1946, in the Supreme Court of Victoria, the Crown Prosecutor, Leo Little KC, once more rose to his feet before the presiding judge, Sir Edmund Herring, ChiefJustice. It had been a long case, a trial for the rare offence of obscene libel. Counsel and judge had delivered their final addresses, and the jury had retired to consider its verdict, which most observers anticipated would be favourable to the accused. More was at stake than the fate of the defendant, a former seaman named Robert Close. The struggle to control the future is always a struggle to interpret the past, social and personal. In this struggle, culture generally and literature in particular are crucial. They determine our understanding of who we are and whence we come, and thus set the limits within which we can imagine who we might be. In this case, the bewigged judge and prosecutors beneath the royal coat of arms represented a belief in Australian tradition as a continuation of British forms and, behind them, of the values of European civilization. Close stood for the right of the author to tell his story in words that shaped life as he saw it. The working men who provided his characters and the ship that gave him his setting belonged to the tradition of social realism that valued the experience of ordinary men and women, particularly workers, above the forms of a traditional order. The court spoke in the language of an establishment that saw Australia as the last battleground in a struggle between the unchanging values of civilization and the barbarisms of modernism and communism. The defendant's work belonged to the tradition of radical nationalism that prized the success of Australians in their escape from repressive British and European orders. Through their experience of survival in a harsh environment, they had developed an independent tradition of egalitarian democracy that would enable them to join other free peoples in building a global future based on freedom and justice. 1

2


As always, the generalities of the issues manifested themselves in the responses elicited by particular words. The prosecution case hinged on whether the term 'rutting' in fact meant 'fucking', and if so what a rutting gesture might be, and whether it was proper for a reader to be confronted with its verbal expression in the pages of a novel. During the hearing, it was revealed that the Melbourne booksellers Robertson and Mullens had independently made up their minds on the issue and had returned the entire consignment of Close's novel, Love Me Sailor, although they considered James Joyce's Ulysses, then still banned by Australian Customs, quite suitable for a major display in their show window. At this point His Honour mildly enquired: James Joyce's Ulysses? I do not know the book is it a translation?' Within an hour Robertson and Mullens had removed Joyce from their window and restacked the copies under their counter, thus combining morality with continuing profitability. So far, things had not gone well with the prosecution, but this situation was about to change. 'On Monday last,' the prosecutor informed the court, 'a man ... left the court in company with the foreman of the jury.' The man, he explained, was a literary critic known to both the author and the publisher. The man was Ian Mair, who as a public servant had found time light on his hands since finishing a wartime history of the Navy Department, and had filled the wanton hours listening to the trial of his old mate Bob Close. On the first day of the trial, according to Mair, he had recognized the foreman of the jury as someone he had known through the 3UZ radio quiz program 'Battle of the Sexes'. He had had a beer with him on the strength of it. The Crown had known of this encounter for four days, but had allowed the defence to present its entire case before bringing the juryman's encounter to the attention of the court. When the prosecutor did raise the matter, Sir Edmund Herring decided that he had no option but to discharge the jury and order a new trial. At this second trial the Crown was able to avoid the pits into which it had fallen during the first. Close was convicted and sentenced to a fine and to imprisonment for three months. He was led away in handcuffs. The Victorian InspectorGeneral of Prisons, Mr A.R. Whatmore, responded to subsequent criticism of this treatment of the novelist by explaining that at all times he would be treated exactly the same as any other prisoner. This meant that he would be allowed two visitors a week and would be allowed to write only letters, and these of a personal or domestic kind. Asked for the regulations which justified this regime, he replied, 'What regulations stipulate it? I say it. I am the authority.' Thus did conscience and authority combine to turn a novelist into a felon.1 The judge in the second trial, Mr Justice Martin, justified this act of legal persecution. In sentencing Close, he asserted that 'The morals of

PROLOGUE

3

the community, especially the youth of the community, must be safeguarded at least as strictly as its property. ...' This judge five years later was to preside over another notable case, the trial of the Communist and novelist Frank Hardy on a charge of criminal libel.2 The importance of the LoveMeSailorca.se, apart from its effect on Close, who after his release from gaol went into 'self-imposed exile' for twentyfive years3, was to provide a precedent for using the criminal law to suppress writing that challenged conventions. Frank Hardy's novel Power Without Glory offered an explicitly political challenge, and by arraigning its author on a charge of publishing a criminal libel, the establishment showed the lengths to which it would go in using legal processes to prevent any questioning of its authority. Yet both Close's and Hardy's novels are in fact very conservative works, certainly by the standards of Ulysses. The location of Close's novel on a windjammer, albeit a weatherbeaten relic plying the guano trade from Chile to the United States during the inter war years, is in itself an appeal to nostalgia through the invocation of away of life now dead. As realistfiction,particularly in its description of the storm and of the skills men bring into play to resist the extreme trials brought on them by the forces of nature, the book is good. Insofar as it is a study of how character arises from this situation it convinces, but the central theme of the plot, the challenge of the femme fatale to this enclosed male society, is shallow romance. As such, it reinforces the myths of destructive female sexuality, but it does also convey some of the variety of male sexuality, and undermines the myth of the sexless male hero of the working class. It was presumably this element of the novel, rather than its particular vocabulary, that so affronted its prosecutors and jurors.4 Similarly, the significant transgression of Power Without Glory was not the alleged legal offence committed by Hardy, that he 'did maliciously and criminally libel Mrs Ellen Wren', by accusing her, in the character of Nellie West, of having seduced a married man and having had a child by him. Hardy's real offence was that he showed government not as a contest between differing views settled by the periodic arbitration of a democratic electorate, but as an interlocking series of conspiracies by powerful men furthering their own interests.5 The full weight of the law had therefore to be brought to bear lest this distorted view should corrupt the populace and destroy their confidence in democracy and their chosen leaders. Jack Galbally, the lawyer representing Ellen Wren, virtually admitted this at the preliminary hearing when he argued that not only was the book a 'wicked libel' but also that it was 'a Communist conspiracy against the government' and that 'it defames the Parliament, the Church and the Judiciary'.6 Hardy and Close in fact occupied the same mental world as their accusers, a world dominated by the mythology of nineteenth-century

4


colonial capitalist society in which the individual who understands his world can change it. Close's ship of individuals seeking to achieve their separate ambitions through collective endeavour is for a time corrupted by the irrationality of passion, but the agent of corruption is finally drowned, freeing the men to go their own ways. Because Frank Hardy chronicles the evolution of a society rather than the voyage of a single ship, he shows his individual characters contending with the forces of production and its finance rather than with those of nature. The only collectivity that he explores, the labour movement, is shown to be as corrupt and susceptible to manipulation by the strong man as are the direct agents of capitalism in its various guises of rentier, industrialist and financier. Given its form as a nineteenth-century realist novel of fortune, it could scarcely show anything else. Its view of reality must be that ofJohn West, and it can differ from him, and from its legal opponents, only in its distribution of blame and praise among the characters. The direct challenge to realist fiction was to come, not from lawyers nor from politicians, but from writers who were unable to accept its limitations. From one direction the challenge came from poets like Judith Wright, whose concern for the sources of human sexuality and natural vitality led to what may be termed an environmental understanding of the individual and history. Wright places her emphasis on the human being and humanity as elements in the web of nature rather than on the interaction of the individual and society. From another direction came those poets who rejected the realist belief in human society as producing its own history. Rather, their work felt its way towards an acceptance of the self through patterns of order and tradition. Foremost among these writers was James McAuley, who, after earlier flirtations with anarchism and then Buddhism, had become Catholic in religion, formal in poetics, and rigidly conservative in politics. This brought him into direct opposition to the faith in collective action and purposive writing that sustained the realist writers in the postwar years. As explained in the first issue of the Realist Writer in 1952, these writers sought their inspiration in folklore and ballads, and in 'the image of an Australian tradition of mateship, of standing together against the exploitation of tyrants.'7 Believing that 'capitalism, with American and British warmongers at its head,' was entering 'the last phase of its existence', they rejected poets 'obsessed with the idea of death and corruption' and novelists who 'consistently spread a defeatist philosophy about life or else turn hopelessly to the loneliness of their ivory towers.' Against this defeatism they set the realists who paint 'word pictures of life as it was lived.' They felt, however, that in the modern age not even this realism was sufficient. The article continues:

PROLOGUE

5

Proust and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf may at first impress us as realists in the sense that they endeavour to analyse the flow of conscious thoughts of their characters. But their detailed probing has no more important purpose than to show indecision, futility, boredom, escape. It does not help us to a clearer view of the society in which these men and women are supposed to move. We are not made aware of the significant struggles that are continually shaping man's destiny. We do not see the ordinary people engaged in these struggles ...

The writer goes on to argue that the only realism valid 'today under capitalism is social realism' (sic). Its works are not marked by pessimism and despair because their authors have an understanding of the process of history and they know that 'the future is with the people.' He concludes that the social realist writer will identify with the people's struggles and 'write as a partisan, a spokesman' for working men and women, and against the 'black reaction and ruthless corruption of day to day issues like the imposition of the Crimes Act and the treachery of strike breakers'. The slide from the universal to the contingent is characteristic, and was no doubt one reason for the split in consciousness between the writer and the activist that Hardy was later to complain characterized his life at this time.8 More importantly, the attempt to incorporate writing in the political struggle, rather than to recognize it as itself a struggle for freedom, led to a form of censorship that stifled writers and blinded activists to the nature of the world they sought to change. The idea of writing as a struggle for freedom was captured by authority, and the writing came to emulate within its own bounds the tyranny of its chosen model, the Soviet Union. For Australia, this meant that there was no effective challenge to the complacent and reactionary authoritarianism of the right. The writing and publication of Hardy's Power Without Glory, and its subsequent trial, constitute in a microcosm the doomed attempt to establish in Australia the structures of an alternative working-class culture that would provide the basis for a socialist society. Hardy based his story on meticulous research into the separate records and memories of earlier participants in the struggle against capitalism. His novel brings these together in a form that raises the consciousness of its readers to an understanding of the society in which they work. He published and sold the first edition himself, but, when Ellen Wren's private complaint against the book was taken over by the State of Victoria, the collective effort of activists supported and organized by the Communist Party and its agencies produced a second edition of the book and distributed it through their own networks to its working-class readers. This effort showed how producers could retain control of a product intended not for consumption as entertainment, but for use in furthering political understanding and thus, potentially, political power.

6


The first ideas for Power Without Glory had come to Hardy during the war, when he discussed them with Ambrose Dyson.9 The genesis of the ideas can be traced back to Hardy's father, who repeatedly explained to his sons that the Labor Party no longer represented the workers, but had become John Wren's party'.10 The decision that Hardy should be backed to write the novel was made by Ralph Gibson, then editor of the Melbourne Communist weekly, the Guardian, but the work was made possible by George Seelaf, secretary of the Amalgamated Meat Industry Employees' Union, the Butchers. Hardy describes his first meeting with Seelaf, 'an affable, thickset and - it must be admitted - extremely ugly-looking man of doubtful age.'11 When Hardy put to him his idea of syndicating realist stories to union journals, Seelaf 'screwed up his wrinkled face in what passed for a smile but made him look even more like an ape and said "I've been trying to din the idea into their heads around here for years: writing for the working class. If you can supply the stories I can supply the journals ..."' This led to members of the Realist Writers Group, including Hardy, who had now become its president, and John Morrison, gaining publication, but as importantly it led to Seelaf employing Hardy as advertising salesman for the union's journal while he did his research and writing for Power Without Glory}2 Although the income he received from this union patronage did not cover the expenses of living, it did help. Power Without Glory falls uneasily between reportage and fiction. Although its notoriety was based on its implicit claim to historic truth, its author was acquitted of criminal libel on the basis of an argument that there was no identity between characters in the novel and contemporaries with similar names. Hardy has claimed that characters like John West, based on John Wren, are 'fictional-composite characters', and there is no reason to doubt him when he writes that the glossaries that purported to give the real life names of the people corresponding to the characters in the novel merely 'appeared' without his involvement.13 He explained that 'The book began as a vague idea... and took four years in the writing, with John West slowly becoming more real than John Wren.'14 Yet at the trial he wanted to use the defence of truth and public benefit, and disagreed with the line taken by his defence counsel, who denied any association between characters in the book and the Wren family.15 The distinction between the book's political and literary functions dogged Hardy's personal life, which alternated between total involvement in political causes and withdrawal to pursue his writing. Similarly, it runs like a faultline through the novel itself, preventing it from fully embodying either the author's faith in the common man or a consciousness of the struggles and conflicts in which he is involved. George Seelaf has said that the full story of the publication and trial of Power Without Glory will never be told. Part of it, he said, was confidential

PROLOGUE

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between himself and others now dead, but he was pledged to take the secret with him to his grave.16 Part of this secret is the source of Hardy's information. According to Ted Hill, Ralph Gibson had Frank Anstey's papers, on which much of the middle part of the novel seems to be based, but Hardy was the author.17 Hardy on the other hand claims that Anstey burned his papers shortly before his death, following a visit from Ted Theodore. This corresponds with the account in the novel, although the character Frank Ash ton, based on Anstey, leaves a memoir after his death.18 Seelaf says that the Masons, motivated by their anti-Catholicism, assisted with the collection of evidence. He himself drove Hardy to meetings with Mrs Bill Egan, whose husband was the original of the bricklayer whose adultery in the novel provided the pretext for its trial. These meetings, which took place late at night, became so frequent that Seelaf s wife accused him of being out with another woman.19 In 'Voices Off Hardy promises to reveal the truth about what he learned from these meetings, but after a long discussion on the nature of truth the manuscript, deliberately or accidentally, abruptly switches to a new chapter.20 He does however add the information that when his counsel discovered that the brother of the woman who had given Hardy the information about Ellen Wren was a Commonwealth policeman, he had refused to call her as a witness. The actual publication of the book was financed, according to Hardy, by a fortunate win at the races, and according to Ted Hill by a loan of £50 or £100 raised by the Victorian Branch of the Communist Party, and never repaid. The loan was however most likely a grant, analogous to the money raised in 1949 to further Noel Counihan's career. The money for Counihan was however raised by public advertisement, whereas the source of the funds for Power Without Glory remains a mystery to this day.21 Hardy did much of the novel's typesetting himself or with the help of a friendly printer, whom he paid; the folding was done at the Melbourne Argus, until its manager discovered the nature of the contents. Hardy spirited the printed pages away, and the task of folding and binding was completed at various backstreet works, and, when the money ran out, by volunteers. The whole edition was distributed through union and Party networks.22 When Hardy was arrested, he atfirstbelieved it was for theft of the paper, but by the time the courts had required an undertaking that distribution would cease, the edition was gone. The printing of a second edition by the 'Industrial Printing Press' (Industrial Printing and Publishing Company), a firm controlled by the Labor right and the Catholic Movement, was arranged by Seelaf with the knowledge of Pat Kennelly, a director, who accused Ted Hill of being the actual author. When the Labor proprietors found out what was being printed at their

8


works, they moved to destroy it, but Hardy and his supporters pre-empted them by seizing the printed sheets and a ton of paper in a midnight raid.23 During the trial, Seelaf again had to raise money, this time to pay for the defence. The defending barrister, Donald M. Campbell, had no love for Communists, and told his junior, John Starke, that each day's money had to be paid before they went into court or they would see nothing for their troubles. Although a committee for the defence, chaired by Alan Marshall, had raised funds, they were not sufficient to meet the costs of £200 a day. Seelaf told Hardy not to worry or to ask questions - the money would be there. Although Campbell believed it came from the Party, Seelaf said it was supplied by wealthy supporters.24 Hardy's junior counsel, John, later Sir John, Starke, has described the trial judge, Mr Justice Martin, as a 'bad tempered old fellow' and 'not much of a lawyer', who conducted the trial Very unfairly'.25 His ruling that the Crown did not have to prove that the book was calculated to disturb the peace, and his refusal to allow it to be read in full to the court, restricted the defence case. However, Campbell, the senior counsel, had continual rows with the judge and succeeded in having great parts of the novel read out as an integral part of his cross-examination of prosecution witnesses. This was designed to elicit from them denials that the iniquities attributed by the narrative to the fictitious John West had anything to do with the real John Wren, and thus to deny that Nellie West could be identified with the Ellen Wren whose adultery was the subject of the action. The tactic succeeded, and Hardy was acquitted. The public effect of the trial was, however, to link John Wren inseparably with the unscrupulous character in Hardy's novel. To this extent, the book succeeded in its political purpose. This success served to obscure both the novel's literary strengths and its failures. Read as history, it achieves the author's aim of showing how the 'ruthless accumulation for its own sake of great power will corrupt a man, corrupt every organization over which he gains control, and blight his relationship with people, even those he loves.'26 Yet if the purpose of socialist realist fiction is to enable us not just to understand the world, but to change it, the novel fails, because its picture of spreading corruption overwhelms any sense of a possible alternative. The workers' own organisations, the labour movement, become just a part of the corruption, while the Communist Party is portrayed in terms so ideal as to leave it as disconnected from the action of the novel as its historical counterpart became from the politics of Australia. The opening pages of the book give promise of a greater achievement.27 The sovereign spinning between John West and Constable Brogan provides exactly the right symbol for the theme of the book, and is at the same time socially and psychologically authentic. The conflict

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within Brogan between greed and duty is fully dramatized as his eyes follow the coin, and when West contemptuously flips it to him and the policeman grabs it, we sense West's feeling of vindicating power. As the author shows us John West walking briskly off down Jackson Street, he deftly enlarges his focus to set this particular incident in its physical and social context. West runs alongside one of the recently installed cable trams, leaps on board the dummy, and as he is borne through a Carringbush showing the signs both of the interrupted boom of the 1880s and of the Depression which has succeeded it, the narrator reflects naturally on West's origins and his career up to this turning point in his fortunes: Life in Carringbush and heredity had imposed on John West the humble, the furtive and the sordid aspects of life. His family was among the poorest in the squalid, poverty-stricken suburb. His friends were the workers, the workless and the larrikins. When he and his brothers were boys, the police often found cause to call at the house ... (p. 12)

The historical materialism and sense of class in this passage are impeccable, but they belong absolutely within the unfolding narrative. They establish the hopeless sense of being trapped which Hardy develops first in his brief history of the West family and then in the scene where the West brothers and their mates play a desultory game of poker in the back shed. This game provides the occasion for John West's disclosure of his plan to break out of the trap by running an illegal and crooked betting scheme - a book - and Eddie Corrigan's challenge to it. Corrigan, the unionist, points out correctly that West offers the punters hope only at the expense of their equally desperate fellows. As an alternative, the union offers the hope of collective resistance to the bosses. In the conflict between these alternatives lies the novel that could have fulfilled Hardy's purpose of revealing the underlying pattern of social history and the 'clash of wills resulting in events that none willed'.28 In fact, Hardy shirks this conflict, choosing instead to follow the events of West's career. Hardy's problem is that his underlying ideology is so absolute that it will allow literally no action of human value to succeed before the revolution has been achieved. In the meantime, the individual can gain material advantage only at the expense of his fellows. This is the world of the nineteenth-century realists, of his model Balzac or of Dickens, except that in Hardy's case no benevolence can offset the effects of avarice, nor even temper it. It is not just that Hardy cannot imagine an alternative to the power of money: his structure will not allow him to entertain such a possibility. Thus, once West has made his choice, all that remains for him is to learn the joys and limitations of power.over others - thinking he

10


has chosen freedom, he has chosen to become a victim of necessity. Although Corrigan appears from time to time as a kind of counterpoint to West's scheming, Hardy, wisely dropping an earlier plan to give him a larger and romantic role, leaves us also without any indication of his career as a unionist, a role that might have supplied a tragic theme.29 The unionists who appear in the novel's later action have already failed and become mere venal operatives. Only at the end of the novel does Hardy try to offer a real alternative by having Mary West defy her father and join the Communists, but the struggles she finds herself involved in are so idealized and generalized that we can believe in them no more than we believe in Dickens' visions of domestic bliss in rose-covered cottages as a solution to the problems of the urban poor. The strength of the novel rests on its portrayal of the way power takes possession of John West once he has made his initial choice. Through West this power also takes over the reader, so that we perforce admire the steely determination with which he sweeps aside every obstacle, enmiring himself ever more deeply in the slough of deceit, corruption and violence as he does so. It is easy to see why the book, read as an historical document, so upset the establishment. Yet this historicity is also one of its problems. It is not only that Hardy finds it necessary to impose his judgement on people so that we will not forget his historical pattern, as when he introduces the Premier, Thomas Bond, with the explanation that 'as leader of the Conservative Government [he] was concerned only to advance the interests of business men, bankers and squatters' (pp. 178-9). More seriously, we find ourselves reading scenes with an eye to their historical facticity rather than their imaginative truth, wondering whether the historical Archbishop Mannix played this particular part in this conspiracy or whether the journalist Clive Palmer was bashed to prevent him disclosing the rigging at the Stadium, or whether both incidents belong only to their fictional counterparts. The interest thus elicited is appropriate to gossip rather than to a fictional enquiry into the underlying structures of society. Instead of discovery, we are given the assertion that these superficial acts of intrigue and violence are all that matter, and that the only thing hidden is the line of command.30 Power Without Glory must be seen as a part of the problem it describes as much as a response to it. Its limitations can be seen if we compare it with the work of one of Hardy's fellow members of the Melbourne Realist Writers Group, John Morrison. Morrison's stories are anchored in society and firm in their ideology, but they also contain their own opposites. They show the destructive power not only of capitalism but also, in a story like 'Going Through', of working-class solidarity.31 His work is based on a trust in experience that is lacking in Hardy, who must explain experience in terms of conspiracy. It is a trust also lacking in the conservatives, mainly

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poets, who stood in the name of tradition against social realism and the political uses of literature. These writers fled from experience into the patterns of imposed artistic form and political reaction. To turn from Hardy, or even Morrison, to the poetry ofJames McAuley is to enter a world that is recognizably modern, where, because there are no temporal certainties, the stakes are higher. Hardy's characters create their own history even as they become its victims, whereas McAuley's are explorers rather than makers. They do not make history: instead, they seek to discover a world in order to possess it, and through it, themselves. Yet the order they discover is static, a retreat from the present into a history that does not so much arise from the past as find itself trapped within it. McAuley's work consistently moves from temporal chaos into divine order. The only option allowed humans is to re-enact the eternal. His emphasis on the cyclic is a reflection of his deliberate rejection of what he described as 'the myth of revolution', but with that rejection goes a refusal of all meaningful action.32 His heroes do not act: from Prometheus to Quiros they endure events and wait on time to reveal its purposes. In this they have much in common with the seekers and visionaries in Patrick White's novels. After his victory in the Power Without Glory trial, Hardy travelled first to Europe and then to Russia. Returning to Australia, he published his eulogy to the Soviet Union, Journey into the Future, which he later described as 'the only basically dishonest book I ever wrote'.33 In 1958 he became editor of the Sydney-based Realist Writer, established to assert the principles of socialist realism that he believed Overland had abandoned. Although he constructed himself as a character of popular legend, particularly through his Billy Borker yarns on television, he continued to find his work banned or neglected, and his relations with the Communist Party were stormy. Eventually, in But the Dead Are Many,54 he laid the ghosts of his own and his comrades' Stalinist past. By contrast, James McAuley became founding editor of the journal Quadrant, dedicated to opposing communism and asserting traditional social and literary values, and went on to become Professor of English in Tasmania and a public exponent of conservative politics and poetics. Yet both careers can be seen as responses to a common perception that the postwar world of triumphal scientism imposed an order that allowed no toehold for the individual. The Cold War abroad and sterile ideological conflict at home were the political counterparts of their separate literary responses. In the opposition of their work and their politics they characterize the cultural situation of Australia in the postwar world. This situation was determined by the passions and hopes of the experience of the war itself, when white Australia for the first time confronted an enemy that threatened its continuing existence. In hindsight,

12


we may recognize that the Japanese never intended an invasion, but the rapidity of their invasions of the countries to our immediate north made the threat seem real. By the middle of 1942, the supposedly impregnable fortress of Singapore had fallen and thousands of Australians been imprisoned. The Dutch had been driven from the East Indies and the Americans from the Philippines, Darwin had been bombed, and the slender Australian forces who now engaged with them at Milne Bay and on the Kokoda track seemed the last fragile barrier against invasion. When the Americans landed in Australia, military command was entrusted to their commander, General Douglas MacArthur. Earlier in the war, Richard Casey, then Australian Minister to the United States, laboured mightily to establish direct and friendly relations at all levels. When the the erratic but brilliant Dr H.V. Evatt became Minister for External Affairs, he gave priority to developing a diplomatic service and a foreign policy based on Australia as an independent nation participating fully in a world body, the United Nations, assuming responsibility for international peacekeeping. These hopes were thwarted by the emergence of the great power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, and its hardening into the Cold War, but Australia remained inescapably embroiled in the affairs of its north. Under both Labor and Liberal governments, Australia's external policies in the postwar years were characterized by a search for a security that the war had destroyed forever. This search led to our involvement in the Korean War, in Indonesia's struggles for independence and sovereignty, in the insurgency in Malaya, and eventually in the Vietnam War. The divisions of the Cold War extended to domestic policies. The Curtin and Chifley Labor governments were determined that Australia would not return to the prewar policies that had produced the misery of the Great Depression. The policies of postwar reconstruction were intended to ensure that Australia developed an independent industrial basis that would support a just society marked by full employment and universal welfare services. Despite rhetorical differences, the Menzies coalition government largely continued these economic policies, but its virulent anti-communism at home and abroad polarized politics and intellectual debate. As a consequence, Australians reinstated the emotional isolation, the real and mental dependence on powerful friends, that had characterized prewar society. The radical nationalists who had emerged after the war became marginalized, while the conservatives were locked into a defensive stance that led them to identify modernism with the enemy and to retreat to the traditions of preEnlightenment Europe as the only barrier to barbarism. This book looks first at the attempts to develop a new spirit of nationalism as the foundation of a socialist and democratic Australia.

PROLOGUE

13

These attempts were built on contradictory modernist and nationalist movements that go back to the 1930s and were represented by the Jindyworobak movement and the journals Angry Penguins and Meanjin. The establishment of Overland in 1954, at the height of the Cold War, was the culmination of the attempts to unite the left around an alternative culture that would be both democratic and socialist. Although this attempt was vitiated by the ideological and sectarian conflicts that afflict the left, it encouraged the production of a body of writing, particularly fiction, with a distinctively Australian and working-class voice. It also generated a fierce response from the right, manifest both in the foundation of Quadrant, explicitly conservative, anti-communist and anti-modern, and in an intensification of political attempts to constrain writers. As this division hardened, the conduct of the Vietnam War revealed the sterility of Cold War policies abroad and a new generation of writers emerged to challenge the division between public and private that was inherent in the politics and in the writing of the postwar period. This generation widened the openings made by their elders in the new journalism that first appeared in the fortnightlies, the Observer and Nation, and then in the dailies, led by the Australian. The newer writers went beyond the renewed intellectual vigour of this journalism to extend the reach of writing itself, and to place the individual at the centre of the politics of the state and of their own lives. The book closes with an examination of the hopes and the disasters of this attempt, and a glance at its aftermath.

ONE

Modernism and Nationalism Jindyworobaks, Angry Penguins, Meanjin and other Weird Creatures

The fall of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942, and the arrival in Australia of General Douglas MacArthur and his American legions later the same year, confronted Australia with the collapse of the imperial order that had hitherto underwritten its security. The Prime Minister, John Cur tin, made clear the new reality in his New Year message for 1942, when, as the British dithered in Singapore, he declared 'that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom'.1 Although Curtin himself did not intend his words as a declaration of independence from Britain, events produced their own logic. Australia became a military base from which the United States launched its campaign to drive back the Japanese. The troops who came tofillthe base brought with them colour discrimination and Coke, but also jazz, modern poetry and courtesy to women. Max Harris, who had established the journal Angry Penguins in Adelaide in 1941, and Clem Christesen, who in 1940 in Brisbane had founded Meanjin Papers to keep civilized values alive amid wartime restrictions, were among those who appreciated the new spirit.2 To youngsters who had grown up under the repression of Prime Ministers Lyons and Menzies and Attorney-General Hughes these newcomers brought the sense of a world open to conquest by the mind and the senses. Meanjin welcomed contributions from American writers like Harry Roskolenko and Karl Shapiro whom the tide of war had washed to Australia. At South Brisbane High School a slightly younger generation found liberation from respectability in the jazz dives that served the American servicemen. They expressed their joyous rejection of everything old in the pages of their own journal, Barjai, founded by Barrett (Barrie) Reid and Laurence Collinson to give artistic expression to Australia's youth. At the end of the war, Christesen moved Meanjin to Melbourne, where Reid followed 14

MODERNISM AND NATIONALISM

15

at the end of the 1940s. Here the interaction between modernist enthusiasm and the new spirit of radical nationalism that arose more directly from the experience of war was generating the cultural energy, and some of the cultural spleen, of postwar Australia.3 I Before Meanjin there had been the Jindyworobaks. Established in Adelaide by the poet and nationalist Rex Ingamells, they forswore not only the literary forms but also the language of England in favour of an amalgam of Australian sentiment, the imagined Aboriginal Dreamtime of Alcheringa, and a vocabulary synthesized from Aboriginal sources. Brian Elliott has suggested that for the founders of the group the practice of poetry was a means to demonstrate their theory of cultural nationalism. Nevertheless, he claims, even in its excess their enthusiasm produced 'a wild, bright, fresh music'.4 Not all the critics, however, were so charitable. Writing in Meanjin, Max Harris, who had himself been sufficiently caught up in Jindyworobak zeal to publish in its anthologies, dismissed the writers as concerned more 'with what they experience than the way they experience.' Harris identified the central fallacy of their theory as the belief that writers should be encouraged to express in their poetry the 'real world of their immediate experience', by which they meant the experience of the physical environment. Harris maintained that the poet's 'fundamental environment is himself. It follows that the only function of landscape in poetry is for the poet to say something about it and to say it in a language that is his own. He finds that Ingamells' poetry, in particular, fails on both counts.5 Harris' review starts with an attack not on the Jindyworobaks but on the nationalist contributors to Meanjin, whose verse he contrasts with the ideas of the critics who had used its pages to argue for universal standards of literary achievement. Harris quite rightly saw the early issues of Meanjin as driven by the same imperatives as the Jindyworobaks: 'So much talk about Australian Kulchewer, environmental values, national beauty ... shrieking and caterwauling about a purely fictitious problem'. The critic's responsibility, he argues, does not lie either with the nationalists or with the universalists, but is 'to examine the poetry that is produced according to the highest aesthetic judgement and sensitivity that he can develop within himself.' This was the task he set himself in his own journal, Angry Penguins, which consciously set itself against literary nationalism and in favour of the aesthetic standards he found in modernism. Harris' own contribution to the 1941 Jindyworobak Anthology, 'Harris the Hobo', sounds by its title like a piece of populist nationalism. In fact it reads

16


like the modernism that was to be so savagely parodied by James McAuley and Harold Stewart, themselves both occasional Meanjin contributors: I am no lover's attorney; have wept the midnight's cold, into a dreary myth, the core of history's countenance, have kept it secret in the grooves of the understood.6 Just as the Jindyworobaks could publish this piece of modernism, with its abrupt shifts between apparently random images, so Meanjin could publish a poem, 'Letter to Home', byJ.D. MacKenzie, beginning To balumbirs and jibbens, birralees of Yarra Yarra, Borah of Arunta sends paper yabber-yabber. (2/2, p. 13)

In fact, the Jindyworobak anthologies, Meanjin and Angry Penguins all arose from the same determination to establish a place in the world for Australian literature and art. Elliott explains this as coming from a decade when the nation 'was still emotionally and intellectually a colony in adolescence, awaiting cultural maturity' (Elliott, p. xvii). At the same time, 'a great cloud of ugliness and terror' was enveloping Europe. The Jindyworobaks turned away from the corruptions of the old world to 'the innocent and undefiled waterhole of inspiration' they found in their understanding of the Dream time culture of the Arunta. In their impulse both to reject the present and to find a purer form of mythology, the Jindyworobaks resembled Hugh McCrae and Norman Lindsay before them. Their choice of Aboriginal rather than classical mythology represented an acceptance of the land on its own terms in place of the rejection of it as hostile that had been central to earlier affirmations of nationalism. This acceptance, which they shared with Meanjin, itself bearing a name derived from the Aboriginal, was poetic rather than scientific, a source of inspiration for the whites rather than a recognition of Aboriginal culture in its own terms. The Jindyworobaks were interested in more than a mythology to compensate for the sterility of their times. In the Aboriginal concept of Alcheringa, which they misleadingly translated as the Dream time, they believed they had found a positive way of relating not to some universal ideal but to a particular past and to the potential of the land in which they lived. Even their language is to be understood in this sense. Aboriginal terms served Ingamells' purpose of ridding his vocabulary of European connotations that he considered irrelevant. Even drops of dew described as jewels suggested 'the pageantry of the old world', the panoply of European courts and their Australian parodies. He believed


17

that a new vocabulary drawn from the ancient peoples of the land would break with English influences and allow 'the birth of a new soul'.7 Ingamells drew this belief in a new start from P.R. Stephensen's The Foundations of Culture in Australia, which in turn reflected the longstanding faith that Australia offered the opportunity to build a new nation free of the faults of the old world. Yet, at the time Stephensen and Ingamells were writing, this aspiration arose not so much from selfconfidence as from resentment of the continuing power of British capital to shackle Australian development. At a deeper level, several novelists at this time were examining the brutal exploitation of the land by pioneers attempting to establish the older civilization in an alien environment. In Landtakers (1934) Brian Penton reversed the nationalist myth of the pioneers to show how by their efforts they brutalized themselves. Xavier Herbert, who for a time had been an associate of Stephensen and his 'Australia First' Movement, in Capricornia (1938) showed how the land itself destroyed those who tried to exploit it for their own purposes. The Jindyworobaks were trying to go beyond the savagery of these novels to find in the land a source of strength that would enable Australians to transcend the brutality and alienation of their origins. Yet even their best work went little beyond Ian Mudie's retreat to the image of the laconic Australian unaffected by the vicissitudes of the world, or of Roland Robinson's recovery of a romantic view of the land conveyed through myths and images of its creatures. Neither engaged effectively with the actualities of the world. Yet the poet Bruce Dawe, who published in later Jindyworobak annuals under the name of Llewellyn Reece, emphasizes their importance in enabling Australians to see the actualities of their environment and its first people. They 'put people inside the landscape', he says, and enabled him to put himself in the 'position of people who were conquered'. Dawe recognized that, while Aboriginal mythology gave European Australians something to hang on to in the face of a country alien to their imported culture, their struggles to belong were at the cost of the Aborigines: the difficulties we have in belonging, these are your cenotaph.8 The recognition of difference enabled Dawe to move beyond mythologizing to a poetry that places the individual in the centre of a social and moral as well as a physical landscape. II The reality of the modern world had become impossible for Australians to avoid after the fall of Singapore brought them into direct confrontation

18


with both potential and real invaders. While the country was mobilized to resist the Japanese, its American protectors filled its cities. Herbert was later to respond to the consequences, first in Soldier's Women (1961), which describes both the civilizing and the brutalizing effects of the American invasion of Sydney, and later in Poor Fellow My Country (1975), which in its vast compass includes a description of Darwin's day of shame in the face of Japanese attack as a metaphor of the stupidity and cowardice that invalidate the claim of white Australians to their land. More immediately, Clem Christesen and the contributors to Meanjin affirmed Australia not as a place apart but as a mature member of an international community. Christesen has explained that his intention in establishing Meanjin was to provide a journal that 'should see what was happening to our community and resist it', and to make clear the connection between literature and politics.9 At the time, the only other general, as opposed to polemical, literary journal in Australia was Southerly, which had been established in 1939 by the Sydney branch of the Australian English Association. This association existed 'primarily to maintain the [English] language in Australia and encourage its right use'. Although its journal fostered Australian writing, it eschewed both 'propaganda of any sort' and 'politics'.10 Christesen, on the other hand, encouraged political discussion as part of his journal's function of observation and resistance, the necessary complement to art in keeping alive the spirit of civilization in a time of wartime austerity and propaganda. As a consequence, Christesen from the start found himself involved in controversies with contributors and other magazines, as well as the usual problems of time and finance. Unlike Angry Penguins, Meanjin attracted criticism on political rather than literary grounds. In 1942, for example, H.M. Green wrote that in the latest number 'some damned person made an outrageous statement about Britain's lack of virility and determination'. 11 He invited his correspondent, Dr F.W. Robinson, in whose house Christesen had conceived the idea of the first Meanjin Papers,12 to join him in protesting, and said he had told the editor that 'unless there is some sort of withdrawal ... no decent man is likely to have anything more to do with Meanjin Papers'. Judith Wright, who in 1944 had become unpaid secretary to Meanjin, has written of both Christesen's querulousness and his strengths as editor at this time: As an editor, Clem was catholic but volatile ... highly sensitive about his lack of academic and even journalistic qualifications ... This made him a difficult and self-contradictoryjudge. But at least an editor uncertain of the worth of the new ideas and the new European philosophies now floating everywhere as people looked towards war's end was unlikely to become a pundit or an exclusivist.13


19

These qualities gave Meanjin a different emphasis from its contemporary, Angry Penguins, which was more concerned to bring the international community into an Australia it considered jejune and provincial. Angry Penguins was established in 1940 by Max Harris with the support of the Arts Society of the University of Adelaide. From 1943 until its demise in 1946 it was produced in Melbourne and financed by John and Sunday Reed. Through the Reeds it was closely connected with the Contemporary Art Society which had been established in order to promote modern art in Australia. Although the society was eventually split between the philosophic anarchism of Albert Tucker and the social realism of Noel Counihan, both these artists were for a time, like Harris himself, members of the Communist Party. Harris and Tucker had their philosophic differences with the Party and allowed their membership to lapse. Counihan was expelled, rejoined, and remained a loyal member to the end of his life.14 But behind these differing allegiances lay the single dilemma of the artist in the age of industry. It has been said that before the industrial revolution every person was a special kind of artist. The romantic movement that began in England as a reaction to industrialism taught instead that every artist was a special kind of person. This was the dilemma of Australian artists in the 1940s. The group around John Reed and his wife Sunday, at their estate of 'Heide' in Melbourne, believed that they had the vision to liberate their fellows from the greed and philistinism that had produced the Great Depression and the subsequent war. Against this view was the belief of Counihan and his associates that liberation would come only by working with the masses to enable them to take control of their own lives. Yet both visions were flawed by the same contradiction. The artists claimed that their vision was generated by nature, by the essence of things as they were. For the nationalists, the truth of things as they were was to be found in the landscapes and myths of Australia, while for the social realists truth was the objective social order established by Marxism and defined by the Party. For the modernists and anarchists, it was the product of the imagination of the creative individual. None of these groups could explain why their particular vision of the natural remained unrecognized by those with whom they wished to share it. All of themfinallyhad to resort to the same excuse - their lack of recognition was the product of a system dominated by reactionary elites and foreign interests that prevented those subjected to it from recognizing their own needs, interests or environment.15 Behind this problem lies the dilemma of the liberal humanism that informed these separate groups of artists and intellectuals even when they rejected it. As Hugh Stretton has observed, in a conservative period liberals will appear radical, whereas in more turbulent times they will

20


seem conservative as they emphasize respect for continuing human values.16 In the literary field, Tim Rowse has identified the dilemma in terms of the inability of the radical nationalists to reconcile their liberal belief in the freedom of the individual and their faith in the natural progress of Australian society with the realities of class relations in Australia. They therefore alternate between optimism about inevitable progress and despair at the failure of the masses to live up to their hopes. This, he argues, was the dilemma of both Meanjin and, later, Overland}1 Although Angry Penguins avoided this dilemma by its lack of any overt political or nationalist agenda, its commitment to modernism was in itself a commitment to the romantic idealism of the anarchic artist, and was thus a threat to settled standards, social or aesthetic. This brought about its undoing at the hands of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, only begetters of the supposed poet Ern Malley. Ern's poems, composed during a dull wartime afternoon in Melbourne's Victoria Barracks, were designed as a satire on the modernism Harris had so enthusiastically embraced, but submitted to him, under the general title of 'The Darkening Ecliptic', as a hoax and a test for his editorial judgement. Harris, responding immediately to their modernist symbolism, published them in the Autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins, embellished with a cover by Sidney Nolan and a lyrical introductory essay by himself. He was not to know that they were an exercise in the kind of modernism their authors detested. They represented what Stewart many years later described as the symbolism that explores, rather than the symbolism that knows.18 Yet, despite their detestation of a poetry of arbitrary private symbols whose meaning eludes both poet and reader, McAuley and Stewart wrote better than they knew. Michael Heyward is the most recent critic to show how the poems reflect their authors' preoccupations in poetry of genuine power.19 Harris' problem was not so much his acceptance of them, as his enthusiastic editorial endorsement. This made him the hostage of newspaper editors more interested in bespattering artists than in literary merit, and drew him to the attention of the moralists of the South Australian police who successfully prosecuted him for obscenity. These events destroyed Harris' confidence as well as his credibility, and led to the journal's decease. Ern has, however, continued to flourish in the annals of Australian literature, despite Brian Elliott's premature attempt to give him 'decent burial' in Meanjin, rival to both Angry Penguins and the Jindyworobaks.20 Ern's most immediate resurrection was in the title of the magazine, Ern Malley s Journal, which Max Harris was reluctantly persuaded to edit with John Reed and Barrett Reid.21 The third issue of this journal contained a heated exchange between Elizabeth Vassilieff, Max Harris


21

and Barrett Reid.22 Their comments clarify what was at stake between the modernists and the left, although they leave untouched the fears of the right that the two were engaged in a conspiracy against western civilization. Vassilieff dismissed the contributors to the journal as 'outsiders' who wrote about society without being a part of it. She divided their work between the three categories of subjectivism, objectivism and mixed - all rendered equally sterile by their authors' failure to engage as actors in society, concerned with the 'burning problems of community'. 'The central problem of art', she argued, 'is to represent adequately the complete personality, the totality of things: man in all his essentially human determinations, man-in-society.' This engages the artist in the concrete task of 'helping to change society so it may develop men in completeness', and to produce art that will be measured by values beyond the aesthetic. Implicitly, these values are being realized in the Soviet Union. Harris rejected this criticism with the argument from pluralism. There are, he asserted, many social realities, and the writer may work from any of them. 'The writer shows us values and ourselves when he deepens and enriches any human reality.' Reid, however, would have nothing to do with this catholicity of taste. For him, the demand of the left for art or literature that speaks for the common man was an intolerable restriction on the right and duty of the artists to write what they wished, to renew sensibility and to extend the bounds of what is communicable. The function of the lyric poets whom Vassilieff had dismissed as subjective and sterile is to 'recreate in the reading one singular state of being'. This was a total reversal of the socialist realist doctrine that the private is fulfilled in the public. Rather, Reid insisted that the public domain, the realm of what is already known, could be understood only by discovery of the private realm in which it is experienced. Reid's subjectivism was as much an affront to the traditionalists as to the socialist realists, and took him as close to the later public role of Meanjin as it removed him from the aesthetics that were championed by McAuley and the formalists. Yet Meanjin had started from a position close to McAuley's. Its first issue, identified as a 'Traditional Number', comprised eight poems in forms and themes to delight the most traditional of its readers. The opening lines of Paul Grano's 'For These Are Gracious Things' set the tone: Wind soft as whispering silk Not rough like yesterday ... Although the poetry is formal, conjuring up a world and concerns far removed from quotidian reality, it is intended to serve the public

22


purpose of maintaining standards of the mind and the spirit in the oppressive atmosphere of wartime mobilization. Ill From its beginnings, Meanjin was wider in its ambitions than the Jindyworobaks, both broader and narrower than Angry Penguins, and more catholic than Southerly. Christesen did not have preconceived ideas of what kind of writing was appropriate to Australian culture. Until the arrival of the Americans, he showed no particular interest in contemporary work being published overseas. Wartime restrictions and publishing barriers in any case restricted access to American books. When, in the second issue, a 'Critical Number', the contributors discussed modernism, it was in the spirit of T.S. Eliot rather than of the poets or painters who attracted Max Harris and John Reed. The Australian poems selected for praise were Robert FitzGerald's 'Essay on Memory' and Kenneth Slessor's 'Five Bells', as well as, surprisingly, the work of William Baylebridge, which was praised for its style but rejected for its philosophy. It is clear that, at this stage, modernism for Christesen meant poetry that incorporated ideas. Good poetry was judged by its achievement of the traditional quality of 'old loveliness', which clearly distinguished Slessor's poem and was identified in a later editorial as characteristic of Eliot's verse.23 This appreciation places Eliot in the line of the traditional romanticism of the main contributors to the early Meanjin, establishing an historical perspective that distinguished it from Angry Penguins. At the same time, its affirmation of the continuity of tradition kept it apart from the crusading zeal of Angry Penguins to break the bounds of what was already known and tap the energies of the unconscious to find new ways of defining the world. The editorial in the second issue made explicit the journal's object of presenting 'the best available work by Queensland writers', and at the same time indicated that this would be by writers who were 'alive to the presentday Australian and world tendencies.' An article by one of the founders, James Picot, whose own work was open to modernist influences, gave substance to these generalities. He argued that poets must find suitable terms to express the Australian background, and suggested that these are likely to be in free and harsh forms that will enable poets to break through 'to their own unconsciousness and the object'. This recognition of the role of the unconscious in poetry took him beyond thejindyworobak concern with place to a modernist understanding of the role of the artist in revealing the selves made by society. Implicit in this is a rejection of the attempts of any bureaucracy, state or party, to control the creative individual in the interests of a wider good.


23

The 'Crisis Number' of Meanjin (1/8), published after the fall of Singapore, entered into equally direct confrontation with the regimentation of thought that the editor saw as the most significant enemy at home. An editorial entitled 'War on the Intellectual Front' argued that the justification for the war was resistance not just to the military might of Germany and Japan but to the ideas they represented. This meant upholding the central principles of our own civilization: 'justice between man and man, generosity towards the weak and suffering, and the creative spirit of the poet and the craftsman.' The publication of Meanjin itself defied these attempts. But as the state of the war changed from resistance in the jungles to an advance on the homelands of the enemy, so the intellectual battles changed from the defence of creative values to the seizure of the high ground on which to build postwar society. The imperatives of this society were that it be free of the war and the poverty that had blighted the world in which the wartime generation had come to maturity. As these evils stemmed from power and repression, it followed that the new society would be socially egalitarian and intellectually and emotionally free. The planners would produce the space in which the artists would create a free life. While the more radical, or pessimistic, believed these hopes would be realized only through revolution, Christesen invested his faith in the Labor government. In the postwar period, however, even its modest program of reform raised the spectre of dispossession among the wealthy, and they hit back ferociously. 'No wonder I want Australia to stay free' said Betty Freeland to her baby. 'You're one reason I want Australia to stay free', murmured Betty Freeland to her baby Jill. 'I want you to grow up in a country where you'll be educated to take your proper place in life ... where you'll be free to think, speak and act for yourself.' That's a wish which will find agreement in the hearts of countless mothers. But don't let it stop at that! When you read and hear of 'isms' that are foreign to the Australian Way, don't hesitate to state your opinion as forcefully as you can. For your own sake ... for your children's sake ... keep Australia free!24 This advertisement, inserted in the Melbourne Argus by the National Bank of Australia, was part of the campaign against bank nationalization. It played on the fears induced by the Cold War threats of such headlines as 'Workers getting Communists off their backs', 'Italy must fall to Reds', and 'Communism is the enemy'.25 Its equation of patriotism with freedom and education with fitting the child for her proper station in life left no room for the joyful turbulence of creativity for which Meanjin stood. As politics became polarized, the journal and its editor inevitably became equated with the enemy.

24

WRITING IN HOPE AND FEAR IV

From the later years of the war onwards Christesen kept his pages admirably open to a plurality of ideas and forms. In his 'General Notes' to the first issue of volume two, Autumn 1943, the editor both reported that the journal would henceforth be published quarterly rather than every two months, and explained that its policy would be to make an attempt to interpret and record the varied phenomena underlying the imaginative life of this country; to present a documentation of experience during these fateful years; to seek out Australian tradition; to record the story, in prose and verse, of how our people faced up to this unprecedented crisis. (Meanjin 2/1, 51) This national ambition was qualified by the insistence in the remainder of the article that this task would be a matter of 'national self-discovery' and 'intellectual charting', and that the war itself had made it evident that there was no ready answer to the question 'What is Australia?' In the 'News Reel' that followed his notes, Christesen made it clear that finding the answer would involve continuing the exchange of ideas already occurring between Australia and the United States, as instanced by the publication of 'Sergeant Xavier Herbert's ... "Capricornia"' in the United States, and by the publication of American writers in Meanjin. The most significant poems in this issue were in fact by Australians. In 'Australia', A.D. Hope rejected his homeland only to return to it in the last, now justly famous, lines that aspire to finding that, in 'the Arabian desert of the human mind' Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare Springs in that waste. McAuley, by contrast, tramping by Newcastle's 'Coal-blackened sea', feared that he would Drown beneath my workaday, alone With Ethel, Pa, and Uncle George always, Nosed by the random monsters of the deep. Both poems unconsciously anticipated in their vocabulary Ern Malley, whose career was to begin later that year. McAuley had stayed with Hope in 1941,26 and the desert of Hope's poem was to yield the 'sole Arabian tree' of Ern's 'Petit Testament', while McAuley's own verse provides the pseudonymous poet's sister and legatee. The 'random monsters of the deep' nosing at suburban repose are a precise description of the content of the poems he was to write for Ern's suburban sister to send to Angry


25

Penguins. Both Hope and McAuley in these two poems kept to the classical ideals of appropriate symbols conveyed with expressive clarity, but in both cases the symbols contain disturbing connotations of the monsters threatening their clarity of structure, verbal and social. The most important poem in this issue was by Judith Wright. 'To A.H., New Year 1943' is an elegy for a friend who 'piloted the fighter / and died in the dark sea'. The poem hinges on the question of whether 'it was for love you gave away your life' and whether your scattered bones rolled on the chill floors of the shallow Baltic accept the sacrifice. The attempt to understand the meaning of the blood sacrifice, to find the value of life in the face of annihilation, is as old as war. The strength of the poem comes from the way it confronts its lack of illusion and its penetrating political statement with a sense of the fulfilling density of life: Over the lands of the Danube and the Rhine where in an uneasy year, in a loaded spring there yet was laughter and dancing and some kindness, darkness covers a million crucifixions. You whose direct mind, intolerant of madness, found everywhere the pleasant and the gentle, and made of them your friends, said to me once: "Liberty is a word with many meanings, most of them false. Each country builds its frontiers in the name of freedom, destroying freedom; and each man fortifies his single soul in the name of freedom, not understanding that liberty is love and has no frontiers." The simplicity and insight of the statement gains its power from the fact that the words are placed in the mouth of the man who has died away from his home and over a sea that belongs to no country. This is traditional poetry of statement, even of beauty, but it moves beyond the conventional because the external is expressed so clearly in terms of the inner experience of the speaker. The world has value because it is valued, and this valuation enables it to survive, even by 'finding a meaning in annihilation'. The language is being shaped not by any fashion but by the full pressure of its time. In 1946 Christesen launched a new venture with the publication under the Meanjin imprint of Wright's first collection, The Moving Image. Wright was an appropriate choice, as her poetry was central to the direction in which the journal developed from its first commitment to the maintenance of a generalized creative spirit. Although it never lost the sense

26


of speaking for an embattled minority, which sometimes seemed as few as one, Meanjin gradually developed a strong commitment to the interpretation of Australia's place in the new circumstances of the postwar period. As the journal increased in size, the poems were complemented first by stories and then by essays. The anthropologist A.P. Elkin brought a scientific dimension to the interest in Australia's presettlement past. In a series of 'Letters to Tom Collins' various contributors discussed, in fairly literal terms, how his vision had gone wrong. Later these were superseded by articles reviewing developments in music, art and drama, discussing the spirit of the land or the changing role of the intelligentsia, introducing European concerns with existentialism, or bringing news of intellectual and creative development in London and New York. Margaret Preston's woodcuts were among the published art works that demonstrated the movement of Australian art to expressionist rather than simply illustrative forms. Then, in a seminal essay in 1944 Bernard Smith hailed the development of a 'new realism' as Australian artists moved away from the purely subjective themes of earlier approaches to modernism. Dorothy Hewett's poetry represented the same movement in literature, while Dorothy Auchterlonie (later Green) used the form of simple lyrics not to express but to question the meaning of love, death, sacrifice. McAuley's prophetic expression of modernist angst, 'The Incarnation of Sirius', appeared in the same issue, Winter 1945, as Wright's 'Nigger's Leap: New England'. McAuley was to go in a different direction, but Wright's concern for the past surviving in the present, and our continuing responsibility for it, was to remain central to her work. She recognizes the past because it possesses her with its loss and its concrete presence. This sense of a past still to be redeemed and fulfilled was, with its concern for Australia's place in the international community, to be characteristic of Meanjin itself. The editor's concern with Australia's future led him to identify with the postwar reconstruction led by the Chifley Labor government and with international movements for peace and co-operation. This idealism was however soon overshadowed by the onset of the Cold War, by bitter struggles between democrats and sectarians of left and right in the Australian labour movement, and by the material needs of ordinary Australians to get on with the business, deferred by the war, of establishing their homes and families. As vision receded, so Meanjin became embroiled in the bitterness of ideological conflict. In 1945 Christesen accepted an offer from John Medley, ViceChancellor of the University of Melbourne, and moved there from Brisbane. This was partly because Brisbane had reverted to 'its old status as a shabby minor State capital ruled by the rural ascendancy and happy


27

otherwise to idle in the sun', and partly because it offered a chance of administrative support and financial stability. Christesen explained to F.W. Robinson that he would much prefer to live in Sydney. Melbourne's weather frightens me. Most of my support, though, comes from Melbourne, and certainly Medley and Badger [Chairman of the Melbourne University Extension Board] are most enthusiastic that I go there ... Something has to be done, within the next month, if the journal is to continue.27 The journal expanded its contents to include more fiction and critical, historical and philosophic writing, but its financial situation remained precarious. In 1946 Meanjin received from the Commonwealth Literary Fund the first of the grants that became essential to its survival. Yet this support itself generated controversy. It was suspended in 1948 and 1949, and became permanent only in 1950.28 The financial support from the university was not as generous or certain as Christesen had anticipated. The registrar was totally opposed to the magazine, found the poetry 'incomprehensible', and believed that the journal should stick to the safely academic activity of literary criticism.29 Critics both in the university and in parliament contended that by engaging in political comment the editor disqualified it from receiving assistance as a literary magazine.30 Behind these ostensible attempts to separate literary from political issues lay a paranoic fear of communism and anything that could be associated with it. Although Christesen had never been a member of the Party, his support for the peace movement, goodwill towards the Soviet Union and, after 1949, China, and his admiration for the Chifley Labor government, were sufficient to identify him and his journal as instruments of subversion.

One of Meanjin's critics was Vincent Buckley, who argued that from 1949 to 1956 it had 'followed policies which were in certain clear respects objectively pro-Communist'.31 Earlier, he had suggested in a letter to Martin Haley that, although he was 'very much on Clem's side', he believed that 'the Comms. use him at times'. The particular object of his concern was an anti-clerical review of the Melbourne University Magazine, 1953, in Meanjin by Elizabeth Vassilieff, a Party intellectual, that he found 'a piece of execrable form'. In her review, Vassilieff took Buckley's poem 'In Time of Martyrdom', written in commemoration of the trial of the Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty, as the example of everything she found wrong in the journal. The editors of MUM had described the poem as

28


'one of the most important single poems produced in Australia'. Vassilieff admitted that it was 'written very nicely', but claimed it totally misrepresented Mindszenty by casting him as the hero of his trial. In his letter to Haley, Buckley, claiming that he had plenty of facts to support his viewpoint, complained that Christesen refused to publish an immediate reply. Yet in a later letter he admitted that, although 'Clem's position is difficult and his mind frequently confused in detail... I don't think he is consciously running the Communist line, and believe him when he says he is a liberal.'32 This forbearance was not shown by other critics of Meanjin and its editor. Richard Krygier, seeking support for an anti-communist journal to combat its influence, reported to his employers in the Congress of Cultural Freedom that' "Meanjin" [is] published by the Melbourne Uni. which does not mean that it is not a rabidly pro-Communist magazine.'33 ASIO classified Christesen as a 'Communist sympathiser' with 'a long record of association' with Communist front organizations.34 But the strongest, although not the most damaging, attack on Christesen came from one of his regular contributors, Frederick Macartney, who at his own expense published a pamphlet, The Increased Price of Liberty, which seemed to have had the sole purpose of discrediting Meanjin and having its Commonwealth Literary Fund subsidy withdrawn: 'the question arises,' he wrote, 'whether the payment to Meanjin is proper while that journal continues, as it has done for a long time, to deal with matters outside the literary sphere, doing this, moreover, with a bias objectionable to most Australians.' His answer was obvious: 'The Commonwealth Literary Fund is not intended to provide subsidies for discussing political matters' (pp. 1-2). His objections were evidently not merely to the fact that Meanjin published political commentary, but to the particular politics it espoused. The objections were made more bitter by his feelings that his own literary work was generally neglected, and that Christesen in particular made only token payments to contributors, despite the 'money pouring in to him.'35 Macartney's belief in Christesen's financial resources seems to have been exceeded only by his overweening confidence in his own talents. To his feeling of being a poet undervalued, Macartney added the resentment of a well-wisher scorned. He complained in another letter that Christesen 'has always seemed to me to have so little qualifications for literary editorship, I tried from time to time to help him for years, but gave it up at last.'36 Yet Macartney's polemic missed the political point as much as did Vassilieff s attack on Buckley. Each reduced its,object to an argument about freedom. For Macartney, freedom arose from an ordered society that would give poets space to write their poems of formal beauty. The politics of conflict, the resistance to ASIO and the politics of fear, could


29

only hinder 'goodwill and co-operative development in our community'. Similarly, for Vassilieff, the poem existed only to present an argument, in this case about the importance of Cardinal Mindszenty as an image of freedom. Her historical reading of the trial led her not just to conclude that the poem fails, but to the belief, as Buckley noted with amazement, that it is 'a blow at world peace'. Just as Macartney's spleen led him to ignore the real political function of Meanjin as a forum bringing together creative, analytic and polemic writing that challenged conventional thought, so Vassilieff ignored the actual politics that are at the centre of Buckley's work. Buckley by no means ignored history, and his letter to Haley indicated that he had collected documentary material on Mindszenty to support his view of the trial. But he understood history as more than the simple battleground of right and wrong seen by antagonists in the Cold War. Rather, he saw it as a theatre in which we might discover God incarnate as love, as freedom and as strength. Whatever the historical circumstances may have been, Mindszenty on trial in Buckley's poem represents this incarnation. Buckley did not in fact publish many of his poems in Meanjin at this time, although he did contribute several of his seminal essays. The essays on Kenneth Slessor and Francis Webb show how his reading of their work clarified his own ideas of poetry.37 He rejected the early poetry of Slessor because, although its imagery was full of energy, it was not located in any particular time or place. The poetry of his middle period, he argued, was preferable because it was specific in its imagery, the poetry of a writer 'with keen observation' who 'has begun to locate the perennial problems of man in the ordinary affairs of the men of his own time' (p. 25). It was only in the last poems, and particularly in 'Five Bells', that Buckley found Slessor bringing together his concerns in images that 'can be used as vantage-points from which to get a perspective on the flux of human experience' (p. 28). In the essay on Francis Webb, although he had only the early poems to deal with, he still worked through to an 'interim report' that anticipated the work of Webb's maturity. He found in the poems 'considerable dramatic skill, a genius for language, a sense of human destiny, a fine though discriminating compassion, a fullness of Christian values, never preached but unerringly to be divined' (p. 33). With the exception of the dramatic skill, this could stand as a statement of Buckley's own poetic concerns, particularly the emphasis on values to be divined rather than preached. As it happens, the same issue of Meanjin also contained Judith Wright's 'For the Loved and Unloved', James McAuley's 'Celebration of Divine Love' and Buckley's own poem 'Responsory', dedicated 'To Thomas Merton, Poet and Monk of the Trappist Order'. These enable us to contrast the different directions in which their authors were then moving.

30


Interestingly, Buckley's concern for discovering the love of God is closer to Wright's sense of love discovered in the order of the world than it is to McAuley's celebration of a divine love that gives order to the world. Wright's poem is built around the theme of 'Love in his alteration' inventing the world to suit him. Its central image of the rose is universal rather than national. Using the literal meaning of'invention' as 'comes into', Wright described how the rose finds its colour and form by working to its innate or genetic truth: 'a light no vision / into our world has welded'. She likens this to the compass that guides 'the far-returning swallow' and to the destiny of humans, whose roads 'unwind within us' as we 'ravel / the thread by which we travel' (p. 26). The poem is grounded in a humanist vision that embeds us within the natural world at the same time as identifying our responsibility for our own journey. Fate is incarnate in nature. McAuley's poem returns to the mediaeval equation of the history of the universe and the individual. He describes the drama of the individual life in terms of the cycle of creation, fall and redemption. He however made two significant changes before publishing his poem in book form. In the amended first line the infant 'laughs' rather than 'wakes' beneath the cosmic tree. This imparts to the poem the active feeling of joy that McAuley felt had been lost from creation, and that was the object of his earthly search. In both versions of the second stanza, McAuley described the 'outer life of exile on the plain' in terms of work richly fulfilled. In the later version, this vision is overtaken by an 'obscured' instead of an 'obscure' guilt. Again the effect of the change is to move the verse more actively, but this time in the direction of an external force acting to blind mankind.38 This fits the theme of the poem as a whole, in which the individual finds guilt within but redemption beyond himself. The 'Annunciation' that he finds of 'natural order in the way of things' leads him by way of 'old mysterious symbols' to Christ reigning as 'a figure on Eternity's gold ground' (pp. 24-5). The static image in this stanza resembles Dante's portrayal of God's will fulfilled in the last Canto of his 'Divine Comedy', but McAuley's poem contains none of the force of history through which Dante travels to reach his vision, nor even of that we find in the mystery plays that are its other source. McAuley instead takes us outside history to find the meaning that can redeem us within it. Buckley's poem moves in the opposite direction. Like McAuley and Wright, he uses a universal imagery to invoke a love that will redeem the cruelties and confusions of a modern world. The concluding stanza, Be patient in delight. The fine and sewing hands that spun Webs of torture, let them rest, Where cooling waters run. (Meanjin, 12/1, 27)


31

is also the pivot of the poem, changed only by a comma and a conjunction from the opening and fourth stanzas. These grammatical changes however make the waters a healing conclusion discovered through the experience of mental and physical anguish, rather than just one more mental phenomenon bearing 'strange cargo' in 'ships of anguish'. Neither the strangeness nor the anguish is dissolved, nor is it clear whose hands spin the webs of torture. Rather, the same hands that bring torture also seek rest - all share both the guilt and the suffering. These characteristics of the twentieth century thus become the means by which we may find, with prayer and love, the source of strength to endure them. The contrast between Buckley and McAuley becomes clearer if we compare their versions of the story of Quiros' search for the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.39 In his verse sequence, 'Land of No Fathers', published in 1954, Buckley entwined the story of Quiros' voyage with the story of his own forefathers' coming from Ireland. McAuley, writing between 1958 and 1960, presented the same story as an epic of noble vision betrayed by human perfidy. His Quiros sought a land where he could establish a community ruled by the spirit of God, only to find that men brought to the new land the same passions and sins that have destroyed the old. Despite this human weakness however the vision remains intact, still to be realized in a history to come. Although McAuley gives us the historical detail of the voyage and the life of the mariners, these remain apart from their leader's vision. Buckley on the other hand offers fewer details of daily life but more of place, so that the mission, or rather quest, emerges from the stories of the two groups of men 'who bear alone / The life they have built into their flesh' (Stanza VII). Their God is never explicit, but literally incarnate, hidden in an experience that remains strange to them. The poems of these three authors represent the three major directions in which, beneath the turbulent ideological debates, Australian culture was moving at the time. Judith Wright's humanism was central to the broad thrust of the left. Although it had been nourished by the nationalism of the Jindyworobaks, it went far beyond them to a scientific understanding of place as integral to the relationship produced by culture between nature and society. McAuley's retreat to authority ultimately proved a sectarian ideology of division that invested politics with a mantle of righteousness that marked a community defined by its exclusions. Despite his residual liberalism, his work exacerbated the divisive politics of both right and left. Buckley by contrast looked to a politics grounded in the European legacy of Christian humanism that would create on Australian soil a people at home at once with their environment and their imported culture. Notwithstanding his differences with Christesen, the best of his work stands for the same kind of politics of inclusion that Meanjin, with its

32


catholic attitude to the creative arts and its polemic of peace and social justice, maintained in the face of fierce sectarian attack, not least from Buckley in the letter we have noted.40 Far from being narrowly left, Meanjin throughout the 1940s and 1950s provided a forum within which readers could encounter the most recent thinking of European philosophers and American theorists alongside the best critics, polemicists and creative writers working in Australia. Overseas authors it published included Anai's Nin, Dylan Thomas and Arthur Miller, who contributed a Swiftian proposal on making the state secure from dissidents. Arthur Phillips contributed the articles on Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy that became the core of his seminal work, The Australian Tradition. J.A.C. Mackie was one of the contributors to examine the changes in Asia from a point of view that went beyond Cold War stereotypes. J.F. Cairns and Leicester Webb debated socialism in Australia, the latter arguing that its future depended on its proponents abandoning the protestant and totalitarian models of Fabianism in favour of a catholic understanding of the centrality of groups and institutions. It published McAuley's fierce attack on Australian liberals, radicals and progressives, his 'Letter to John Dryden', and Jack Lindsay's equally polemic response, in which he raises the revolutionary Milton above the orderly Dryden. The journal took a constant interest in civil liberties in both Australia and America, and published an article highly critical of the American Association for Cultural Freedom, particularly for its attitudes to the harassment of Owen Lattimore (3/55). It also published a favourable account of his visit to the Soviet Union by Claudio Veliz, later to be one of the harshest critics of soft liberalism. It regularly published the New Zealand poet, James Baxter. Its short stories mostly belonged to the realist school, from such writers as Lyndall Hadow, Donald Stuart, John Morrison, Judah Waten and Alan Marshall, until in 1957 it was one of the first Australian journals to publish a major piece by Patrick White. In short, while there was little anti-communist polemic or experimental fiction and poetry, the journal was generally near the centre in both political and literary terms, and certainly did not exclude any important forms of Australian writing or opinion. In fact, its contents provide a guide not only to what was significant in Australian writing in these years, but also to what were to emerge as the major cultural debates. On its own, the journal refutes the absurd charge that the Communist Party dominated intellectual or cultural debate in Australia during these years. The editor made space to fulfil his journal's broad cultural function by refusing to become locked into the more sterile antagonisms of the Cold War.

TWO

Literary Conflicts and Failed Vision Overland and the Realist Writers Groups

The Australian literary journal Overland was spawned in 1954 from the Realist Writer, which in turn was the official organ of the Melbourne Realist Writers Group, one of the cultural organizations sponsored by the Communist Party of Australia. The Realist Writers Group had been founded after the war to promote the discussion and production of socialist realism in literature, and nurtured such writers as John Morrison, Frank Hardy, Ralph de Boissiere and Judah Waten. Overland and the Australasian Book Society reflected the experience of Frank Hardy and his colleagues in publishing and distributing his first novel, Power Without Glory.1

In the early 1950s, Hardy, then probably Australia's best-known Communist writer, came to the conclusion that the contents and political commentary in the Party's newspapers did not reflect the actual interests of the worker.2 To remedy this, he proposed that worker correspondents should be appointed in each workplace to write reports of what they and their fellows were actually doing and discussing. Those correspondents who developed an interest in writing should be encouraged to join groups that would nurture their talents and produce a national journal to publish the best of their work.3 Finally, a publishing co-operative would be established to bring their completed work to a national audience of their fellow workers. Thus the Party would build a network of readers and writers whose books and journals would provide the sinews of a workingclass culture which would develop revolutionary zeal among workers until they seized the government of Australia. The Realist Writers Groups, the Australasian Book Society and the journal Overland were the fruits of this vision.4 Hardy's ambitions were as generous as, with hindsight, they appear romantic and doomed to failure. But the failure had not necessarily been 33

34


inevitable. In examining the reasons that led to it, we should discover the factors that bedevil every attempt to challenge the dominant political and cultural systems of capitalist society. The problem with the new structures was that their organizers already knew what writing they wanted. The rules had been laid down by Zhdanov, Stalin's cultural commissar and head of the Soviet Writers' Union. The Realist Writers Groups, with the Party organization behind them, behaved as a cultural police force more concerned with ensuring that form and content were ideologically correct than with encouraging writing that would bring a new consciousness into being.

Stephen Murray-Smith, founder of Overland, and Ian Turner, friend, colleague and collaborator, met at the University of Melbourne after the war. Both had come under the influence of radical teachers at their boarding schools. Murray-Smith, whose father had made his money supplying remounts for the Indian army, came from Toorak and Geelong Grammar. During the war he served in New Guinea with the Fifth Independent Company, AIF. He claims that his wartime experience consolidated the chief lessons he had learned in boarding school: how to stay alive under difficulties, and how to resist the idiocy of authority. Both lessons were to be vital to the life of Overland. Turner, whose father was a stock agent, had been raised in Nhill and schooled at Geelong College. He also had served in the army: in Australia and New Guinea, and then in the Army Education Service. He wrote that the most important thing that happened to him during the war was that he joined the Communist Party. He had counted himself a communist since 1943, and had formally joined the Party in 1945. After the war, Murray-Smith was successively persuaded by his father to join the Liberal Party, by Geoffrey Serle, whom he had met in New Guinea, to join the Australian Labor Party, and by Turner to join the Communist Party, all within twelve months. The common factor in this pattern of joining was his determination to play a part in creating the new world of peace and democracy.5 After graduating from the University of Melbourne, where he and Turner had become leading lights in both the Labour Club and the university branch of the Communist Party, Murray-Smith travelled to London and Prague, where he eventually became a journalist with Telepress, the official news agency of the new Communist regime. Turner entered Party work in Melbourne, becoming organizing secretary of the Australian Peace Council, which had been formed at what he describes as 'a top secret meeting of party members and close sympathisers in Melbourne in 1949'. In this capacity he travelled to the

LITERARY CONFLICTS AND FAILED VISION

35

Warsaw conference, only to be dismissed on his return. He then became a cleaner with the Victorian Railways. Murray-Smith was in Prague when the Czech government was taken over by the Communists, and later commented to me that the most immediate effect was the total loss of service in the shops. On his return from Prague, he worked first as a journalist for a Czech news agency and, after it was suppressed by the new regime, for the Australian Peace Council. Turner meanwhile found that his efforts to become as one with the proletariat were less than successful - his interests were political, theirs were primarily industrial, and they shared few of his cultural interests. It gave him, however, experience in the limitations of working in a united front with non-Party members. This was to stand him in good stead when, after being dismissed from the railways for his political activities, he became secretary of the Australasian Book Society.6 The Australasian Book Society was established in 1952 on the initiative of Frank Hardy, following his success with the publication of Power Without Glory and Eric Lambert's similar experiences in publishing and selling Twenty Thousand Thieves through the union movement. According to Frank Hardy, the idea was originally conceived over beer with George Seelaf in the Lygon Hotel opposite the Trades Hall in Carlton.7 The first meeting was convened by Seelaf on 1 February 1952, at the unlikely venue of Collins House, although an earlier meeting may have occurred at the Newport Railway Workshops.8 Jack Beasley says that the first meeting was held in Collins House on Anzac Day, 1950, before the Power Without Glory trial, and the first official meeting in 1952. The society was also discussed at a writers' conference held at the conclusion of the Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship held in Sydney in 1952. At this conference, Frank Hardy and Eric Lambert used the difficulties they had had with their books as examples of the need to provide a publishing avenue 'for new writers with something to say'. Ominously, there was 'acrimonious discussion from the floor' about the action of Victorian writers in establishing the society on their own initiative, rather than first consulting with Realist Writers Groups in all other states.9 At this stage, the Communist Party was not formally involved, although it is likely that everything was planned by the Party and its fractions.10 In any event, the society went ahead with Bill Wannan as its first secretary. When in 1954 Wannan, finding intolerable the degree of political supervision exercised over him, resigned, Ian Turner succeeded him as secretary.11 This was the same year that Murray-Smith converted the Realist Writer into Overland. The society's problems began with its first two publications, Crown Jewel, by Ralph de Boissiere, then an unknown writer who had recently come to Australia from the West Indies, and Frank Hardy's own eulogy to life in the Soviet Union, Journey into the Future. De Boissiere's novel is a

36


fine piece of realist fiction that anticipates the later flowering of writers from the Caribbean, but was nevertheless a strange choice for a society trying to cultivate an interest in Australian literature among a public scarcely knowledgeable about their own writers, let alone those from exotic cultures. Hardy's work, on the other hand, was a tract so enthusiastic in its praise of Stalin's Russia as to surprise even true believers, let alone attract new readers. The society had originally declined this book on the grounds that, as a straight political documentary, it was outside the society's ambit. This rejection was reversed by a meeting of the Melbourne Realist Writers Group, meeting as the Communist Party literary fraction, and so binding Party members to support its decision on the society's board of management.12 This triumph of ideological zeal over commonsense and literary judgement, which led to the resignation of the members of the society's selection committee, Leonard Mann, Alan Marshall and A.A. Phillips, showed the inherent difficulty of subordinating the literary to the political. Yet both Beasley and Turner explain, in their accounts of their time with the society, how pragmatic considerations, particularly the need to attract readers, countered the rigid doctrines that were expressed in the Party's official journals and used by zealots to delay or prevent the publication of manuscripts that offended them.13 These attitudes, which were eventually to cause a violent split between members of the Overland board and to precipitate the journal's break with the Communist Party, arose from the attempt to apply the rigid doctrine of socialist realism to Australian writing. Although the doctrine has its origins in Marx, and was developed by such theorists as Lukacs, the Party functionaries in Australia based their understanding on the definitive expression given it by Stalin's literary henchman, Andrei A. Zhdanov. Zhdanov had declared that bourgeois literature was no longer capable of creating great works of art, and had been superseded by socialist literature. This new form of literature 'has organised the toilers and oppressed for the struggle to abolish once and for all every kind of exploitation and the yoke of wage slavery.' The supreme expression of socialist realism was in Soviet literature, which 'has based the subject matter of its works on the life of the working class and peasantry and their fight for socialism .. .'14 The key elements in this were the need for working class subjects and the emphasis on revolutionary struggle. As applied by Australian ideologues, this meant that writers were expected to portray workers as heroes from a sanitized working class. There was no room for the kind of people Ian Turner had actually met in the railway workshops.15 The ideological conflicts were exacerbated by differences of personality. Murray-Smith and Turner were both products of Victoria's private


37

school system and Protestant morality. Their commitment to the left was a rejection of their class background but not of their essentially liberal values. Hardy, on the other hand, had been brought up in a working-class Catholic family where he imbibed the ideas of socialism from his father and his friends, and from books like Upton Sinclair's collection The Cry for Justice. Hardy had left school at fourteen, but he was passionately convinced that education offered the means to free workers from their domination by others.16 He supported Overland and the Realist Writers Groups as means to this end. At the same time, however, his own needs as a writer got in the way of his political work for others.17 The Australasian Book Society endured constant criticism both from the left and from publications like the Melbourne Herald and the Sydney Bulletin, both of which regarded it as merely a Communist front.18 Its membership reached a peak of just over three thousand, in 1961, and it never secured adequate capital.19 Nevertheless, the works it published, on its own or through joint ventures, have made a significant contribution to the Australian tradition.20 A complete collection of Australasian Book Society publications would omit some leading Australian novelists and most poets from the years it was active, but would provide an excellent survey of twenty years of writing in the radical nationalist tradition. That the society did not fulfil its potential is no reflection on the dedicated work of its officials and of the writers like Frank Hardy, Ian Turner and David Martin who travelled the country promoting its publications, nor on the overall quality of these works. Rather, it was handicapped by the refusal of the Communist Party to recognize that literature has an autonomous function within politics and culture. For example, J.B. Miles, a Party operative, could not understand why Katharine Susannah Prichard did not want to submit her work to Party authorities before publication. In 1952 J.D. Blake authoritatively expressed Party policy on cultural work in an address on Zhdanov's doctrines. Starting from the proposition that 'art is a weapon', Blake rejected other approaches as the 'formalism that separates life from art and will destroy art'. Instead, he defined the essential feature of socialist realism as 'ideology and party spirit, the partisan spirit in art'. The task of cultural workers, he explained, was to publicize the Party's policies, portray Australian reality and build a mass movement of cultural workers. This definition, with the tasks that follow from it, not merely subordinates literature and the arts to politics, but ensures that no artist can, by moving beyond what is already known and agreed, stimulate new thought or imagination.21 It was this attitude that led to the long delays in the publication by ABS of F.B. Vickers' novel The Mirage, which the dogmatists held was naturalistic rather than realistic. Turner explained that Vickers failed to draw the

38


proper militant conclusions from the scenes he described so vividly.22 The corollary of this politics was a refusal to entertain any exploration of the anarchic disruptions of sexuality. Thus Turner was forced to reject a manuscript from Flexmore Hudson unless he deleted sections that described incest, showed fettlers swearing, and would generally be regarded as an 'offence' to the society's readers.23 Even a novel about conscripts in New Guinea, The Dark Blue Sea, by David Forrest, then a Party member, apparently did not get through unscathed, although Forrest appears to have encountered more problems with the Brisbane Realist Writers Group than with the management of the society.24 Turner's dilemmas were eventually solved for him when in 1958 he was dismissed at a general meeting where, as he wrote, his 'obsequies were read' but 'not many tears were shed on either side.'25 He was succeeded by Les Greenfield, a 'political watchdog' whom Turner recognized as a more effective administrator,26 and then by Jack Beasley. In 1958 the society was moved to Sydney, a decision, deeply resented by the Melbourne members, that was made by the Party executive to ensure that it did not suffer from contagion at the hands of Turner and Murray-Smith.27 The society was eventually wound up at a general meeting at the end of 1980.28 The ideals held by the society's supporters nurtured writing that has survived the doctrines that inspired it and the dogmatists who attempted to confine it to their own purposes. And yet, by concentrating on realist fiction and on what it defined as progressive political ideals, the society separated the realist tradition from the mainstream of writing that was emerging in Australia in response to changing circumstances. Most of the authors it published started their careers in the years after the second world war, but there is little sense in their writings of the changing urban Australia. Judah Waten writes of the lives of migrants, Frank Hardy and John Morrison of dockside and office workers, Dorothy Hewett and Mena Calthorpe of factory workers, but all from the perspective of the immediate postwar struggles. None of the writing published by the society gives a sense of moving beyond this period into the new Australia of polyglot assembly lines and dormitory suburbs, or of the changing attitudes to sexuality, gender, family, religion and moral issues that characterized the generation born after the war. The society's publications reflect a generation of readers and writers retreating into a past that lent itself to easy ideological explanation. II When the first issue of Overland appeared in spring 1954, its masthead described it as 'Incorporating The Realist Writer' - a roneoed quarterly that had appeared first in 1952 and had been edited for two issues by Bill


39

Wannan, and for the next seven by Stephen Murray-Smith. As MurraySmith has commented, it was * essentially an in-house bulletin for members of the Realist Writers' Group'.29 As such, although it published writing by a distinguished group of contributors, its main function was to allow members to see each other's work, to publish polemic that would strengthen their common commitment to peace and socialism, and to share information with members. It was, in other words, a means of training writers to express themselves and of mobilizing them for political activity. Writing was that part of this activity which raised working-class consciousness. In tone, it claimed the high moral authority of a spokesman for the working class. For example, an attack on P.R. Stephensen, of the prewar Australia First Movement, and Bruce Muirden, who had had the temerity to write about Stephensen and nationalism, concluded with the stirring declaration that' [Frank] Hardy has warned Bruce Muirden, and the Realist Writers' Group adds its collective voice, that out and out nationalism can only lead to fascism.' Overland, by contrast, generally avoided claiming the role of spokesman, authority or censor, and valued writing not just as a means to an end, but as the end itself. Australian and working-class writing was preferred not because it raised consciousness, but because it constituted the culture its readers shared. Although the aim of the Realist Writers Groups was highly political, neither in their meetings nor in their journals did they engage in theoretical debate. The nature of society, the role of the intellectual and the leadership of the Party were all givens. The role of the intellectual was to formulate precise analyses of manifestations of class conflict in world affairs, and the corresponding task of the creative writer was to rouse workers to an understanding of their role in the historically inevitable overthrow of capitalism. Individual work was judged 'objectively' on the basis of whether it contributed to this purpose. Thus Power Without Glory was good because it exposed the corruption of bourgeois democracy and the complicity of the Labor Party, whereas the works of Patrick White or of modernist poets were bad because they diverted the attention of the reader away from the realities of class to the illusions of metaphysics and the inner life. The further complaint was that the symbolism was inaccessible to the ordinary person and so served only to conceal social truth.30 These worries about the function of literature surface in the reaction of the Sydney Realist Writers Group to the first issue of Overland?1 Members of the group were generally delighted with its appearance, and excited by the idea that they at last had a journal which could bring socialist realist writing to a wider audience, particularly among unionists. They immediately took steps to distribute and sell the journal around Sydney. They saw the journal very much as an integral part of their program, rather

40


than as a complement to it. They used each issue as a basis for discussion in their meetings, they passed on their criticisms to the editorial board, and they expected that their members would find publication in its pages. From the first issue, therefore, they were disturbed to find work from writers who were not only not sympathetic to their aims, but who produced work that, 'objectively', was hostile to them. They took particular offence at an exchange between David Martin and A.D. Hope that was published in Overland's first issue. Hope had published in the Sydney Morning Herald a dismissive review of From Life: Selected Poems of David Martin, in which he had launched an attack on what he later described as then his 'bete noire, the now rather neglected literary movement called social realism.' When, years later, he republished his review, he admitted that he had been unfair, that Martin was a 'kindly and generous-minded man' who later became a friend, and that there were 'other and better poems in the book which I ought in fairness to have mentioned'. At the time however his review honed in with deadly accuracy on the central principle of socialist realism, that 'the basic function of literature is not creation but activation.' In his concern to make his political point, he discussed very little of what Martin actually wrote. Hope made his crucial point at the end, where, remarking that 'some of the greatest poems in the world have been whole-heartedly didactic', he argued that It is, I suspect, not trying to teach in itself, but the sort of thing you try to teach which is crucial. There are doctrines which poison the creative imagination as surely as there are doctrines in which it finds its native and natural food. The didactic impulse is about as likely to be stimulated to acts of creative imagination by the arid doctrines of dialectical materialism as the maternal instinct is likely to be satisfied by marriage with a mechanical man.32 Hope was later to return to this argument in the pages of Prospect, where he argued against taking any account of a writer's commitments in judging his work. In this earlier comment, however, he reversed the argument to use the quality of the writing as an index of the vitality of the doctrine. The Realist Writers were correct to see this as radically incompatible with their view of the role of the artist. Martin chose to respond not by defending his verse but by attacking the pride of the critic who so exalted his own opinion as a measure of both truth and beauty: You love to play God, To toy or to praise, To brandish your rod To destroy and to raise. But the Lord took the dust, And made it a man,


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While you earn your crust By the opposite plan. (Overland 1, 1954, 7) Hope's reply, published in the same issue, was genial enough, beginning 'Dear Martin, you have scored a hit ...' The Sydney realists however objected to giving any space in the journal to such a 'reactionary' as Hope. Unlike Murray-Smith, they were not primarily concerned to provide a forum where writers - workers or not - could speak from their own experience. Their ideological certainty allowed them to value only the writing that reinforced their own position. Yet their opposition was more deeply based than perhaps they realized. The form of Martin's reply takes the argument out of the ideological dimension and places it in a universal context of proper artistic and critical conduct. He is actually anticipating Hope's later position, that writing is valued purely for what it is, and not for the truth of what it may say. Overland readers were ever ready to criticize any departure from what they saw as its proper working-class line. One of Murray-Smith's correspondents, Bernard Meyer, who proudly signed his long letters as 'Ironworker', made a vitriolic attack on the collection of Laurence Collinson's poems that Overland published as a separate book in 1958. Meyer objected to their concentration on private rather than revolutionary emotions. 'Sing us battle songs,' he wrote, 'not songs of love.' The indulgence of personal feelings in literature was, he stated, criminal when it came from a Communist, and, in an ambiguous warning to poets who strayed from the Party line, he advised that the author be castrated 'to make him a man'.33 Less violent, but equally political, criticism was reported by Joan Clarke from the Sydney Realist Writers Group, who objected to Frank Hardy's 'Death of a Unionist' (Overland, 4, 1955, 15-18). Members of the group objected that the characters in the story were not 'typical', the husband Bill showed a 'bad attitude' to his wife and had an anarchic attitude to union discipline, and the story left it unclear whether the woman gave away her baby for economic or domestic reasons. Later, the same group criticized a review in which Elizabeth Vassilieff praised John Morrison's collection, Black Cargo, as a 'masterly work'. They felt the review 'should have been more critical and helpful to the writer' (Overland, 6, 1956, 29). The critics presumably objected to the way that Morrison showed some of his characters, and even situations, like the ugly threat of mob violence that Vassilieff had quoted, without comment, from 'Going Through'. This criticism fails to see that the source of the story's strength is its recognition of the dark side of solidarity. The problem of Overland was that too many of the supporters who shared its dream of a just society were determined to project all of their feelings of frustration and

42


alienation on to the system and its agents, rather than acknowledge any human weakness in themselves or their comrades. In response to criticism, Murray-Smith wrote that he prized stories that are 'written of people as they are, no false heroics, no phoniness, essentially realist'.34 The belief that it was the role of the artist and intellectual to campaign rather than to describe and analyse is expressed most vehemently by the Western Australian unionist and poet, Vic Williams, in his correspondence with Stephen Murray-Smith. Williams argued that the role of socialist literature was to serve the workers by speaking directly to them of their struggles. It should clarify the political issues and raise the workers' spirits. His own work came from a combination of direct involvement in the immediate struggle and an ideology that related every battle to the total war. I have been putting forward for a long time controversial theories about the way to create working class, socialist art and literature. I have had a lot of people say my theories are wrong. They attack them as theories, test them on their own level, as it were. ... I explained to KSP [Katharine Susannah Prichard] a few months ago how I set about writing poems, and she said she thought it was 'cerebral', I wouldn't produce poetry. ... Now old Mao in his article on cognition (and of course Marx and Lenin before him) say that the real test of theory is in practice... So I take it that those who question my theory should test it in the light of my practice of poetry... The quality of this impulse, he argues, should be decided by the response it elicits from an audience: ... to come to a specific case, The Song of Victory'. I have read it to several mixed groups, and it did go over very well. The seamen on the NW ships have dogged-eared copies of it. It was published in the Maritime Worker, and Carnarvon wharfies pasted it up in several places in town. I have had quite a few comments from wharfies about it, all liking it. I am prepared to listen to your opinion on it, but your opinion has no more weight with me than a wharfie's ... He then applies these principles to the contents of Overland: We haven't been able to have a discussion of Overland by the Realist Writers. I tried it downhold among a fairly militant group. The only thing read at all consistently was Morrison's story. It got them in, but left most of them baffled by the mechanics of the situation. I tried Overland on wharf comrades, but couldn't raise a spark. I think in its present content and direction it has a literary market but not a mass market.

As an example of the work he produces in accordance with his theory, he sends a copy of one of his poems, explaining:


43

I am sending you 'Swing Our Crane' for personal reading ... This is a prime example of my theory and method of work, of stating the political need, in this case the popularising of the demand for trade with China in view of our alarming wheat crisis and danger of war. .. .35 In another letter, he contrasted his attitudes as a working-class writer with those he detected in Overland. Never forget that the working class and the intellectuals come to socialism from very different directions. The intellectuals mainly come from a book understanding, from personal frustrations. The workers come to socialism from collective struggle for reforms, and from collective realisation of the incompleteness of such victories.36

The members of the Overland board, he claimed, were entirely middle class. Williams' diatribes drew an angry response from Murray-Smith. He accused Williams of being absurd, argued that his position is not new, and speculated that his isolation in the west induced a classic case of escapism into unreality. 'Exhorting the troops is not good enough for poetry,' he wrote. 'The writers expect praise for their revolutionary sentiments, but the stuff is shallow and unimportant as verse ... The reason I don't like "Song of Victory" is because it has a slightly phony ring to me.' He rejected Williams' sneer at 'middle class intellectuals', and commented that ' "Song of Victory" ... in no sense recapitulates that struggle Ted Roach had at Carnarvon to weld the economic and political struggle. No sense of the dialectic of that struggle is given. It sounds like a poem written from outside.'37 Williams rejected the criticism, arguing that workers had responded enthusiastically to readings of this particular poem, and had published it in their journals, and stuck it up around the waterfront. His arguments however had no effect, and Overland did not publish 'Swing Our Crane'. Williams' conflict with the editors rose directly from the journal's aspiration to be the voice of its community of readers. This ambition directly contradicted the determination, which became stronger over the years, to select work on its merit as writing rather than on its ideological or representational quality. This policy was probably made inevitable by the sheer volume of material submitted for publication, as well as by the editors' desire to see their journal make its distinctive contribution to the totality of Australian writing. Murray-Smith's expressed preference for content over form may have kept the magazine accessible to a wider range of readers, but he could not allow it to give them all space as writers. Those writers who wrote directly to the experience of their readers, like Dorothy Hewett, David Martin or John Morrison or Cecil Holmes, did so because they had first mastered the craft of writing. To

44


others, like Paul Carroll, Overland gave encouragement and time to practise, and space when they had achieved quality. Still others, like Peter Mathers, found in the stuff of their experience bizarre fantasy that stimulated some readers and bewildered others. The community became a conversation of mixed voices. Although the variety of voices enriched this conversation, inevitably it excluded many of the readers who looked to the journal to give voice to the common Australian. This belief is put strongly by one correspondent, E.N. Bob Burns Wedlake, in an angry response to Ian Turner's 'reluctant' rejection of his work.38 Writing from Frankston, Victoria, Wedlake complained that the journal applied middle-class standards and published little genuine working-class literature. He offered his own work as 'more forthright, more direct to the point, and more inspired by a boiling rage against injustice and dishonesty, than the writing you are used to ...' He went on to describe his own dismal situation: I am writing this in a partly built house, furnished with the cheapness of bare necessities. On a labourer's wage I struggle to keep a wife and four schoolchildren (three of them going to High School). We can afford only poor quality food. Clothes and footwear only when the current models are falling to pieces. In constant fear that illness could wreck all we have struggled for. Cycles are our transport. Our only luxuries are a typewriter and a battered old piano. The only valuable thing I possess is debts. The verses he offers, based on the one poet 'the vast majority of British people know', Robert Burns, have Burns' form and passion, but lack his concrete imagery. The eloquence of his letter is dissipated in their generality of sentiment: So many interests are at stake, so many versions clash, so easily could one mistake unleash the devil's lash. Even the more concrete example he gives departs from the immediate, not to context, but to the simplified image of twentieth-century horror: At the bottom of my stomach there's a heaving and a turning and I spew into the pot beside my bed, when I think of little Tommy and his empty bellied yearning, and I think of Hitler standing on his head. Wedlake declares that he is not prepared to recruit one extra reader for a journal that ignores the truths that produce his anger and his writing. But while his words summon up common feelings and responses, they provide no new literary form, and therefore no new politics. Yet new


45

literary forms fail to speak to the people who, like Wedlake, are victims of the old system. The attempts of Overland's editors to keep it free of the dogmatisms of the left were not enough to win it approval from those on the right who believed literature should be kept separate from politics. Frederick Macartney, scourge of Clem Christesen and Meanjin, complained that Overland was 'definitely of red inclination'. It simply did not publish writers who offered contrary views. The answer he sought was not to withhold subsidy from politically unsatisfactory journals, but to establish a single journal 'supervised by the Advisory Board' and edited by 'somebody more inspiring than any of those now controlling literary magazines.'39 This proposal, continually recurring in Australia, to take politics out of literature, meant locating literature firmly at the centre of conservative politics as a vehicle of comfort rather than challenge. The only distinction between the views of Macartney and of Wedlake is that Wedlake wants his words to comfort the excluded rather than the establishment. Ill The disagreement over the purposes of the magazine inevitably became a conflict over management and control. The journal had achieved a satisfying circulation, exceeding 4000 by 1957, but its finances never matched its ambitions. In that year it had 1243 subscribers, 690 of them through the Australasian Book Society, and bulk sales of 2010, bringing total receipts for the financial year to £921. At the same time, expenditure was £979, of which £747 went to the printers and £33 to contributors. The accumulated debts were £400.40 The journal was kept solvent only by contributions from well-wishers, and could ill-afford the impending loss of ABS subscribers or the continuing denial of a subsidy from the Commonwealth Literary Fund. It was in these circumstances that members of the Realist Writers Group chose to challenge the ownership and direction of the journal. The process by which the Realist Writer was subsumed into Overland, and consequently the ownership of the new journal, became matters of bitter contention. According to Frank Hardy, the Realist Writers Group itself was the initiator and appointed Murray-Smith 'to edit the journal,' which was intended to express and publicise the ideas and work of progressive cultural groups ... emphasise discovery and encouragement of new working class writers and publication of established progressive writers ... [and] to have a left-wing, working class standpoint, a militant policy on political and cultural questions and a clear working class tone of voice.41

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This was also the viewpoint of two of those who were there at the beginning, Eric la Motte and Jack Coffey. Coffey was a member of the original editorial board, and became, with Ian Turner, an associate editor after the fourth issue. La Motte was a member of the Melbourne Realist Writers Group, contributed a short story to the fifth issue, and compiled the 'Smoko' column from the sixth issue. In 1959, Coffey prepared for the Melbourne Realist Writers Group a statement on the origins of Overland. In this he claimed that Overland, which ... incorporated THE REALIST WRITER, was established in 1954 by the Society of Realist Writers in Victoria ... the Journal was the property of the Society of Realist Writers. The Realist Writers entrusted Stephen Murray-Smith with the editorship of the journal. Murray-Smith together with associate editors J. Coffey and I. Turner became part of an Editorial Board comprising Victorian, Interstate and New Zealand writers.42 According to Murray-Smith, writing some years later, Judah Waten had offered him £15 to turn the Realist Writer into a printed magazine, and he had gone ahead on that basis and 'presumably with the agreement of the Realist Writers Group'. 43 His declaration at the time was however quite unequivocal. In a letter to Len Fox, he wrote that 'the decision to start Overland was mine. At that time I was accepting leadership from both the RWG and more particularly the fraction, when there was any difference, but in both cases the decision was mine.' He added that for a great deal of the time of Overland's existence there had been no Realist Writers Group, as it had been virtually disbanded on Party orders. He also noted that a clear majority of the editorial board, a lineal descendant of the first, 'unreservedly supports my stand and policy'.44 Fox supported this claim, saying that he had documentary evidence 'that Overlandhas never been the property of any RWG.'45 The probability is that, in the way of these matters, tacit understanding was reached without any formal agreements, and only when ideological conflicts divided the people concerned did they come to dispute the processes. Certainly, after the first issue Murray-Smith, in thanking Frank Hardy for favourable comments in the Communist Review, noted that 'Overland is NOT [the] organ of the Melbourne RWG, and to characterise it as such tends to minimise its role as a national organ.' 46 There can be no doubt that, apart from the donation arranged by Waten, Murray-Smith had from the beginning had the full organizational, financial and editorial responsibility for the journal that enabled it to fulfil this role. Murray-Smith, as long as he could keep the journal as a forum of the broad left, had been content to leave the issue of ownership vague and to work with an editorial board including representatives of the Realist Writers Group. His problems began when members of the board moved


47

beyond criticizing particular editorial decisions and began to demand the right to make the decisions themselves. After 1956 Murray-Smith and Ian Turner, now secretary of the Australasian Book Society, found themselves increasingly at odds with the Stalinists who continued to run the Party. They avoided making a total break in order to preserve the cultural structures they had built around Overland and the ABS, which from 1956 included Overland in its subscriptions.47 Matters came to a head in 1958, when Turner was expelled from the Party and Murray-Smith resigned from it in protest. Turner lost his position with the Book Society, and Overland consequently lost the subscriptions it had received for society members, but a midnight raid secured Overland1* subscribers' files, leaving Murray-Smith in control of the journal and his enemies in impotent fury.48 Impotence however generates rage, and the violence of the attack on Murray-Smith and Overland can be explained as much by the frustration of thwarted bureaucrats and would-be dictators as by political sectarianism.49 The hard left, like any group of political activists, was small, but its ambitions were huge, and its members saw themselves as the heirs of Lenin and Stalin, forerunners of the inevitable Australian revolution. Their comminations against dissenters, although of minimal practical effect, were uttered with all the confidence of those who know that history is on their side. Foremost among these exterminators of heresy and defenders of the one true path were Jack Coffey and Eric la Motte. Their dismay at the conduct of Overland'* editor was as unyielding as their claim to ownership. They wrote that this dismay began early: Dissatisfaction with the policy pursued by Murray-Smith as editor began to be expressed in 1956 by some Victorian members of the Board. In the main, this criticism took the form of objecting to the undemocratic and bureaucratic practices of Murray-Smith as editor.50 The 'bureaucratic practices' were the editor's habit of making his own decisions rather than submitting everything for prior decision through the board and the society. Coffey and la Motte went on to claim that Murray-Smith had 'ignored, evaded or side-tracked' requests for the board to 'meet and function properly'. They admitted that he had 'arranged and participated in various meetings on Overland', but argued that the fact that he had not yet allowed Board members to discuss a plan, contributions, contents AND EDITORIAL policy for a new issue of the magazine demonstrates that such issues and the subjects imposed on them by Murray-Smith constitute deliberate diversions to evade responsibility to the Board and frustrate its proper functions. [Emphasis in original.]

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This was the central issue. While Murray-Smith saw himself as assisting the society by relieving it of responsibility for the journal and converting it into a magazine of general importance to the left, the officials of the Melbourne group saw it as their property and believed that MurraySmith should be responsible to them. There had already been a dispute about responsibility in the previous year, when Coffey objected to the appointment to the board of Eric Lambert. Lambert had written for the British press an article that attacked the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the suppression of its popular government. Murray-Smith took the attitude that Overland had no official line on Hungary, and that the views of individual members of the board on the subject were therefore irrelevant. More significantly, he emphasized that the functions of the board had never been precisely defined and that its members were merely advisory. 'The Board itself is, as you know, not an elected body so much as a co-opted one.'51 In the event, the membership of the editorial board was not published in subsequent issues, where the editor's name alone appeared until 1960, when the names of Kylie Tennant, Ian Turner, now in Canberra, Tom Errey and Nancy Cato were added as advisory editors. In a letter to Tennant, Murray-Smith explained that this was an attempt to broaden the representation of the journal. In fact only Turner was actively involved, although Tennant attempted to establish a Sydney committee.52 Despite various changes in the people involved, and the addition of a number of Melbourne advisory or associate editors, who undertook direct editorial tasks, this remained the journal's organizational form until Murray-Smith's death in 1988. Murray-Smith's assertion of his ownership did not go unchallenged. After the meeting that purported to dismiss him as editor, Realist Writers Groups around the country debated the issue vigorously. In Sydney, Frank Hardy supported Coffey's view that Overland was the property of the Realist Writers Groups, and maintained that MurraySmith was swinging the journal away from the left. The Sydney group made plans to publish its own Realist Writer as an alternative to Overland™ Party functionary Rex Chiplin in a review in the Sydney Party newspaper, Tribune, condemned Overland as a 'shackle on the Labor movement', and condemned Murray-Smith for allowing in a supposedly left-wing journal a discussion of Pasternak's Dr Zhivago rather than giving space to reports of intellectual and democratic progress in the Soviet Union.54 According to Murray-Smith, this review rallied many intellectuals to the journal's defence and 'struck a blow at the intellectual prestige of the Communist Party'. On the other hand, Len Fox, also a Party member and the editor of the miners' union paper, Common Cause, gave the journal a most supportive notice, which Murray-Smith


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contrasted favourably with Chiplin's 'arrogant, illiterate and sectarian review'.55 In the subsequent debate in Tribune, intellectuals who rallied to the support of Overland included Katharine Susannah Prichard, who condemned the sectarian attacks and urged the support of Communists for the magazine. She argued that the magazine 'stands for the defence of peace and democratic rights of the people' and gave writers on the left a chance of reaching a wider audience than would be possible elsewhere. As an example she cited the willingness of the editor to publish her own remarks on Pasternak's Dr Zhivago, in which she rebutted 'the absurd claims for this insignificant novel'.56 Hardy remained adamant. Chiplin's attack, he maintained, took a 'fundamentally correct political and class standpoint'. He supported the claim that Overland was 'initiated' by the Melbourne Realist Writers Group, which appointed Murray-Smith as editor. But Murray-Smith, as editor, had failed to follow directions to establish 'a left wing, working class standpoint, a militant policy on political and cultural issues and a clear working class tone of voice.' Yet, although arguing that the editor had been guilty of a 'betrayal of the people who appointed him and the Labor Movement which gave it birth', Hardy offered to co-operate with him if he would agree to accept a joint editor and/or appoint a representative editorial board and return to its original policies. Hardy's stand was not supported by all his comrades. John Morrison, in particular, was worried that the whole affair could only bring comfort to their enemies. In a letter to Hardy, he supported the stand taken by Katharine Susannah Prichard. Hardy's reply expressed his sense of betrayal. He complained that the enemy would have more cause to rejoice if we had permitted the renegade Murray-Smith to get away with debasing Overland, taking it away from the people who originated it, robbing it of its fighting spirit and giving it a flavour of anti-communism. He went on to describe Murray-Smith and the others who had left the Party as 'latter-day saints and ex-Communists looking for a place in the capitalist sun ... bourgeois intellectuals ... petty and self-seeking.'57 Murray-Smith responded with similar passion, describing Hardy's letter to Tribune as 'a highly misleading and mendacious document'. He went on to characterize Hardy as a crude idealist, philosophically speaking, whose Stalinist sectarianism is made worse by his ambition, his mendacity and his determination to play the same role as Fadeyev did under Stalin: the 'transmission belt' between the Central Committee and the Party writers.58

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In fact, whereas Fadeyev eventually committed suicide, Frank Hardy continued writing, and used the death of Paul Mortier, the Australian ideologue who did take his own life, as the basis for But the Dead Are Many, the novel which explains the ideological zeal that blinded so many of his contemporaries. Meanwhile, in Melbourne the battle of the meetings raged. An editorial meeting ended in disarray, and Murray-Smith then convened a full meeting which both factions proceeded to stack. As he explained to Len Fox, At 9 p. m. the night before the meeting was to take place, Coffey rang me, told me that he had invited 'some other members of the editorial board', and hung up. It was clear from the few words I did have with him that he had done a whip around of everyone who in the last five years had ever attended an Overland meeting (staunch CP membership only, of course). I immediately contacted Vassilieff and Collinson, who agreed with me that the only way to counter such childish tactics was not to ignore the meeting, but to go ahead and invite a number of people ourselves. This we did. Of course the meeting was a shambles, though very revealing to most of the people I invited along as observers. Finally Coffey agreed to withdraw his attempt to pack the meeting and to revert to a normal editorial committee meeting. Very humiliating for him, but then he should have realised that I didn't come down in the last shower.59 It was apparently after this meeting that Coffey convened the meeting that Murray-Smith refused to attend, and from this time on Coffey had no effective association with the journal, to the editor's pleasure. In a letter to Turner, Murray-Smith confessed that 'another three years of working with Coffey ... was a matter of such distaste to me that I was beginning to feel that we should agree to part ways', and it appears that he seriously considered abandoning the magazine altogether. Instead, he proposed transferring it to a partnership. In the event, he continued to run it on his own for some time, trying to enlarge the board only in 1962, when he endeavoured to set up state committees, but emphasised firmly that their function would be advisory and critical. Looking back on the whole affair many years later, Joseph Waters, who had been at the critical meetings, wrote that 'As we are now aware, that was the correct decision. The pragmatic approach to Overland's future was better than a decision taken wholly on ideological grounds.' 60 The final episode of the struggle between Overland and the ideologues was written in 1961. By this time Judah Waten had replaced Frank Hardy as the leader of the campaign against the journal, but according to Murray-Smith, after 'a really filthy vituperation match he and I had in the lavatories at Union House [University of Melbourne] during the course of the dinner for Soviet writers he couldn't have been sweeter!' MurraySmith continues:


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Dear Judah. There is a screamingly funny story, retailed by the inimitable Joe Waters, ... of a fraction meeting before the Soviet visit, in which it was proposed by Coffey and la Motte that Murray-Smith be taken on for Round 2 and properly done over this time. They were instructed to go away for a month and draw up the Document of Excommunication and Final Denunciation. During the month that the Russians were here, Judah went to Sydney with them, Overland put on a good show for them, I had them down to Mt Eliza, and the line changed. But, in the good old way, those in the know about the line changing kept quiet about it until the psychological time. Comes the reconvened fraction meeting. Coffey produces twelve copies of the Document to end all Documents - completely banning Overland and warning all Party members to have nothing to do with it or me, etc. Silence after he reads this. Then Judah, State Committee representative etc. weighs in. Such sectarianism! Such dogmatism! Such idealism! Hadn't the comrades the political education to understand that Overland was a progressive magazine and Murray-Smith a progressive individual to be worked with (?on) [sic]. The meeting ended with a ceremonial burning of all copies of the denunciation (Joe, to my fury, not sneaking one out for myfiles)and Coffey retired to his sickbed with a nervous disorder for three months. La Motte hasn't been seen since.61

It should be noted that, ten years later, Murray-Smith was responsible for arranging that Overland host a sixtieth birthday dinner for Waten.62 The left remained a contradiction of ideological enmities and personal friendships that could change overnight.63 IV With the defection of Overland from the Communist Party and the Realist Writers Groups, the Sydney Realist Writer remained as a vehicle for working-class writing and literary militancy. Edited at first by Frank Hardy, with a board including Jane Tabberer, Mick Staples, Betty Collins and Vera Deacon, the journal, which first appeared in July 1958, was thoroughly integrated with the activities of the Realist Writers Group and run in the way members believed Overland should have been. The consequence was that an enormous amount of energy went into organization, literary debate and self-criticism and, as with Overland, into the conduct of social functions to rally support and raise money. The ambitions of the group constantly outran its performance. In 1961 the journal announced the formation of the National Council of Realist Writers, and from the second issue of that year it sought a national audience, but it does not appear that its circulation ever rose beyond a few hundred.64 At the only national conference recorded in the Hardy papers, the interstate delegates seem to have been representing mainly themselves, and apart from Hardy himself, who already had an established reputation, the significant writers to emerge from the group were Ron Tullipan and Roger Milliss, although Dorothy Hewett was also

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associated with it and published in the journal. The journal changed its name to The Realist in 1964, when it also changed from a typescript to a printed format, and continued until 1970 under the editorship of Ray Williams (Ray Verrills). The Realist Writer succeeded where Overland had failed, in being the voice of a community of working-class writers. It is another question whether that community was in any sense representative of the working class as a whole. An editorial in the second volume noted that virtually all the material came from members of the Sydney Realist Writers Group, which exercised close control over the material published. The method of operation was set out in an attachment to the national secretary's report in December 1963.65 These explained that the board elected the editor and executive, decided policy and read and commented on manuscripts. The editor planned each issue and circulated scripts, returning those not approved by a majority of the board. The editor was given executive authority 'in appropriate circumstances', such as the final stages of production, but his plans and decisions were always to be accountable to the board. 'On minor matters subject to a variety of opinion (such as phraseology for instance), the decisions shall be left to the Editor unless there is a clear majority among the Board.' Decisions were made by majority vote, although sometimes as few as three people attended meetings. Minutes of the committee record that it asked Frank Hardy to supply a shorter story than the one he had submitted ('The New Policeman'), wrote to Roger Milliss requesting that he change the last two lines of a poem, refused an offer from Peter Leyden to subsidize the cover because it was 'not anxious to associate with him in any way or allow him to take any part in the preparation of the cover', and asked Dorothy Hewett to change a review of John Manifold's poems to write out the implications that he, like most left-wing poets, failed as a political poet, and that political poetry should be avoided. Hardy's advice to the board was that Hewett should merely reverse the order of her arguments, and in effect reverse her conclusion. This close supervision was however not enough for one member who, apparently remembering the problems with Overland, complained to executive members that 'there has been too much flouting, by-passing and ignoring of the National Council and its Executive. The result is a denial of democracy . . . the democratically elected council is a concrete expression of the fact that we have made an honest break with the concept that ONE-GREAT-HYPHENATED-EGO is the fount of wisdom.'66 With this control, it is not surprising that the work published in the Realist Writer consisted mainly of heavy polemic, realistic stories about working-class men, and exhortatory poetry. The polemics were directed


53

strongly against any kind of formalism, and particularly Patrick White, but even Judith Wright's poem 'The Bones Speak' was condemned as an example of verse which in addition to demonstrating the inscrutability of a typical symbolist poem ... provides a good example of the pseudo-profound speculative nonsense proferred by academic critics when analysing obscurantist literature .. .just as abstract, metaphysical, unenlightening and obscure as the poem itself.67 Paul Mortier, who with Frank Hardy was the chief ideologist, criticised Dorothy Hewett's Bobbin Up because it gave 'a sensual rather than a fully conscious picture of reality' (2/1960). In a longer article in the fourth issue for 1960, Mortier expanded on his ideas of socialist realism, which, contrasting it to the 'tragic example' ofJames Joyce, he proclaimed as the only valid literature for the twentieth century. 'The inability to recognize the liberating role of the working class,' he explained, 'cripples literature.' Implicitly, by this standard Hewett's novel falls short, as she shows her workers retreating from the struggle into sensuality and defeatism. The editor, Ray Williams, was conscious of the problems of applying these criteria to poetry. In reply to John Manifold, who accused the journal of lacking any poetry policy to govern its selection of poems, 'not even the elementary one of being good in their own way', and questioned the qualifications of the board members as critics, Williams emphasised the board's responsibilities to members of the Realist Writers Groups. He acknowledged the board's lack of confidence about poetry, which he attributed to their own lack of education and to the 'obscurity and dull; unmusical nature of so much modern verse.' He went on to suggest that the best way to remedy this problem was through the education by practice that the groups provided.68 By their nature, however, the groups confined themselves to the reading and practice that were least likely to accomplish this aim, although the editorial board did try to augment its own expertise by appointing Manifold as literary editor. The Realist eventually ceased publication in 1970. By this time the group had fallen away, and the journal was being sustained largely by the efforts of Ray Williams and his wife, who felt they could no longer continue.69 Its story could be taken as no more than a tale of well-meaning people blinded by ideology and puffed by their own self-importance. Yet this would do less than justice to the hard work and enthusiasm, sustained over many years, of a group of people who believed passionately in the ability of working people to create through their own words the conditions for a world of peace and justice. While their efforts to give voice to the community of workers may have been vitiated by the ideological constraints they put on this voice, their relative failure was

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also an effect of the conditions of literary production in a society where the channels of publication are controlled by capital. The failure of the groups to build within the labour movement an alternative means of publication, and so provide a foundation for Frank Hardy's vision of an alternative culture, is a case study of how ideology works in a closed group to frustrate its ultimate objectives. Their ideology gave the Realist Writers their drive and coherence, but at the same time their self-consistent and comforting view of the way the world works left no room for correction from a reality external to itself. Socialist realism was as formal as the most aesthetic writing, but it remained unconscious of its own forms. It was thus as dangerous a solecism as its antithesis, the belief that literature is merely a play of words and forms. Neither can be tested against any reality external to the writer. Yet if ideology is insulated from other reality, it is not free of effects on it. The passionate debates in the Realist Writers Groups over whether particular stories were sufficiently working class or militant or revolutionary were not settled by appeals to empirical evidence, which would undoubtedly have shown that the working class they described was passing and that aspirations to a revolutionary situation in Australia were pure fantasy. The debates were not actually about such issues, but about power within the groups and within the Party. They were settled by appealing not to what might be 'typical' of the working class but to what was 'characteristic', that is, what best fitted the ideology. Similarly, militancy was established by showing 'positive' qualities in the workers and 'optimism' about their actions. As these terms were all subject to interpretation, the debates finally had to be resolved by appeal to the authority of the Party's current definitions, as Beasley shows in his accounts of the interventions by such Party heavies as J.B. Miles or Jack Blake. In Australia, these resolutions had little effect other than determining who was published and who received Party favour for such benefits as trips to the Soviet. The solemnity with which the groups discussed them, however, is a reminder that the penalty for losers of such discussions in the Soviet Union was banishment or death. The games were the same; only the stakes were different.

THREE

The Community o/Overland Lambert, Morrison, Waten, Hewett and Martin

For Overland, as for its progenitors and contemporaries in the Realist Writers Groups, a free, democratic and socialist Australia was the logical fulfilment of a tradition of radical nationalism that went back to the 1890s. This belief implied a commitment to social realist literature that would reflect the conditions of the ordinary Australian, and particularly of the Australian male. The journal never however allowed this commitment to degenerate into the sectarian exclusion of work that failed to satisfy the current thinking of Party leaders or its own understanding of political correctness. As Stephen Murray-Smith later wrote, We are not particularly interested in stories-with-a-social-message. We think messages emerge through well-written stories with good insight into people. Generally speaking we would favor stories with some kind of humanist content and not too mannered, and we wouldn't publish, of course, racist (for instance) material however well put together.1 This inclusive policy, valuing literature for its humanist insight rather than for purely formal characteristics, and at the same time recognizing that writing nevertheless has non-literary consequences, was the basis of both Overland's politics and its aesthetic. It implies a community based on tolerance, openness and intellectual curiosity - essential qualities if socialism is to be democratic.

During the Cold War Overland provided one of the few places where literary and political debate across the whole range of the left was able to continue the task of reinterpreting the Australian tradition in order to produce the circumstances for a free and independent Australia. Its early 55

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issues were distinguished from other literary magazines and leftist journals by its populist tone, its eclectic choice of contributors, and its open debates and discussions. In his Preface to An Overland Muster (1965), Murray-Smith noted its larrikin irreverence and preference for content over form. He wrote of the journal's 'unfashionable' belief that 'literature had become separated from life', and of his view that where form and content are not perfectly matched (as they so seldom are in art), we will look as kindly as possible on those with something worthwhile to say but struggling to express it as other publishers and editors look on those with little to put before readers but the graces of a refined technique ... This literary standpoint matched his understanding of the journal's political function: From the time Overland was founded until the present day I have seen as one of its most important functions to make the voice of humanism, radicalism and social protest more effective because broader, more humorous, more conscious of literary standards and less dogmatic in every way.2 Murray-Smith's humanism took the form of establishing Overland as a location for a kind of continuing conversation between editors, writers and readers. An examination of the first dozen issues of the journal discloses the kind of structure that was established. In these issues, contributors engaged in discussion with each other, not only about political and literary issues, but about such matters as the intelligence of the horse. Merv Lilley felt that John Manifold had slighted the horse in a quotation from Banjo Paterson, and responded with a ballad of his own about a horse that used its wits to establish its freedom against all the odds (no. 3). Short articles on such writers as the Palmers, John Morrison, Ralph de Boissiere and Alan Marshall established them as members of a democratic community. Murray-Smith set the general tone of the journal in his column, 'Swag', which gave readers an irreverent mixture of gossip, news and opinions. From the start, this column invited readers to enter into conversation with the journal and its contributors. Space for their contributions was extended when, in issue number 6, 1955-56, Eric la Motte started the 'Smoko' column 'to record in print the many fine - and funny - stories that are told by workers on jobs and in pubs all over Australia.' This column resembled the Aboriginalities column in the old Bulletin, but extended the bush ethos more consciously to embrace all workers in solidarity against bosses and bludgers. The stories were built on the traditions of the bush yarn employed by Dal Stivens in The Gambling Ghost (1953) and Alan Marshall in his tales of Speewah, or collected by Bill Wannan in The Australian (1954). Typical of the 'Smoko' stories is the

THE COMMUNITY OF OVERLAND

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first, which tells how a 'Mate of mine once worked in a department of GMH where there were 50 foremen, 48 of whom had ulcers. The managing director sacked the other two — reckoned they must be bludging.' The column also recalled such wharfie nicknames as Hydraulic Jack, so named because he would lift anything, and London Fog, who never lifted at all. These items furthered the interest the journal had already shown in the Australian folk tradition by publishing John Manifold on Banjo Paterson, Hugh Anderson on Charles Thatcher, the 'Colonial Minstrel', and Frank Hardy on Edward Harrington, self-proclaimed 'last of the balladists'. Three of Harrington's own ballads, including 'The Swagless Swaggy', an example of bush yarn becoming legend, appeared in the same issue (no. 3). This ballad, like some of the nicknames, actually subverts the ethic of mateship by turning larrikin into shyster. Readers were asked to support the journal in the most practical ways, by showing it and selling it to their mates, and by contributing to the floating fund, which to this day remains a vital part of the journal's finances. The first contributions to this, announced in the first issue, were for £7 10s and £5 from F.J.H. and E.L., presumably Frank Hardy and Eric Lambert. Issue number 3 took readers into its confidence by pointing out that it was still being produced at a loss, and urged them to help by talking about it, donating to it, encouraging writers' groups to 'look upon the journal as their own property, and to make it their task to popularise it imaginatively and enthusiastically.' In issue number 5, an editorial announced sales of 4300 and donations of £31 2s from the previous issue. The editorial attributed the journal's success to its 'broad and popular approach, the wide variety of writers who have contributed and the variety of viewpoints expressed, and its dedication to Australia, past, present and future.' The editorial linked the continuing economic plight of the journal, and the continuing failure of the Commonwealth Literary Fund to support it, to the threat to free speech posed by the attacks on the Fund for supposedly supporting left-wing writers. Although, as we shall see, the Fund survived these attacks, they nevertheless served to inhibit its activities and so perpetuate the climate of cultural mediocrity and conformity that characterized Australia in the years of Menzies. It was to take another ten years for either Overland or its right-wing adversary, Quadrant, to receive any government support. The official ideology was that literature and politics should remain distinct. Overland continued to oppose this view, both editorially and through contributions from such writers as A.D. Hope and the then Leader of the Opposition, Dr H.V. Evatt, both of whom appeared in the fifth issue. The journal's combination of financial exigency and libertarian stance helped to maintain among readers a sense of membership in an oppositional community.

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This community was based, as the editorial noted, on the slogan, Temper democratic, bias Australian'. This motto, adapted from Joseph Furphy, remains a controversial issue. The assertion of democracy was an overt challenge to the Leninist doctrines of democratic centralism which then governed the Communist Party in Australia as elsewhere. The proclamation of nationalism offends those who believe that nationalism is outdated or dangerous or both. At the time it was adopted, it implicitly challenged both the servility of the Australian establishment towards Britain and America, and the corresponding deference shown to Moscow by the left. The first issue of Overland opened with a poem by Nell Old, 'Swans in Footscray', contrasting the serenity of nature with the dispossession of the Aborigines, an article by Brian Fitzpatrick on the attempts by parliamentarians and the press to silence the left, and John Morrison's story 'Nine O'clock Finish'. This story brought together the political with the personal on which its politics was grounded. The story describes a commonplace dispute on the waterfront. However, the chatter of the men as they sit around waiting for the issue to be resolved one way or another gave Morrison the opportunity to record their lore, ranging from the traditions of the union to the best way to plant onions. The story thus includes the wharfies in the community of the journal, both speaking to them about their concerns and explaining these concerns for them to other readers. By contrast, Jim Comerford's 'The Bottle', in issue number 6, used tall stories to embody the dream of the battler triumphing over hostile fate. The story does not worry about realism, socialist or otherwise, but strengthens the sense of masculine community by invoking bush traditions of hard drinking, miserly publicans and a bush perish as its base. Most of the stories published in the early issues belong with Morrison's realism rather than with Comerford's or Harrington's rebellious legend. They describe work in factories, abattoirs and on building sites, struggles between miners, scabs and the police, and tragic conflicts of loyalty and obligation to union and to family. They set up the image of the battler struggling against the power of money supported by the state, with only the union offering hope of redressing the balance. A few writers take the theme further. Frank Hardy, in 'Death of a Unionist' (no. 4), a story criticized by the Sydney Realist Writers for its attitude to the place of women in the family, takes mateship to extraordinary lengths as the source and product of working-class male solidarity. Hardy was to parody this mateship, but not its masculinity, in his Billy Borker stories, two of which, 'The Crookedest Raffle Ever Run' and 'The Only Fair Dinkum Raffle', the journal published in 1958. These develop the kind of images of the ordinary bloke that Hardy had valued in Edward Harrington's


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work. They show the speaker's mates as battlers and con-men surviving the system rather than as the strugglers working to overthrow it. Other writers extended the journal's thrust beyond the lone battler. Lloyd Davies juxtaposed the absorption of the scientist in his project with the blind procedures of bureaucracy and the fantasies of security. Hilary Richmond parodied both romantic and realist fiction by setting their forms against images of a woman's social entrapment. David Forrest enlivened an otherwise melodramatic tale of an ambulance in a race with death by shrewd observations of character and a keen ear for dialogue. Forrest's hero, Kinivan, is the son of a soldier who 'died in one of the savage bayonet charges the dreadful day the Second Ninth Battalion went down to Cape Endaidere'. His mother battles on, running a boarding house and working for Legacy and the Red Cross. Kinivan volunteers as an ambulance driver. They are members of an ideal community founded on service, sacrifice and self-effacement. By publishing the story, Overland addressed those who see themselves as part of this community, rather than as lone battlers. The poetry reinforces the same ideal of community. David Martin spoke of writing to Mick Lawson, the miners' poet, to suggest he show a more cheerful aspect of working life, only to be rebuked by the fact of seven men killed in a Collinsville pit. He then revised his own advice: 'Sing of the seven Who at Collinsville died. Sing of the seven colliers Who went into the night.' Lawson responded: David Martin wrote to me:'Write not of tragedy.' And as he wrote to me Seven died needlessly. Death called for seven. I write of tragedy. Death has claimed seven. (no. 2)

These verses are like the poetry of war, where, as Wilfred Owen wrote, the poetry is in the pity. Another poet of the mines, Jock Graham, drew the moral in a poem published on the same page. This poem generalizes the miners' experience in the ballad form, allowing the popular devices of rhyme and rhythm to draw the reader into its emotions as he leads us from his beginning By profession and birth I'm a man of the earth I burrow in it like a mole;

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WRITING IN HOPE AND FEAR I dig it and drill it, I blast it and fill it, For that great commodity, coal...

through a catalogue of the hardships and calumnies suffered by the miners at the hands of society, to his conclusion: Yet through muck and mire and lung dust and fire, More clearly I'm seeing my goal; To work and unite and to preach and to fight, For socialist mining of coal. Other poets went beyond this simplicity, but always in forms which pointed to an external reality. Rewi Alley's translation of four poems by Ho Chi Minh, long before the struggle in Vietnam had been perceived as much more than a sideshow to events in China, took the guerrilla outside conventional frameworks of heroism or villainy into a sensitive human context. Poems of Laurence Collinson's like 'Old Maid on a Late Tram' present complex human situations which hold no simple answers. John Manifold's 'Red Rosary', on the other hand, used a sophisticated form, the sonnet, to present a simple sequence of heroic revolutions. While it is easy now to mock the naive faith of a poet who could respond to the death of Stalin with the cry that Here at the dawn-lit first perimeter Of communism, Uncle Joe reached home (no. 7)

it is important to distinguish the historical blindness from the truth of the poem's central celebration of the unconquerable human struggle for liberty. Yet it is proper to ask how Overland could have been for so long blind to the structural oppressions of Communist regimes. The answer is that its politics were built on the sense of a solidarity within a community of the oppressed. Through its poetry and its fiction, through the history and folklore it renewed, it built a sense of a democratic tradition seeking to throw off the stultifying shackles of an era characterized by fear abroad and complacency at home. In rejecting irrational fears of communism, it neglected also systematic criticisms. A residual belief remained that the apparatus of oppression and the acts of cruelty were aberrations, and that the vision of the November Revolution remained alive within the structures of Communist regimes. The memory of past injustice, the spectacle of contemporary capitalist aggression and oppression, kept alive the hope that the regimes of Russia and eastern Europe, which had promised to free their peoples from poverty, ignorance and prejudice, still had the capacity to free themselves from the bureaucratic structures and fear of their own people that had led them, so far, to replace old tyranny with new.


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Murray-Smith came of a generation that awoke to politics at the time of the Spanish civil war and had known at first hand the horrors of the Holocaust and the second world war. For members of this generation, peace was the central issue, and America and its allies, armed with atomic weapons, the greatest threat to its continuance. Their view, which in Murray-Smith's case grew from the writings of suchfirstworld war writers as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, was well summarized in Elizabeth Vassilieff s response to an attack in Quadranthy Frank Knopfelmacher on Victor Wallace's collection of essays, Paths to Peace. Vassilieff condemned Knopfelmacher and his like for not understanding that * communism is a social challenge, not a military threat, a world-wide historical development, not a diabolical conspiracy.'s The well-justified fears of McCarthyism at home and American imperialist adventurism abroad led to a blindness towards Russian imperialism and tyranny. Overland's sense of tradition carried with it the belief that Australia remained capable of leading the way to a new world, in the arts as well as in politics. This depended first on getting our own affairs in order, and particularly in understanding the development of a distinctive Australian culture. T. Inglis Moore noted the absence of studies in Australian literature from the universities, and the journal discussed the designs of the new Melbourne Olympic Pool (no. 8, 1956) and the proposed Sydney Opera House, as well as hopes for a new national theatre (no. 7, 1956) and laments for unmade Australian films (no. 9, 1957). Writers alternatively welcomed Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll as the first sign of theatrical renaissance, and condemned it as a betrayal of the working classes (no. 8, 1956). The critic Joe Joseph, writing as Gerry Grant, represented the developing interaction between purely local concerns and the global culture, as well as Overland's passion for relating culture to politics. After his death at the age of 36, Helen Hughes wrote of the London-born M.E. Joe' Joseph, who also wrote film reviews for Outlook under the name of Gerry Howard, and for the Melbourne Communist weekly, the Guardian, under his own name, that All his life he tolerated his enemies and suffered the foolishness of chance acquaintances with equanimity, but for his friends he reserved his passions and often his rancour. Yet his only regrets in the last, tremendously courageous days of his life were that he had not done more to expose crimes against reason and scandals against humanity, and that he had not attacked sycophants and hypocrites with more vigor and imagination .. .Joe's social and political life centred round every good cause ... with strong side interests in music, films, writing detective novels and girls. He ... followed his friends to Australia in 1954, riding his motor-bike on a solo overland trip enriched by acrimonious argument with the officials of two dozen countries.4

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His articles on film and television brought together aesthetic and political criticism. He identified the exclusion of issues of class from the American film BlackboardJungle (no. 5), and showed similarly how the romanticism of the Australian film Jedda (no. 6) only concealed its implicit racism. He also examined pessimistically and, as it has turned out, prophetically, the threats posed to Australian independence by the structures of ownership and control of the new television channels (no. 7). If Joseph represented the bohemian and international aspect of Overland, Arthur Phillips represented its nationalism. In a seminal essay, 'The Democratic Tradition', he linked the literary and political commitments which constituted the core of the radical nationalist school of criticism. A sub-heading supplied to the article, 'Plain Roast Mutton', suggested what Phillips considered the essential quality of Australian writing. He believed that this quality came from the kind of audience nurtured by the Bulletin. The Bulletin as Archibald finally evolved it was vulgar enough - happily and unashamedly vulgar. It met plebeian taste by its snappiness and irreverence, but it was not pandering to the vulgar; its writers enjoyed that tone as heartily as its readers. If, with a firm free hand, the Bulletin writers shook the naked tomato-sauce bottle over their plain-roast mutton, it was because they shared the national taste in cookery ... the final cause of its success lay in the assumption that the vulgar could think - and like it. (no. 5, p. 22)

Phillips contrasted this attitude with that of the British publisher Harmsworth, whose 'cynical seizure of a commercial opportunity' offered by the 'new audience from the elementary schools' trivialized readers and writers alike with 'a diet of scraps and shreds of meaning containing as little of the red meat of meaning as possible.' The quality of Australian writing, therefore, arose directly from its democratic trust in its audience. Writing as an historian, Ian Turner responded to Arthur Phillips' article by seeking to find 'satisfactory explanation for the growth of the Australian democratic tradition.'5 The location of the original causes in the convict economy did not adequately explain why the tradition had 'come to dominate Australian literature in the 1890s'. Turner argued that by this time economic and political developments had 'produced a consciousness of nation among Australian working men', and that 'it was the working people rather than the more highly educated upper and middle-classes whose past was deep-rooted in, and whose future was wholly committed to Australia.' Although he admitted that the early optimism of this literature had later been lost, he identified a continuing tradition of hopeful struggle in political journals of the left. By implication, Overland was committed to continuing this tradition through its community of writers, unionists and the newly educated classes.


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II Although Overland contributors generally remained optimistic about the regimes in Russia and eastern Europe, Murray-Smith was prepared to publish criticism of the left in general and the Soviet Union in particular. When Pasternak's Dr Zhivago appeared in 1958, as well as orthodox criticism by Katharine Susannah Prichard, who could not reconcile its author's disillusion with her own idealistic views of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the journal published an appreciative review by Maurice Shadbolt (no. 14). This brought criticism in the Tribunefrom Rex Chiplin, who argued that presenting two points of view was an inappropriate way of dealing with the truth, which was always singular.6 The journal's critical attitude to the left increased over time, although it remained sympathetic to pacificism. In 1963 it published attacks on militarism in an article by the Labor parliamentarian Jim Cairns and a cartoon by Bruce Petty. In the following issue, number 27-28, extracts from Khrushchev's speech on the responsibility of militant revolutionary artists to educate the people in the ideals of communism, and his criticism of Yevtushenko's 'Babi Yar' for presenting 'things as if only Jews were victims of the fascist atrocities', were followed by a response from the Mexican radical writer Carlos Fuentes: 'Art, Socialism and Life'. Fuentes condemns Khrushchev's backward step and 'the imposition of dogma over criticism and of optimism over realism', which closes out 'all possibility of individual expression by the artist and in consequence the possibility of art.' He condemns the socialist realists for cutting themselves off from western art, and so destroying the possibility of a 'coincidence of artistic and literary revolutions ... [that] could have been of incalculable effectiveness.' A similar attitude to art and liberation is expressed in the following interview with Yevtushenko, who defends both his own methods and the potential of communism to free the 'cumulative good that exists in so many men now alive in the world.'7 This combination of a belief in collective action and the power of the individual imagination enabled the journal to identify the blighted hopes of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and to protest energetically against the Soviet Union's repression of its own writers, without ever feeling obliged to retreat to the anti-communist sterilities of the Cold War.8 Ill Apart from Frank Hardy, the Australian writers who at this time wrote most directly within the social realist tradition were Eric Lambert, John Morrison andjudah Waten, all of whom were, at the height of the Cold War, to fall foul of the parliamentary critics of the Commonwealth Literary Fund. Also suspect were Alan Marshall and David Martin, both

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Overland regulars but in important respects different from the other three. Marshall was never a member of the Party, and Martin did not regard himself as simply a socialist realist. Even more heterodox was Dorothy Hewett, who moved from the stirring popular and socialist ballads and realist fiction of her early work through tempestuous politics and marriages to the fierce dedication to individual liberty and the feminist politics of her later work. Of these, Eric Lambert is the least orthodox. For all his leftist opinions, his first novel is essentially a realistic account of the men of the Second AIF during their African campaigns. It does however depart from the general pattern of Australian novels of the first world war, which essentially portrayed the rite of passage from innocence to an experience in which the bonds of mateship hold the troops together in their encounter with evil. Although Lambert's novel retains elements of this pattern, it places war as an extension of the evils of the class struggle that generates it. The officers become the class enemy. Although this underlying theme is not emphasized, and could easily be disregarded by unsympathetic readers, they could not, however, mistake the novel's hostility to officers as a class and war as a whole. This is summed up in what Lambert himself identified as the 'indictment of war and the officer complex'. 9 This indictment was not a condemnation of the men with whom he was proud to have shared the fight for what he considered ajust cause. Both his pride and his hatred are expressed in two passages that give the thoughts of the main character, the earlier on his first encountering the corpse of a man slain in battle, and the later just before the novel's climactic action:10 Naked on a rock in the Mediterranean, he was seeing death for the first time in the shape of a hollowed out corpse. The wind seemed to blow through his turbulent thoughts. Here were the remains of a Nazi. Here was something that had once been a boy. What sort of world had it been born into? It was easy for him to imagine this. A crippled, humbled, defeated country. A confused, angry, poverty-shadowed world. A youth without certitude - one of the legion of the betrayed. ... Suddenly he realised he did not really know what fascism was. He only hated it because its results were frightful. The depth of his ignorance left him with a bitter, vague anger ... (pp. 63-4) The narrator's confusion, arising from his recognition both of the humanity of the dead enemy and of the historical circumstances that had destroyed him as a human being before taking away his life, leads to his realization that he himself understands little of the causes and nature of fascism, or of war. However, his quality as an observer, one of the men but also apart from them, enables him to make some sense of his experience


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through the remainder of the novel. Later in the book he has reached some security in his attitudes: There was no fear left in Dick. No doubts. He was calm and his mind was clear. For a few seconds he had a huge vision of tens of thousands who lay waiting as he did. How many were there like himself:- angry at life no longer, unafraid of death, yet knowing the meaning of what was soon to happen. Seeing this battle as the end of a crime and themselves as its victims. This tragic, this just, this terrible battle. ... And many must die. This was war. Curse and damn to the ends of the world all those who had made it necessary. (p. 313 - Lambert's emphasis)

Lambert's wartime experiences led him after the war into the Communist Party and enthusiastic participation in the Peace Movement, particularly the organization of its great cause for 1952, the Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship. In Victoria, the Realist Writer, under Stephen Murray-Smith's editorship, devoted practically a whole issue to it.11 In Sydney, Richard Krygier was already monitoring peace movements for his early reports to his new employers in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, but does not seem to have noticed this particular event.12 He was however working closely with Standish Michael Keon, whose parliamentary attack on Lambert's novel concentrated more on the author's political activities than on the book's literary content, dismissing it as 'anti-Australian and anti-British propaganda'. H.B. Gullett MHR similarly claimed that it was 'a false and scandalously misrepresentative account of the Australian army'.13 These remarks, which seem to reflect the speakers' antipathy to the Peace Movement rather than their response to the novel, ignore the underlying anarchism of Lambert's attitudes. Just as these produced a contempt for war and its minions, so they were to lead him after the Hungarian revolution to break with the communist left that tried to defend its own brand of totalitarianism. He withdrew even from his strong support for the Australasian Book Society when he realized that its decisions were made on political grounds.14 IV Unlike Lambert, John Morrison remained a loyal member of the Communist Party, but at the same time he insisted that as a writer he wrote the truth as he saw it. He distinguished between making literature and engaging in the class struggle. In 1966, for example, he wrote to the editor of the Moscow journal Foreign Literature Magazine that he had never accepted socialist realism and had never ceased to say so. He explained, My conception of realism was always just that - realism, coloured only by faith in the intrinsic human decencies. Writing of Life as it IS, and of men and

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women acting as they DO act and react. Certainly I believe that the writer has a responsibility to society that he should be a lover of his fellow-men, and that he should be on the side of right in the struggle against the wrong. What I believe is, in short, that writers should concern themselves PRIMARILY with man in conflict with himself, and not PRIMARILY in conflict with society .. ,15

The responsibilities of the writer to the Party became an issue between Morrison and Frank Hardy when Overland was starting to come under attack from the Realist Writers. Morrison wrote to Hardy welcoming the new Tribune policy to cease its attempts to restrict working-class writers to particular issues, and expressed a wry satisfaction over recent admissions that Soviet writers had been subject to dictation from the Party. He admitted, with sorrow, that 'in spite of all efforts to believe otherwise', he was 'forced to the conclusion that it isn't the industrial working class who value my stories ... [sic] it is, well, others.' He concludes with the forlorn wish that the Party will cease its 'urgent discussions' and just 'leave the bloody writers alone'.16 Hardy's response was that Morrison 'owe[s] it to the Movement' to submit his stories to Party journals, and that he has more working-class readers than he realizes. Hardy argues that Morrison's worries about Party direction are unnecessary, claiming that he has 'been a writer for 13 years and a Communist for longer,' and in this time no one has urged him to write on any specific theme. Even in Russia, while he admits mistakes, he claims that the 'positive achievements' of their literature 'far outweigh the negative factors'. He does chide Morrison for looking to Moscow for a lead, and advises him instead to consider the achievements of Australian writers through the Realist Writers Groups, Overland and the Australasian Book Society. Morrison however refuses to believe that Hardy has never been directed, and asks what all the Realist Writers Group discussions have been about if not direction. He criticizes the Party which has advised writers to 'get out among the people', yet has praised work that earns the applause 'of the inner circles and the already converted', and has treated with contempt the opinions of critics outside the Party. This dismays him, for he believes 'only the Party stands between Mankind and disaster'; yet, while he acknowledges that Hardy gives himself more fully to the 'struggle that does, after all, transcend literature', he closes his letter with a declaration that his part in the struggle is to give it his best as a writer.17 Although Morrison distinguished his 'struggle' from his 'literary' stories, all his work was political, although not written at the behest of the Party. His gift was to render reality in such a way as to imply its opposite, the paths not travelled and the potential not realized, for good or ill. This


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enables him to move from the experience of his characters - often as seen by an observer or a participant who stands slightly aside from the central action - into the apprehended consciousness of the main actors and thence into the forces - public, collective and domestic - that form that consciousness. The politics comes from his ability to enter into the hopes and fears of his characters and to show how these are shaped by society and in turn shape the possibilities of their fellows, whether of gardens they destroy in the frenzy of mutual envy, daughters they deny, or workers whose human potential they constrict through economic exploitation. In 'All through the Night',18 Morrison demonstrates his capacity to place the apparently unremarkable characters and incidents in their full social context. The story apparently does no more than chronicle one gang's experience of a wartime nightshift unloading a ship's hold under pressure of time, a bullying petty official, and the difficulties of the cargo. The story places the gang's work in the context of the changing light from midnight to dawn, the wider concerns of the union and the government, divisions within the gang, their domestic hopes and dreams, and the presence of the unknown yet companionable Lascars who make up the ship's crew and are implicitly united in a feeling of solidarity that transcends national and linguistic boundaries. The background of the changing but constant river anchors in solid reality the slippery words with which the workers seek to define their conflicts and problems. This sense does not so much heal the division between literature and struggle that worries Morrison, as provide a basis for both. Morrison's early stories, apart from some he wrote for popular magazines, are overtly political in the sense that they are written of and for the working class. As he wrote to Ralph de Boissiere at the time, 'There is much of importance for the working class that must and should be said. Don't ever be afraid that they will turn us down.'19 The stories of the waterfront show the everyday reality surrounding the industrial campaigns of the wharfies for decent conditions for themselves and security for their families. They also show the importance of the union as a source both of collective strength and individual dignity. Nevertheless, the union secretary, Big Jim Healy, objected to one story that portrayed a wharfie as a drunk whose mates covered for him.20 To right-wing critics, the Waterside Workers' Federation constituted, with the Seamen's, Miners' and Railway unions, a treacherous alliance designed to destroy Australia's security and betray it to a foreign power. To James McAuley, founding editor of Quadrant, the 'whole purpose and value' of a Morrison story of the waterfront 'consisted in propaganda for the Waterside Workers' Federation'.21 But when Morrison departed from the industrial setting, he annoyed critics on the left like Frank Dalby Davison, who wrote that a story like 'North Wind' was all artistry and no

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substance.22 Yet this story, like much of his later work, is as political as any of the others. It deals with the prickly issue of family politics where there was no easy ideology to supply the interpretation - readers are forced to provide it for themselves.

Judah Waten, most politically intense and active of the realist writers, contributed only one story to Overland, apart from reviews and reportage. John Morrison, in an affectionate portrait of his friend, identified his two chief characteristics as 'an undeviating loyalty to his friends, and an almost fanatical devotion to literature'.23 Alongside Morrison and Hardy, his work is central to the socialist realist tradition, and he was the main target for the parliamentary attacks on this tradition. Like Hardy, his public personality overshadowed his work, and he was at once a generous supporter of other writers, a vitriolic controversialist, and a committed and dogmatic Communist. Nevertheless, Waten's career in the Party was erratic. The basis of his politics was his conviction that the Russian Revolution was the greatest achievement of the international working class and must be preserved at any cost. He remained a member of the Party after the pact between Hitler and Stalin, but resigned in 1941 because he believed that the circumstances called for a government of national unity to fight fascism and nazism, whereas the local Party supported the Labor government. He rejoined in 1956 or 1957, when people like Turner and Murray-Smith were leaving or being expelled, as an act of solidarity with the Soviet Union, which he believed was simply 'the greatest achievement of the international working class,' deserving the support of socialists everywhere.24 He ignored even its endemic and repeatedly virulent persecution of the Jews. When the CPA eventually abandoned its Stalinist past, Waten left it in protest, joining the hardliners in the new Socialist Party of Australia, committed to the eternal truths of Marx, Lenin and Stalin and to unflinching solidarity with the Soviet Union. Yet his best fiction is social rather than socialist realist, showing how people resist the circumstances that shape their lives, yet always moving from circumstance to the politics it produces rather than imposing ideology on character and situation in the mode of his weaker novels and the criticism of the Realist Writers Groups. At the time of the parliamentary attack on him in 1952, the only book Waten had published was Alien Son.25 This is a discontinuous narrative, a series of short stories which together tell the story of a Jewish family coming from Russia to find a new life in Australia, and finding instead that, as the mother tells her son, 'You will have to struggle here as hard as I had


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to back home. For all the fine talk it is like all other countries' (p. 187). This sentence sums up the book's overt politics, which otherwise intrudes only in memories of pogroms and revolution in Russia or glimpses of poverty and strikes in Australia. These glimpses give a depth to the individual stories that trace the growing alienation of the parents from the new land, from each other and from their son. It is therefore probable that it was not the politics so much of the book as of the author that drew on him the rage of Wentworth, Keon and their supporters. Yet, in a way that goes beyond the immediately political, the book is deeply offensive to those whose interests were served by the myth of Australia as a classless society that promised a fair go to everyone. It shows the racism that excluded both Jews and Aborigines from full participation even on the margins of society. It shows how the power of money prevents even the hardest working individuals from prospering from their own labour. It mocks at the patriotism that sent men to fight for King or Tsar. Above all, through the figure of the mother it suggests ideals of human service and 'the fight to deliver mankind from oppression' that contradict the ideology of individualism. These elements, merely hinted at in Alien Son, were to become major themes in his next novel, The Unbending™ which he wrote with the help of the Literary Fund grant that was the object of parliamentary opprobrium. Ironically, this work drew from some of his friends, including Vance Palmer, criticism similar to that levelled in parliament at his earlier work. Although couched in literary terms, their objections were to the novel's politics. Frank Davison for example wrote: I found 'The Unbending' somewhat lacking in depth of the human side, and lacking in breadth on the political side - the former defect deriving from the latter . . . when you turn to those whom you regard as political friends or enemies, persons whose actions may be supposed to have a direct bearing on ... the party line of the moment - the political pamphleteer in you tucks the artist... under his arm and runs down the street with him. .. ,27 This concern was expressed to Waten by his friends not only in letters but also in practical editing. Nettie Palmer wrote to Davison that, although Waten's novels might still be too political, his readers would never know what they had been spared as a result of Vance Palmer's 'long afternoon sessions out on the lawn, with Vance rooting out the politics and Judah submitting to one murder after another.' 28 Davison, recognizing that the writer must be free to follow his own bent, saw a danger in the plethora of well-meaning advice Waten's friends heaped on him. In a later letter, he advised Waten that he and Vance Palmer might be pushing him the wrong way as a writer, Palmer by his insistence on objectivity, he by constantly aiming for an aesthetically satisfying structure. Davison insisted that they were both

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right, but added that there are more than two ways of being right, as the novel is a very flexible form.29 Yet few critics at the time seemed able to accept explicit political involvement as having a place within this form. Arthur Phillips was one of many who objected to the politics as such. More specifically, A.R. Chisholm objected to his portrayal of the First AIF and its attitudes, claiming 'I shared all the contempt my mates felt for the I.W.W.' By contrast, another war veteran, Leonard Mann, praised Waten's portrayal of the AIF, and Davison pointed out that at least the troops had had the grace to vote against conscription.30 By seeing Waten's work in terms of its overt politics, these friendly critics were making the same mistake as his enemies. Certainly, The Unbending is a political novel in a way that Alien Son is not. Yet, unlike much of Waten's later work, where he presents the politics as a solution to the problems of the individuals he portrays, the politics of The Unbending is a part of the situation in which its main characters become involved. The novel, written at the height of the postwar wave of immigration, examines the hopes and disappointments of an earlier generation of refugees who had come 'with not the slightest doubt that they were heading for the Golden Kingdom' where 'each would get an ample share' (p. 11). In Shares in Murder,*1 the detective novel that followed The Unbending, Waten explicitly portrays the corruption that the power of money spreads through the community, undermining such human values as justice or conviviality. In his later novels, however, this perception of the power of money and his belief in the potential of the organized working class to overthrow it reduces his characters to ciphers acting out predetermined roles. Only in his short stories does he allow them to find themselves through their circumstances. VI Dorothy Hewett is a major writer who has been associated with Overland since 1958, when her 'Atomic Lullaby' was published in an issue of the journal dedicated to Katharine Susannah Prichard. Three years later, her story, 'Joe Anchor's Rock', and her poem, 'Go Down, Red Roses', both celebrations of all lovers and all battlers, appeared in Overland, 21, 1961. In 1967, the journal published her poem 'The Hidden Journey', in which she renounced her previous blind loyalty to the Communist Party and its adulation of Stalin, and in 1969 she caused further upset with her clear-eyed obituary 'Excess of Love: the irreconcilable in Katharine Susannah Prichard'. This offended Prichard's friends and supporters because it recognized her contradictions as well as her achievements. Hewett's socialist politics matched Overland's radicalism just as her deep roots in the country fitted its conception of the tradition of


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Australian nationalism. In fact, most of the poems she published in the journal in these years were either political refrains or lyrics of love. The exception, 'Bagman's Ballad', in Overland, 35, 1966, is actually a farewell as much as a salute to the tradition. Although he is 'the immortal swagman' who goes 'Singing down the centuries', he is also the ghost of a 'poor witless man' whose ballad 'like a Bathurst burr, / Sticks to his back', and whose passing leaves only 'the ashes of his glory' to be 'cold and desolate next week'. The ambiguity of this attitude to the legendary past is even stronger in her collection Windmill Country, published by Overland in 1968, the same year the journal published 'Alice in a German Garden', the first of the poems in which Hewett found her way to a new politics of the senses. The book's title comes from an image in its major sequence, 'Legend of the Green Country'. This poem, which recalls the speaker's heroic pioneering ancestors, finds their legacy in the present where 'The windmill head hangs, broken-necked, flapping like a great plain turkey'.32 Instead of being a meditation on the contrasts of character to which she is heir, the poem becomes a study in the personal and public policies of colonization. Yet it also clearly acknowledges that this land, destroyed by the settlers who have cleared it and allowed the salt table to rise, is 'my country', where the speaker goes back 'for nurture' To the dry soaks, to the creeks running salt through the timber, To the ghosts of the sandalwood cutters, and the blue breath of their fires, To the navvies in dark blue singlets laying rails in the scrub. (p. 50)

The poet's recognition of the labour that has made settlement possible is as characteristic as her constant shifting from images of death and sterility back to the human energy that matches both the harshness of the land and the strong forces of nature. As an embodiment of the tradition of radical nationalism, the poem adds to its celebration of the endurance of the first settlers an understanding of the cost in the destruction of land and people. While there can be no denying the passion of Hewett's politics, its nature remains elusive, refusing to submit to definition, let alone the rigours of socialist realist criticism. Rooted in an understanding of history as a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed, it is characterized by an identification with individual people rather than with some abstract conception of people in the mass. In her earliest work these individuals are heroic folk-figures like Clancy, while in the later they become mythic projections of the inner self like Alice and her spirit lover Nim.

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The ambiguous conflicts between love and politics, commitment and fulfilment, ruffle the surface of Hewett's first novel, Bobbin Up, published by the Australasian Book Society in 1959.33 This was written after her flight with her lover from Perth to Sydney and eight years in which she was 'Silenced by political activism, the deep-seated anti-culturalism and socialist realist dogmas of the Australian Communist Party, plus the terrible struggle to survive/34 Only towards the end of this time did she return to writing, at the instigation of Frank Hardy and the Sydney Realist Writers Group. Although she was still an ardent believer, Hewett's certainty had already been challenged by the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Khrushchev's revelations to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU of the Party's record of deceit and betrayal. Hardy began the process of her disillusion with doctrinaire Marxism of the Realist Writers, by rejecting a couple of her propagandist poems and telling her, 'For Christ's sake, Toddy, write a poem about the death of your mother or something.'35 Instead, she wrote Bobbin Up, a novel based on social rather than personal politics. Although the book's factory setting provided the standard conflict of boss and worker, this was overlaid by a feminine politics centred on the conflict between home and work, the security of the domestic and the solidarity of the factory. The great political offence of Bobbin Up was that it accurately portrayed the ill-educated, undisciplined and apolitical, but spirited and generous, working class of inner Sydney, rather than the sober, steady and respectable workers idealized by the Party. The Realist Writers who criticized the novel failed to recognize that its strength comes from the way the joyous energy of the characters generates hope in the midst of misery. For some, this hope lay in the Party, but Hewett showed how it equally might be placed in marriage, children, a Housing Authority flat or even the prospect of a house in a better suburb. Her emerging doubts about the Party enabled her to depict these politically incorrect aspirations, so allowing the life of the novel to develop according to its own truth. As in her poetry, this truth centres on dreams of liberty struggling to emerge from cultural and economic deprivation. In demonstrating the conflict between individual and social solutions to deprivation, Hewett identified the problem at the heart of revolutionary politics, or of any politics which seeks to change society: those who commit themselves to the struggle use it as a vehicle for individual power and condemn those who attempt to maintain individual integrity, whether of vision, like the author, or of simple hope, like her humbler characters. Her identification with these lives, and her rejection of a bureaucracy that sacrificed them to ideology, as surely as capitalism exploited them for profit, eventually led Hewett to break with the Communist Party. She returned to Perth in 1959, and in 1967 published in Overland 'The Hidden Journey', the poem that dramatically announced her disillusion.36


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'The Hidden Journey' was based on two trips to Russia, and contrasted official complacency with the record of betrayal and death, and with the courage and endurance of the people, particularly writers and the young. Yet it was also about the writer's journey through the doubts she had buried under her commitment to the Party. The poem is a strong rewriting of Australian socialist realist fiction of the postwar decades, in which writers like Frank Hardy or Judah Waten traced their characters' lives through poverty and hardship to the moment when they found truth in the Party's socialist vision.37 Hewett's poem instead opened at the culminating moment of vision, the arrival at the source. Yet the expected triumph of this moment was immediately questioned by the ambiguity of the images: In 1952, in the year of Stalin, I came to Russia, And sawflowersgrowing out of the blinkers on my eyes, Saw the statues in the squares with their heads blown off, The stumps of their thick stone necks stuffed up with These flowers were not growing in celebration of the new dawn of socialism, but out of the blinkers of socialism that the speaker brings with her. The statues with their heads blown off, in the context of her journey of 1952, were reminders of wartime devastation that had still not been repaired. In 1968, when the poem was published, they suggested the Stalinist idols that had been literally and metaphorically destroyed by the events of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The stumps of their thick stone necks stuffed up with roses' thus became an image of the natural beauty of the people redeeming the sterility of dogma. In the body of the poem this beauty became concrete in the Russian people's actions and words, which led to the conclusion that the soul of Russia had been kept alive through the testimony of the artists and writers who have died by rope and bullet, as well as through the memory of the unknown whose voices 'cry out under the red stars like untended graves' (p. 75). VII After Overland lost its formal links with the Realist Writers Groups it became the only major literary magazine without any organizational or institutional basis. That it survived at all is an indication of the energy and commitment of its editor and sole proprietor. The difficulties of survival are indicated by the fact that it took three years, from the beginning of 1957 to the end of 1959, to bring out the second eight issues, and almost twenty years, until 1972, to reach itsfifty.Yet despite the changes during this time and the effort expended in the mere

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struggle to survive, assisted only after 1963 by the Commonwealth Literary Fund, it retained its commitment to placing and examining the best Australian writing in the context of the broadest traditions of Australian life and culture. By 1956 the journal was extending the range of its contributors beyond its original basis among the Realist Writers. In his 'Swag' for Overland, 13, Stephen Murray-Smith explained that the journal was attempting to bring together the two streams in the Australian cultural tradition that he designated as ' "literary" literature and "unliterary" literature, or ... "low culture" and "high culture" writing.' (p. 18). He pointed to the publication in that issue of 'Bill Harney's War' and John Manifold's literary translations as examples of what he meant, and argued that bringing the two strands together strengthened both. Yet the issue behind his remarks was not so much one of two levels of literature as of its use value. He described 'Harney's War' as 'one of the most remarkable radio scripts ever broadcast in this country', which 'in unmistakable Australian accents and attitudes' showed 'what a fake the Establishment is' and provided 'the most powerful anti-war message that has crossed my consciousness in years.' These terms did not defend the work because it was popular, but showed how Harney had used a popular medium to produce a powerful cultural artefact. As Overland broadened the base of its support from its origins among the realist writers and political activists, the proportion of ostensibly higher literature it published increased. The journal continued to present this in the context of work that dealt with the broad concerns of Australians at work, at play and in the public life of politics, the sciences and the arts. These concerns were expressed not only in the verse and fiction or the book reviews, but also in essays like those in which Ian Turner rethought the nature of Australian nationalism, or David Martin identified changing currents in contemporary society. Above all, the reportage, of which 'Harney's War' is a classic example, became a distinctive Overland feature and the way by which the journal bridged the gap between the two strands of the national culture. The context was further extended by comments on drama, art and architecture and a continuing campaign and detailed proposals for a national arts policy. The publication, in the same issue as the Harney interview, of Marcus Oliphant's presidential address to the Congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, 'Science and the Future of Humanity', both showed the responsibility of science for the 'world-wide unrest and turbulence in the human family' and examined the possibility of science being restored as an integral part of the culture of learning. This address was not peripheral to the journal's literary concerns, but rather placed them as part of a general project of


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learning to live with ourselves in a world in which humankind was increasingly imperilled and disempowered. While Ian Turner was Overland's chief ideologist in these years, David Martin was its conscience. His essays, mostly contributed under the rubric 'Hinterland', characteristically moved from personal experience to general reflections to which he brought the perspectives and scepticism of a European intellectual who had experienced revolution, war and persecution at first hand. In his columns he placed topical events under a scrutiny that was iconoclastic, cosmopolitan but affectionate towards Australia, and often, he claimed, pessimistic, countering the easy humanism he found in much of the journal. He refused to accept the easy answers of the revisionists and anti-communists who believed that the abuses of Stalin had forever discredited both socialism and communism. Writing about the removal of Stalin's body from its tomb on Red Square, he was wryly amused that the decision to transplant the corpse was made with the same unanimity that had called for death sentences on his victims. Unlike the faithful on all sides, Martin recalled that there were always two Stalins: the one celebrated in Overland by John Manifold, a 'colossus who led whole empires out of the middle ages, ... through what toil, what suffering and what heroism', and the other one: the one of the ugly statues, lifeless and inhuman; devourer of revolutionaries and poets; falsifier of his own and others' theories; the tyrant, the murderer of Trotsky - and how many besides! - . . . the old man who feared above everything the tempestuous, creative fire of the masses. (Overland, 22, 1961, 43-4)

It is characteristic and appropriate that Martin's catalogue of crimes should start with the ugliness of his art and finish with his fear of the masses. This is not because art either makes or destroys revolutions, but because it is a product of the creative spirit that fires them, and without it they are dead, with no barrier to the descent into inhumanity for which Stalin has become a symbol. \fet Martin refused to see him as merely that. He insisted that in him 'two forces met in a unique and extraordinary way.' He was as a man 'full of the old fecund, dung-heap elemental village Russia', but he also 'represented in the highest degree the modern and the new.' Martin noted, presciently, that those who were then denying Stalin were using the system they inherited from him to repudiate his works while still keeping his legacy to themselves and cheating the Russian people as history repeated itself as farce. This insistence on going beyond the rational contradicts the certainty of dogma, but is in harmony with the secular humanism of the journal, which Martin also clearly enunciated in his essay 'Reality and Illusion' (Overland, 20, 1961, 47-8). In this he reflected on his experiences in Laos and the

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regret that any thinking and feeling person must have at the destruction of an age-old way of life. But he also recognized this as merely an example of a universal truth: 'the inevitability of change and the inevitability of resistance to it' and of the consequences of this resistance in violence and bloodshed, and even atomic war. His clear analysis led him to the inescapable conclusion that the only hope for humankind is to disarm the rich and powerful. If this is not to mean merely passing power to a new elite, he reasoned, 'we must not fantasise for ourselves some new, classless dialectic outside nature, but fight within it'. This policy gives no guarantees, but is the only source of hope. This is the clear and rational framework on which he builds the whole of his work - fiction, reportage and commentary always using reason to its limit and recognizing that the truth finally lies outside that limit. As the title of one of his most successful novels suggests, this isfinallyWhere a Man Belongs (Cassell, Melbourne, 1969). Martin's work represented the spirit of Overland after its break with the Realist Writers. As well as publishing narrative and lyrical poems, and knockabout humour in its populist tradition, it maintained its radical socialist tradition with essays by young Labor activists like Race Mathews and John Patterson. This kind of programmatic discussion remained however more characteristic of Outlook and the recently established Dissent. Overland kept rather to its tradition of fiction, poetry, reportage and polemic. It featured reportage on New Guinea and the north by Cecil Holmes, special features on film and television, black-and-white art by Noel Counihan and Bruce Petty, essays by Vane Lindesay on such classical Australian black-and-white artists as Norman Lindsay and Phil May, urban photography by Louis Horton, prose portraits of writers, unionists, missionaries, letters to Joseph Furphy and letters from Greece, Spain, Canada and Walt Whitman, debate on censorship and culture. It introduced the extraordinary fictions of Peter Mathers, who, in works like 'The Stupendous Adventures of Wondermath' (Overland, 39, 1968), extended the possibilities of reportage to the furthest boundaries of fantasy. Through these authors the journal produced a combative, unpredictable community of writing bringing its readers together in a community linked only by thought and imagination.

FOUR

Conspiringfor Freedom The Australian Association for Cultural Freedom

The conservative ascendancy in Australian politics that had begun with the defeat of the Chifley Labor government in 1949 reached the zenith of its sway in 1956. Apart from a slight hiccup in 1961, its authority would last until Robert Menzies, full of years and honours, retired in 1965, and his successor Harold Holt disappeared while swimming in 1967. By then, a new politics of national expectation was emerging. John Gorton recognized and responded to this change, but his commitment to the war in Vietnam and the intellectual immobility of his party prevented him from leading the country towards a fresh understanding of its place in the world. His encouragement of the arts did, however, help to create an audience for the writers and artists who were developing new understandings of people and place. The Whitlam government that took office in 1972 was able to build on their efforts. All this was far distant from the mental paralysis of 1956. The election at the end of 1955 had revealed the Labor Party as a shattered electoral force. The conflict within the Party over Santamaria's Movement had culminated in the split of 1955 and the formation of the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), later the Democratic Labor Party, whose preferences guaranteed Liberal-Country Party victories in successive elections. The leadership of both major parties was locked into the past. The founder and undisputed leader of the Liberal Party, Robert Gordon Menzies, inhabited a dream of the British Empire that turned to farce in his attempts to discipline Egypt's Colonel Nasser, and was eventually to attain the clothing of respectability only in the absurd attire of his retirement appointment to the English Lordship of the Cinque Ports. Herbert Vere Evatt, Leader of the Labor Party and the Opposition, had been pushed by successive defeats into a world of paranoia where every plan seemed thwarted by the conspiracy of evil men. The politics of his 77

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deputy, Arthur Calwell, was dominated by memories of the Depression and fears of an invasion of Asian migrants. Standish Michael Keon, who a few years earlier had been regarded by some conservative Labor members as a future prime minister, was out of parliament and dedicated to the Democratic Labor Party, after 1955 merely a rump faction controlled by devious and obsessive political operators.1 A buoyant economy and a growing population allowed the rest of Australia to get about its business of growing wool, building houses and raising children without bothering too much about the old men responsible for the nation's business. This domestic equilibrium, built on nostalgic loyalty to British institutions and servile reliance on American military protection, was already being eroded by changes in both the components of Australian society and the balances of international power. Yet in the absence of leadership from the major parties there was no movement within Australian politics or culture strong enough to challenge our complacency. The world, divided by the rigidities of the Cold War, failed to respond effectively to the events in Hungary, where the attempt of the local Communist leadership to introduce democracy was bloodily suppressed by Soviet troops. This intervention further undermined the moral and organizational strength of the Communist Party of Australia, already divided by its refusal to acknowledge Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes in his speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. Subsequent resignations and expulsions, including those of Ian Turner and Stephen Murray-Smith, weakened it organizationally, mentally and morally. I The absence of political leadership or ideological debate encouraged intellectual hatreds and delusive fantasy. The only available sources of resistance were provided by the struggling quarterlies, particularly Meanjin. Despite his personal and ideological bruising at the hands of the Petrov Royal Commission, its editor, Clem Christesen, remained staunchly nationalist and imaginatively responsive to international thought. The Sydney quarterly Southerlywas both conservative and narrowly literary, and Overland was still battling to maintain the cause of socialism and find a common front between communist and non-communist left. It was in this context that a newjournal, Quadrant, appeared in 1956. Although it came clothed in the garments of moderation, dedicated to the support of democracy and the national interest and to the publication of writing of quality, regardless of the politics of its authors, it served from its first number as the voice of the intransigently anti-communist right. To understand the path followed by the journal, we must examine the politics of its sponsors. The Australian Association for Cultural Freedom,

CONSPIRING FOR FREEDOM

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the national affiliate of the European-based Congress for Cultural Freedom, embodied one of the more delusive fantasies of the time, the belief that Australia was no more than five minutes from the midnight of totalitarian communist government. Ironically, the only people to share this delusion were those on the extreme left, although they anticipated the prospect with hope rather than fear. For both groups, this fight for or against revolution took precedence over all else and justified secretive and manipulative methods of operation. On the left, it led to constant changes of tactics and the approved political line. On the right, it led to intransigence, a refusal to have any truck with the enemy. The representative of the Congress, Richard Krygier, explained this stance to supporters in Brisbane in 1953, when he argued: It is a mistake to call communism extreme left, this has nothing to do with left ideas. Communism thrives on slavery... there is a very general thought among people who say 'if only we could improve social conditions in poorer countries, then the danger of communism would be reduced...' Well, the social reform in this statement is a very worthy idea... but I would submit.. .that it should not be connected to the problem of fighting communism. At the present moment in the world you have examples that Communism is strong, not where poverty is strong, but where there are intellectuals, and so called cultural classes. Empty minds bring Communism more often than empty stomachs.2 Krygier went on to complain that six or seven intellectuals, working secretly, had been 'able to so organise the control of the means of communication that they were able to effectively alter the foreign policy [of the USA] in China'. This view of the world became the justification for preferring organization to public debate, and indeed for acting to exclude from the public debate anyone perceived as an enemy. The belief in the effectiveness of conspiracy and the imminence of revolution was the driving force behind both the Association and Santamaria's Movement, with which the Association worked closely, although remaining publicly aloof.3 Their covert organizational struggle against the plotters of revolution matched the rhetoric of the Cold War at the cost of diverting energy and attention from the real struggle of these years between different conceptions of freedom. Extremists of both right and left, concurred in the belief that freedom depended on a prior acceptance of an authoritative doctrine, and of the principle that those who refused this truth were to be destroyed by any means available. Against these stood both liberal and social democrats who, while accepting that justice was a product of particular social and economic systems, about the nature of which they might differ, agreed that freedom was a prior condition of justice. The basis of their politics was public debate, not private or institutional organization. As a consequence, they found

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themselves relegated to the margins of public affairs until the controversies stirred by the Vietnam war opened up new forms of debate. The Australian Association for Cultural Freedom was established in 1954 by Richard Krygier, a Sydney importer who had since 1952 been employed as the Australian agent of the international Congress for Cultural Freedom, based in Geneva.4 The Congress itself was an American-financed body that had been established after the war in order to combat Soviet cultural diplomacy. The inspiration for the Congress had come in Berlin in the late 1940s when Michael Josselson and Melvin Lasky, watching 'trainloads of Soviet prisoners being carried from the West to death in the gulags', had determined to save western civilization by recovering socialism for democracy. Josselson, a CIA operative, found support from those of his superiors who shared his belief that the future belonged to socialism. Their concern was to ensure that it was a noncommunist left that triumphed, and they were prepared to finance the Congress to this end. The finance came from the 'International Organizations Division' of the CIA, and was channelled through private foundations and the American Federation of Labor.5 In an autobiographical letter to Francois Bondy, Krygier states that he was born in Warsaw at the end of the first world war, and had been active in leftist organizations in Poland before the second world war. After graduating with a Bachelor of Laws from Warsaw University in 1943, he had escaped through Russia and become a 'Polish war correspondent' in the Pacific, attached to General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters. He was later employed by the Polish consulate in Sydney, but lost this job when the Polish government in London lost its recognition. Before he turned 30 he had thus seen his homeland twice destroyed, once by the Nazis and a second time by the Communists. Just as he had struggled to defeat nazism, he was now ready to wage similar war against communism, which seemed to be threatening his new country as it had ravaged his old. He joined a 'research organisation doing anti-Communist Research specially on the Australian press which was white-anted to a very great extent'. This organization was headed by W.C. Wentworth, a Liberal Party member of the federal parliament and well known as a nationalist and red-baiter. Krygier claims he had equally important contacts within the Labor Party, mainly from its anti-communist wing, and including Keon, with whom he had a particularly close friendship.6 Once appointed Australian representative of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Krygier devoted himself to extending its influence among those who determined public opinion, and to destroying what he believed was a communist hegemony among Australian intellectuals. He was not himself an intellectual in the sense of a man devoted to ideas, but rather was the classical operator, a conspirator interested in amassing facts and


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unmasking competing conspiracies. He could live without books, but passionately devoured magazines in several languages. He quickly established three objectives for the Congress in Australia: establishing contacts within the political, professional and business establishments, building local committees and publishing a regular journal. Despite opposition, he eventually succeeded in all three. In August 1952 Krygier reported to Paris that he had compiled a mailing list of 500, and in October that he had commenced publication of a regular 'Bulletin', which he expected to obtain a complimentary circulation of three to five thousand. He planned to distribute the 'Bulletin' through the Country Press Association, the Australian Labor Party organizations in New South Wales and Victoria (both then under right-wing control), the Institute for Public Affairs, and the organization behind the patriotic 'Call to the Nation' that Paul McGuire and a number of public figures had launched in the face of 'determined opposition among a leftist group of Protestant Churchmen'. This 'Bulletin' was the first vehicle of his hopes of establishing a regular journal of opinion in Australia.7 The first political issue Krygier planned to tackle was the fight between 'Bevanite' Labor leaders and the moderates who, he claimed, were backed by Catholic Action. He initiated conversations with B.A. Santamaria, founder and chief executive of the Catholic Social Movement, later named simply the Movement, the Melbourne-based organization of lay Catholics established and supported by the bishops, particularly Archbishop Mannix in Melbourne and his diocesan allies, to provide an ideological and organizational opposition to communists in trade unions and the Labor Party. Krygier, indifferent in religion and anti-fascist in politics, reported that he and Santamaria had agreed to put aside their differences over Falangist Spain and to co-operate on the overriding imperative of anti-communism. To this end he co-operated closely with Santamaria's Movement and the ALP faction led by Keon. Keon and the Industrial Groupers, he reported in 1952, totally opposed their own leaders and supported the government on foreign and defence policy, although they believed that the Liberal government was 'not properly equipped to give the necessary leadership in proper anti-communist fight.'8 This lack of strong anti-communist leadership reflected, in Krygier's judgement, the lack of an articulated conservative position in the community at large. This deficiency, he believed, was due to the influence of pro-communist intellectuals in universities and the media. To combat this, he arranged for the supply of Congress 'Bulletins' to leaders of opinion, but he also commenced planning a more ambitious publication. As the time was not auspicious for raising local funds for this purpose, Krygier sought Congress support. His plans drew only a lukewarm

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response from his European supervisor, then Michael Josselson, who refused to sanction its publication and, reminding Krygier that the Congress was 'not a political organization', asked that at least 40 per cent of the content of the existing 'Bulletin' be devoted to cultural matters. 9 II By 1954 Krygier's work in building networks of influence had been successful. A meeting chaired by the former Chief Justice, Sir John Latham, had agreed to form an Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom, 'not to form a rigid organisation with strict rules but rather a private society.. .'10 This organization, which later became the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom (AACF), was nominally controlled by an executive that met annually in Sydney, but in fact was largely run by Krygier and his confidants. Among those invited to join the Committee were the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Eugene Goossens, D.A.S. Campbell, a Sydney businessman and editor of Australian Quarterly, J.J. Maloney, a Labor member of the New South Wales Legislative Council and a former Minister to Moscow, Mr Justice Barry of the Queensland Supreme Court, and Professors John Eccles, Macfarlane Burnet and Joseph Burke. Burke declined membership, and Burnet does not appear in subsequent records, but the others seem to have accepted the initial invitations.11 In an earlier letter Krygier had claimed that Laurie Short, B.A. Santamaria and W.C. Wentworth were members of 'his committee', but, although all maintained close contact, none seems to have been a formal member of the Association.12 Latham, as president, played an active role. When first approached by Krygier, he had contacted his old friend Richard Casey, then Minister for External Affairs and, according to Krygier, responsible for the government's ideological policies.13 Casey replied: My Dear Jack You asked me lately about the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had approached you about your becoming associated with them. I asked Colonel Spry [Director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation] about this, in order to ensure that it had no covert Communist associations. He now tells me that the organization is well known both to the British and to the American authorities and that it is definitely anti-Communist and is in very good repute, so that you need have no qualms about associating yourself with it. Yours. Dick.14 In a handwritten addendum, Casey noted that he was enclosing for Latham's perusal and return a letter and enclosures from Spry. So assured, Latham was able to give himself whole-heartedly to the work of


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the Association. However, although he had himself used the services of Security, he was careful to ensure that the Association kept its distance. Thus, when Krygier sent him a report from a Truth/Daily Mirror journalist about university affairs, allegedly based on a source in Security, Latham returned it with a strong warning: If its origin is correctly stated it should never have been given to any journalist. Such an action is a grave breach of a most binding obligation. If it is used as the basis for an article in Truth or elsewhere the consequences may be serious. I express the hope that you will not use the material in any way. I add that I dissent entirely from some particular statements in the report.15 This response must have been particularly disappointing to Krygier, who had already written most enthusiastically to Bondy in Paris about a 'sensational story of Communist infiltration of Melbourne university', which he explained was 'based on a Security Report which was "leaked" to a friend of mine and will break in the daily press .. .'16 Later in the same year, Latham again rebuked Krygier about a suggestion that the Association should use Security to check the credentials of prospective members. The discussion began with a letter from Krygier explaining that he had been thinking about 'the best method of making sure that people who offer their support and active help are not "infiltrators'". He reported further that he had discussed the matter with two other committee members, Roger Ford and Maloney, who shared his concern and suggested that 'an unofficial approach' ought to be made to Security and a 'contact established to be able to ask their help in vetting people'. Latham rejected the idea as offering no advantage to the Association 'except possibly some education', but Krygier was insistent that the enemy was at the gates. 'The infiltrators are used in order to compromise an organisation'. Their method, he argued, was to destroy an organization byfirstinfiltrating and then letting it be known that it was '"honeycombed" with Communists'. Latham, however, remained intransigent, admitting that, while a Security check might be justifiable in a particular case, in general the risk to individual rights was too great. 'I have been in an intelligence section during the war, and I know what it may mean if a person once becomes the subject of a file in a security agency'.17 Yet Krygier continued to send regular and damning reports to Congress officials in Paris on the activities and characters of his enemies in Australia. Presumably these were in turn passed on to the CIA and Australian Security authorities. Latham also worried about the source of the Association's funds. Despite the support received from the Congress in Europe, Krygier was continually worried about the shortage of funds for activities in Australia. In the letter accepting his appointment as Congress representative in Australia he regretted that he could not afford to do the work without

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payment, but left the actual amount to the discretion of the Paris executive. His initial grant from Congress was £200 a year. By 1963 this grant had risen to £4000 a year, including £1205 for salaries for Krygier and his secretary. In 1966, the salary paid by the Congress to Krygier was $A2412, plus a car allowance of $300.l8 When Latham asked where money of this kind came from, Krygier assured him that one-quarter of Congress funds came from self-supporting national committees and the remainder from private foundations, chiefly in the United States. 'I have been assured', he told Latham, 'that no funds and/or any other help is being given by any Government whatsoever.' He also reported to Latham that he had discussed with Menzies the possibility of Australian government support for Congress activities in Australia.19 In response to Latham's continuing worries, he wrote that he had been told that the Congress Charter prohibited it from accepting any government funds. This was less than honest. According to Donald Home, Krygier was aware from the first of the Congress's CIA connections, andjosselson, his chief contact, was in fact a CIA agent who later received a CIA medal from Allen Dulles, Director of the agency.20 Apart from his concern for the proprieties of the Association's activities, Latham worked hard to define and promote its purposes. So, when W.G.K. Duncan resigned because of his perception of the danger of becoming 'a "fellow-traveller" of a movement which identifies freedom with anti-Communism', Latham responded by drawing a distinction between 'freedom from' and 'freedom of, declaring that the Association was concerned with the latter: freedom of religion and freedom of thought.21 Earlier, he had written more extensively to a correspondent enquiring about membership. The Committee for Cultural Freedom is what its name describes. It is an anticommunist organisation only in the same sense that it is anti-Franco and antiPeron, but its direct object is to protect freedom of thought and expression in Australia.22 Latham's prestige was however not enough to convince all those whose support he sought. The war historian Gavin Long, for example, declined an invitation to join, arguing that its declaration of principles revealed it as an organization which places a high value on 'an intolerance aimed at a vaguely defined group' variously described as 'the professional intelligentsia' and 'progressive intellectuals' ,23 These were the very people whom the Association most sought to influence and who remained most distant. Its support came instead from the establishment businessmen and professionals that Latham himself so clearly represented. His style of operation, with its preference for the quiet word or the discreet letter rather than the public declaration, while in keeping with his profession,


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abetted Krygier's propensity to use the Association to manipulate debate and suppress contrary opinion.24 Despite the public importance of its honorary officers, Richard Krygier remained the power and driving force of the Association. Although there were active state committees, and Latham and his successor Lloyd Ross, as well as various executive members, were heavily involved in special purpose committees, Krygier continually complained about his lack of support, while members complained and resigned because of his autocratic control. Others resigned because he kept its focus too narrowly anti-communist, even though such a zealot as Sibnarayan Ray worried that the sponsoring authority was veering towards a neutralist line.25 Nevertheless, by 1960 Krygier was able to claim an impressive range of activities, including the publication of two periodicals, a major operation to organize dissident groups at the Melbourne Peace Congress, intervention in the Orr and Stuart cases, and the circulation of statements on passport control, anti-semitism, the Poznan riots, Hungary, censorship, obscene publications, apartheid, extradition, and defamation. 'There have been no splits, heated arguments or sudden resignations throughout the existence of the Association'.26 This happy situation would, however, last only until 1962, which was marked by the resignations of Henry Mayer, Hal Wootten, D.K. Spann and John Kerr, all precipitated by their concern about the arbitrary conduct of the Association.27 Krygier's comprehensive list of activities marks a certain selectivity in the Association's activities. It protested about such matters as censorship or miscarriage of justice, but its passion was reserved for occasions like the attempt to extradite Australian residents to communist Yugoslavia. At the same time it declined to take any action when the Australian government sought to deport an American teacher whose views it disliked.28 The overriding purposes of the organization, at least in Krygier's view, were to oppose communism in all its forms, and to expose the duplicity that led men of goodwill to become fellow-travellers, to be lukewarm in their non-communism, or to embrace the dreaded doctrine of 'moral equivalence' which produced an equation between American and Russian imperialism. These dupes included pacifists and neutralists, 'anti-anticommunists' and anyone who refused to accept that communism was the central issue.29 Neutrals he associated with Owen Lattimore, the American scholar of China whose career was wrecked when James Jesus Angle ton and other agents of the American right laid on him the blame for Mao's victory in China.30 Anti-anticommunists he regarded as dupes or agents of the Kremlin. These people, he believed, dominated political debate in Australia through the support they had gained among the intelligentsia, including writers, protestant clergymen,

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and the staff of daily papers and the ABC. As a further consequence, they had disproportionate strength in unions representing teachers, journalists, clerks and actors. In order to counter this influence being exerted from below, Krygier went to managers, those who exerted direct power, to alert them to the subversion of their authority and persuade them to act in the first place to suppress criticism of the Congress and its friends, and in the second to ensure that positions of influence were opened only to the ideologically sound. He also arranged overseas trips and contacts for friends of the Congress, like Frank Knopfelmacher, and warned overseas affiliates about its enemies, like Clem Christesen, whom he described to his Indian associates as 'either a secret Communist Party member, or a non secret fellow-traveller.' He added, incorrectly, that Christesen had resigned from his position as editor of Meanjin, 'a major literary quarterly', and was 'not a major literary figure in Australia'. His concern with ideological purity was demonstrated by another letter of introduction he wrote to the Indian Association for an Edwin Morrisby, to which he added the note that although he has been generally friendly to our Committee, he belongs to that group of intellectuals for whom occasional lapses into neutralism or leftism cannot be resisted. Therefore ... I would not like you to treat him as either a member or a trusted friend of our Committee.31 Krygier was incensed when the Sydney Sun, a paper whose staff he described as 'riddled with all sorts of Communists and pro-Communists', published an article by Professor Julius Stone, 'a leading fellow-traveller of late and now an "anti-anti-Communist"'. Instead of responding to Stone publicly, he had several private conversations with the paper's editor to ensure more favourable coverage of the Congress and the Association in the future. Similarly, when the Sydney Morning Herald defended Professor Macmahon Ball against attacks by Casey on his criticism of American policy in Korea, Krygier wrote privately to the editor. His report to the Congress describes Macmahon Ball as 'One of the greatest trouble-makers in forming public opinion . . . perhaps Australia's closest opposite number to Lattimore except that no-one suspects any underhand dealings. He is almost certainly naive.'32 Characteristically, Krygier acknowledges neither Macmahon Ball's record of achievement nor his qualifications to comment on Asian affairs. In The Liberal Conspiracy, Peter Coleman suggests that the eventual failure of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was due to the reluctance of its founding operatives to sever its connections with the left. Although they were successful in revealing the truth of Soviet totalitarianism,


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eventually they left the Congress locked into the 'dead end and contradictions of the non-Communist left', unable to follow the 'logic of its conquest'.33 Congress intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler, Daniel Bell, Raymond Aron, Irving Kristol and Edward Shils, whose views dominated the American Association, adopted the position that both communism and socialism were incompatible with liberty. This split allowed the initiative to pass to the neo-conservatives. It is difficult to see where else its logic could have led it. While a noncommunist left was always possible, the anti-communist left was selfcontradictory, producing the same kind of exclusivism which was to stultify and eventually destroy the ostensibly communist states of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Although Coleman's perception of the romanticism of the left intellectuals associated with the Congress is accurate, his disavowal of their position leaves only the path to reactionary neoconservatism and anti-communist paranoia that was taken by its American affiliates. The Australian Association for Cultural Freedom was honest in never seriously seeking any support from the left. Krygier's intellectual energies were concentrated on preserving the freedom he knew rather than on attempting to envisage or create a world where freedom might be enlarged. His intransigent opposition to communism in all its guises created a gulf between him and those who tried to work with Communists in the pursuit of common objectives in Australia or abroad. His concern with communism and its relationship to the left, and in the power of communist conspiracies, meant that from its beginning the Australian Association was concerned with providing a voice for conservative intellectuals rather than with nurturing a non-communist left. This is not to say that members of the left were at no time engaged in Congress activities in Australia. However, its virulent anti-communism meant that the only leftist intellectuals who remained active in its organization were those who had separated themselves from dialogue with the broad spectrum of radicals.34 These included the Australian Association's longtime President Lloyd Ross, a social democratic intellectual and secretary of the New South Wales branch of the Railways Union. In 1963 the Congress acknowledged his importance by arranging for him a world tour to contact other Congress affiliates, and paying $1065 to his costs.35 John Ducker, later secretary of the New South Wales Trades Hall Council, who sought the support of Congress in providing him with contacts for an overseas trip, was associated with the anti-communist Labor right as an operative rather than an intellectual. For a time, such Labor lawyers as Hal Wootten and John (later Sir John) Kerr were members.36 These, however, were untypical. From the time Krygier established the Australian Committee it was dominated by an establishment of those who

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feared change and the loss of privilege. As Susan McKernan (now Lever) has noted, the role of the members of the Congress was to lend it the prestige they had gained through their other roles in the community, not to earn prestige by making it the vehicle for their independent social action.37 Ill The basic commitment of the Association to anti-communism generated a problem about the meaning of cultural freedom. For Krygier, the issue was always freedom from totalitarian oppression, but this gave no guide as to how the Association should act when democratic governments interfered with freedom of expression. It was relatively simple to oppose oppression in the communist world, but the same oppositional methods made little impact in democratic countries which faced quite different threats to freedom and its expression. This confusion arose when the New South Wales government insisted on such alterations tojoern Utzon's designs for the Sydney Opera House that he was forced out of his position as its architect. A member of the executive, the philosopher David Armstrong, drafted a letter of protest which noted, among other matters, that the 'Sydney Opera House is such an exceptional work of art that to take it out of the hands of the man who conceived it threatens to destroy the artistic integrity of the whole endeavour.' When this statement was circulated to other members of the executive, it drew the response from David Stove that 'I am against the statement (to put it mildly). Even if I were for its contents, however, I would be against the Association pronouncing on this affair. If it is an issue of freedom, what isn't, I wonder.'38 This restrictive notion of freedom was complemented by an equally restrictive understanding of the legitimacy of political dissent. On the three occasions the Association had an opportunity to act on behalf of a freedom jeopardized by forces other than communism, its internal divisions rendered it powerless. The first of these occasions was when an Anglican priest, Neil Glover, approached the Association to support his right to travel to the Stockholm World Peace Congress. Latham was disturbed by the suggestion that a citizen's political beliefs could inhibit his right to travel, arguing that except in war or similar circumstance, there should be 'no censorship on travel'. Yet his concession destroyed his principle, at least for those who believed that Australia was at war and that the peace movement represented the enemy. Krygier quoted Maloney's view that the 'World Peace Council exists solely to undermine peace and bring the free world to slavedom . . . Ergo - there is no reason to interfere with the Government's decision on ground of the security of the state'. Although


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Latham did not accept the argument, he was prepared to go along with the majority of the executive in declining to take any action/9 The second occasion was when the vice-president of the committee, Sir Eugene Goossens, was prosecuted for bringing supposedly pornographic material into Australia. Rather than defending his right to live his life artistically and privately according to his own imperatives, the committee asked for his resignation to save embarrassment for the organization. Although this suggestion came from Latham, McKernan suggests that its motive was to prevent alienating the committee's strong Catholic support.40 It also reflects the Association's narrow understanding of cultural freedom, its conception of freedom as purely negative. For Latham, cultural freedom meant freedom of religion and freedom of thought, and he consistently opposed action by governments or other organizations that would inhibit either of these.41 For Krygier, freedom meant freedom from tyranny, and particularly communist tyranny. His sense of the overwhelming threat of international communism left him little energy to give to liberal worries about the restrictions placed on a few individuals in democratic societies, and in fact his correspondence shows repeated attempts to inhibit the activity of people of whose politics he disapproved.42 The third failure of the Association to defend intellectual freedom remains controversial. This case arose over the dismissal by the University of Tasmania of Sydney Sparkes Orr from his position as Professor of Philosophy on the grounds of his alleged misconduct with one of his students, Rosalind Kemp. Critics of the dismissal argued that the love affair was a mere pretext, and that the true reason the university wanted to get rid of Orr was that he had been a persistent critic of the university administration. This theory is discredited by letters to Latham from Sir John Morris, ChiefJustice of Tasmania and Chancellor of the University, which show that the university was most reluctant to take any action against Orr until it received a complaint about his conduct from Kemp's father. The dismissal, which led to a split among Orr's colleagues, aroused the attention of one of the Congress for Cultural Freedom's international affiliates, the International Science and Freedom Committee, led by Michael Polanyi. Two lawyers on the committee of the Australian Association, John Kerr and Hal Wootten, investigated the case and concluded that the university had acted properly. In the various investigations of this complaint, no one seemed to question whether an act of seduction was in itself grounds for dismissal. In their report to the Association Kerr and Wootten did, however, canvass the other critical issue of whether the relationship between a university council and the academics was one of master and servant or whether all should be considered members of a single organization. They argued

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that, while Orr had been given a fair hearing, a collegial view of the relationship of staff to the university would require different procedures. The Association did not take up this issue, although McAuley believed it was crucial.43 The committee and its members accepted the proposition that, once the sexual association of Orr and his student was established, he should be dismissed. Latham wrote that 'At no time was the question of academic freedom raised' and that 'the controversy was not in any sense a controversy about freedom.' He based his conclusions on a traditional morality of decency, probity and responsibility, writing that 'It can hardly be contended that seduction of a girl student by a Professor is not good grounds for dismissal' and that 'Orr is not a very worthy person ... His application for the post he held contained ... misstatements of fact - they were simply lies.' Krygier reported to Josselson that 'Orr was not a victim of anybody, but was a pathological liar'.44 IV The Association's difficulties with the Orr case were indicative of its particular concerns with universities. The universities provided the obvious sources for the left-wing influence that Krygier had identified in his early report to Josselson.45 Krygier was eager both to recruit members from among academic staff and to counter the views of the academics he found unreliable. The University of Melbourne presented a particular problem. A strong Labour Club, with Communist support, was a powerful force in student politics and debate. Although there were both Liberal and ALP clubs on campus, there was no countervailing force corresponding to the Andersonian sceptics in Sydney. The main intellectual opposition to Marxist ideas came from Catholics, but they themselves were divided between traditional Labor, Santamaria's Movement, and the Prospect group that had emerged from the Newman Society. For Krygier, the crucial matters requiring Association attention were the defection of members from the Communist Party following the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary, the Melbourne Peace Conference of 1960, and the drift towards neutralism and peaceful co-existence. With the assistance of Santamaria, he was able to develop within the University of Melbourne a group under the leadership of Frank Knopfelmacher, Newman Rosenthal and, later, Sibnarayan Ray, to provide the organizational centre for activities at Melbourne and, eventually, other Victorian campuses. This group organized meetings to hear the Hungarian writer Tibor Meray, worked with ex-Communists Ken Gott and David Bearlin, and ALP members Leon Glezer and James Jupp, to support others who had left the Party and to organize dissenting meetings and publications at the Peace Congress, and arranged summer schools to combat neutralist thoughts.46


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Even after it established Quadrant as its official publication, the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom obtained money from the Congress to support other anti-totalitarian publications. These included a book on Vietnam, published by Nelson but covertly financed by the Association, which retained the copyright.47 More significantly, from 1963 the Congress funded Dissent, a democratic socialist quarterly published from Melbourne byJim Jupp, Leon Glezer and Peter Samuel, all of whom had as students at the University of Melbourne come under the influence of Frank Knopfelmacher, who himself was paid some expenses, including telephone bills and assistance for his travel to Vietnam.48 It also paid for the publication of a Dissent pamphlet on the peace movement, by Harold Crouch, and one by Ken Gott on the Australian League of Rights.49 In 1965, Krygier found the occasion that substantiated his long-held belief that Australian universities, along with the other institutions that formed opinion, were dominated by leftist thinking that would tolerate no opposition. His friend Frank Knopfelmacher applied for an appointment to the University of Sydney's Philosophy Department. This was, to Krygier's knowledge, the third time that Knopfelmacher had been refused a university appointment. A cryptic letter from McAuley had reported his failure to obtain 'Frank' a position, presumably at the University of Tasmania.50 Then, in 1962, he had applied for a position as Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the then new Monash University, and was, according to two members of the committee, Professor Percy Partridge and Dr David Armstrong, the outstanding applicant. Krygier claimed, however, that Partridge 'stopped the appointment' on the grounds that Knopfelmacher 'had an opinion [sic] of being difficult to get along with and since eventually they will have to establish a Chair, why not establish a Chair right away.'51 Knopfelmacher was a difficult case. An outstanding teacher and a recognized scholar in both psychology and philosophy, he was also an unyielding polemicist who attracted both loyal support and implacable enmity. His application for the position at Sydney was made at the suggestion of David Armstrong, an executive member of the Association, who later wrote that Knopfelmacher was defeated because the left was able to exploit his weaknesses. In the course of his political controversies he quite often used intemperate, not to say ungentlemanly, language in writing about his opponents. In this he was a man fatally ahead of his time by a few years. A short time afterwards academic rebels were saying pretty much anything they liked, how they liked, about their opponents.52 Feelings on all sides ran high. Krygier cited Professor Frederick May as describing Knopfelmacher as 'paranoic, an illiterate', and attacking him

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in 'a pornographic play in a pornographic magazine, Squire', so providing evidence of malice which could be used against him in a court case being contemplated. Tom Hughes, later to become federal Attorney-General, advised that May's words were clearly actionable, but warned that, in the event of a loss, costs against the plaintiff could be as high as £2500. Santamaria and Wentworth organized a support fund for which they raised £1500.33 Knopfelmacher's application was supported on the original committee by Armstrong and Henry Mayer, then Associate Professor of Politics and a member of the Association executive. Despite this support, the appointments committee was divided, and its decision in favour of Knopfelmacher therefore had to go to the Professorial Board for ratification. Before the board met, leftist members of the academic staff gathered evidence to have the appointment rejected on the grounds of the vitriolic and unprofessional nature of Knopfelmacher's published polemic. One of the articles cited, from the Catholic journal of opinion, Twentieth Century, included charges of professional misconduct and sexual debauchery against unidentified members of the staff of the University of Melbourne. In a later response to Father Golden SJ he claimed that his students were in danger of being blacklisted. In another article, in the Sydney Bulletin, on the subject of state aid to church schools, he accused psychologists of suppressing and falsifying research that could discredit the concept of the authoritarian personality. He refused a challenge from the British Psychological Association to support these charges. Ray Evans, who had received support from the Congress for his campaigns against alleged Communists in the La Trobe Valley, defended Knopfelmacher's charges against the University of Melbourne as a response to 'an outbreak of sectarianism which I remember as extraordinary in its intensity'.54 Armstrong argued that the nature of Knopfelmacher's polemic, however deplorable, was not a reason for denying him the appointment. Melbourne left-wing academics, including Stephen Murray-Smith and Ian Turner, supported him in the name of academic freedom. Krygier, however, saw the case as further evidence of the control exercised by the left over intellectual opinion. This episode led to the severance of the connections between Dissent and the Congress. By 1965, the journal's founders, Glezer and Samuel, had moved apart politically, and Krygier became suspicious of Glezer's reliability. The precipitating episode seems to have been Glezer's refusal to take a sufficiently active role in supporting Knopfelmacher. Glezer, a man reserved by nature and restrained in argument, did not respond with the vehemence expected by Krygier. When Glezer asked for a renewal of the subsidy, Krygier told him that, although the grant came without strings or any intent to influence editorial policy, he 'considered


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somebody's attitude to the K [Knopfelmacher] case as absolutely crucial and ... did not think Dissent had behaved properly.' Glezer assured him that the published editorial was one of support for Knopfelmacher, but insisted that he would not publish an article on the subject by Samuel because it had 'appeared already in a similar form in Quadrant'. Glezer's relationships with both Samuel and Krygier continued to deteriorate, until he took the journal away from them entirely.55 The Knopfelmacher and Dissent issues both illustrate a central problem about freedom. For Krygier and Knopfelmacher, freedom meant the freedom to organize and agitate against the evils of totalitarian movements seeking to subvert democracy in favour of regimes that use the utmost brutality in order to suppress all independence of thought or action. It follows that those who oppose their methods, or find anything good in communism, are either knaves or fools, and must be fought by every means available. Those who are attacked in this way feel, with justice, that such attacks diminish their own freedom, and thus feel justified in opposing the professional advancement of people they consider intellectual vandals. At all stages in the affair, Knopfelmacher's opponents insisted that his methods, not his views, disqualified him from appointment. Libertarians such as Turner and Murray-Smith, by contrast, held that even obnoxious methods were a part of argument, as necessary a cost to bear for the sake of freedom as obnoxious opinions. In another contrast, Glezer's attitude was that freedom is best served by temperance in argument on all sides. At the height of the Cold War, his was the most necessary and least fashionable of all positions.

This position was far from the one that had been adopted in the Association's own journal, Quadrant. The establishment of this journal, which had been Krygier's ambition from the beginning of his involvement, was certainly the Association's greatest achievement, but it was long opposed by Congress headquarters, which would have to provide the subsidy to make the publication of the magazine feasible. At first Krygier had had to be satisfied with the monthly 'Bulletin', later named Free Spirit. This consisted largely of reprints from overseas sources, but came to include more commentary on Australian matters, to the extent that Josselson became concerned that it was becoming predominantly political rather than cultural. By 1955 Krygier was ready to move beyond this stop-gap measure to a fully professional journal of literature, politics and culture. In circulars explaining the desirability of the journal, he had emphasized the need to combat Meanjin, which had become 'effectively a fellow-travelling

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publication' and the monthly Voice, which 'had followed a confused and naive line merely prolonging the illusions of left-liberal and neutralist groups and is helpful to the Communists'. He argued that 'the task of any organisation which is dedicated to freeing men's minds from the spell of Communist influence must include very close attention to the matter of prestige and fashion.' Attached to the circular were statements from Roger Covell, John Thompson, Kenneth Slessor and James McAuley, who had all been approached to consider the editorship and to suggest ideas about the journal's direction.56 From these, the editorial board appointed McAuley. Soon after, Krygier reported to Latham that McAuley had had talks with Menzies, who had been 'very favourably disposed to the idea' and had promised 'all the help he can', including specifically a Commonwealth Literary subsidy once the first issue was published, requests to embassies to subscribe, and personal assistance with raising money from 'rich people'. He also promised to arrange permission from the public service for McAuley to edit the journal, and expressed his disapproval of Meanjin. Menzies alarmed McAuley by implying that he would redirect Meanjiris subsidy to Quadrant, a course that McAuley considered would only arouse prejudice against the new journal.57 In January 1956 Krygier finally received a cable from Congress headquarters in Geneva informing him that the quarterly magazine project had been approved.58 During the next twelve months the Association would pay £2149 to establish Quadrant, compared with £1375 for the publication of Free Spirit. This came from a total budget for the Association of £7108, of which £5660 came from Congress. This undoubtedly made the new journal the wealthiest in Australia, but nevertheless, like its rivals, it had continual difficulty in meeting its costs. Of its expenditure, £740 went on editorial salary and fees, £142 to contributors, and £702 on printing costs for the first issue. By 1968, income for one issue had risen to $4376. Of this, $104 came from the Commonwealth Literary Fund, an amazing $500 from the state government, $824 from advertising and $1362 from the Congress. Expenditure included $600 to the editors, $575 to contributors, and $2659 to the printers.59 It is clear that, without its direct subsidies from the Congress and its effective subsidies through advertising it could not have survived. By way of contrast, in 1955 Meanjin received, in addition to its Commonwealth subsidy of about £400 a year, a mere £700 through the university, and small amounts of publishers' advertising.60

FIVE

The Mission o/Quadrant James McAuley and Voices from the Right

The men who established Quadrant saw a very different world from the one that appeared to the founders of Overland, The secular left believed, in the words of Eric Aarons, that they 'could create a society where the suffering that propelled people towards religion would be eliminated.'1 The need for a religious faith was to them evidence of a shameful emptiness of being. For James McAuley, founding editor of Quadrant, this emptiness was the central fact of life. Left unfilled, it became home for the demons that threatened to bring disaster on both the individual and society. I The fear of social and personal disintegration haunts McAuley's early poems, ambiguously in the Blue Horses that 'stamp among the spiritual mills' and 'weave a universe from our decay', more terribly in the 'monstrous form of God's antagonist' that sprang from Aldebaran as the incarnation of Sirius.2 This fear drove him from anarchism through Buddhism to the Catholicism that offered the certainty and structure he needed. Catholicism alone could control the fear which, he told the poet Vincent Buckley, had for years led him every night to thank God that he had got through another day without committing an act of violence on those closest to him.3 In his poetry, the firm prosody controls the centrifugal impulses to violence and disintegration. In his public life, his inner fears were projected onto the threat of world communism. His energies were directed against secular liberals whose attraction to modernism jeopardized the moral order, whose inclination to socialism shifted responsibility from the individual to the state, and whose flirtation with communism threatened the power of the state to guarantee 95

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the liberty of its citizens against foreign aggression and domestic subversion. When, in 1956, he became editor of Quadrant, its pages became the weapons in his literary, moral and political battles. Progressive radicals in Australia were at this time at the nadir of their postwar fortunes. Yet, while the hope of revolution was receding on the left, its phantom remained vivid in the nightmares of the right, whose members still believed that revolution was imminent unless democrats rallied to resist it. But even within the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its national affiliates there was considerable division of opinion on other issues. As Douglas McCallum wrote, The Association for Cultural Freedom is one organization that has brought together Laborites and Liberals, Protestants and Catholics, scarcely agreeing on anything of a specific character in economics, education, religion or politics, but concerned with publicizing issues connected with cultural freedom.4 Peter Coleman has explained that it was this variety of opinion that made the Association so rewarding to its members. 5 But while the Australian Association's members may have been divided, Krygier set its public tone and was vigilant to ensure that its publications reflected it. McAuley shared his attitude to communism and his belief that these were freedom's last days, but his motivation was quite other than that of Krygier, let alone the more liberal Congress officials in Europe. These differences surfaced in 1955 at a meeting of Congress's governing body that Krygier attended. He reported to the Australian executive that Stephen Spender, editor of Congress's British magazine, Encounter, had attacked the Australian and Indian committees because they 'talked too much politics and didn't work hard enough in the cultural field'. The American philosopher Sidney Hook came to their defence, and the American committee in its turn attacked Encounter tor not being sufficiently combative, describing it as 'a very good literary magazine, but nothing else'.6 Although McAuley shared this American distrust of liberalism, his opposition to communism was far more deeply seated. For him, it represented the ultimate form of secular, instrumental reason that had disrupted the proper direction of European history since the Reformation. His commitment to fight against it was the total commitment of Malraux or Sartre against the contingency of history. Unlike them, however, he had no sense of artists or intellectuals discovering the truth by constructing themselves through their own choices and actions. Rather, he believed the duty of the artist was the discovery of self in the greater truth that lay behind the history of European Christendom, and making this truth again operative in the affairs of the contemporary

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world. Communism was evil not merely because it was a conspiracy against the freedom of the individual, but because even when it lacked political power it worked with others to destroy the grounds on which any social order could stand. In waging war against it, therefore, he was not merely engaging in debate to expose the falsity of its premises and so win its adherents to his side, but was wrestling with the embodiment of evil. This belief explains the distinctive tone of McAuley's Quadrant, so different from the genteel liberalism of the Congress's British journal, Encounter. For McAuley had already identified the enemy as secular modernism, a term that brought under the one label 'liberalism, positivism, naturalism, agnosticism, materialism, pantheism, panvitalism, secularism, nationalism, socialism, progressivism.'7 Under his editorship Quadrantwas committed to fighting the whole unlovely horde. Yet there was a conflict between this commitment and McAuley's desire to make Quadrant a 'medium of purpose and influence' among Australian intellectuals.8 His selection of work in the first issue was eclectic, demonstrating his ambition to provide a forum for civilized discourse among reasonable people. It included A.D. Hope's essay on the discursive mode in poetry, George Molnar's discussion of good manners in street architecture, Alan Villiers' account of James Cook's seamanship, and Alan Barcan's reflections on the conservatism of the current generation of students. An article by Francois Bondy examined manifestations of new nationalism and Europeanism in France, without identifying the author as an official of the journal's sponsors, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The poetry ranged widely in theme, from Hope's 'The King', with its analogy between the tapeworm ad 'technocratic man' through Vincent Buckley's 'Spring is the Running Season' and Evan Jones' 'Epithalamium' to Judith Wright's 'For My Daughter'. While varying in theme, the poems were alike in their capture of human passions within the decent formalities of rhyme and metre. Like the essays, their tone is detached but not neutral, committed to a central standard of civility. The detachment however was a pose, contradicted both by its official sponsorship and by its editorial aims. These were made clear in the 'Comment: by Way of a Prologue' with which the editor, James McAuley, opened his first issue. This started with the declaration, implicit in the journal's contents, that Quadrant would 'try to be liberal and progressive'. It distinguished this aim from 'the rituals of sentimental and neurotic leftism' with its delusion that 'the totalitarian Beast from the Abyss is really a big woolly bear which the little men who have had a busy day in this country can safely cuddle as they sink into the dreamland of Peaceful Co-existence'.9 This position led McAuley, by way of a description of the exciting possibilities of a world linked and expanded by

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science but facing a 'thoroughgoing crisis in social relationships', to an apocalyptic vision of the advance to world domination of Communism: Suddenly this one huge glaring visage, this enormous mask made of blood and lies, starts up above the horizon and dominates the landscape, a figure of judgement speaking to each person in a different tone or tongue, but with the same question: And what do you think about me} Then indeed we hear the ghosts of rhetorical humanisms, academic positivisms, and progressive illuminisms (whose frightening heir and fulfilment Communism is) squeak and gibber in the streets, imploring us to maintain the most rigorous neutrality as between the 'warring fanaticisms' of right and wrong, truth and falsity, liberty and slavery, honour and dishonour, resistance and submission. But events whirl these ghosts resistlessly around and away, the dead leaves in a gale.10 In a later essay McAuley identified Satan's promise to humankind as the common first principle of both secular humanism and communism, describing it as: the serpent's ideology: 'you shall be as gods'. Man shall decide, shall rule, shall reveal, shall determine the categories of good and evil - not God, whether He be dead or alive. Not Christus Pantocrator, who shall divinize men by incorporation with Himself: but Humanitas Pantocrator, who shall divinize all the human units in the perfected collectivity on earth.11

McAuley derives the image of these dupes of humanism swept around like leaves in the gale from Milton, who uses it for the fallen angels who lie Thick as Autumnal leaves that Strow the Brooks / In Vallombrosa'. From Milton the image takes us back to Dante and before him to Virgil, both poets who celebrate the divine order that authorizes the secular.12 Similarly, McAuley identifies God as the Pantocrator, the ruler of all who appears as the static figure at the centre of the saints in a Byzantine dome, rather than as the Creator, which would suggest the more active source of energy portrayed in the Renaissance humanist tradition of such artists as Michelangelo. McAuley's divine order is eternally present, in eternal opposition to the humanist idea of progress. This juxtaposition gives a clue to the nature of McAuley's objections to both humanism and liberalism. Although he rejected Milton's theology, he respected him as one of the major poets who 'wrestle faithfully with the dark riddle of man's existence; they show us, in the magic mirror of art, man foolish and failing and seemingly overwhelmed by appalling forces, yet somehow preserving hope and love'.13 Yet Milton was also a revolutionary, committed to the four propositions that threaten the only possible basis of human order. These propositions, and their political corollaries, McAuley identified as the beliefs that:

THE MISSION OF QUADRANT A perfect society is possible. The present system is the sole barrier to attaining the perfect society and is therefore essentially evil and must be destroyed, not reformed. The enlightened elite (who define themselves by believing propositions 1 and 2) have a right or mandate to override the majority and impose their will. After the revolution power must be confined to the loyal true believers, while all backward elements are converted or rendered historically inoperative.

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The Kingdom of God is at hand as a political event. The monarchy and established church are the Antichrist which must be destroyed.

The Saints (i.e. Puritan zealots) have a mandate from heaven to overthrow the Government and bring in the new order by force. The new order will be 'the rule of the Saints' in which 'dominion is founded in grace' i.e. power is confined to the Politburo and its cadres.14

In this essay, 'A Visit to Bunhill', McAuley separated Milton's poetry from his beliefs, arguing that the power of the poetry provides a satisfactory resolution to the conflict of good and evil within the poem. This interpretation, by valuing form over content, effectively denies the power of the individual will that motivates and animates the whole epic. Milton's will imposes grammatical and prosodic form on his content, subduing the Satanic will to rebel as much by the force of the author within the epic as by the power of a God outside it. This appropriation of the justifying role of God is Milton's ultimate act of rebellion. By taking on himself the role of justifying God's ways to man, he sets himself against God, but by keeping God in the poem he destroys it poetically. The failure to contain his own ambition is an analogy of the history of rebellion which, as McAuley notes, begins with the demand for total liberation and ends with total despotism. McAuley's wish to keep Milton in the party of God by separating the poet from the rebel invalidated his own argument. The only God to whom Milton can submit is one made in the image of his own will. He is thus, despite himself, the eternal rebel. McAuley on the other hand sought to submit himself not to God but to the order of God. He is thus the eternal conservative, upholding the order of the past and admonishing the present for not being true to it. This understanding of human history as a cyclical encounter of good and evil underlay McAuley's approach to both literature and politics. Although he recognized the historical distance between Milton and the authors of Genesis on the one hand and of the Communist Manifesto on the other, he saw them as sites of the same eternal struggle, of which the Cold

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War was merely the latest episode. Yet even in the consistency of his beliefs there was a contradiction. Ultimately, he rejected liberal humanism not merely because it was secular but because it took the individual as its final measure, viewing man as 'an autonomous being, a Sovereign mind and will.'13 But his own politics was grounded in a belief in the total responsibility of the individual and the ability of each to recognize absolute truth, as opposed to the communist subjection of the individual to the demands of history and the moral relativism of dialectical materialism. By attempting to reject the sovereignty of the individual, McAuley separated himself from the views of his mentor, John Anderson, the Sydney empiricist philosopher to whom he otherwise was indebted for his understanding of the relations between the individual and society. Anderson, who also taught McAuley's associates Donald Home and Peter Coleman, both later to be editors of Quadrant, contributed decisively to the intellectual climate from which the Australian Association of Cultural Freedom and Quadrant sprang. McAuley did not follow Anderson consistently, and indeed on one occasion remarked that John Anderson had an answer to every question. It was "No".'16 Nevertheless, he drew from Anderson his insistence on absolute truth, his confidence that we can know it, and his consequent opposition to any form of moral or cultural relativism. From Anderson too he took his understanding that moral characteristics are an integral part of the order of things, and therefore cannot be detached from any discussion of economic or social issues. Anderson argued that 'It is impossible . . . to discuss social processes except in terms of ways of living or forms of enterprise, and that is moral characterisation.' To describe is to judge, and what is must be. This holistic empiricism led him to the rather peculiar conclusion that any form of welfare state is evil, because it panders to 'the desire for security and sufficiency [which] is the very mark of the servile state.' It turns individuals, in Anderson's view, from producers to consumers, and thus destroys the 'independent and creative spirit' that is the moral characteristic of their proper autonomy.17 Anderson understood that this creative spirit operated within a rational world in which every proposition could be shown to be either true or false. Within this framework there was no room for considering his own concepts of security, sufficiency and servility as relative or contingent. They became moral absolutes that admitted no room for dissent. But where Anderson derived these absolutes from empirical observation and logical argument, McAuley, rejecting man as sufficient measure of his own reality, drew his certainties from divine revelation mediated by the institutional church. This divided him even from those of his collaborators who otherwise shared his politics, and endowed Quadrant with a sectarian rather than a broadly humanistic tone of debate.


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II John Docker has argued that the Sydney tradition to which McAuley belongs is a form of 'elite pluralism' that depends on the rejection of the surrounding society in favour of a symbolic order constructed from an eclectic selection of ideas derived from Europe.18 These ideas are detached from their original historical context and employed as universal criteria by which modern society in general and Australian society in particular are found wanting. Docker identified two strands in this tradition, the artistic and the philosophical, but they are united in their rejection of the common life. The traditionalists condemned this life and its practical problems, and the modernism that tried to understand them, as products of the industrialism that has deformed the natural relationships between man and nature. In these circumstances, the man of sensitivity can find his place only in the world of art and ideas where with suitable companions he can pursue the universals of truth and beauty. In the artistic strand, these are revealed in visions of the transcendental harmony of man and nature. The magazine Vision was the expression of these ideas, and Norman Lindsay their chief exponent. The equivalent in Anderson's philosophy is the drive of the individual for knowledge and fulfilment. McAuley clearly belonged to this tradition, but as clearly he found it inadequate. His collaboration with Harold Stewart to ridicule modernism through their creation of the poet Ern Malley was a product of the nihilistic anarchism to which he was early attracted. The title of his collection of essays, The End of Modernity,19 suggested his desire to go beyond this historical phase, but he succeeded only in going backwards. Certainly, he did not regress, like Lindsay, to adolescent fantasies of paganism, but his conception of a divinely ordered organic society was equally mythical and anachronistic. This in turn determined his attitude to Australia. His Christian belief necessarily separated him from earlier adherents of the Sydney tradition, who were content to leave the rest of society to wallow in its mediocrity while they pursued their lonely aesthetic quest. McAuley was committed to the redemption of humankind, which he believed could occur by renewing the European tradition in the free space provided in the new world of Australia. This commitment made him a particular kind of Australian nationalist. As he explained in his first editorial, Quadrant aimed to be 'Australian in our orientation, quite naturally, because we are interested in this country, its people, its problems, its cultural life, its liberties, and its safety'. The Australia he identified with was characterized by the institutions of parliamentary democracy and the common law, which provide the ideal 'school of

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freedom and civility and prudence'. These institutions form part of the European inheritance that means that 'to be a good Australian is to be a local variety of that "free and lawful man", the traditional ideal of Western civilization'. This he distinguished from the 'ugly nineteenth-century vice of cultural nationalism, which imposes "Australianity" as an antiintellectual criterion, limiting the scope of the mind and serving only as giving a false value to mediocrity/20 This was certainly a reference to Meanjin, which McAuley had condemned as 'effectively a fellow-travelling publication', and Overland, whose contents McAuley had once likened to union propaganda.21 The true nature of nationalism, as he understood it, is demonstrated in his epic poem 'Captain Quiros' (1964), where Quiros' voyage to Tierra del Espiritu Santo becomes an analogy for the quest for a true Australia of the spirit, and the failure of his settlers a model for the failure of the Australian people to recognize their destiny.22 The poem follows the model of Camoens' Lusiads, in which the poet celebrates Vasco da Gama as the Virgilian hero who brings the new Roman imperium to Asia. Quiros' mission, however, was a failure, and so McAuley's poem places its emphasis not so much on the deeds of its hero as on the contrast between the enlightened leader and his quarrelsome followers. This theme is a recasting within the order of the divine of Norman Lindsay's secular ideology of the artist as visionary. For McAuley this vision comes directly from God rather than from the artist's innate genius. The role of the searcher is to find the place on earth where this vision may be made real. Yet his epic demonstrates that, even when this place is found, men bring with them the original sin that once again destroys the vision of a holy commonwealth in an orgy of disease, treachery, bloodshed and death. As the poem comes to the second voyage, its emphasis falls on the active and historical rather than the symbolic or hierophantic import. But as Quiros' hopes are frustrated by fate as much as by human sin, his quest becomes one for a redeeming vision rather than for an earthly paradise. In the closing stanza McAuley suggests that this vision alone is important, keeping alive hope 'Until He comes, who will come'. In the meantime, the best humans can achieve is the vision of 'The cosmic voices pursued in that lost land' to Let the drum-voices wake to prophecy; And through the maze-print on the trodden sand Let masks of vision lead the warriors on ... s;/?. 203) These images connect the poem to McAuley's time in New Guinea, when, as he wrote in Quadrant, he had discovered in native ritual the


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significance of a life still lived as sacral.23 Yet the drum-voices of prophecy call to warriors, who bring violence and destruction. This contradiction has troubled Quiros in the first section, where he enquired of the chaplain why he had permitted the bloodshed only to be given the rather unsatisfactory answer that God requires men to obey the earthly authority that maintains itself through such violence. In the second part, the Father Commissary develops this apologia further. He argues that violence arises from those who yielded to the 'last temptation' of noble minds by trying to establish the millennium on earth. 'There it corrupts to a delirium, As happens to all mysteries we profane. Witness those ravings of millennium When sectaries who would set up Christ's reign Initiate a carnival of blood .„.' (p. 201)

The reference is clearly to revolutionaries from Milton and the Puritans to Stalin and the Bolsheviks of the twentieth century. The argument, however, although justifying God's failure to help such visionaries as Quiros, seems to contradict the mission of McAuley's poem. Yet it also explains the mission and the experience of Quadrant, which had to endure the assaults of the sectaries and could at best keep its vision of order alive, not transform society. The third part of the poem, 'The Times of the Nations', resolves the apparent contradictions of the poem by placing its events in the wider context of history and within the shape of the divine plan for humankind. Quiros now returns to the scheming and perfidious courts of a Spain that 'had reached the hour / When greatness can no longer be renewed'. Here his plans are obstructed by plotting prelates, whose great word, prudence, is merely a cover for 'low views and treachery'. McAuley's description of the wiles they use to thwart the visionary Quiros, professing admiration for his mission while defaming his record and rejecting his plans, parallels the disgust he had expressed to Martin Haley about the treatment of Santamaria and his Movement at the hands of the Sydney hierarchy in the years 1954 to 1957, just before he started this poem. The picture of the Spanish churchmen matches his views on the Sydney bishops Gilroy and Carroll:24 One was a churchman in the recent style, Well-suited to a failing age of drift, A cold mean creature with placarded smile Whom God to try the faithful had bereft Of magnanimity and honour. He Made baseness seem a mode of piety; His right hand blessed the victims of the left.

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WRITING IN HOPE AND FEAR His close adviser was a canonist, Well practised in dissembling double thought In double meaning; skilful to wind and twist All meanings till they cancelled in pure naught. Holy detraction was his special flair, And the light verbal web flung in air Entangling others for the ends he sought. (pp. 206-7)

For these prevaricating prelates, Quiros' project could bring only ruin. In the conclusion to this last part of the poem, 'The Last Vision', McAuley sweeps Quiros' particular fate at the hand of the Spanish prelates into universal history and then into a vision of the part Australia can play in this history. This vision starts with convicts and concludes with the 'faithless generation' for whom the holy architecture of the world lies in ruins and 'nowhere can man's spirit find a home.' The shards of a ruined world, which resemble the nightmare visions of his earliest poems, are redeemed by the faith of an elect few. His vision of redemption is a fulfilment of the promise he has discerned in the actual continent of Australia and its first inhabitants, the 'South Land, vast, worn down and strange' where Man in his tribes, and insect, beast and tree, Set in a cyclic pattern beyond change. and where ... solemn long-shanked birds danced ritually, And painted men enacted and renewed With mime and song in rapt exalted mood The figured Now which is eternity. (p. 212)

This vision takes us back to McAuley's earlier 'Celebration of Divine Love', where myth is constantly renewed in history as ritual, and to his poems of New Guinea, where the sacral vision of life maintained by the indigenous culture is fulfilled through the work of Archbishop Boismenu, the true prelate, and his followers. Christianity, in McAuley's view, does not abolish the pagan ritual, but completes it. The true enemy is the secularism that alienates humanity from the worlds of both nature and the divine that orders it. The problem with this vision is that it is exclusive. Any community of elect is by definition divisive. Beneath its aspirations towards a community of the truly human lies a rejection of the actual humanity within which any historical community must come into being. Further, McAuley shared with Milton the paradox that his community of faith can only be brought into


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existence by an act of the will. He started from a conception of God which he then imposes on history. When his compatriots rejected his vision, like Quiros he separated himself from them and from the evils of the world. This placed him in the position from which he could renounce his political foes and project on them the darker side of human nature. This he did in his first Quadrant editorial, where the fears of his own violence were projected on 'the ghosts of rhetorical humanisms, academic positivisms, and progressive illuminisms' that he saw preparing the way for the glaring visage of communism to 'squeak and gibber in the streets.'25 McAuley in his essays and poetry presented the culture of Aborigines and Islanders as commanding respect, but finally it is there only to be used, like their lands, to renew what remains essentially a European civilization. The validity he granted to their culture in the past has no continuing function in the present except as a measure of the failings of modern civilization. Nor were all invited to take part in the dance that symbolizes the eternal value that this civilization shares with primitive peoples. Those of us who are not among the elect must take it on trust that their faith will redeem the world from the consequences of our sins, but it is clear that we will not share in this redemption. Ill McAuley's exclusive vision set the tone for Quadrant under his editorship. The first issue carried an article by Denis Warner on 'The Communist Conspiracy in Asia' which looked at events in Asia purely in terms of the contest between European civilization and its communist antagonist. Warner examined the supposed consequences of the conference of Communist parties that had met in Calcutta in 1948 'to set in motion armed revolutions to coincide with the climax of the struggle in China and at one stroke win Asia for Communism.'26 This conference remained for the next two decades central to conservative analyses of changes in Asia, which start from the assumption that the Cold War was the single most important issue of global politics, both as a struggle for supremacy and as an explanation of every political development. The emphasis on the dangers of communism and the sterility of secular humanism on the one hand, and the virtues of traditional forms and values on the other, give to the pages of Quadrant, as to McAuley's own writings, an air of distaste for common humanity that belies not only the frequent vitality of the parts but also the greater aspirations towards a truly catholic and embracing human community. The work finally is betrayed by its own divisiveness. The ultimate failure of McAuley's position was exposed when it came to the test of the Vietnam war, a pure expression of the modern will to

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power through industry. For McAuley, this was just the latest example of the eternal struggle of virtue against evil, with the American military machine as the embodiment of virtue. This view of the world as a Manichaean contest between good and evil had already led to his bitter dissent from the Sydney hierarchy of his church over their relations with the Labor Party. As with Anderson himself, it led him away from his distrust of the collective dimension of human life and locked him into a monolithic opposition to the whole collection of secular humanists and liberals whose credulity and pusillanimity he believed responsible for the totalitarian threat. Although his editorship was not unchallenged, his views, with the support of Krygier, prevailed, and were decisive in determining Quadrants approach to society, politics and literature. From the first McAuley saw the role of editing Quadrant in terms of a crusade. He wrote in his submission to the editorial committee planning the new journal that it would provide an opportunity for 'the stimulation of all the potentialities that exist in Australia in the field of general ideas and the arts.' He had no doubt that this stimulation required a broad challenge to the influence of communism in the intellectual and artistic life of Australia where, as he explained, it had become dominant: During the thirties and forties Australian intellectual life became subjected to an alarming extent to the magnetic field of Communism. All sorts of people who would regard themselves as being non-Communist, and were opposed to Communism, in practice were dominated by the themes and modes of discussion proposed by the Communists ... writers' organizations, civil liberties organizations, and so on became Communist or semi-Communist in their real character.27 This view, which comes close to the communist practice of condemning even allies for being 'objectively' supportive of the enemy, determined McAuley's plans for the way the journal should 'win men's minds' to the anti-communist position. It should, he argued, be 'resolutely highbrow', as 'Cultural transformations come from the top and are gradually diffused through lower levels.' While its main subject matter would be arts and literature, it should not be 'narrowly literary' but should give special attention through its commentary on public affairs to 'Communist policy, diplomacy and propaganda in Australia and the East' and examine such concepts as peace, co-existence and anti-colonialism. The program, in short, was not merely to displace communist influence but to discredit all aspects of communist practice. These views matched those of Richard Krygier, who had been struggling for years to obtain support for a journal of ideas to promote his cause. Daniel Newman, whose thesis is based partly on interviews with Krygier and with Donald Home, argues that the journal was not intended as a


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political weapon against leftist intellectuals so much as an alternative for conservatives who saw themselves as a 'dissenting and unheard minority within the Australian cultural Establishment.' Yet he concedes that its purpose was to 'conduct "political warfare" against all shades of dissenters, from liberals to communists.'28 Although, in Newman's view, its intellectual stance was based on Andersonian empiricism, with its rejection of the concept of the economic basis of society and of the idea of a general social good, its anti-communism was central. This included opposition to all forms of socialism and democratic leftism as a 'softening up process' for Bolshevism. This in turn led to the journal's hostility to the supposed 'New Class' of intellectuals and their commitment to the state apparatus, and to literary nationalism which joined with communism in questioning the universal values of western civilization. McAuley's initial appointment as editor was by no means either uncontested or generally welcomed by members of the AACF. Other people were approached, and several made submissions about the direction they would like to take the proposed magazine. Roger Covell wrote of his understanding that the committee was 'concerned to preserve the creative freedoms that now exist and to win back, where possible, those that have been lost.' He agreed that communism was 'not conducive to these kinds of freedom' but warned the committee that the journal should not become known merely as an 'anti-Communist' publication. John Thompson wrote that he was not interested in politics 'as such', but was concerned with the general principles of freedom and proper statesmanship. The policy he proposed was impeccably liberal: My attitude as editor would be to judge literary contributions on their merit alone, and by this criterion the grosser forms of propaganda would be excluded, simply because propaganda is seldom consistent with good art. In social and political matters I will insist on a temperate approach, and will work for factuality and objectivity. He did, however, share the committee's concern to counter the baleful influence of communism. Insofar as we band our energies against totalitarianism, which is the abomination of abominations, we should try to lure rather than to alienate those hangers on and quite well-intentioned fellow-travellers who are so often the catspaw of obdurate extremists .. ,29 The dread of totalitarianism seemed automatically to evoke metaphors of intrigue and war. A different form of absolutism worried another member of the Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom, David A.S. Campbell, a Sydney businessman and then president of the Institute of International

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Affairs and editor of its journal, Australian Quarterly. In November 1955 he wrote to Sir John Latham to express his disgust at the influence McAuley, 'a Roman Catholic and with very strongly biased political views', was gaining over Krygier and hence the committee. In a second letter, he expressed his fears that under McAuley's influence the Association would become 'merely a "front" for other forces in the community.' He was supported by Arthur Denning, an official in the New South Wales Department of Education, who wrote that McAuley was 'almost fanatical in his approach to some of the questions. If he had his way, all our activities would become purely propaganda for the cause as he sees it.'30 There is however no indication that Latham, a leading rationalist, took any action in response to these views, and the editorial committee, comprising Krygier, R.N. Spann, and Roger Ford, in due course recommended that McAuley be appointed as editor of the new journal, and that his submission be adopted as the basis of its policy.31 Although there were later disagreements among members of the Association, and with his editorial associates, particularly Donald Home, about the particular policies or tone of Quadrant, once McAuley was appointed as editor Krygier ensured his tenure was secure. IV After 'Quiros' and the earlier issues of Quadrant, McAuley developed a poetry of acceptance and some of the urgency went out of his politics. After his move in 1961 to the University of Tasmania in Hobart, the politics of Quadrant become more directly cultural, a war waged on the decay he perceived at the heart of society rather than direct attacks on the agents of subversion. His poem 'Liberal: or innocent by definition', published in Quadrant, 25, 1963, suggests the change. The liberal's fault is shown not as malevolence but intellectual sloth - still a deadly sin. He is content to live as part of a chorus squawking 'quagtalk': 'On the one hand this, on the other hand that, Having regard to, I heard for a fact, What one would want to say about this is, That's not my point, and where are we at.' (p. 236)

Yet the pages of Quadrant themselves had by this time become hospitable to contributions from a variety of voices, although none of the writers could be accused of the ultimate crime of the liberal, that They can never be convicted, They have no record of convictions.


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The first two contributors to a series named from Lenin's revolutionary appeal, 'What Is To Be Done?', were RE. Chamberlain, hard left ALP functionary, and B.A. Santamaria, who called for a Pacific confederation to 'exclude communist power from East Asia and the South-West Pacific'. Later contributors included Colin Clark calling for an end to trade protection and political centralism, E.L. Wheelwright demanding more economic planning, and Donald Home castigating the left, 'still shrouded in its own dusty dreams', for its conformism. He urged it to develop a new radicalism that would concentrate on the problems of 'affluence, bigness, "mass culture", "alienation" and the general effects of mass education, on the one hand, and massive technological advance on the other'.32 The most important political essay carried at this time was by a scholar with impeccably liberal credentials. Eugene Kamenka, in 'Karl Marx and Socialism Today', separated Marx as moralist, protesting against the destruction of social value by capitalism, from Marx as ideologist proclaiming the progressive virtue of industrialism.33 This article, which epitomized the European liberal tradition from which the anticommunism of the Congress for Cultural Freedom had emerged, also marked the end of this style of intellectual debate. Its rhetoric and logic belonged to the Cold War struggle between freedom and totalitarianism, and to the arguments within the western democracies about the desirable levels of state intervention, social welfare and entrepreneurial freedom. Its assumptions were that government is the sphere of the rational and that technological change will produce the means to solve the problems of poverty, equality and exclusion that Marx had identified. Yet the article appeared when these liberal assumptions were about to be challenged by a generation for whom the central moral problem was the use of power by western societies to repress their own people and exploit the resources of others, and the central political problem was to integrate the personal with the public. For this generation, the symbol of division was no longer the Berlin Wall but the war in Vietnam. Intellectually, the challenge to both liberalism and socialism came from the arguments of writers like Herbert Marcuse, and before him Marshall McLuhan. These newly fashionable theorists replaced the old Enlightenment hopes of liberation through reason with theories of liberation through the senses. This was to lead to a politics that placed culture at the centre of action. For McAuley, this development was merely another manifestation of the destruction of civilized values by the long unreason of modernism. In his personal politics he fought it by his support for the traditional values of education against what he perceived as the disintegrating effects of egalitarianism in the schools and politicalization in the universities.34 In Quadrant he

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broadened the cultural perspectives by including articles on Indian, Japanese and Indonesian writing, but the journal maintained the division between culture and politics. Although its writers identified the newfieldsof the political struggle, they continued to interpret it in terms of the battle against international communism and its domestic allies. Their outlook could still be summed up in the words of T.H. Rigby, who in an article on the Soviet Union under Khrushchev explained that the key to Soviet policies was that they 'are guided, and continue to be guided, by the drive for total power'.35 Although he found some reasons for hope in the younger generation of Soviet writers, he concluded that ultimately this drive for power was the only thing that mattered. He, in common with other Quadrant writers, saw no reason for dialogue with the Soviet Union, or evidence of possible division or dissent within its monolithic domain. McAuley's poetry at this time moved in new directions. As the Vatican Council seemed to lead his church in false directions, he turned inward to purify diction and vision. We see this most famously in 'Pieta', where he confronts the death of his child. Behind the still form of the poem, the achieved calm of the lines, is the tremendous force of emotions that he could face only through this form. The form is not imposed, it contains, so that it can reach the conclusion that enables the writer to return to life: Clean wounds, but terrible, Are those made with the Cross. (p. 220)

Yet these lines present their own problem. I have always felt that, while their achievement is won at great emotional cost, their logic is too easy, passing responsibility for pain to God. But Dr Syd Harrex has suggested to me that they were written at a time when McAuley's own faith was clouded by doubt, and that they refer rather to his wife's steadfastness despite the suffering her commitment to his faith has brought on her. The wounds are therefore the product of faith, of a choice of the cross, not a random fate brought by a capricious God. Harrex has also suggested that the island of Tasmania brought McAuley comfort, giving him a place where he could feel at home. This is certainly borne out by such poems as 'St John's Park, New Town', where his contemplation of the past enables him to accept that 'Our present is now.' McAuley, according to Peter Coleman, always kept a residual liberalism from his youth. In these later poems, where he comes to accept the pain and folly in his own being as well as in humanity, he may have been preparing the basis for a politics where he would have


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been able to reach out from the island of his self to fuller community with the rest of humanity. The issue of Quadrant that carried Kamenka's article carried also an announcement that from 1964 the journal would be published six times a year, in a new and enlarged format, and with Donald Home joining McAuley as co-editor. Home, who had founded the Observer for Frank Packer, and then gone on to edit the new Bulletin, was a part of the revolution that was overtaking the Australian media at this time. A range of new or reborn publications carried the burden of political dispute and reported the symptoms of cultural change during the years of the Vietnam war. Overland, Quadrant-and the other cultural journals that had borne the brunt of this responsibility for the previous decade came to serve a different, more purely literary and cultural, function. The change in Quadrant's publication cycle represented its adaptation to a new role. Yet this function had its political effects and cannot be understood outside its political context.

SIX

Cold War on Writing Attacks on Writers and Struggles for Funds

The publication in 1956 of the first issue of Quadrant marked a new stage in the conservative struggle to control the agenda of ideas in Australia. The radical nationalists, associated particularly with Meanjin, had attempted to change this agenda by emphasizing the democratic element of the Australian tradition. Overland and the Realist Writers Groups had tried to extend the tradition itself by building a new community of writers and readers. Quadrant was both intended to combat Meanjin in the field of ideas, and more generally to deny legitimacy to literature as a part of politics. The conservative campaign, which refused to acknowledge that every piece of literature, by shaping its readers' perceptions, helps to shape their ideology, had begun as early as 1947 with parliamentary attacks on the Commonwealth Literary Fund and its support for some radical writers. Quadrant maintained this restrictive view of literature as a supplement to politics rather than as a part of the contest. Yet the poetry and fiction it published, as conservative in form as in content, were as much as its polemic a part of its politics. I The Cold War, in which Quadrant saw its role as a combatant, extended to the struggles with and within the Commonwealth Literary Fund. The Fund, originally set up by the Deakin government in 1908 to assist indigent writers and their families, had during the second world war expanded its activities to include support for publishers, literary magazines and lectures and the direct support of authors to get on with their writing. Applications for grants were consideredfirstby an Advisory Board, but the final decisions were taken by a Political Committee comprising two representatives of the Government and one of the Opposition. 112

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Even in the immediate postwar years the Political Committee frustrated the hopes of the Advisory Board. Nettie Palmer, whose husband Vance was its chairman, complained that the board, which had hoped to get going a few long-term projects, now the war is over, finds itself checked utterly by the present political committee, which takes none of the Board's recommendations for granted, not even its purely literary ones, and has shut down some of its minimum past recommendations.1 The Political Committee at the time consisted of the Prime Minister, J.B. 'Ben' Chifley, the former Labor Prime Minister, James H. Scullin, who had agitated to have the Fund's activities enlarged, and the Leader of the Opposition, Robert Menzies. Palmer explained that Chifley, as Prime Minister-Treasurer, ties purse-strings tight. Menzies, besides having literary opinions, mostly disapproving, is professionally averse from all interference with private enterprise, such as lending the Board's recommendation to a collection of poems or giving Kylie Tennant £250 so that she can pause over her next novel. Scullin is a tired oldish man whose energies had a good deal to do with establishing the fund at its present scale in 1939; but now he's largely a watchdog on behalf of decency - nothing sponsored by the Fund must jolt that.

This parsimony of the Political Committee under Chifley was as nothing to the ideological heat it generated among critics who maintained that its grants were serving to support Communist agitation rather than true literature. The CLF had become an object of opprobrium as early as 1947, when the former Country Party leader Earle Page attacked the way it was giving subsidies to Communists and former Communists. The object of this attack was James Normington-Rawling, a decorated veteran from the first world war who had left the Party after the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. The Fund had given him a grant to write a life of the nineteenthcentury Australian nationalist poet Charles Harpur. When Evatt, on behalf of the government, asked rhetorically whether membership of the Communist Party at any time should act as a perpetual bar to writing Australian literature and history, Arthur Fadden, Leader of the Country Party, responded that it should be if other authors were available. Archie Cameron, another Liberal, formerly Country Party member, later to become Speaker of the House, demanded that former Communists should be required to recant publicly and declare their opposition to communism before being eligible for a fellowship. Menzies was prudently absent from the House, but his deputy, Harold Holt, joined in the witch hunt. Chifley responded by declaring that 'Our decisions are made according to the literary capacity of the applicant, and if the committee is

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to become a Gestapo to enquire into the political history of every applicant it would be abolished.' 2 Ironically, Rawling was later to be supported financially by the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom to write a history of the Communist Party in Australia.3 The Literary Fund's first involvement in financing magazines led it into further political trouble. In 1946 it made an emergency grant of £100 to Meanjin, to the disgust of Guy Howarth, editor of Southerly, who saw it as evidence of favouritism to Melbourne. A further grant was made in 1947, but none in the following two years, when the Political Committee objected to an editorial about elections in Europe and Australia. The editor of Meanjin, Clem Christesen, organized a campaign in support of the magazine, only to encounter objections that it was too much aligned with communist opinion. Chifley, in terms anticipating Menzies' later rejection of Overland, objected to its populism and its quality. One supporter suggested that Christesen would be in a stronger position if he could 'convince Chifley of Meanjins devotion to workmanlike prose without sensing a sloppy preoccupation with ideas in the background.' Christesen however continued to publish articles that inflamed conservative opinion against him. Even his printer complained that he was publishing political deviants, citing as examples Davison and Palmer. The subsidy was not renewed until 1950.4 Although the election in 1949 of a Liberal-Country Party coalition government led by Menzies resulted in a conservative majority on the Political Committee of the CLF, the attacks continued. 5 Judith Brett has shown how much Menzies' return from his political grave was due to his ability to appeal to the 'forgotten people', the great middle class who felt themselves excluded from Labor's postwar reconstruction of society along social welfare lines.6 His appeal lay less in mobilizing their hopes than in speaking to their fears. His electors had been brought up in the shelter of the British Empire, only to have their security shattered by the fall of Singapore. In general, this class shared patriotism, a belief in hard work, a private but limited education and a fear of the different.7 Menzies succeeded in projecting their insecurity onto the demon of communism and its socialist handmaiden, conveniently identified with the Labor government. When the coalminers obligingly went on strike in 1949, halting industry and freezing the middle class in their wintry homes, they completed the construction of the zealotry that ensured Menzies' election. One of the first acts of the new government was its attempt to ban the Communist Party. The election atmosphere that brought Menzies to power had been heightened by a Royal Commission into Communism appointed by the Victorian government on the promptings of Cecil Sharpley, a former Party official whose allegations of Communist subversion were promoted

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by the Melbourne Herald. The commission found nothing of significance, but the state government continued its anti-communist crusade in its attempts to suppress Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory.* After this failure, the crusade moved to the federal parliament, where Liberal and right-wing Labor members mounted concerted attacks on the Commonwealth Literary Fund. Allan Ashbolt has shown how this campaign brought together the right wings of both the governing coalition of Liberal and Country parties and the Labor Opposition, and contributed to the death of Vance Palmer, who stood accused of aiding his country's enemies.9 Behind the attacks lay a genuine fear of communism, cynically exploited for political ends though it may have been. This fear fed on the hostility to ideas and suspicion of difference that has been endemic to the Australian tradition since the earliest days of white settlement.10 It expressed itself in Menzies' attempt to outlaw the Communist Party and with it all activities, including speaking and publishing, that the government might from time to time define as subversive. Although these proposals were frustrated in the High Court and the subsequent referendum, Menzies, for motives partly ideological and partly pragmatic, throughout his term of office maintained his efforts to confuse dissent with subversion, and both with communism. Meanwhile, Sir John Latham, the only member of the High Court to find the banning of the Communist Party legal, became after his retirement the founding president of the Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom. The 1952 attack was begun by two associates of Krygier, Labor's Standish Michael Keon and the Liberals' W.C. Wentworth. Keon alleged that Vance Palmer as Chairman of Advisory Board had been responsible over a number of years for 'a deliberate and concerted attempt' to confine monetary grants to 'either known Communists or active workers for the Communist Party'.11 Wentworth attacked grants made to Communist writers, including the novelists Eric Lambert, John Morrison, and Judah Waten. The attack extended beyond members of the Party to include Frank Dalby Davison, who had supported Waten's application for a Fellowship,12 and Kylie Tennant, who obtained an apology on the floor of the House. This she attributed to the intervention of the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies.13 Menzies, as Chairman of the Political Committee of the Board, also came to the defence of Vance Palmer, who, he said, was 'a distinguished writer' whose work on the Advisory Board had been 'honest' and 'disinterested'. The members of the Political Committee, he claimed, never considered political issues in making their decisions. 'We have concerned ourselves with literary matters on the strength of the material that is placed before us.'14 Ashbolt points out that his attitude to Meanjin had not always been so disinterested. As early as

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1947, he had denounced the journal's publication of political articles.15 Later he was similarly to express his extreme distaste for Overland when the question of that journal's funding arose.16 All this hostility was to come into play in the struggle to extend Commonwealth Literary Fund support to Quadrant. The greatest parliamentary vitriol was reserved for Judah Waten. With a fine disregard for literary standards, the cold warriors attacked his novels Alien Son and The Unbending as mere communist propaganda.17 Ironically, at the time Waten had left the Communist Party, and rejoined only when other radicals were leaving, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.18 The campaign was renewed outside Parliament in 1954, when Mary Kent Hughes and the Sydney Daily Mirror, then owned by Ezra Norton, publisher of Truth, castigated the Fund for making the grant that had enabled Waten to write the novel. Waten sought help from Arthur Calwell, Deputy Leader of the Opposition, who promised to read the novel. Frank Browne, publisher of a Canberra scandal-sheet, Things I Hear, and himself in 1955 to be sentenced before the bar of the House to gaol for making scurrilous remarks about its members, joined in the campaign against the Fund. He claimed that most of the recipients of grants were either 'Commos or near Commos' and, using Waten as example, that a good deal of the 'stuff subsidised was trashy fiction.'19 Browne's diatribe was repeated in the Sydney Bulletin, the Melbourne Herald, the Sydney Daily Mirrorand the Intelligence Survey published by the

League of Rights. On Palmer's retirement in 1953, he was replaced as a member of the CLF Advisory Board by Sir Archibald Grenfell Price, a geographer, fervent anti-communist and a former conservative member of the federal parliament. Among other new members of the Board was A.R. Chisholm, who coinciden tally had denounced Waten's The Unbending for its sympathy to the IWW and perceived hostility to the AIF. Waten did not obtain another Commonwealth literary grant until 1970, but he did become a foundation member of the Literature Board that replaced the Literary Fund.20 II These events were soon to be forgotten in the excitement surrounding the defection of the Soviet diplomat and spy, Vladimir Petrov, and his wife. Among those attacked and discredited in the subsequent enquiry were the Leader of the Opposition, Dr H.V. Evatt, and Alan Dalziel, his private secretary who had written to promise support for Waten when he first came under parliamentary attack. Petrov's defection gave the government the opportunity to uncover the 'nest of traitors' that as far back as 1951 the responsible minister,

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R.G. Casey, had announced had infiltrated the Department of External Affairs.21 Casey, described by Krygier as the minister responsible for the government's ideological affairs, was an active supporter of the Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom.22 In the Petrov case, however, the running was made by Menzies himself, with the help of the Director of ASIO, Colonel Spry, and his agents. The affair began, publicly, when Menzies, taking advantage of Evatt's absence from the House, announced in the last week of parliament before the 1954 election that Petrov, Third Secretary and Consul in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, had defected, bringing with him documents and information about Soviet espionage in Australia. Declaring that the government would the next day introduce legislation for a Royal Commission, he added the gratuitous information that the documents named a number of Australian citizens, some under 'code-names', as contacts or co-operators, and promised that there would be 'of course, continued surveillance of persons named, most of whom, incidentally, had already come under the notice of the security service.'23 Menzies did not see it as necessary to add that those named included Liberal as well as Labor members of parliament. He may not have known that one of the people named was the Leader of the Opposition himself, nor that during the Royal Commission the assisting counsel would have the advantage of ASIO eavesdropping on defence lawyers.24 His immediate concern was political, setting the stage for an election campaign on the theme of anticommunism. The drama was heightened a few days later when Soviet Security men attempted to fly Petrov's wife Evdokia, also a Security agent, from the country. There was doubt whether she was leaving voluntarily, and a crowd of anti-communist refugees gathered at Sydney airport to protest at her departure and encourage her to join her husband. Among them were Krygier and Wentworth, who were convinced she was being forced aboard the plane under duress. Krygier later reported to Congress headquarters that he had gathered affidavits from witnesses who swore they heard her saying that she did not want to go. He then introduced these witnesses to Wentworth, who phoned Cabinet in Canberra, presumably to arrange her rescue. The press in the evening carried dramatic pictures of a distressed Evdokia being half-carried onto the plane by Russian thugs. The following morning it contained equally dramatic pictures of her rescue by Australian officials in Darwin.25 Although the Petrov enquiry was supposedly concerned only with espionage, it defined this so widely as to include any activity that might be construed as assisting the cause of the Communist Party of Australia, and thus of the Soviet Union. In their final report,26 the commissioners, Justices Owen, Ligertwood and Philp, noted that espionage was no

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longer confined to military matters, and that in modern times Soviet espionage activities had been much forwarded by the conflict between the ideologies of the Soviet and those of the countries of the western world. The report conveys the same naivety about the teachings of Marxism and the policy and activities of the Communist Party of Australia that had characterized Lowe's earlier report on the Victorian enquiry, but its conclusions showed none of Lowe's caution and respect for evidence. 'The ideology of Communism has its adherents in every Western country, including Australia,' they noted. 'Included among such persons the Soviet can confidently seek some who, for ideological reasons, are willing to help its espionage and fifth-column activities.' Accordingly, they defined espionage as any attempt to obtain 'secrets' of one country in the interests of another or to the prejudice of security or safety in the former; to obtain information about people to use them for espionage purposes; to recruit espionage agents 'amongst adherents to or sympathisers with the ideology of Communism'; to penetrate the machinery of government or set up an organization to operate against the interests of its own government in wartime. As ideological penetration was by this account defined as the first step in espionage, it was inevitable that anyone who argued or otherwise acted against the policies or received wisdom of the government was at least potentially a traitor (Introduction, paras. 36, 37, 38). Actual membership of the Communist Party was even worse. The commissioners noted that Petrov himself had been directed not to seek agents from the Communist Party (para. 937), and that it was 'unlikely that the Australian Communist Party, as a Party, had any connection with Soviet espionage' (para. 316). Nevertheless, they concluded that 'the most likely prospects [for recruitment as spies] were persons with Communist sympathies'. They acknowledged that'... many who are fanatical devotees of Communist ideology ... may be honest' but found that they could be 'none the less dangerous to Australia's security' (paras. 377, 378, 379). As for the leakage of information from the Department of External Affairs, they found that this had been 'significant' from 1943 to 1949, while there had been a Labor government, but had since ceased (para. 593). They did not point out that in the earlier part of this period the Soviet Union had been Australia's military ally. This is a cursory representation of the Petrov Commission's indictment of communism and communists, although multiplying the examples would add nothing to their argument. The report is not so much an example of prejudice as of the commissioners' inability to understand a fundamental principle of democracy- that error in practice is best avoided by encouraging maximum contention among competing possibilities of error in theory. Their lack of faith in the strength of democracy led them

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to conclude that it could be destroyed by the efforts of Marxist theorists and activists. Theory had certainly led some individuals to conclude that capitalism was a disaster, that the Soviet Union offered a promising alternative, and that they could therefore best serve humankind by assisting the Soviet cause, clandestinely if necessary. While this belief may have blinded them to the domestic tyranny imposed by Communist governments, it did not necessarily make them traitors to their own people. Fortunately, they were never put to the test of a successful revolution at home, and neither this commission nor any other enquiry has been able to show that their efforts have undermined any democratic polity. On the other hand, it is easily demonstrable that the aggression of both capitalist and communist powers has led in the last half-century to incalculable misery. The failure of the Royal Commission into Espionage was its inability to distinguish this fanaticism from reasoned debate, dissent and resistance, and consequently its implicit assignment of all Marxists to the ranks of the fanatical and its exoneration of all their opponents. The effects of this failure were disastrous for both the Australian polity and Australian culture. While, in the long term, it may be these effects on the community that were the most important, the effects on individuals summoned before the commission were no less disastrous personally and morally. Some of these individuals, like Dorothy Hewett, were able to triumph over circumstance. Her account of the episode captures the essential absurdity of the proceedings. At the end of 1954 there was a knock on the door one night, and I opened it to a plainclothes detective and a shorthand writer, summoning me as a witness to the Petrov case. I was on the list of Petrov's possible contacts, one of the potential Australian spies he'd never got around to meeting. Very pregnant I fronted the bench, although the day before a drunken court emissary had suggested I could be 'excused' because of my condition, 'so embarrassing for me'. Well, I embarrassed the bench by my appearance, and my statements. I fought hard. 'It's useless to show these people any consideration', said the judge. 'They have no finer feelings, no shame. Remove this woman for contempt.'27 But if the judges in the enquiry were playing a pantomime out of Camus' The Outsider, judging everybody by their own standards of propriety in opinion and behaviour, not all the witnesses were as adept as Hewett in resistance. In the climate of prejudice whipped up by Menzies and his acolytes, merely to be named before the commission was damning in the public eye. Among those who appeared were the journalists Rex Chiplin, Rupert Lockwood and Clive Turnbull, the writer and public servant Ric Throssell, and the editor ofMeanjin, Clem Christesen. The questioning of Christesen and his wife Nina brought distress to their parents, particularly

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Nina's father who was an ardent Russian monarchist and was forced to resign his position in the association of emigrant monarchists.28 The Security forces kept up the pressure on intellectuals at all levels. Before the 1954 elections Krygier wrote that a friend of his had a 'Security Report' that would break in the daily press with a 'sensational report of Communist infiltration of Melbourne University'.29 The following year Clem Christesen had to fight off attacks both on Meanjins position at the University of Melbourne and on its funding from the Commonwealth Literary Fund.30 This criticism followed an article by Christesen in which he condemned what he regarded as a new phenomenon for Australia, the deployment of 'a large force of secret police and police agents', and the associated activities of the Association for Cultural Freedom. While we may question the novelty of the phenomenon, Christesen was undoubtedly right in his identification of its consequences: 'The "enemy" at home is identified with the national, "official," enemy', and finally the authorities 'identify all dissent and nonconformity with "disloyalty" and service to the "enemy's" cause.'31 Fiona Capp, whose study of writers and Security shows that the surveillance of writers and political activists goes back in this country at least to the 1920s, describes the offence taken by Wentworth to this article and the urgency with which ASIO treated his complaint.32 Christesen had suspected the Congress and its Australian affiliate from the first. In 1954 he published a 'London Letter' from Patrick Carpenter, who attacked Encounter, the Congress's London journal, not only because it was crudely anti-communist, but because it was part of the American cultural tide sweeping Britain in such forms as films, comic books and modern art, all perceived as anti-humanist.33 A note in the next issue, which expressed surprise at the establishment of an Australian branch of an organization described as being 'dominated by fanatical Russia-hating ex-Communists' which put cultural freedom 'nowhere', drew a letter in response from the Australian President, Sir John Latham.34 Christesen replied to this in a long letter that gave vent to the frustration he felt after giving fourteen years of his life to establishing and maintaining a journal devoted to the expansion of cultural freedom through the publication of creative and critical writing. Now he found appearing in the same field a new organization whose members had no record of support for any form of culture. Latham himself was the only one who even subscribed to Meanjin. It seemed to Christesen that the one way he could further extend this support was by descending to the same kind of partisan policies followed by Encounter?0 His attitude to these policies was conveyed in the final issue of the year, which contained not only his editorial attack on the secret police but also a forum on the Congress.36

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The forum was not the simple attack on the Congress that Krygier interpreted it as. It opened with an article by Latham that stated the rationale for the Congress and included in his essay an attack on McCarthyism as being, like nazism and communism, an instrument of thought control. Christesen demonstrated his own commitment to open discussion by including Menzies' William Queale Memorial Lecture, which was an argument for the greater social responsibility of government and the 'continuity of these great freedoms of the mind and of the spirit which democracy is destined to serve.' These Burkean sentiments were not, however, shared by all. In a letter to Latham, Christesen complained that one E.D. Lloyd, a barrister and member of the Association, had come to the Meanjin office and demanded to see the material he intended to publish about the Congress. Lloyd, Christesen claimed, had described Meanjin as 'deliberately slanted to the Left' and its editor as 'naive and stupid'.37 Lloyd was a minor player in what can only be described as a continuing McCarthyist crusade against leftist influences in Australian political and intellectual life. It was not a reasoned attempt to demonstrate the evils of communism or the excesses of socialism, but constituted a determined campaign to discredit anyone who disagreed with conservative views of the world and to deny them access to any position from which they might influence thought or action. The whole campaign was profoundly undemocratic, based on an inability to believe that people could make their own judgements or control their own reading or their own organizations. Ironically, communist theories of a vanguard party organized around the mechanisms of democratic centralism show the same distrust of the people. Yet, just as members of the Communist Party continued to believe that they could build a revolutionary consciousness on their industrial successes, so their enemies feared they might prove to be right. Turner's recollections of his own time as a union militant show how these hopes were blunted by the need to compromise political for industrial aims, and by the healthy scepticism of his fellows.38 Industrial capitalism had integrated workers to their own satisfaction, and economism necessarily defeated ideology. As in the unions, so it was to prove in the repeated attempts to turn institutions like Overland or the Australasian Book Society into vehicles of a revolutionary working-class culture, which were undone as much by a failure to perceive the actual situation of the working class as by the sectarianism of their supporters. Ill By 1956 the Petrov Commission had done its work and Evatt was politically dead. However, rightists like Krygier and McAuley were still convinced that

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the left dominated universities, newspapers, and journals of opinion. The campaign therefore shifted to the last of these, both polemically through the columns of Quadrant and other publications promoted by the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, and politically in the struggle for funds, particularly through the Commonwealth Literary Fund. The irony of this struggle is that, despite its political correctness and the support it had in Federal Cabinet, Quadrant had almost as much difficulty in obtaining funding as did Overland. This difficulty arose from the dual system of dispensing money from the Commonwealth Literary Fund. Applications were first considered by an Advisory Board whose members were leading writers. These recommendations went to the Political Committee, which was constituted from party leaders in the House of Representatives. If the Advisory Board did not make a recommendation supporting Quadrant, it would have been unacceptably obtrusive for the Political Committee to have made a grant. The reluctance of the Board may well have been due, as Krygier suspected, to the political inclinations of its members, but equally it may have been a product of their attempt to maintain the distinction, which Menzies had supported, between literary and political. Tom Inglis Moore, for example, claimed in a letter to Judah Waten that there was not 'a shred of evidence' that the refusal of a grant to Laurence Collinson had any political dimension. 'The [Advisory] Board', he argued, 'has always maintained a high standard of integrity in its decisions in making them on literary grounds regardless of politics.'39 The internal correspondence of the publishers of these journals suggests that they were kept well aware of the way their politics were interpreted by the Board. Krygier reports to Geneva on the progress of his applications, and Tom Inglis Moore seems to have kept both Christesen and Murray-Smith informed. The responses to the Fund's politics are suggested in a letter in which Geoff Serle advised Clem Christesen that he had received a letter from Tom [Inglis Moore] indicating the CLF's literal interpretation of 'literary', and warned him to ensure that 'your purely literary content is over half each issue and always higher than Quadrant's (emphasis in original).40 The first application by Overland for funding was made in 1955, when the editor asked for £200 on the basis of sales of 4300 for issue number 4. At the time, the journal had £20 in the bank, £15 owed to it, and debts of £20.41 The first application of Quadrant was made in 1957, when Krygier reported failure, despite Menzies' promise to 'see to it' that the grant would be available twelve months after the journal was first published.42 At this time Quadrant was operating on a budget of £2150, with receipts of £1270 and the deficit borne by the Australian committee, which in turn received funds from Congress in Geneva.43 The following

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year, Krygier again had to advise his employers of lack of success, but added that he was lobbying to have the decision reversed, and, 'most confidentially', that 'both the Prime Minister and the Minister for External Affairs have again renewed their promise to obtain for us some funds from their friends, over and above any Literary Fund subsidy.'44 Despite their ideological differences, the publishers were united in indigence. The Board of the Commonwealth Literary Fund was sympathetic to the needs of new magazines, but was itself constrained by limited funds. Inglis Moore explained to Turner that the members were not prepared to abolish or cut grants to Southerly and Meanjin, and that although he would like to see further grants, the other members did not wish to spend more on magazines. They could not give £1000 to each of the newcomers, and they did not want to give smaller amounts lest invidious comparisons be made. He suggested therefore that they make common cause with Westerly, Australian Letters and Quadrant.45 This suggestion bore some fruit. Krygier and Murray-Smith reached an understanding to join with Australian Letters 'in our fight to secure the Commonwealth Literary Fund grant.' Krygier noted that Overland was 'battling to remain open to the Communist left', but advised that 'Naturally Murray-Smith did not ask me for any financial help nor did I offer him any', although he felt he might be approached for assistance in the future.46 By this time Krygier's own needs were urgent, as Quadrant had debts of £1500 which were concerning Congress officials in Europe. Krygier assured them that there was no crisis, and that economies were in train to contain the debts.47 The common front did not however survive Murray-Smith's suggestion that the three magazines should split the £1000 that seemed to be on offer. Max Harris, publisher of Australian Letters, told Murray-Smith that he and McAuley agreed that such a proposition would be an insult. 'Needless to say', Murray-Smith advised Turner, 'you can tell anyone you see on this matter that Overland wouldn't be insulted.'48 Unfortunately that insult never came. Two years later, Overland was insulted when the Political Committee at last received a recommendation to fund the new magazines. The Advisory Board recommended grants of £1000 to Meanjin and Southerly, and £250 to Overland, Quadrant and Australian Letters. This was based on an assessment the Board had made of the 'literary' content of the last four issues of each journal, which had found that Overland had 30 per cent of political material to 70 per cent of literary, and Quadrant the reverse. At the meeting of the Political Committee, Menzies immediately approved the grants to Australian Letters and Quadrant. Then, Picking up copies of Overland, he looked through them, then said that he was opposed to a grant for this magazine. He did not think it a reputable literary

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magazine. Its standards were much lower than the others. (I gather he also made other comments: he is stated, for example, to be allergic to Ian Turner.) Hefinallysaid that he wouldn't agree to a grant for Overland.

Calwell, the Labor member of the Committee, spoke for Overland, but it was rejected on the vote of the third member, Hugh Roberton, representing the Country Party.49 Murray-Smith was not the only person offended by the Committee's actions. Krygier informed Latham that Quadrant had been successful and that the Prime Minister had vetoed the grant to Overland, but also wrote that he had been advised to reject the grant because it was not at the same level as that given to Meanjin and Southerly. Latham, sensibly and tersely, replied, 'take -with thanks.'50 Overlandhad to endure one more rejection the following year, when one member of the Advisory Board 'bitterly attacked Overland on literary grounds at the Advisory Board meeting which preceded the full meeting'. The recommendation was therefore not unanimous, and Menzies again rejected it on the grounds of 'literary doubt'. Yet the most recent issue had been praised even by such a staunch advocate of literary standards as Leonie Kramer, who had commended it on the ABC, where she commented that 'If the current issue of Southerly is possibly one of the worst to have appeared, the current issue of Overland is certainly one of the best ...'51 Menzies' literary doubts were a cover for his political distaste. Although Overland by this time was scarcely a revolutionary medium, Menzies may have been influenced by its involvement in the issues of Aborigines and New Guinea, by its continuing commitment to civil liberties and criticism of mainstream culture, and certainly by its refusal to embrace the straightforward anti-communism of Quadrant. In the issues published in 1960 and 1961, the editor welcomed the visit of a delegation of Soviet writers, and praised the Soviet attitude to literature and culture, including its publication of translations of Australian authors. Elizabeth [Vassilieff] Wolf stridently attacked a hostile Quadrant review of recent books in which Australian writers praised China. Wolf's article, which caused much anguish at Quadrant, represented the attitude at the time of much of the Australian left, including the authors concerned, to both China and the Soviet. She rejected the criticisms because they were made by an American academic, and praised the books because they understood the simple truth that in China throughout her history it has been the neglect of the common man that has been the chief cause of the recurrent popular risings and has laid the seed for the eventual overthrow of the old order; that the strength of the new order in China lies precisely in the enthusiastic support given to it by all classes of people in the conviction that it is concerned

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to serve their interests. Indeed, I think it is probably the most popular government that has existed in world history! (Overland, 18, I960, p. 45)

This characteristic leftist acceptance of intention and proclamation as reality strengthened the rightist rejection by the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom and its allies of any possible good in communism or any weakness in the capitalism or imperialism that engendered revolution. It meant that no dialogue was possible between the two sides. Overland would however have offended the right during these years on several other matters. Two articles in issue 17 examined sympathetically the work of Don McLeod and his associates in challenging the mining companies and pastoralists and supporting the Pindan Aboriginal Cooperative in Western Australia. Issue 20 carried an attack by Jim Cairns on the new Commonwealth Crimes Act, which attempted by stealth to ban the opinions that the Communist Dissolution Bill had failed to suppress openly. The double issue for Winter-Spring 1963 (numbers 27-28) contained a strong attack on censorship, led by an article by Max Harris about 'The Decaying World of Senator Henty'. Overland's most serious offence at this time was probably the publication in issue 20, Autumn 1961, of an article by Brian Cooper on 'The BirthPangs of a Nation'. Cooper, who was at the time on bail awaiting the result of his appeal against a conviction of subversion, disclosed the mutinies and violent demonstrations that gave the lie to the government's claims of peaceful development in Papua New Guinea. His conviction by the New Guinea Supreme Court was on the basis of a speech favouring independence for New Guinea. The chief witness was a man who had been shown particular favour by the responsible minister, Paul Hasluck, who, on the day prior to the preliminary hearing, had appointed him as the first New Guinea member of the Copra Marketing Board. The trial itself was a part of the whole effort by Menzies, Hasluck and the Attorney-General, Sir Garfield Barwick, to suppress opposition to any government policies, a reflection of the 'paranoid fear of subversion' that gripped them at this time. Menzies himself dismissed opposition as part of the Communist campaign to undermine the Security Service and, in 'the interests of their foreign masters', weaken the government's attempts to 'increase the defence of the nation against treachery and sabotage'.52 Cooper lost his appeal, and Menzies rejected the Overland grant. In 1963 Overland published an open letter to the Commonwealth Literary Fund. This was signed by twelve professors of English, including James McAuley. The letter sought more general support for literary magazines and deplored attempts to distinguish 'purely literary magazines and others of a more mixed character'. In the same issue the

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editor announced that the Commonwealth Literary Fund had made a grant to cover the journal's accumulated deficit. The following year Westerly, previously considered too local and insufficiently literary, received an establishment grant, and Overland wasfinallygiven an annual grant on the same basis as Quadrant and Australian Letters.™ The eagerness to persecute those of different political bent long outlived the Petrov Royal Commission and its immediate aftermath. As late as 1969, Billy Mackie Snedden, Leader of the House of Representatives and Minister for Immigration in the Liberal-Country Party government, defended the withdrawal, after its announcement, of a grant of $3000 to Frank Hardy on the grounds that 'grants could not be made to people who were or had been Communists'.54 Thus did fear continue to mould the politics of the right to keep thought frozen in the sterile attitudes of the Cold War.

SEVEN

Proprietors at War New Journalism in the Lucky Country

In 1964, Rupert Murdoch's establishment of the Australian signalled a daring gamble by him and the end of the old order for Australia's other newspaper proprietors. Originally published from Canberra, its importance was not just that it was the first general national daily in the country, but that it was the first Australian newspaper to seek an appropriate function in a world that used television as its primary source of news. It was also thefirstdaily to address directly the new class of the tertiary educated. The members of this new class were at odds with the old establishment that continued to see the world in terms of the Cold War and our dependency on great powers. They were interested in events in the world beyond Australia, and in establishing our own relationships with the newly independent countries to our north. The first issue of the new paper met these interests by including three pages of world news, and it continued to report extensively on American politics, on defence, and on Australia's policies towards Asia.1 The view of the establishment was enunciated in the fourth issue in a statement from Paul Hasluck, Minister for External Affairs, who was reported as claiming that 'A shadow of fear hangs over all South-East Asia'. The shadow was that of communism, which was seen as the force dominating activity in Sukarno's Indonesia, in Malaysia, and in Indochina, where both American and Australian military forces were already engaged. Only four months after the paper's first issue, the Menzies government overruled its military advisors to introduce conscription in reaction to this induced climate of fear.2 I The establishment of the Australian was a response to a number of disparate changes that had been developing in Australian society for 127

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some years. Most important was the commencement of television broadcasting in 1956. This made an immediate impact through the telecasting by GTV9 (Channel 9) of the Melbourne Olympic Games, which themselves, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary earlier in the year, were a political as well as a sporting event. They celebrated internationalism by their carefully cultivated image as the friendly games, transcending mere politics like the Soviet invasion of Hungary or the British and French invasion of Suez. The Australian media, following the lead of television, emphasized national contests like the riveting twilight final of the high jump, with Australian Chilla Porter carrying the weight of national expectations with him over the bar. The Russian and Hungarian teams in the water-polo final stained the pool with their blood as they refought the battle for Budapest before the electronic viewer. And the heroic Russian distance runner, Vladimir Kutz, relentlessly pounded the track to remind the viewing world of the individual object of the forces of politics. Colin Bednall, first general manager of Channel 9, has explained how the station, using makeshift transmission facilities and an experimental licence, was able to bring these events to the world. Its competitor, Channel 7, unsuccessful in a challenge to the legality of 9's broadcasts, did not realize that it could have stopped them by raising one of its advertising signs to block the line-of-site transmission from the Melbourne Cricket Ground to the transmitter on Mt Dandenong.3 By its success, Channel 9 established the Olympics as a global television event, itself as an all-Australian channel, and television as an Australian household necessity. Murdoch's establishment of the A ustralian inaugurated changes in both the readership and the patterns of ownership of Australian newspapers. Its first editor, Maxwell Newton, had already succeeded in transforming the Financial Review, published from Sydney byJohn Fairfax, from a weekly into a Monday-to-Friday daily. This success followed the national integration of Australian capital markets and management networks whose needs could no longer be met by the business sections of state dailies. The publication of the Australian, and the simultaneous transformation of the Canberra Times into a newspaper with a national as well as a provincial interest, anticipated the requirements of the class entering careers in management, public service and education. The strains on government of providing the facilities to prepare this class were suggested by a report in the first issue of the Australian that the 'establishment of diploma-conferring colleges and increased status for technological colleges are two of the important recommendations of the Sir Leslie Martin committee of enquiry into tertiary education in Australia, and it may spark a controversy in academic circles.' These circles had been subject to continuous change since the war. Whereas

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prewar universities had been training schools for small elites in the traditional professions, during and after the war they steadily assumed the dual functions of research institutions and agencies of specialist education for all professions. The Chifley Labor government founded the Australian National University and introduced the Commonwealth Rehabilitation and Training and then the Commonwealth Scholarship schemes. Change continued under the Menzies governments as the Commonwealth assumed increasing responsibility for university finances. In 1958 the New South Wales University of Technology became the University of New South Wales and Monash University was founded. In 1964 Macquarie, in 1967 La Trobe University, and then second universities in the other mainland states, were established. Now, in response to the Martin Report, the Commonwealth government assisted in funding a major expansion of tertiary education through the establishment of the binary system of tertiary education which upgraded technical colleges and, later, teachers' colleges to Colleges of Advanced Education. The Australian grew in symbiotic relationship with these new institutions. In its earlier years, despite some uncertainty and unevenness it met the needs of their staff and graduates by providing comprehensive international news, complementing its reporting with extensive analysis and interpretation, and adopting a relatively radical editorial posture. The initial slow growth in its readership and profitability showed that this new class was not yet economically strong enough to sustain a national newspaper, and after 1972 it took a more conservative stance and expanded its business sections in an attempt to integrate its professional and managerial readership, the product of the expanded universities, with geriatric investors soured by the new world order of which the newspaper itself was a part. The establishment of the Australian would not have been possible without the personal ambition of its proprietor. Rupert Murdoch's father, Sir Keith, had attempted to establish a nationwide network of newspapers from his Melbourne base in the Herald and Weekly Times Ltd. This business was based on the principle of monopolizing individual state markets but allowing them to operate independently. His main rivals were the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age, both controlled by their founding families and staidly respectable, and the Melbourne Argus. In the early 1950s the Argus, once the pillar of Melbourne conservatism but after 1949 owned by the London Daily Mirror group, mounted a vigorous challenge to the serious but populist style of the Melbourne Herald and Sun. Somewhat in the fashion of the Sydney Daily Telegraph during Brian Penton's time as editor, it developed a style of radical tabloid journalism that provoked thought rather than comforted prejudice. Its strong visual layout reinforced its print to

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provide in easily assimilable form the kind of information and analysis that would become the staple of television. Among the talented team of writers it assembled was Peter Russo, an incisive commentator with long experience in Asia whom Menzies was later to attempt to have excluded from the ABC.4 His daily Argus column on domestic and foreign politics provided one of the few alternatives to the prevailing consensus of anticommunist conservatism. But when, after Murdoch's death in 1952, an internal upheaval in London led to the Argus being placed on the market, his successors at the Herald and Weekly Times moved quickly to buy it, close it down and ship its presses overseas to ensure that no potential competitor could get hold of them. Technically, Murdoch had been only an employee of his company, and his empire did not survive his death, when only the Adelaide evening newspaper, the News, remained in the control of the family. His son Rupert, according to his biographer, William Shawcross, determined to achieve his father's ambitions by using other people's money without ever making his mistake of being an employee of his financiers.5 With Rohan Rivett, who had been his friend and mentor in England, and whom his father had appointed as editor of the News, Rupert Murdoch converted the Newsmto a crusading paper and a strong competitor for the morning paper the Advertiser, an associate of the Herald and Weekly Times group. The News took up the case of Rupert Stuart, an Aborigine sentenced to hang after being convicted for murder in very dubious circumstances. The paper forced the government to establish a Royal Commission and eventually to commute the death sentence, but in doing so aroused the wrath of the Adelaide establishment. The campaign, which was well covered by the Sydney fortnightly Nation, raised the paper's reputation but did nothing for its circulation or advertising. After Rivett had successfully fought off criminal libel charges brought against him by the state government, Rupert Murdoch sacked him as editor.6 The struggle for justice was not compatible with commercial success in the small state market. Time would show that crusading also did not fit into Murdoch's ambitions for the national market he constructed through the Australian. Unpopular causes were to remain the province of the alternative press that emerged timidly into the commercial sphere at this time with Nation and the Observer, and entered its full flowering in the 1960s. Murdoch had used the assets of the News as security to raise the capital for a series of takeovers that made him first the proprietor of a chain of Sydney suburban weeklies and then of its Daily Mirror group, which at the time included the weekly scandal-sheet Truth. For a while he tried to convert this into a serious popular weekly, The New Truth, but when this failed to recruit readers he quickly reverted to its earlier style. During the same period, he changed the name of the holding company from Truth

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and Sportsman Ltd, explaining with rare candour that these terms no longer accurately described the company's business. The production and distribution facilities he obtained through his takeovers provided the basis for the publication of the Australian, and their revenue covered its losses. In essence this has been the strategy he has followed in his subsequent development of a global media empire. At the same time, he began to extend his interests into the electronic media by acquiring in 1962 a shareholding in Channel 9 in Sydney and Melbourne. In this he appeared merely to be following the example of other newspaper proprietors, but whereas they had used their television holdings to protect their press interests, Murdoch was to recognize them as central to a media empire. Just as his establishment of the Australian recognized the obsolescence of locally owned newspaper businesses, so his later activities have anticipated and accelerated the obsolescence of sources of information and entertainment that are nationally owned, dependent on a single medium, and responsible to state, shareholders or consumers.7 II Yet while the Australian raised the standards of daily journalism, it did not satisfy a need long felt by left-wing activists and intellectuals generally for a quality alternative press. The Communist Party had responded with various journalistic and literary publications, but these rarely achieved a readership outside the ranks of the faithful. Labor's own weekly newspapers were at best sectarian and polemical. For some years before 1949 the parliamentarian and journalist Allan Fraser published the Australian Independent Monthly, and then in 1951 Harold Levien published the first issue of Voice, a monthly journal that was to run until 1956. Its initial capital was £200, half from Levien's savings and half from advance subscriptions. In Levien's words, the journal gave expression to his ambition 'to help shape a more rational society providing enhanced opportunities for intellectual and spiritual growth' and playing 'a significant role in increasing the opportunities for such growth in the underdeveloped countries'. The obstacles to this ambition were, he believed, the inefficient use of resources, the concentrated ownership of the mass media, an antipathy to social regulation and an insular attitude to Asia that led to a concentration on defence rather than aid.8 These were the ideas not only of postwar reconstruction, but of the new class graduating from the universities that had expanded as a part of this reconstruction. Levien attributed the failure of Voice to the unwillingness of the Australian establishment, political and financial, to support public debate. His journal, according to his account, was vilified in parliament and privately as Communist. The businessmen from whom he sought

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advertising procrastinated and prevaricated and, when they did respond, expected vast returns of favour in exchange for their meagre contributions. The left matched this meanness of spirit when it withdrew its subscriptions and vilified Voice supporters after Levien published an editorial critical of Dr Evatt's attack on Catholic Action in the Labor Party. It took more than twelve months for its subscriptions to return to their former level of 4000, which was insufficient to guarantee survival. After the failure of an appeal to raise £10,000 in shares, the journal closed. Significantly, the new subscribers in its last months were 'nonparty readers and intellectual Labor supporters' rather than the 'fairly zealous non-intellectual members' who had provided its original readership.9 These intellectual supporters represented the class which, during the further sixteen years it was to be excluded from participation in political power, put a great deal of its energies into developing its ideas through a succession of alternative journals. The inclusion of Levien's memoir in Quadrant shows that journal's ambition to place itself within the same group. Voices place on the left was taken to some extent by the two-monthly journal, Outlook, established in Sydney in 1956 by Helen Palmer. Like Overland, Outtookwzs able to call on the support of left-wing intellectuals who had withdrawn from the Communist Party after the revelations about Stalin and Khrushchev's invasion of Hungary, as well as of the democratic socialists who sought a transformation of society but had never accepted the Communist Party as the means. This ensured that Outlook and anyone associated with it were vilified by the leadership of the Australian Communist Party.10 Ironically, the Outlook committee later had to remove several former Communists among its members, including Ken Gott and David Bearlin, because they had become too vehement in their attacks on the Victorian ALP.11 Ill Meanwhile, there was a significant change in the range of news magazines when, in 1958, Donald Home persuaded his employer, Sir Frank Packer, to launch the Observer, and Tom Fitzgerald commenced publication of Nation, a similar fortnightly journal of news, analysis and opinion. The two journals, although serving a like readership, were quite dissimilar in their politics and material circumstances. By agreement with Packer, Nation appeared on alternative Fridays to the Observer. The Observerfirstappeared on 22 February 1958, and Nation on 26 September of the same year.12 Fitzgerald, the financial editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, was a liberal who believed that neither of the main political parties allowed space for his

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viewpoint. Becoming dissatisfied with his lack of journalistic independence, he decided to publish a paper of his own, and was surprised when the Heraldagreed to allow him to continue in his employment while doing so. Home on the other hand had stood as a Conservative candidate for the House of Commons and now edited the Observer in the time he could make available from his main task of producing the populistjournal Weekend. He was a friend of James McAuley, although at this time he was critical of McAuley's associates in the AACF. By 1960 however Richard Krygier was able to report to his employers that 'Our relationship with THE OBSERVER has become rather close'. He indicated that he supplied Congress material to the journal - as indeed he did to many others in Australia - and claimed that through it 'we dispose of a national magazine the whole editorial team of which is very closely interested in our work and supporting our objectives.' Home certainly did not see his position in this light, and claims that for much of its life the Observer was highly critical of the Congress.13 Home proclaimed the stance of the Observer as 'radical conservative'. Although this was partly a continuation of his Andersonian scepticism, not to say journalistic cynicism, it was also an expression of the general feeling that Australia had lost its way, that the Cold War had produced political ossification.14 This was even more strongly expressed in Nation, which adopted a strong liberal position. The two journals were able to secure contributions, often pseudonymous, from journalists who could not get them published by their mainstream employers, and shared a generally critical and irreverent attitude to the establishment. Nation specialized in well-researched analyses of financial skulduggery in the business world. Both papers were able, through their proprietors, to obtain national distribution, an essential factor in their success.15 By contrast with the Observer, which was financially secure as long as Packer remained interested in it, Nations only support came from a £5000 mortgage Fitzgerald took out on his house. Twice during its history, Fitzgerald refused offers that would have made him financially secure, but at the cost of his independence. This attitude was shared by his deputy and finance manager, George Munster, an intellectual of Austrian descent whose apparently bohemian lifestyle belied a shrewd insight into worldly affairs and a capacity to manage. The new paper quickly established its reputation with lengthy articles on such matters as the battle for the international soap market and the spread of breakfast foods, its sprightly headlines, detailed reporting on politics, the churches, and the media, and regular analyses of the affairs of Australia's northern neighbours, particularly New Guinea, Indonesia and the Malay states. Its consistent criticism both of the government and of the antediluvian leadership and factions of the Labor Party was not, as with

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the Observer, a matter of style, but reflected an impatience with a politics locked into outdated certainties. Chief among these was the White Australia Policy, which the Labor Party continued to endorse long after the government had started to weaken its application. In foreign affairs, the paper was from the beginning sceptical about conscription for overseas military service, but, although it was critical of American policy and South Vietnamese corruption, it consistently proposed that the war in Vietnam should be ended by a political solution based on the military strength of the south and its allies. Only after the My Lai massacre did an editorial, in issue number 283, 13 December 1969, recognize the war as a civil conflict and call unconditionally for it to be ended. The paper's more significant achievements included its exposure of the behaviour of the South Australian government and courts in the Stuart case, its discrediting of Australia's censorship laws by, among other things, publishing two chapters from Nabokov's Lolita when its importation into Australia was banned, and its broad coverage of books and the arts. The critic Robert Hughes, who wrote also for the Observer, brought the visual arts out of the realms of the purely aesthetic and into touch with the ordinary experience and intellectual life generally. At the end of 1960, less than three years after the foundation of the Observer, Packer was able to purchase the venerable weekly, the Bulletin, and amalgamated the two magazines under the continuing editorship of Donald Home. The Bulletin, most radical of papers when it was founded in 1880, had been staunchly conservative since the first world war. It remained an important vehicle for publishing fiction and poetry, but its black-and-white art had deteriorated into what Donald Home described as 'girlie jokes, cannibal jokes' that took it down to 'barber's saloon proportions'.16 The influence of its Red Page of book reviews had declined relatively as the metropolitan dailies, particularly the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, expanded and improved their weekend literary pages. It somewhat resembled Overland, looking to a mythical past as its index of the true Australia, although holding up the bush cocky rather than the itinerant worker as its hero. Donald Home's first act, on taking its helm, was to drop the longstanding tribute to prejudice of its masthead declaration, 'Australia for the White Man'. Home worked to enhance the quality of the magazine and to shift it from its attachment to a rural past to a concern with the changes affecting contemporary Australia. He continued to publish fiction, but only when he had work that met his standard. The magazine had already provided the major vehicle for Hal Porter's stories, and Home continued to publish enough of them to provide the greater part of his collection The Cats of Venice, which came out in 1965, after Home's departure and after his successor, Peter Hastings, had dropped poetry and fiction altogether.

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Home even updated the magazine's anti-communism from the 1920s' fear of the Bolshevik menace, captured in Norman Lindsay's cartoons, to a 1960s' concern with domestic subversion promoted to abet communist expansion abroad. The journal appealed to the new managerial readership, conservative in politics, cosmopolitan in style, educated in an English tradition and informed by American fashion. This readership however remained an elite. The Observer had reached a circulation of 8000 at the time of the merger, and the BuUetinhad declined to fewer than 20,000. The circulation of the combined journal reached 40,000 a year after the takeover, but did not pass that figure until a change of policy in 1972.17 While the establishment of Nation and the Observer, and the later development of the Bulletin, represented the beginnings of a vigorous national press, the first publication in 1961 in Perth of a three-weekly paper, the Critic, marked an alternative and concurrent move towards regionalism that was equally a feature of the 1960s. There had of course been vigorous local and national papers at earlier periods in Australia's history. Both the Bulletin and Truth, and later Smith's Weekly, had sought and secured national readerships. Women's journals, before they declined to publications designed by a formula to provide a market for advertisers, had promoted the confidence and skills of women nationwide. Competition had ensured a lively debate among papers in state capitals and even in provincial cities such as Newcastle, Bendigo or Warrnambool. But the independence of the provincial papers was gradually destroyed as better communications brought them into direct competition with the capital city dailies, and competition within the capitals was, in most cases, destroyed by higher production costs and the decline of revenue during the Depression. The attempts by the Argus in Melbourne or the News in Adelaide to revive competition at an intellectual and political level failed because they could not attract sufficient advertising. The alternative press could escape this bind by relying on unpaid contributors and using small job printers to produce their short runs. Their exclusion from the major distribution networks ensured that their runs remained small. The Criticfirstappeared in January 1961 as a two-page broadsheet priced at sixpence. Its interest was artistic rather than political. Declaring that it would 'assess in all directions', it deplored the low standards of the Western Australian press and at the same time dissociated itself from the cliques and politics of the eastern states, from 'the fashionable Melbourne game of Critical Standards', the disciples of A.D. Hope, Peace Conferences and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Its critical content comprised reviews of art, theatre, music and film. In its second issue it revealed that it was published by the Literary Society of the University of Western Australia, edited by F. Arndt, H. Nicholson,

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J. O'Brien and E. Schlusser, and supported by a £45 subsidy from the Arts Union of the University of Western Australia. This issue also adopted the ten-page quarto format that it was to keep through its history. Although the journal retained its emphasis on the arts, it extended its commentary into such wider cultural and social fields as town planning, architecture and education. It criticized new buildings at the university (January 1963), the new social studies course in Western Australian schools (August 1963), the negative attitudes of lord mayoral candidates to cultural issues and educational television (July 1964). Later in the same year, it carried a three-page editorial denouncing the political interference in the ABC that had followed Allan Ashbolt's use of a Tour Corners' program to dissect the RSL (24 November 1964). Although the Critic was primarily a journal of arts criticism, the course of events involved it more directly in wider social and political issues. Its attacks on the sacking of the Perth city planner in 1967 led to its being attacked in the state parliament by one M.N. Guthrie, a Liberal member who declared that 'The sooner we put a few nails in the coffins of these so-called experts the better it will be for democracy in this country' (reported 15 September 1967). In its later years, it carried longer, more analytical articles on such issues as the state of the universities or of the arts in the general polity. A polemical essay by Patrick O'Brien used a national example to raise the international question of standards and progress in the arts and their relation to the social conditions of their time. With characteristic vitriol he attacked Melbourne's home of the new drama, La Mama theatre, where, he claimed, the 'second hand politics of the absurd [were] being acted out when the first hand, real life experiences are so depressingly all round us' (27 February 1970). Dorothy Hewett, by contrast, argued, in an article entitled 'A Strange Case of Sadomasochism', that the fault of Australian theatre was its refusal or inability to treat playwrights seriously. These changes in content, and complementary changes in format, were however not enough to keep the journal alive, and the issue that carried Hewett's article, 21 August 1970, was its last. In its decade of existence it had demonstrated that the regional need not be parochial nor the national insular. IV Meanwhile, in the national press the Bulletin recovered the kind of influence it had had in its earliest years, although it was now clearly speaking for urban managers rather than farmers, bushmen and workers. In 1962 Donald Home was succeeded as its editor by Peter Hastings, who in turn gave way in 1964 to Peter Coleman. Before his appointment, Coleman had edited a collection of essays, Australian

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Civilization, which offered a sceptical perspective on the traditional interpretations of the radical nationalists. After his departure, Home started work on The Lucky Country, a vigorous and highly critical analysis of Australian society and the complacent myopia of its ruling elites.18 Presciently, but perhaps optimistically, he included a discussion of Australia's transition to a republic. The book also marks a further change in his thinking, and in the intellectual climate, as it moves to a radical liberalism that was to supersede both the radical conservatism that he had identified with as editor of the Observer and the liberal conservatism that characterized Coleman's anthology and continued to be the dominant note of Quadrant during his terms as associate editor and editor. Between them, these two volumes represent the radical conservatives of the generation that had come of age during the war. Unlike their elders, they had no servile attachment to King and Empire, but their scepticism, particularly about governments, kept them apart from the idealistic revolutionaries or democratic socialists of their own generation. Their liberalism, their belief in the importance of the individual and of ideas, allowed them to transcend the reactionary anti-communism of many of their associates. Yet, just as the postwar socialists failed to build the foundations of an alternative culture in Australia, so the radicals failed to discover the foundations of a new conservatism. Their failure reinforces Tim Rowse's argument that among Australian intellectuals liberalism has always been the dominant ideology, serving to disguise class and imperial interests and to prevent the emergence of a politics of real change.19 Instead, all political parties have concurred in the development of a corporate state that leaves intact the power of overseas and local capital. This argument fails to recognize that the corporate state and its institutions, such as the Reserve Bank or the legally sanctioned system of industrial relations, have allowed some direction of capital to socially beneficial areas and some distribution of excess value to the workers who produce it. More generally, liberal values have encouraged in Australian politics a drift to the centre that has normally both checked extremisms of left and right and made the systems of governance permeable to a plurality of values. Although the intellectual challenges to these values have most frequently come from the left, it is the right that has most often had the will and the power to subvert them. It used its power to do this in the 1930s, and again in the McCarthyist years of the Menzies supremacy in the 1950s and beyond. Home's book, like Peter Coleman's Australian Civilization, challenges these mean spirits, but his liberal attachments prevent him from formulating the kind of conservative defence of the community and its institutions that would provide a basis for protecting society against the assaults of reactionaries.

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The conservative position has always been difficult in settler societies where all institutions are necessarily inherited and therefore tainted with the odour of the imperial masters. Liberalism, starting from the concept of the individual, free of all cultural burdens, as the master of his own destiny, is far more attractive. Its fault is that it holds up a false hope of freedom that fails to acknowledge the prior role of society in producing the individual, and consequently the centrality of institutions in maintaining the conditions of freedom. Coleman, in the introduction to his symposium, both complains that Australian historians of the left have paid insufficient attention to such institutions as universities, schools and the church, and expresses his fear that the 'increase in institutionalized intelligence, whether in the universities, the various Commonwealth research organizations, the Australian Broadcasting Commission or the Treasury' may reduce 'the spirit of freedom' as it leads to the supplanting ofAustralianismbya'newsmanagerialism' (pp. 10-11). Neither Coleman nor his contributors establish a conservative analysis of the function of institutions that could have provided a basis for opposition to the corporatism that in the later part of the century has developed from neoclassic liberal economics. In the name of individualism, this weakened the ability of the state to provide a bulwark between the individual and powerful private and international corporations. Like Donald Home, Coleman and his contributors generally struck 'a severely pessimistic note sometimes bordering on pessimism' (p. 11). \fet, whereas in Home's book this tone seemed to come from his exasperation at the refusal of Australians to think critically about themselves and their precarious prosperity, Coleman found in pessimism a reason for optimism, a sign that people were at last starting to look honestly at Australia and its traditions. The pessimism of Coleman's contributors reached its greatest depths in the sardonic gloom of Douglas McCallum, who argued that the Australian egalitarian myths camouflage an insecurity that expresses itself in truculence, conformity and cowardice. The ebullience of his prose however suggests a rejoicing in the delights of provocation rather than a genuine conviction. McCallum's fierce onslaught on all who would impose any restriction on individual freedom was itself a cleansing of the cobwebs of puritanism and intellectual bullying that he found at all levels of Australian life. His refusal to recognize any form of liberty other than the individual, and his belief that we are born as individuals, aligned him firmly with the Andersonian tradition that Manning Clark and Vincent Buckley, in their separate essays, both identified as Sydney's contribution to Australian life. Although Donald Home, in his book, presented an altogether sunnier picture of Australia than did Coleman, his edgy prose emphasizes the irony of his title. Australia was for him the 'lucky country' because its

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people had developed a satisfying and decent way of life, but their luck was in deep jeopardy from the mediocrity of their leaders. 'Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck' (p. 217). He was at his best on the Liberal Party and the age of Menzies, and at his worst on the Labor Party. Writing in 1964, when the two major parties were still led by Menzies and Calwell, he understood the obsolescence of the Liberal Party, its desertion by the intellectuals, and even the tiredness of its anti-communism. His own obsession with communism however prevented him recognizing the same symptoms of weariness in the Labor Party, whose ills he attributed to factional conflict, particularly between the left and the Catholics. Consequently, he failed to identify the essential difference between the closed politics of the Communists, the Democratic Labor Party and their Industrial Groups, and the old left on the one hand, and the open politics of the centre and the new left who were starting to regroup under Whitlam. Even the disastrous electoral defeat of 1966, which Home attributed to Calwell's acceptance of extreme policies, furthered this regrouping by committing the party to oppose the Vietnam war. The Liberal Party's success in 1966 can now be seen as the last domestic victory of the Cold War. In opposing Vietnam, the Labor Party enlisted the support of a generation which saw these Cold War attitudes as irrelevant, and which was certainly not prepared to be conscripted to fight in defence of them. In The Lucky Country Home was alive both to changes in the Australian community as the result of postwar immigration, to changes in attitudes towards Asia, particularly among the educated, and to changes in Asia itself, as well as of the complexity of peoples, cultures and politics within Asia. It was against this background of change that he mounted his criticism of the complacency of Australia's leaders. He was more critical of business leaders than he had been in his essay in Australian Civilization, and he now linked them in his criticism with the leaders of Australian political parties, trade unions, the press and the universities. The nub of his complaint was the lack of interest in ideas which shows itself in a willingness to import technologies, the lazy reliance on tariffs to provide business opportunity, a reliance on British and American models and a lack of awareness of either Asia or Oceania, and the supposed decline in standards of education in schools and universities. Yet, as he argued, it was the products of these schools and the expanded universities who were developing the new attitudes for which he called. These were the people who provided the continuing market for his summons to action, keeping the book in print in three editions over more than a decade. At the end of The Lucky Country, Home examined the factors that could destroy the luck. These included changes in Asia, the development of technology and a decline in our relative economic situation. All these

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have occurred, and we are moving towards the other changes he predicted would be necessary to meet the new challenges: 'Acceptance of the changes of technology, involvement with Asia, the shock ... of declaring Australia a republic' (p. 228). The major change that he saw as necessary, 'accommodation on top to some of the values of ordinary Australians,' has been a more hectic process. In the years after the appearance of his book, a younger generation brought about many of the cultural changes Home foresaw: a greater acceptance of pleasure; an acceptance of the fact that all that one can see of the world is man and his environment; a concern for extreme ease in human relations; the ability to act without fundamental belief, to give it a go.20 Yet along with these changes there was a retreat from reason into the new-age irrationalities of mysticism, and from a healthy hedonism into a narcissistic and puritanical zeal for the health of the body. Yet, despite this retreat, many of the gains of the 1960s have remained. Above all, the 1960s, as a consequence of changes in the nature of the media and in political and cultural comment, generated a new confidence in Australian writing and its place within the international community. This confidence was demonstrated by the 1964 publication by Penguin of a collection of historical and interpretative essays Australian Literature, edited by Geoffrey Dutton. Dutton in 1961 had been one of the founding editors of the first series of the Australian Book Review, and in 1963 one of the founders of the Adelaide review, Australian Letters. In 1961 he, with Max Harris and Brian Stonier, had been appointed to the team that established Penguin Australia as a separate company.21 It was in this capacity that Dutton had encouraged the first publication of Home's The Lucky Country. However, the confidence evidenced by these enterprises was challenged when Penguin England, on the advice of Francis Hope, assistant editor of the London New Statesman and Nation, vetoed the publication of The Penguin New Australian Writing, a collection that Dutton had edited but which Hope considered too lacking in quality to be printed. The collection was eventually published by William Collins as the Fontana Modern Australian Writing, but not before two writers from Monash, Peter Smart and Boyd Oxlade, himself now a published novelist, had in the Australian condemned all Australian writers as 'pitiful' and Australian writing as 'a history of plagiarism, dreariness and inanity'. In another letter to the editor, the poet Bev Roberts used the occasion to condemn 'the apparent mediocrity of our writers', which she attributed to 'the national cult of self-conscious anti-intellectualism'.22 Yet, while these battles about the value of the Australian tradition generated combative heat, the new internationalists were preparing an assault that would throw all the traditionalists' values into question.

EIGHT

New Little Magazines Religious Prospect and Secular Dissent

While the older magazines sought new ways of accommodating to changes in old Cold War certainties, a newer generation of editors began to search for fresh starting points. In 1957, Helen Palmer, recently expelled from the Communist Party, had established Outlook, a two-monthly journal that provided news and commentary on current events from a Marxist but nonParty point of view. During its thirteen years of existence, it was distinguished by its interest in issues of education and race matters, in Australia, Latin America and South Africa, and in constructing alternative socialist forms of power through both the trade union movement and parliamentary processes. It was reviled by those who stayed in the Party, who argued that its claim to represent 'the new left' was merely camouflage for attempts to 'tear down' the Soviet Union and, following the 'failure of the Hungarian counter-revolution in 1956' to destroy the 'vitality and strength' of Marxism in the interests of capitalism.1 From the point of view of the new politics, the most important of the new journals were two Melbourne-based publications: the Catholic and communitarian Prospect,firstpublished in 1958, and the secular and socialist Dissent, established in 1961. Despite the differences in their religious stance, they shared some common contributors, and even editors, and both, while remaining sympathetic to Labor, were firmly anticommunist. They differed from the established literary journals by being more concerned with intellectual debate than with fiction, poetry and criticism, or even historical writing. This put them outside the realm of subsidy and within the circle of the university. Dissent considered Outlook, with its inclination to be soft on communism, its chief enemy, while Prospect set itself against the kind of secularism represented by Overland, and objected to the association with the journal of a man like Ian Turner. In return, Turner defended Overland as a journal that tried to build a 141

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community that would stand against the 'despoliation of the minds of the great majority of the people by Admass' and transcend the division between intellectuals and the rest.2 By contrast, their base within a formal intellectual community gave Prospect and Dissent the advantage in mediating the new currents of thought enlivening the Catholic church and the new left. It also produced a certain unworldly idealism that tempered the activity of their contributors in both church and party politics.

Prospect was established in Melbourne in 1958, under the editorship of Paul Simpson and Tony Coady, as a journal concerned with establishing the responsibility of Catholic intellectuals in contemporary society. It grew from the concerns of the 'Apostolate', a group of lay Catholics who had come together in the Newman Society at the University of Melbourne, and were influenced by the university chaplain, Father Jerry Golden, and, more ambivalently, by the fiercely combative anticommunist, Frank Knopfelmacher. Vincent Buckley has written that the new journal was intended to be 'forward-looking, pluralist, a genuine forum, specializing in reviews, poetry, literary and ethical discussion.' It would have no 'standard line', but would 'demonstrate the uselessness of the standard Catholic view by not applying it.'3 Accordingly, it provided a distinctive alternative to the voice of a Christian social order, Twentieth Century, edited from Melbourne by W.G. Smith SJ for the Institute of Social Order. This journal, which was strongly sympathetic to Santamaria and the Movement, published articles supporting the South African rugby tour of Australia and in opposition to the Moratorium demonstrations against Australia's support for the Republic of South Vietnam.4 At the heart of its arguments was the assumption that the state was the only possible guarantor of social order, and therefore had to be protected not only against communist subversion, but also against all those forces, such as the movements against colonialism and racism, that might weaken it. The members of the Apostolate, by contrast, believed that order was built, not given. Prospect shared with Twentieth Century a concern for the nature of community, and for the relationships between the state and the particular communities and individuals who constituted it. For members of the Prospect group, this concern was grounded in the belief that God was incarnate in the lives of individuals who could, through their obedience to the Holy Spirit, recover order within society. This was totally at odds with the view, implicit in Twentieth Century, or in the political activity of the Movement, that the present order of the state had to be

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preserved in order to give room for the agents of the church to work towards the redemption of society. Its incarnational beliefs brought Prospect into conflict not only with the managerial attitudes expressed in Dissent, but also with Santamaria and the Movement, and even with James McAuley, who shared its poetics but not its politics of order. For the Prospect group the church was a community from which the members, while acknowledging its teaching authority, drew the strength to bring its order into their personal, professional and public lives. Prospect expressed the Apostolate ideal of a religiously based community that, by nurturing the spiritual health of its members, enabled them in turn to contribute to the welfare of the wider community through their individual contributions to literature, the arts, education and politics. This differed profoundly from Santamaria's understanding of the church as a disciplined body of believers working together to enforce authoritatively determined principles in all spheres of political life. This did not prevent agreement between the groups in their adamant opposition to communism, or support for state aid to church schools, but even in these cases there was disagreement on details of implementation. Certainly, Prospect writers attacked the ALP over its refusal to acknowledge the justice of some form of state support for church schools, its prevarication about co-operating with Communists in trade union elections, and its failure to protest against Communist manipulation of peace congresses to preconceived determinations, regardless of debate or evidence. But, while agreeing with Santamaria on these subjects, Prospect argued that in their application of religious principles to politics he and his followers failed to distinguish between the church as an organization holding a particular body of principles, as a community of the faithful joined by mystical sanction, and as an authority acting as disinterested arbiter of moral issues.5 Prospect's concern for the value of community took it beyond issues of efficiency, or even of equity, to a real interest in the nature and social function of the arts, and particularly of literature. It also led to a difference in the ways it discussed concerns it shared with the secular Dissent. Both journals took an interest in civil liberties, including the rights of the citizen against the state, and the right of the state to ensure the proper preparation of future citizens. But while Dissent viewed these as matters affecting the efficiency of the polity, Prospect associated them with the nature of the community and the situation of individuals within it. Thus whereas Dissent discussed education largely as a matter of equity, as a means of giving students from all backgrounds access to opportunity for work, power and personal fulfilment, Prospect regarded it as a question of faith, morality and the rights of parents, or fathers, to control the upbringing of their own children. Thus Jim Cairns, writing in Dissent,

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rejected aid for Catholic schools because the Church, in his view, demanded the right to determine the morality of all aspects of human conduct. In Prospect Peter Wertheim argued, not only that this view of Church teaching was wrong, but that as a parent he had the right to choose the elements, including religion, that he considered essential to his children's education.6 Both writers emphasised the tension between the rights of state and individual, whereas John Patterson, writing in Prospectfrom the point of view of a non-Catholic socialist, saw the issue as one of justice.7 A more purely Catholic point of view was argued in Prospect by D.J. McKenna, who concentrated on the role of churches in the Australian community. McKenna argued that the Catholic Church is not an authoritarian institution imposing its views on the state, but a community with binding authority over faith and morals for those who by a free act of conscience accept this authority. Its claim for the authority to teach their children is therefore for the parents a matter of faith, but for the state a matter ofjustice.8 Prospect's discussions of education were closely entwined with its general interest in culture. This followed from the concept of incarnation, the body of God made flesh in the world through the community of the church. The members of this community are obviously bound by the teachings of the Church on social and political issues, but these teachings provide the starting point for social engagement, not a set of rules and policies for implementation. The consequent concern for the cultural health of the community, expressed particularly by Vincent Buckley, drew not only on Catholic sources, but also on the critical tradition that, going back through F.R. Leavis to Matthew Arnold, understood this health in spiritual or moral rather than material terms. So, in a discussion of the mood of neutralism among students and intellectuals, Buckley neither welcomed it as a means to a peaceful world nor condemned it as a surrender to communism. Rather, he analysed it as a symptom of the confusion and withdrawal that surrender the public sphere to manipulative activists. This confusion he traced in turn to the 'men of the thirties', who, after finding the simple commitments of their youth betrayed, used their awareness of moral complexity as an excuse for neither working nor speaking, but retreating into despair.9 Buckley extended this view in a later article on the universities, where he wrote of the pressures, from size, bureaucracy and the alienation of academic staff, which were leading the university to lose sight of its central reason for existence. In contrast to the managerialism of the Dissent group, he insisted on seeing institutions, like universities or the church, not in terms of goals and outcomes, but rather of their function as institutions constituent of the greater society.10 If their health fails, so does the whole community.


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Another member of the Apostolate, Tony Coady, in one of a series of articles that took up Buckley's remarks on neutralism, summarized the mission of the Church as 'the realization and full living of the doctrinal fact of the Incarnation in her members'. Coady, examining the consequences of this mission for the question of neutralism, concluded that the significant neutralism of the time was the separation of religion from the world, either by withdrawal into private pietism, or by the exclusion of religion from social involvement.11 This view of religion as providing a base of faith from which one becomes involved in the world, of a church 'for man's sake', is diametrically opposed to the concept of Santamaria and the Movement of the Church Militant as a disciplined body going forth into the world to impose on the polity its particular answers to social and moral problems. Even on the common ground of opposition to communism the two groups took opposite stands, the one resisting all forms of totalitarianism, the other engaging in tactical and organizational warfare. The issue of culture was by no means confined to questions of religion or the organized church. In fact one of the most complete expressions of Buckley's attitudes is found in his discussion of C.P. Snow's work in relation to his lecture on the two cultures of science and the humanities. Buckley, following Leavis, found Snow's understanding of the humanities 'disgracefully inadequate'. He pointed out that rather than there being two cultures, technology was in fact ensuring that the world became culturally unified, and argued that, while arts scholars should certainly be concerned with the implications of science, the common concern for both scientists and humanists is human achievements and their problems. The value of literature is that it provides criteria by which we can assess these achievements. ... my own study, the study of literature, releases a man in the fullest way (short of the supernatural life) to a sense of his own and his neighbour's destiny as persons, and to an awareness of the marvellous richness of the natural world, the marvellous complexity of the social world, in which we all live. And this is a bit more than pursuing a study which has a 'moral component up to its bone'.12 This sense of culture as being like religion in providing a fullness of life informs the major part of Prospect's writing, and certainly that contributed by members of the Apostolate. It can be seen in the reviews of collections of poetry and exhibitions of painting, and in the editorial decision to include in each issue not a sprinkling of poems, but two full pages to display the work of one, or at most two, poets. It did not, however, prevent the journal from engaging in detailed political dispute with Santamaria and the Movement, or, when occasion called, with the

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bishops, nor from publishing fiery polemic by contributors like Peter Kelly, who was one of the first to use the term 'left liberal' as an expression of contempt,13 but it did ensure that its readers were taken beyond the rhetorical superficialities of political and religious debate. In keeping with its profession of Catholicism in the widest sense, and its mission of lay apostolicism, Prospect's contribution to culture took the form of a sense of order rising from the natural to the sublime. This ideal was expressed early in an article in which Alec Hope attacked the kind of literary ideals espoused by such journals as Overland. He argued that to judge literature by its commitment, whether to socialism, nationalism or a religion, is to impose on it a double standard. Literature is either good or bad as literature, and not by any other standard. Were this all he argued, there would be nothing remarkable about the article, which would be no more than another exercise in aestheticism. But he did not leave it there, choosing instead to consider the work of such committed writers as John Milton or Jonathan Swift, both of whom, he claimed, wrote literature of the highest quality not despite but because of their commitment. The essential issue for him was that they chose for themselves the values to which they committed their work, they did not have them imposed on them. Through those values they produced work which neither imitated the natural world nor simply expressed a particular philosophy, but produced a higher order of being than either. 'The arts establish another plane of being, a new natural order in the world.' The greatest artists, he argued, reach this plane by going beyond their own plans and intentions. It is the quality of genius that, having planned and proposed adventures far beyond ordinary powers and talents, it tends to find what it imagined and proposed merely serves to free the heart from home influences and habits, it serves merely as a prelude to something beyond any anticipation so much so that this has often been described as a divine intervention or inspiration: the descent of divine energy into a human agent.14 While this passage reveals the romantic conception of the artist that lies beyond Hope's classical forms, he was on dubious ground in his claim that the modern arts have reached a higher stage than the primitive as they have ceased to be 'tied to the practical ends of human societies'. This contradicts both the religious conception of incarnation and the materialist understanding of cultural value. His argument did succeed in transcending the divisions of sacred and secular that either define the two as separate realms of being or try to collapse the one into an instrument of the other. His own examples of Milton and Swift show the unity of the two functions, although serving the one may be no guarantee of fulfilling the other.


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Not all critics writing in Prospect shared Hope's understanding of the relation between art and the political or religious views it expressed. It sat uneasily with the tone of Leavisite moralism that underlay most of the journal's social and literary criticism, and which avoided contradiction only because Buckley and others identified wholeness with moral health. Their views constrained them to look in a work of art not only for wholeness in its creative vision, but also for social or moral usefulness. The finest expression of Prospects commitment to order was in the work of the poets it chose to publish. These included Bruce Dawe, Evan Jones, Vincent Buckley, Gwen Harwood, under her own name and her pseudonym of Francis Geyer, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Ron Simpson and Rodney Hall. While all poetry is committed, by definition, to the search for order, it is significant that all but two of these poets, Dawe and Hall, devoted much of their energies to the exploration and creation of order through the traditional poetic forms. Yet while in all these cases the work meets Hope's criterion of establishing a higher order of being, it can also be recognized as contributing directly to our understanding of the natural and social orders, and thus of having an instrumental function. Dawe's work pointed to the order we seek in our lives;15 the other Prospect poets tried to embody it more directly in their poetry. Gwen Harwood showed her characters struggling with rituals and words in their efforts to subdue the turbulence of their thoughts and passions and simply 'embrace / the stubborn presence of life'. Ron Simpson similarly took people at particular moments in their lives, trying to make sense of pasts 'Where the dead walk as if alive'. Even Rodney Hall, whose verse moves furthest from traditional forms, looked for a pattern of meaning behind the suffering and death of his 'Songs of War, Ancient and Modern'.16 Prospect also published James McAuley's 'Prologue' to his epic poem on Quiros' search for a new land in which to re-establish the true spiritual order.17 Other poets associated with the journal, including Vincent Buckley, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Evan Jones, made similarly ambitious attempts to discover a whole order of significance from the contingencies of history. By embedding their subject matter - war, revolution, militarism, nationalism - in poetic form, the writers made a political statement about order underlying both the turbulence of history and the absurdities of individual experience. The contribution of Prospectto a sense of order in society and literature was not limited to the poetry or polemic it published, but also emerged strongly in its reviews. In particular, from the first it showed an understanding of the nature of Patrick White's aspirations, his attempts to discover in the world what would make life bearable or give it meaning. Thus, Helen Prideaux, in an article on The Tree of Man as an

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experimental novel, observed that White's * obsession' is with 'the ultimate isolation of the human soul in that solitary land of the individual experience'. She argued that ultimately his quest was selfdefeating, for his obsession with the incommunicable prevented him conveying the nature of the illumination Stan Parker achieved.18 In a review of Riders in the Chariot, Margaret Aughterson came to a similar conclusion, although she believed the earlier novel was the more successful.19 Aughterson considered that in Riders in the Chariot the vision escaped the restriction of one man's experience and, although ultimately incommunicable, was shared and 'carries a clear implication of community responsibility'. However, she argued that the weight of the earlier novel was carried by the language: 'The novel questions the meaning of life by testing the attitudes of [its characters] against the core of experience affirmed by the language itself.' The later novel begins similarly, 'assuming a width of experience which Himmelfarb only gradually comes to recognize.' This leads the novel into the new theme of redemption, but at this point the language, as in the earlier novel, breaks down, proposing an 'unquestioning finality of experience' that it does not convey. Each of these reviews was concerned finally not with the aesthetic qualities of the novels, but with the kind of vision they achieved. Both saw language as the central issue, the medium within which order is conveyed, and their criticisms thus came not from the application of the kind of external criteria to which Hope objected, but from the qualities established in the fiction itself. If finally they felt the novels do not achieve their ambitions, this was because there remained more work to be done, not because the ambition was wrongly conceived. Their praise of White was that he opened new levels of being, even if he did not take us all the way with him on his quest. Yet, for all its interest in the new, Prospect remained essentially backwards in its regard. The emphasis on order was conservative, as the new levels of being attained through artistic or religious inspiration are developments from the past within an agreed framework of meaning. This stance does not doom mortals to constant repetition, as we can always ascend to ever higher spheres, but we cannot make a new start. There is no room for Harold Bloom's 'strong poets', who shatter the old moulds of perception to make place for their new visions.20 Following Bloom, we may be able to integrate Blake and Milton into a history that reaches back to Homer and the Bible, but to understand them we have still to recognize that in their time they remade history, retrospectively as well as prospectively. Hope may believe his poets of genius go 'beyond any anticipation', but for the Prospect writers the new work will always be contained within an established order, just as for them Dante's journey was contained within the mind of God.


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II The secular equivalent to Prospect, Dissent, edited originally by James Jupp and Peter Wertheim, took a radically different view of culture and the arts. Established in 1961 by a group of University of Melbourne students including Peter Samuel and Leon Glezer, from about 1965, under the pressures of the Vietnam war and the corresponding revolution in the values and expectations of a younger generation, it began to take a consistent and sustained interest in culture and the arts. In contrast to Prospect, it looked on them as new ways of seeing and behaving rather than as further orders of being. Thus Andrew Bear found the James Bond books and films worthy of discussion not because they were banal or corrupt, but because they were often 'good in their own terms', and offered an 'entertaining way to pass the time', and a unique opportunity to study the workings of popular culture, not the least interesting aspect of which is the response of the intellectuals. And it must be said that they have been on the whole less honest than those vulgar, unsophisticated21people who cheerfully admit to liking a bit of sex and violence now and again. This was a clear rejection of the Leavisite school of literary and social criticism to which Prospect was committed, and which was implicit in most cultural criticism in Australia until this time. Bear rejected the idea of a hierarchy of value in cultural productions. The Bond novels were worthwhile because they offered enjoyment and were valued by large numbers of people. The task of the intellectual is not to judge but to analyse the means that produce these effects. These two ideas encapsulated the ideology presaged by the beat generation in America, but only then coming to fruition there, and to influence in Australia. On the one hand, there was the emphasis on effect and activity rather than on meaning and control. On the other, there was the identification of the individual, alone or, as in this case, in mass, as the sole judge of value. These two ideas were to be as destructive of the communal values of the left as of the hierarchical values of the right. Donald Home commented in a letter to the Paris secretariat of the Congress for Cultural Freedom that the group running Dissent regarded the AACF as 'remote, pompous and rightwing ... part of the Australian establishment run by lawyers and senior academics', but explained that he found them interesting because they were 'radical and largely leftwing.'22 The editors themselves were concerned to provide a forum for the ideas that the official labour movement was profoundly uninterested in, to give a voice to the non-communist left, and to counter the influence of writers like those associated with the Sydney Outlook, which

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they saw as still too close to the communists. They had as students, Jupp has said, all been strongly influenced by the uncompromising position of Frank Knopfelmacher, and this was sufficient to make them suspect in Labor quarters.23 Because its hopes were identified with the political success of the Australian Labor Party Dissent became entangled both in the public debates over the relationships between socialism and communism, between the democracies and governments that styled themselves communist, and between democratic socialists and members of the Communist Party. These debates in turn became embroiled in the internecine struggles of the ALP, particularly in Victoria, where the party at the time was controlled by the shadowy Trade Union Defence Committee, a mixed bunch that included sectarian bigots, union manipulators, Maoists and Trotskyist demagogues who had been able to gain authority after the expulsion in 1955 of supporters of Santamaria's Movement. To this group, academics in general and critical discussions of policy in particular were anathema, just as they had been to the previous Movement-dominated executive. Editors and associates of Dissent like James Jupp and John Patterson were not only critical of the Party's electoral policies and administrative practices, but were also members of the Victorian Fabian Society, brought to new vigour at this time by Race Mathews, later to become in turn secretary to Gough Whitlam, a federal member of parliament during the term of the Whitlam government, and a Minister for the Arts and Police in the Victorian government led by John Cain the younger. In the 1960s, however, such prospects of electoral success were remote, and were viewed with suspicion by party operatives who saw the changes necessary to bring it about as a threat both to their power and to the principles they held to be central to Labor policies. They projected their insecurities onto the Fabian Society, whose conferences they saw not as forums for open debate but as venues for conspiracy. In consequence Dissent and its supporters were driven to the margins of political activity.24 This accounts for the plaintive tone of injured propriety that increasingly marked the journal's editorial comments. Its writers knew they were speaking for the new generation to which Labor would need to appeal, and they saw its refusal to heed their arguments as perpetuating the division of thought from authority, and their own seemingly endless exclusion from power.25 Their vision of justice through efficiency moved them beyond the shibboleths of right and left. The anti-communism that was central to Dissent's editorial stance led to conflict between the editors as controversy over the Vietnam war became central to Australian politics. As early as 1963 (3/1), it had published an article by Graeme Duncan, 'Buddhists in Revolt'.26 Duncan


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argued that the war was unwinnable while the Diem regime remained in office, and that, unless the Americans withdrew their support, they would be totally discredited. While Duncan was by no means unsympathetic to the Americans, this was one of the first articles critical of their policy to appear in one of the little magazines in Australia. By contrast, Outlook published its first criticism, 'South Vietnam: the Hopeless War', by Betty Gale, in January 1964. Overland did not get around to looking at the problem until May 1966, when it reproduced a series of sketches on war by Udi Selbach, together with an editorial statement, a letter from a Vietnamese intellectual, who chose to remain anonymous, reportage from Vietnam by Ian Wilson, and analysis by C.P. Fitzgerald and Phillip Adams.27 Meanjin did not examine the issue in any detail until 1968, when a series of articles on 'Pacific Signposts' began to consider it in the context of Australia's overall foreign policy. In Dissent the war and the issue of communism in Asia became a matter of intense debate, leading to Peter Samuel's resignation as editor in 1965. Krygier wrote to Congress, which had supplied the funding for the journal, that Glezer ... has become utterly unreliable both politically and financially, according to Peter Samuel. He is associated with a group of Labor party opportunists who have shifted from, say, the Crosland position to neutralist position under pressure from their party machine.28 Although the journal then became overtly opposed to the war, later that same year it published Geoffrey Fairbairn's analysis of the war as a guerrilla struggle in which the Communist Vietcong waged 'total war' in order to gain control of the people through 'terror, manipulation and bribes.'29 Then, in the Winter 1966 issue, Glezer published two editorials in which he unequivocally attacked United States policy in and Australia's policy towards China. Shortly afterwards, Krygier reported that Glezer is a cynical bastard ... he is spreading the rumour that he continues to be subsidized by the Congress against my will ... Samuel is trying to take drastic steps to disengage himself from Dissent of which he is a partner and major creditor.30 Krygier added an explanation of Glezer's dereliction in the light of his own jaundiced view of academic life in Australia, explaining that he must 'please his Professor [Hugo Wolfsohn] and conform with the general atmosphere of his Department.' Samuel, on the other hand, went on to become a journalist, and in 1967, together with Brian Buckley, former member of the board of Prospect, was the object of an attack in Dissent from Gregory Clark, as responsible for launching 'a full scale frontal assault on the leftwing in this country'.31

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WRITING IN HOPE AND FEAR III

Despite these intense conflicts, the most striking characteristic of Dissent was its general blandness. The members of the editorial group and its contributors generally described themselves as democratic socialists. They believed that the Australian Labor Party, while the only potential vehicle for their ideals, was out of touch with its constituency. This view was expressed most eloquently in an early issue by Sol Encel, in a paper based on his address to a Victorian Fabian Society conference.32 Encel started from the proposition that socialism is a moral movement that aspires to construct a society based on the principles of 'equality, brotherhood and co-operation as an alternative to the oppressive and repressive society produced by capitalism'. The same issue carried articles, also from the Fabian conference, by E.L. Wheelwright and Hugo Wolfsohn, who similarly suggested ways of reforming Labor policies and its projected government practices. These articles, however, in what was to become the characteristic Fabian manner adopted by Dissent, were concerned not so much with the substance of socialism as with the means to efficient andjust administration. Wheelwright argued that we must develop special forms of management training to ensure that public enterprises in fact worked for the good both of their workers and of the wider society. Wolfsohn attacked fashionable leftist ideas by arguing that Australia, as part of the democratic world and inevitably dependent on American leadership, could not have an independent foreign policy. Neither Wolfsohn nor Wheelwright tried to develop an argument from fundamental principles of socialism, and even Encel moved quickly from his identification of the moral basis of socialism to a discussion of the means of implementing it through parliamentary and bureaucratic means. All three articles thus embodied the form of managerialism that Encel, identifying it as social engineering, recognized as the enemy of socialism. Their lack of passion explains why they failed to appeal either to the older generation that had fought the Depression, wept for the Spanish Republic and pinned its hopes on the Russian Revolution, or to the younger generation that was to seek new forms of politics, based on individual freedom and communal practice, amid the turmoil over the war in Vietnam. More important than the particular policies these or other writers advocated in Dissent was the sense of commitment to a moral community which we find at the heart of Encel's paper and which remains as a sense of what has been lost in the succeeding decades of political and economic change. Yet this commitment, although assumed by most Dissent contributors, was all too rarely explicit in their writing, let alone the subject of the discussion. When Dissent first appeared in 1961, it seemed that at least in economically advanced countries the basic


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problems of subsistence had been solved and that, apart from continuing but relatively minor cyclic slumps, the issues facing society were peace, equality between and within nations, and the problems of affluence. Galbraith's The Affluent Society, examined by John Patterson in Dissent in 1963, was a key text.33 Patterson accepted Galbraith's argument that economic stagnation and the vast social problems that flow from it had been avoided as society changed from producing goods to satisfy human needs to manufacturing human needs to consume itsflowof goods. He rejected the revisionism of British socialists like Richard Crossman, who wanted to use nationalization and economic planning as means to divert the growing production of wealth into the satisfaction of social rather than merely private needs. He found their criticism of materialism puritanical, and their appeal to continuing growth unacceptable, particularly in the underdeveloped countries which 'will probably never reach the high levels of income per capita which we know, if for no other reason than the scarcity of natural resources'. His solution was 'the removal of the productive processes from their dominant position as arbiters of success, happiness and virtue to boot'. He argued that 'a growing proportion of the work force do jobs which are demanding and interesting, and it is in increasing the size of this group that the ultimate solution lies'. While Patterson's vision was akin to the Marxist dream, about to capture another generation, of the citizen who hunts in the morning, attends to civic duties in the afternoon, and writes poetry and makes love at night, it also anticipated the ecologists and proponents of zero growth as the only hope for the planet. While, despite its disclaimers, it shared something of Crosland's puritanical distrust of the pleasures of materialism, it was also capable of being developed as a vision of true community. Unfortunately, he did not foresee the oil crisis that would bring an end to immediate dreams of a socialist Utopia and embroil the western world in the global problems of energy, pollution and the distribution of scarce resources that the juggernaut of affluence for so long allowed its citizens to ignore. Although the leads given by Encel and Patterson and others for rethinking the nature of a socialist society were neglected in favour of detailed discussions of the nuts and bolts of foreign and defence policy, economic planning and political organization, there were a few glimmers of the underlying concern for community. As early as 1962, Jennifer Gribble discussed Raymond Williams' The Long Revolution, which offered direction and hope for a socialist community. Several articles examined the state of education and the conditions of teachers and teaching, although mainly in relation to equality of opportunity rather than to the cultural values taught or embodied in the system. Eugene Kamenka took

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the opposite view to John Patterson, arguing from an examination of Marx's work and his understanding of alienation that if socialism is to retain any meaning it must focus on people's needs as producers rather than as consumers (2/3, 1962). Philip Sargeant examined the responsibilities of the architect to contribute to the public good by designing buildings that would serve the community rather than stand as individual masterpieces (2/4,1962). Bernard Smith wrote on the lessons of William Morris for the twentieth century (3/4, 1963). John Button reported on the attempts of the Victorian Fabians to extend their concern to the visual environment (no. 14). Although Dissent continued to publish direct political analyses, even these became less oriented towards policies and more towards ideological issues. Aboriginal affairs received a great deal of attention, and articles on Africa and Asia became concerned with the internal state of the countries rather than with their significance for Australian foreign policy. Considerable attention was given to the student movement at home and abroad, and of course there were direct debates about the Vietnam war and the means of opposing it. But the remarkable change in the journal was the increasing attention it gave to cultural rather than simply institutional politics. This led not only to an increased interest in cultural issues, but also to a change in the way in which it treated directly political issues. As early as 1965, in the same issue that carried Button's report on bourgeois Fabians, a photo-essay on folk politics on Melbourne's Yarra Bank attempted to extend the meaning of politics beyond words and analysis. Yet this feature was almost an exercise in nostalgia, celebrating an institution that has since disappeared with photographs concentrating on the faces of the old, starting with veteran red-baiter Arnold Paine, famous through grafttti around University of Melbourne as Australia's leading ratbag. The significant recognition of politics as culture was to come later. In 1967 Dissent published an article by Graeme Duncan, 'In Defence of Political Utopias'.34 Duncan took issue with those who saw in the projected Utopias of the eighteenth century and later the seeds of twentieth-century totalitarianism, but pointed out the crude cultural determinism and moral cowardice that produce such scorn of attempts to project an ideal society. By grounding his article in cultural analysis Duncan went beyond the often sterile propositions that had marked earlier political debate in the journal, and cleared the ground for articles like Denis Pym's study of 'Youth and Bureaucracy' in the following year.35 Pym, whose article introduced a discussion of student culture in America, West Germany, Japan and Australia, had digested McLuhan and recognized student activity both as a new subculture in an increasingly diverse society, and as the manifestation of a major historical transformation based on the electronic


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revolution. The new professionals, he argued, were characterized by a 'strong desire for autonomy and a preference for imposing their own structure on their lives.' In pointing out the incompatibility of the nascent culture with existing forms of bureaucracy, Pym expressed the Utopian hopes of the first generation to grow up with television, while remaining oblivious to the power of the same technology to exclude people from even the most elementary control over their circumstances. The pessimism of many of the political essays in Dissent at this time was combined with an urgent demand for changes far more radical than any envisaged by contributors to the journal in its earlier issues. This conjunction, which matched the revolutionary enthusiasms of the immediate postwar years, came from the writers' fear of the continuing power of established authority . Thus Dennis Altman saw the collapse of American hopes and institutions, but did not envisage a new order arising for either good or ill. Harry van Moorst, Frances Newell and Michael Hamel-Green all wrote of their experiences in opposing the war in Vietnam, bringing a unity of reason and experience to the politics of their own lives and the lives of society's victims, at home and abroad. Finally, a special issue in 1972 discussed the lives and politics of women in Australia.36 This series of articles gave a further dimension to the politics of means and ends that had formally dominated the journal and provided the link with the more purely cultural analysis that now also found a place in its pages. Yet the writers, for all their understanding that the personal is political, betrayed no suspicion that their own activities might become complicit in a new tyranny. To understand how this radicalism declined to bureaucracy, we would need to look to the structural changes that occurred in Australian society, and elsewhere, between the Whitlam and the Hawke governments. Although these changes lie outside the scope of this study, part of the explanation lies in the formative experiences of the generation who came to power in those years. Among the managerial Fabians who contributed to Dissent and later rose to political and bureaucratic power were John Button, Ralph Willis, Race Mathews, Gregory Clark, Alan Lloyd, Gareth Evans, David Scott and John Patterson. All have since held positions where they could shape the development of society. More important than the influence of particular people has been the educational and professional experience of members of this and the following generation of the new left. They learned from the old left the techniques of subverting authority by the tactical use of motions from the floor and rank-and-file, now called staff-student, committees, but after graduation found themselves in an entirely different situation from their predecessors. The old left had gone into organizations, including universities and the public service, dominated by hierarchies of power

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and established rules. Finding themselves a minority, they devoted a great deal of their energies to undermining these structures so that individuals could use them for their own ends. The new left, by contrast, grew up at a time when tertiary education, or at least training, was becoming the sole passport to the kind of jobs that provided authority and satisfaction. As Buckley had pointed out, the proportion of the eligible age group attending universities grew in a quarter of a century from 1.4 per cent to 5.8 per cent.37 To these numbers must be added those in teachers' colleges and institutes of technology, taking the numbers of the tertiary educated to probably over ten per cent of their generation. Buckley saw this growth in numbers as itself a threat, believing that 'a university of even 11,000 undergraduate members . . . is too big to be an intellectual community'. Further, those educated in the colleges and institutes were subject to a regime of bureaucratic rather than academic authority. As students, therefore, they perceived the bureaucracy as the enemy, but as graduates they had the numbers to overthrow its hierarchies and take control themselves. This new control, depending on numbers rather than positions of authority, was enforced by procedures and guidelines instead of rules that could be subverted. As everything became subject to a committee, so the individual autonomy that had been the aim receded from view. The acceptance of the ideology of the socially constructed subject was the last stage in the process of freeing individuals from responsibility for their actions. These distinctions in outlook become apparent from a comparison of Vincent Buckley's article on the Threats to Freedom in the Universities' with the discussions in Dissent of the student mood in the 1960s.38 Buckley stressed the decline of a scholarly and intellectual community in which staff share their concerns and understanding with students. The students writing in Dissent echoed his complaint about the increase in bureaucracy, but laid their stress on a decline in the standards of teaching and accountability. Significantly, they looked to increasing student participation in university government as the likely consequence of radical activity, but they worried that in practice this would merely reduce the chances of real democratic reform. The most important aspect of the student movement in the 1960s was its attempt to produce a radical redefinition of democracy. Its insistence on personal autonomy threw into question the legitimacy of representative democracy, in both parliamentary and committee forms, and promoted concepts of direct participation in all levels of government. These concepts in turn reflected and influenced cultural debate. Popular culture offered an appealing field of study to socialist intellectuals, enabling them to exercise their critical talents on work that had the democratic virtue of mass appeal. Unfortunately this culture had also


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the capitalist potential of being used by the powerful few to garner riches from the powerless many, and in so doing to manipulate social demand to suit their own interests. In England, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams had confronted these contradictions in two recent studies that examined the way the working classes resisted manipulation and used the resources available to them, from their own communities as well as from capitalist entrepreneurs, to construct their own culture based on their traditional value of solidarity. The media critics Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannell had carried this work further with their distinction between 'popular art' and 'mass culture'. In a trenchant attack on this work, Michael Wilding returned to the issues that had earlier been introduced into Dissent by Jennifer Gribble and Andrew Bear. Wilding argued that this whole line of British criticism assumed the intellectual and moral superiority of the critic in a tradition that went back through Q.D. Leavis to Matthew Arnold. He described the call by Hall and Whannell for 'training in discrimination' as a 'moralistic attack on people enjoying the wrong things'. Wilding conceded that the controllers of the media exercised a pernicious power over its producers, but insisted that the answer to this was neither criticism nor regulation, but a multiplication of the channels of communication so that people could choose for themselves what they wanted to enjoy.39 Wilding's article is a good example of the extension of the libertarian or permissive approach to matters of individual morality to the public arenas of education and criticism. Buckley and Gribble in Australia, Hoggart and Williams in England, assumed that the community was dependent on a continuing tradition. This reached back, in Leavis' view, to an organic community bound by ties of function or, in Williams' accounts, to a working class united by practices of solidarity. Wilding, however, drew his inspiration from the example of individuals like Milton who have demonstrated in their lives and work the need to rebel against the constraints of power and the custom that enshrines it. The community to which he aspired is set in the future, constructed by the work and desire of the individuals who constitute it. Despite these cultural debates, Dissent remained essentially an analytic magazine of politics. Its importance in opposing the Vietnam war or changing political and cultural attitudes was probably far less than that characteristic product of the 1960s, Oz, whose mixture of verbal and visual satire despatched the staid, the repressive and the orthodox to the dustbins of history. But by taking the new culture as a matter for serious analysis, and incorporating it in political discourse, Dissent gave it a respectability that helped to make it a part of the cultural formation of a generation rather than a passing fashion of youth.

NINE

Opening the Pages The Subsidized Journals, 1964-72

Although by 1966 the literary journals addressed a similar audience about similar matters, their ideological differences remained, even if they sometimes published the same authors. Thus Sir John Latham, the object of an earlier furious correspondence from Clem Christesen, published a political memoir in Meanjin, Leonie Kramer wrote in Overland about the need for a canon of Australian writing, Brian Kiernan examined the literary value of Such Is Life in Quadrant. Their convergence came from their responses to the challenge of new writing from authors like Manning Clark and Patrick White. This writing led them to a deeper examination of Australian society, its history and culture, than had characterized the more ideological debates of the previous decade. I The most challenging development at this time was the establishment of regional journals. Westerly, which in 1956 succeeded earlier literary reviews published by the Students' Guild of the University of Western Australia, carved out its place as a regional journal providing both an insight into Western Australian writing and a regional perspective on national and international cultural affairs. Australian Letters, started in Adelaide in 1957 by Max Harris, Geoffrey Dutton and Bryn Davies, was explicitly not regional. Rather, it used its Adelaide base to provide an urbane Australian contribution to international letters. Its series of collaborations between writers and artists, which began in 1960, by crossing the boundaries between two art forms enabled each to speak to a wider audience. Yet at the same time this combining of arts tended to relegate both forms to the purely aesthetic. The magazine became decorative, apparently committed to contemplating life rather than 158

OPENING THE PAGES

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engaging in its everyday mess. Even Judith Wright's contribution to this series, a collection of her bird poems, was a series of close observations, lacking the poet's characteristic involvement with her subjects. This art work, in which urbanity becomes detachment, contrasts with the series of Bruce Petty's * Perambulations' that Overland started publishing in the same year. In these the artist created extraordinarily tangled networks which traced the structures of thought that weave together society and the professional groups that work within it. As Peter Mathers had done with literary realism, Petty's work went beyond the superficial likeness even of caricature to show the absurd underpinnings of society. But whereas Mathers tended to find a fierce anarchism at the centre of society, Petty portrayed it as a series of closed systems, each driven by its own imperatives of greed and ambition, each failing to connect with anything beyond itself. On the other hand, Australian Letters, seeking an art beyond the limitations of society, ran into the dangers of producing art that ignored its own basis. At this time, the long campaign by Overland and others for a proper academic recognition of Australian literature had come to fruition with the establishment of a chair in Australian Literature at the University of Sydney in 1962, the appointment of veteran Australian critic and editor Colin Roderick to the Foundation Chair of English at James Cook University in 1965, and in 1964, following a suggestion from James McAuley, the foundation of the critical journal Australian Literary Studies. Edited from the beginning by Laurie Hergenhan, and published with the assistance of a grant from the Commonwealth Literary Fund, this was 'the first journal to be exclusively devoted to the scholarly and critical study of Australian literature', and quickly established, through its articles, notes, reviews and annual bibliography, a scholarly base and focus for the subject.1 While Overland continued to publish leftist commentary by the editor and regular columnists like David Martin, even this was iconoclastic and anti-authoritarian rather than socialist. It became eclectic rather than programmatically radical. Its most serious political campaigns were against censorship, to which it devoted most of one issue (27-28, 1963), and in favour of government support for the arts, a policy Quadrant also favoured, although not as consistently. In a number of reviews and essays, Ian Turner rethought the Australian labour tradition and reworked a theory of socialist democracy. The fiction went beyond the tradition of socialist realism to include Peter Mathers and, in 1963, Patrick White. Although the tradition of working-class ballads of its earlier years was continued in populist verse narratives by Ian Mudie, Jill Hellyer and Bill Scott, these were complemented by lyrics, satire from Chris WallaceCrabbe and David Malouf, and more meditative verse by Judith Green

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(Rodriguez) and Rodney Hall. Features were published on such topics as the Spanish civil war, Walt Whitman, commercial television and the Australian myth. Taken together, the contents suggest a magazine looking for a wide audience of mildly radical leanings and anti-authoritarian temperament, but with a lively general interest in writing, the arts and the world around them. Sadly, this readership never provided the wide base of support the journal had found in its earliest years. During this same period, Quadrant remained true to McAuley's belief that the way to change the dominant culture was to appeal to an intellectual elite. It was austere in its appearance and carried serious articles of historical and literary interest. 'A Letter from Rome', A.D. Hope's Augustan complaint about T h e final brutal voice of naked power': the din of motorbikes, represented its interest in poetry that was formal, urbane and explicit in its statement (27, 1963). In his editor's report for 1963, James McAuley was able to note that, in the first 28 issues, the journal had published 216 articles by 172 individual authors, 37 stories by 25 authors, and 132 poems by 76 different poets. He explained also that he had discontinued editorial pieces because 'I felt this obtruded myself too much . . . one must be careful not to be too oppressingly present in one's own magazine'.2 He had continued to publish 'Notes and Comments', which introduced each issue with an explanation of the rationale for its contents. Yet, despite the inclusion of'What Is To Be Done?' and like series, each issue seemed to be a collection made from material at hand, rather than the expression of a consistent view of what was important to its constituency in Australian society. This was to change. In the final issue for 1963 McAuley was able to welcome editorially the journal's move to bi-monthly publication and to acknowledge his indebtedness to readers who have made it known to him that 'a personal bond exists' with the journal. The announcement of the increased frequency of publication also noted the appointment of Donald Home as co-editor and Owen Harries and Roger Covell as associate editors to assist McAuley with his responsibilities. In the event, Covell did not take up the position. McAuley concentrated on the poetry, leaving the rest of the editorial business to Home and his wife Myfanwy, who did the proof-reading. Home's influence was clear in the journal's transformation from a quarterly mixing literature with polemic to a topical review of literature, the arts and current affairs. While McAuley had dropped editorial articles, the new team expanded the prefatory notes in each issue to take the form of a commentary on recent events rather than a justification for the magazine. In the notes to issue 30, the editors were explicit about their intentions for the journal when they invited contributors who would stimulate dialogue on 'developments in Australia and Asia, political and social analysis, general intellectual

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issues, literature and the arts'. They expressed their hope that these contributions would overcome what they saw as 'one of the weaknesses of our culture' in distinguishing between 'literary' and 'intellectual' approaches. This openness did not weaken the journal's anti-communist commitment, but it did widen its range beyond high arts and conservative politics.3 Meanjin, dressed with covers and internal illustrations from artists' blocks, also carried poems by A.D. Hope, as well as more unsettling verse by Thomas Shapcott, Gwen Harwood and Dorothy Auchterlonie. As early as 1957 it had published an extract from Patrick White's Voss, and in future years followed this up with extracts from Riders in the Chariot, The Solid Mandala and two of his stories. In 1962 it commenced a series on 'The Australian Image', published writing from Indonesia and devoted a whole issue to France. It situated itself as a serious national review looking outward to our immediate neighbours and to our cultural sources. Like Quadrant, it assumed a readership prepared to give serious attention to literary and cultural issues. II The change by Quadrant to its new two-monthly schedule did not take place altogether smoothly. Krygier's hopes of raising additional advertising were dashed by such excuses, familiar to all editors of little magazines, as the advertising budget being 'fully committed', or the proposal not being 'company policy'.4 The first issue under the new arrangements appeared in April 1964, instead of the planned January. Only four altogether were published during that year, to the chagrin of at least one correspondent. L.C. Rodd, husband of the novelist Kylie Tennant, wrote to complain that not only was he being short-changed in numbers, but that the contents also were objectionable. I dislike the new Quadrant intensely. It has no original literary material whatsoever, The so-called 'poetry' by people such as Evan Jones is beneath is harsh, polemical and semi-political; it is not contempt. The tone of Quadrant a literary quarterly any longer.5 The journal in its new style also brought unfavourable comment from Congress supporters, particularly the Melbourne academic and polemicist Newman Rosenthal, who had previously offered his resignation from the Australian Association because of his objections to Donald Home, and who now again resigned because of the Association's supposed 'drift to neutralism' and 'the fatuous contents of Quadrant which carefully never says or does anything.'6

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The early issues of the bi-monthly Quadrant gave little reason for either criticism. They included such writers as David Martin, Max Harris, Gwen Kelly, Bruce Dawe and Chris Wallace-Crabbe who might equally well be found in Overland or Meanjin. A piece of reportage on the Burmese province of Arakan by Geoffrey Fairbairn is now, in the light of what has since happened to that unhappy country, almost unbearably poignant. Like similar pieces published in Overland, its politics arose from the relationships its author established between himself, the people and their place. Also, like such Overland contributors as David Potts or Cecil Holmes, he allowed his observations to lead his sympathies to the locals in their resistance to the impositions of authority, and shared with them even a romantic but doomed hostility to the inevitable progress towards the one world of technology. The difference was that Fairbairn identified the forces leading to this world as decent but corrupt liberalism and indecent communism, whereas the Overland writers tended to identify them with efficient but amoral American power or Australian neglect. Presumably it was Fairbairn's refusal to see easy divisions or solutions that affronted Rosenthal. On the other hand, the poems by Evan Jones that upset Rodd were unexceptional verses on the recurring human sense of alienation, by gender and generation. Their well-wrought forms contain the depths that lurk behind quotidian triviality. The political differences between Quadrant and its rivals remained evident in their attitudes to international rather than domestic and cultural politics, although even here Quadrant took a more conservative approach. It published an attack, by Leonie Kramer, on the opponents of censorship who had defended the publication of Fanny Hill (29, 1964). Kramer argued that the book was mere pornography, and that pornography cannot be literature, nor literature pornography. Although Kramer's views were later challenged by Gordon Hawkins (34, 1965), on the grounds that the arousal of sexual as of other feelings is a legitimate function of literature, and by Eugene Kamenka (35,1965) on the grounds that the free circulation of pornography does no social harm, it was nevertheless characteristic that Quadrant should initiate its discussion of the subject with an article that ran counter to contemporary intellectual fashion. Quadrant's treatment of the most divisive issue of the decade, the war in Vietnam, was sympathetic to the governments of the United States and South Vietnam, and reflected the American view that the Cold War was the central issue of the time, the split between the Russian and the Chinese communists changing merely the details of dangers and opportunities. This view was accompanied by a deep scepticism about claims of Soviet domestic achievements and about the possibility of peaceful co-existence between the two power systems. Thus, J. Zubrzycki analysed

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the failure of Soviet agricultural policies as not merely economic or climatic, but cultural, arising from the failure to assimilate the peasants into the 'Socialist body politic' (31, 1964). Owen Harries interpreted disagreements over the prospects of co-existence as a conflict over whether ideology determines the foreign policy of communist powers or whether they merely follow traditional imperatives of expansion and security (32, 1964). By adopting the first interpretation, he endorsed a policy of unyielding struggle. Yet Harries' uncompromising argument was followed immediately by an 'Appraisal' of Yevtushenko, in which John Helmer showed the complex shifts from the poet's earliest period of Stalinist acclamation to the reappraisals of his personal experience between 1954 and 1958, and then to a more ambivalent period in which he is torn between his wish to acclaim the ideals of his society and his personal rebellion on behalf of individual freedom. His rebellion, Helmer argued, made him the hero of a younger generation, but his work contained within it an urge towards self-destruction that Helmer locates in Slavic culture. This emphasis on personal and cultural contingency rather than ideological system put the essay at odds with the hard line of most of the journal's political writing. Yet, by bringing politics into his literary analysis, Helmer overcame the dichotomy between the two spheres that had characterized earlier issues of the journal. Harries' theme of unending struggle provided the key to Quadrant's discussion of Vietnam specifically and Asia generally. The journal published articles and reports on India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and, of course, China. Although a lengthy report on China by Robert Guillain provided a dispassionate survey of economic progress and social costs, most of this writing, even by such indigenous authorities as Sibnarayan Ray, presented Asia through the prism of the Cold War. Two articles on Vietnam, one urging the need for patient resistance to communist advance, the other offering hope for American-led campaigns of pacification in the south (31,1964) both started from the assumption that the war there was a part of the global struggle and was therefore the west's business. A fine piece of reporting by the Australian officer and academic, Robert O'Neil, showed the violence that was a part of the Viet Cong political tactics, and displayed the mixture of military force and social idealism that drove Australian programs of pacification. The article however did not put in question the policy of intervening by military force in the social and economic reconstruction of a foreign country, nor the issue of whose interests were ultimately served by it. This conception of foreign affairs as struggle was given a theoretical basis in an article, The Most Important Problems' (45, 1967), in which Frank Knopfelmacher argued that fissures and differences between Communist parties do not alter their essential status as totalitarian enemies. The tone of Quadrant

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in these issues was however set not so much by its politics as by its seeming detachment from Australia. Writers like Harries and Knopfelmacher consistently applied a universal program to Australian problems, rather than seeking an Australian approach to general problems. Noel Stock expressed this attitude in relation to culture in an article that defined both the United States and Australia as 'cultural colonies' (28,1963). In this he argued that Australians and Americans, who between them had produced only one novelist and two poets who might be counted as 'major figures in English literature', nevertheless need not feel culturally inferior as long as they 'use the English tradition as their base'. Two books discussed in the previous chapter demonstrated the approach of the Quadrant school to politics and national culture. In 1962 Peter Coleman, then editor of the Bulletin and to become editor of Quadrant after Home's resignation in 1966, edited the symposium, Australian Civilization. This book took a sober look at tradition and contemporary society, finding both lacking in such matters as racial tolerance, respect for liberty, cultivation of ideas and respect for the environment. Although Coleman found cause for hope in the liberal rather than the radical tradition, his contributors generally shared a feeling that Australia had lost its way not so much through strident nationalism as through neglecting the European roots of civility. In 1964 Home published The Lucky Country, an individual report on the state of Australian civilization. After a prologue in the Carlton Hotel in Hong Kong, he began his racy survey in the South Sydney Leagues Club among ordinary people in the most egalitarian of countries. He finished with a discussion of the possible catastrophes that threatened this country run by 'second-rate people who share its luck'.7 In those images Home brought together the optimism of the radical nationalists and the cultural pessimism of the contributors to Coleman's collection. His pessimism arose from his concern that luck had blinded his people to the real dangers that faced them, but optimism finally triumphed in his hope that the real strengths of Australian society would enable it to fulfil its radical potential by creating a new nation 'with values that have some relation to ordinary human aspiration'. Although he acknowledged that such an achievement might prove impossible, that the 'conventionalism of Australian elites may prove so strong that it breaks men who have new views of the possible' (p. 221), he looked with hope to the younger generation carrying out the necessary social revolution. The changes he believed were required included, at the national level, 'Acceptance of the changes of technology, involvement with Asia, the shock . . . of declaring Australia a republic' and at the personal level a greater acceptance of pleasure; an acceptance of the fact that all that one can see of the world is man and his environment; a concern for extreme ease in

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human relations; the ability to act without fundamental belief, to give it a go. (p. 220) The ideal of informing an elite that could respond to these challenges facing Australia, of bringing the lucky country into a wider world, underlay Home's editorial contribution to Quadrant. Despite the continuing Cold War rhetoric, the articles published during his term brought to their readers informed accounts of the countries to our immediate north and west, essays on science and its implications for our understanding of our humanity, and discussions on the Vatican Council, on east-west dialogue in Europe, and on our changing relationships with Europe, and essays on European thought. These views were presented in a context formed by discussions of cultural policies and economics in Australia and debate on the issues of civil and academic liberties.8 Finally, the journal's collection of reporting, argument and polemic was seasoned with fiction, and poetry, mainly Australian. Although Quadrant purported to be engaged in the task of incorporating intellectual traditions in contemporary reality, the almost complete absence of historical articles from its pages meant that it merely offered the powerful substitute of mythology for any useful understanding of the past from which Australian society, with all its contradictions, had sprung. The mixture as a whole lacked the confidence H o m e had worked towards in The Lucky Country. The strength of the magazine seems to have defeated him. Possessed by a vision of secular evil, communism and liberalism, it failed to reconcile its own absolutes or to find any way of converting this oppositional stance into a public ideal. As Norman Podhoretz wrote in a guest editorial in the last issue for which H o m e had responsibility, Every magazine that deserves the name has a character, a style, a point of view, a circumscribed area of concern, a conception of how discourse ought to be conducted; if it lacks these things, it is not a magazine but a periodical anthology of random writings. Obviously the editor's personality, his cast of mind, his biases, his interests are crucial to the formation of this character. Yet once it has been formed - if it has been truly formed - it takes on an independent existence of its own, resisting even the editor's efforts to change or qualify it.9 Quadrant remained firmly rooted in the past, distrustful of the present, fearful of the innovation H o m e believed essential to the nation's future. After the first two issues of 1967, in what appeared to be a neat exchange, H o m e left Quadrantto return to his earlier responsibilities as editor of the Bulletin, and Peter Coleman shifted from editing the Bulletin to editing Quadrant. In fact, H o m e had found working with McAuley intolerable, and Coleman had decided to shift from journalism into the law, and the change suited both of them. Although, in the recommendation that Quadrant become a bi-monthly, McAuley had recommended H o m e as

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co-editor, he quickly became frustrated at the lack of any clear division of responsibility and the feeling that he was doing the bulk of the work. Writing to Krygier of his experience as editor, he described it as 'one of the most disappointing ventures' he had ever been associated with. He now believes that McAuley never really wanted him in the position.10 As editor, Peter Coleman, who had a good working relation with McAuley, maintained Quadrant's place on the right. Knopfelmacher explained in an article why he identified most of the left with the extreme right, Warner dismissed Wilfred Burchett as a 'clever, calculating communist', various writers complained of declining standards in education and literature, and McAuley lamented the failure of the Catholic Church under Pope John XXIII to maintain its rigid stance against communism. The journal continued its support of censorship with an attack on Portnoy 's Complaint as mere pornography. Patrick Morgan and Christopher Koch attacked the Australian literary establishment for applying political criteria to literary production and ignoring conservative writers. The journal maintained its stance on Vietnam with a variety of contributors, defended American intervention in Vietnam as benevolent, the Vietnamese government as benign, and the war itself as central to the defence ofAsia and the Pacific against communism. Colin Hughes, Gerard Henderson and others attacked the student protest movement as trivial, a deliberate subversion of the liberal academy. Other writers extended the scope of conspiracy to include the Australian Broadcasting Commission, liberal academics, and the movement to legalize marijuana.11 Ill The most important immediate issue for Quadrant in 1967 was the revelation that the Congress for Cultural Freedom had always been underwritten by the CIA. This disclosure, first in the New York Review of Books, led to threats of legal action, and then to the resignations from Congress affiliates and journals of such luminaries as Frank Kermode, one of the editors of the British journal Encounter, which to his dismay was revealed as a Congress enterprise. In Australia, Roger Covell was the only person connected with Quadrant or the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom who resigned in protest against the secret funding. The CIA had set up its cultural program and supported the Congress in order to oppose communist influence in cultural matters. According to Home, Krygier had always known of the CIA involvement, although he had explicitly told Sir John Latham, the first president, that the organisation was privately funded.12 Krygier was constantly in touch with his employers in Geneva, where his chief contact, Michael Josselson, was a CIA operative, but they did not directly control his activities, and indeed

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attempted at times to restrain his zeal.13 The key CIA figures in Congress were genuinely liberal and had considerable difficulty with the hard line taken by various national affiliates, including the Australian Association. They did, however, countenance Krygier using their funds in 1966 to subsidize a book on Vietnam which was ostensibly an independent work published by Nelson. Even the Association's ownership of the copyright was concealed.14 Krygier also obtained Congress funding to pay for visits to Australia by such anti-communist intellectuals as Tibor Meray and Sidney Hook, and sponsored visits to Vietnam by, among others, Home and Knopfelmacher, both of whom subsequently contributed to Quadrant articles that were sympathetic to American aims.15 In an editorial, McAuley conceded that the Association and Quadrant had from the beginning received funds from Congress, and admitted that the 'submerged financial link' with the CIA was a 'deplorable fact'. He went on however to deny that the CIA had used these funds to exercise any influence over the policies of the magazine or the association. The Australian Association for Cultural Freedom has ... experienced no kind of external manipulation. Its members and its executive are people who have been drawn into the Association on a common principle of being against totalitarianism, and a common wish to promote worthwhile cultural activity. I am sure that by citing my own experience I can speak for that of others. In 1955 I was asked to become the founding editor of Quadrant. I was aware, as everyone was, that part of thefinancerequired would be provided as a subsidy from the Congress. In my beginnings as editor I watched with close interest to see whether the relation to the Congress would find expression in any sort of pressure upon my editorial freedom. I experienced none then or at any time since. The Australian Association has also shown the most scrupulous regard for the independence of Quadrant™ This was disingenuous. Certainly, the Association did not attempt to determine the contents of Quadrant in the way the Realist Writers Groups had attempted to control Overland. Yet the Realist Writers Groups were not the Party, just as Congress was not the CIA. In both cases, the political organization exercised its authority through key officials who could ensure that, despite a great deal of freedom on matters it perceived as marginal, its key principles were followed. There was no need for Congress to play any direct role when, as we have seen, a committee including Richard Krygier appointed McAuley as editor of Quadrant on the basis of a submission that emphasized his commitment to making the magazine strongly anti-communist. Nor, once he was appointed, was there any reason for it to exert any pressure on him, as his own declared politics would ensure that he served their policies. It may be that McAuley and the other editors did not know the source of his funding, but, as Donald Home has observed, it would have

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made no difference had they done so. They believed in what they were doing, and the sources of the funds that made it possible were irrelevant to them.17 Yet, while the editors may have been blameless, the involvement of the CIA through Congress made them a party to the covert distortion of Australian opinion in American interests. This was no longer the case after 1967, when the Congress officials who had been responsible for CIA funding resigned, and Congress itself broke its links with the CIA, changed its name and constitution, and found funds from its own sources, mainly the Ford Foundation, to continue supporting its global affiliates and publications. While this led to what Krygier described as 'brutal' cuts to the budget, the assistance was still substantial. In 1968, Quadrant received support totalling $4000, the Australian Association grants of $13,000, and Krygier fees of $12,000.18 IV During these years, the various literary journals became engaged in debates about the direction of Australian literature, culture and politics. In five issues in 1961 and 1962 Quadrant published its political series on 'What Is To Be Done?', which was superseded by the wider literary and cultural discussions of the 'Quodlibet' series. In 1962, Meanjin commenced a series on the 'Australian Image'. Leonie Kramer's Overland essay in Autumn 1963 was the first of an intermittent series of discussions in that journal of Australian literature and criticism. The Meanjin series began with an essay by H.P. Heseltine entitled 'The Literary Heritage'.19 Much celebrated and much misunderstood, this has since been taken as the significant moment when literary critics turned their backs on our democratic tradition and wandered instead in deserts of the mind where they discovered, in place of Hope's prophets, the gloom thesis. Heseltine began his essay by acknowledging the power of the democratic themes in our literature. He set this power in the context of a 'view of our literature which . . . sees it as a contest between an exclusive and an inclusive culture, in which the latter has consistently marshalled superior forces' (p. 35). Acknowledging A.A. Phillips as the critic who has argued this view with great tact and power, and agreeing with him about the importance in our literature of 'the enormous force of the drive towards egalitarian democracy', he questioned only whether 'it is at the very centre of the Australian imagination'. Rather, he saw the writers who most clearly expressed this tradition as belonging to a stage in the 'passage of what was once a colonial culture to national independence and maturity'. To concentrate only on the 'simple virtues appropriate to a frontier society' is to be 'left with a heritage which is an empty inheritance' (p. 36). Even with its concessions, this analysis

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offered a major challenge to the evaluation of Australian writing past and present. In particular, it provided a base from which Australian critics could start to come to terms with the challenge of the writing emerging prominently at this time. The new and more complex approach to writing first became evident in prose, as Peter Cowan, Hal Porter, Patrick White, Randolph Stow and Manning Clark began publishing their major works. Despite their differences, these writers were all responding to an Australia that could no longer be interpreted in terms of the old legends. Although each of them was deeply dissatisfied with life as he found it in Australia, none of them could easily be fitted into either a popular and democratic or a conservative and imperial conception of the Australian tradition. All of them wrote traditional narratives, distinguished by style and content rather than by formal innovation, yet none fell into any of the established categories of radical, liberal and conservative represented by the three major literary journals. Porter, a man out of harmony with his society and his own nature, sought escape through the way of the dandy. Cowan reworked the realist tradition in urban and rural settings distinguished by the impenetrability of both land and people. In an increasingly minimalist style he identified the tiny material and human details that map existences otherwise as desolate in time as the landscapes that are their allegory in space. His work seems to say that the only thing that matters is our consciousness, but that is a frail and uncertain instrument to steer us through deserts of unmeaning and isolation. The other three writers, to the alarm of radicals, looked beyond both the secular radical tradition and human rationality to ground their meaning in the spiritual dimension of human experience. Manning Clark, of the three the one apparently most easily placed within the democratic tradition, nevertheless insisted on the importance in history of spiritual bearings rather than material circumstance. Stow described a world where humanity is grotesque or hostile. At its best, as in the most realist of his works, the autobiographical Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, this world offers occasional refuge from the violence that lurks as a constant threat just beyond the limits of our settlement. Nevertheless, the reconciling vision his characters seek eventually either eludes them or taunts them with its fraudulence. White, patrician in upbringing and outlook, and similarly troubled by social barbarism, traced its source to the spiritual emptiness the majority of his characters are determined to defend against the occasional visionary. Like Stow, he placed his vision outside both social and individual life. The work of these writers helped to force the journals to reassess their relationship to the nation and its literature. Porter's stories appeared mainly in the Bulletin, but his collections and his autobiographies

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eventually drew major critical attention. Although he published one story in Quadrant, 72, 1974, the journal, which ceased to publish regular book reviews in 1965, did not otherwise notice him. Meanjin noticed his work from the first, but the reviewers found it troubling. Vance Palmer found that a 'disgust with life is exhaled from its image-studded prose'. H.P. Heseltine, in a survey of the year's fiction, started with Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot and concluded with Porter's The Tilted Cross. He justified Patrick White's prose style as arising from 'a profound commitment to the richness of the fully experienced moment', and found that the novel conveyed a new and deeply disturbing insight into the Australian character. Porter's style, by contrast, he described as 'lush, contrived,' using 'overheated prose' in a 'shuddering search for the moral and sensuous frisson.' Jack Lindsay found the style of Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony 'disinterested . . . at times prim and tedious, though studded with caustic tone and brilliantly evocative image.' A.A. Phillips was the first Meanjin reviewer to enjoy Porter's style, finding 'Every sentence crammed with meat', expressing 'a fresh and exact observation ... spiced with a tasty fantasy'. He disagreed however with the publisher's claim that the stories represented a 'search for truth': Porter has a keen eye for human types and eccentricities, but he never creates a character, or explores one in even narrow depth ... [a] Porter story has no movement of the whole; it is lost in the whirl of phrases, each jitter-bugging its ownflamboyantgesture. Only in 1966, in a review by John Barnes of stories by White, Porter and Cowan, did a Meanjin writer examine Porter's work as a whole in which the elements of style and narrative represent a consistent artistic endeavour to 'face an inner darkness that cannot be shared' and express the 'anguished sense of life as a process of corruption to be endured'.20 In 1964 Australian Letters published Porter's illustrated essay, 'South Gippsland and its Towns'. This essay, with his poetry collection In an Australian Country Graveyard, also illustrated by the author, was the product of a journey through Gippsland with the artist Les Tanner.21 In these two works the discipline of observation, expressed both in words and in the lines of the drawings, produces an objectivity that prunes but does not destroy the baroque curlicues Porter finds among the artefacts of the lives on which his pen and pencil dwell. People themselves are largely absent, observed fleetingly rocking on a chair or rollicking from a pub, sea-sick on a voyage or ambitious on landing, caught in the slavery of settlement or the slumber of dwelling in the land they have made their own. The mood of this deliberate rewriting of the history of Australian settlement is one of nostalgic regret for a simpler and relaxed life led close to nature and the neighbours, in contrast to the:

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juvenile delinquents, strikes, New Australian riff-raff, brothels, traffic jams, petulant aborigines, communist academics, conservatory architecture, leftist Cassandras, and those rag-tag-and-bob-tail combinations of soi-disant intelligentsia who can create no work of art but are skilled in creating trouble for the forces of law and order ... (p. 190) This catalogue of prejudice betrays the man who must retreat to a rural past because he can find no place in his own time. The only place Porter can find where the sensitive spirit may escape is into the self-sustained life of his own creation.

Manning Clark's histories do not challenge the received view of Australian history so much as reveal a new dimension to it. Where earlier historians had seen it as a story of progress, interrupted by periodic disaster but finally moving to economic and social achievement, Clark saw at its heart the tragedy of fate, human error and the frustration of human hopes. Unlike Porter, he felt proudly at home with the ambitions of the radicals and reformers, yet at the same time he was aware of their failures and of the impossibility of their visions of creating human happiness from material progress. When he concluded his second volume with the prophecy that in Australia 'men, freed at last from the stain of the Old World, freed too from the convict's clanking chain, might see that heaven and hell were priests' inventions, and come to trust the brotherhood of man',22 he knew that the future he would trace in succeeding volumes held only failed heavens and real hells. This contradiction of hope by reality was the source of the tragic vision that illuminated his work and forced reviewers into fresh appraisals of the nature of Australian history. Writing in Meanjin, A.G.L. Shaw described the first volume of Clark's history as 'very thought-provoking, partly because unusual' in the domination of its story by the characters of the principal actors, particularly governors and officials. He noted however that this emphasis not only neglected economic and political matters, but ignored the problem of how we can actually know the inner springs of a person's public actions. In a review in Quadrant of the second volume, he expanded this criticism to argue that Clark had given only 'half an answer' to the historians' question of 'what made men do as they did?'23 He acknowledged that Clark's work was important for his emphasis on elements of history that had been ignored by his predecessors, noted that it was too limited for the reader to accept the publisher's claim that it is a definitive history.

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While Shaw emphasized Clark's neglect of material factors, other historians were more ready to acknowledge the importance of the metaphysical dimension that he had introduced into Australian history. In his Quadrant review of the first volume, Michael Roe placed the history in the context of the question Clark himself posed: Just as the history of a man turns some to a tragic vision of life, the history of men's dreams prompts others to work for the day when that wealth of love which used to be lavished on Him is turned upon the whole of nature, on the world, on men, and on every blade of grass.24 Roe pointed out that these words bring together the Dostoevskian and Nietzschean attitudes which constitute Clark's tragic view of history. This is a question of an entirely different order from the one Shaw posed; it is to do with ends rather than with causes. In Overland, Ian Turner similarly recognized that Clark's history differed from the writings of his predecessors because he was asking different questions of the documentary record. He identified the guiding principle as a concern for the values of the people who built Australian society rather than the material culture that enabled them to conquer the land and its Aboriginal inhabitants.25 He also noted that Clark had turned away from the preoccupations of leftist historians with progress and the role of the working class, and was engaged 'in a debate about the eternal search for happiness'.26 This debate can never be resolved either by the collective answer that 'man can find a meaning for life in the contribution he makes to the well-being of the species as a whole' nor in the individual answer that 'the meaning of life is to be found in the self. Not the inadequacy, but the impossibility of either answer was the source of Clark's tragic vision, yet this also led to the hope that humanity would eventually escape from the self by turning its love to the whole of creation. While the human inability to live in either the material or the spiritual world makes this release of love overwhelmingly difficult, Clark, in Turner's account, faced the consequences of this dilemma by tracing in Australian history the attempts of individuals to escape from it. Turner concluded optimistically that Clark showed that 'material progress, a transformation of society, alone can free man from the dehumanising character of his present environment ... thus enabling him to confront his own emptiness, his own spiritual needs'. VI What Manning Clark did for the historical account of Australian history, Patrick White did for its imaginative apprehension. Both authors

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appeared quite directly in the journals as authors as well as objects for review and discussion. During 1962 and 1963 Australian Letters, Overland, Quadrantand MeanjinaM published new stories by White. His simultaneous acceptance by the various editors marked not only the convergence of their literary judgements, but also an acknowledgement of the fact that White could no longer be ignored. This sudden spread of publication did not, however, represent any easing in the critical attitudes to his work.27 Widely praised abroad, White's novels had been generally received in Australia with indifference or hostility, most notably in A.D. Hope's infamous description of his style as 'pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge'.28 Certainly, as Alan Lawson has pointed out, White from the beginning received some favourable reviews in Australia, and British and American reviewers were less unanimous than White and his admirers have claimed.29 But overseas the laudatory reviews appeared in the most influential journals, whereas in Australia their equivalents published the damning notices, and so set the climate of opinion. Hope's phrase stayed in the mind despite his admissions that the novel showed its author's ability to 'create real people and a real world for them to live in', and to depict his characters 'with that touch of the tragic which must always attend the depiction of what is rare and great in human life.' While Overland at first avoided the White problem by declining to review a novel that so contradicted its assumptions of the proper function offiction,30Quadrant acknowledged his importance by leading the review section of itsfirstissue with an acute analysis of The Tree ofMan by Patrick Coady.31 Coady, although not uncritical, recognized that the novel went beyond realism to show the separate searches of its two central characters for a completeness they never entirely find. The review is open to the novelty of the fiction. It was Clem Christesen, however, who had the perspicacity to commission Marjorie Barnard to write for Meanjin a review article that would analyse this novel within the whole context of White's work to that time.32 Barnard, whose essay was the first extended discussion of White published anywhere, gives a sensitive account of his first four novels.33 She finds in The Tree ofMan a resolution to the problem of man's 'inarticulate searching' for the 'ineffable moment' that for a moment illuminates the 'mystery between himself and God'. Overland critics remained ambivalent towards White. In its first discussion of White - a long review of Voss (12, 1958) - Ian Turner decided that the tragedy fails because Voss fails as a human, displaying 'an incompetence as gross as that attributed to Robert O'Hara Burke'. Worse, the book fails because it does not fit with the 'rational realism' that is characteristic of Australians. Instead, it finds tragedy in the human encounter with an unforgiving environment rather than with ourselves and with the mysteries of God. 'And this,' he added, is:

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why Patrick White has not succeeded for Australians because he is exploring, in an Australian environment, a mind, a way of thinking, that is foreign territory to most Australians. It is a mad world, one in which all the familiar signposts are standing, but are all pointing in the wrong directions, towards no land of experience that we can recognise as our own.34 In a response in Meanjin, David Martin showed the continuing ambivalence of the social realist critics.35 H e argued that Australian writers needed to recognize that the gap between our national achievements and aspirations is outside rational control, but he claimed that White in Voss and Stow in To the Islands fail to make tragedy from this failure because their characters lack reality, and consequently 'the symbolism does not flow from character and action'. On the other hand, in a subsequent essay on the realists, he identified their weakness as arising from the division they construct between g o o d and evil men, rather than between the good and evil within each individual. 36 When Riders in the Chariot appeared, Overland went beyond its usual circle of critics by publishing a review article from David Bradley.37 In a gracious but highly critical letter, White acknowledged it as a Very interesting and impressive exercise', while warning that 'you will not expect me to agree with all of it.' H e then took the review as an example of everything that had annoyed him about Australian intellectuals. What is so strange in this country is the immense amount of labour intellectuals expend on pointing out how to go wrong, while I receive letters from all over Australia, from all conditions of people, showing me they have seen the point I have tried to make. It must be true; more readers than one expects have the intuitive approach of the artist, whereas more critics have not come out the other side of 'education*, which is where understanding begins. ... I must comment, though, on Bradley's misunderstanding of the passage quoted at the top of p. 6. Abstract painting 8c music have always meant a great deal to me, and in passages of that kind I do tend to make calls on the other arts, to try to paint an abstract picture in words, & to hear phrases of an impressionistic music. Has Mr. Bradley never hung from the strap in a tram 8c heard the screech as the tram rounds the corner 8c his arm is nearly yanked from its socket? Has he never picked up a penny freshly squashed by tram or train, and smelled that lingering, obscene, metallic smell? All these are experiences Himmelfarb might well have had especially as it was some time since he had parted company with the universities. Perhaps David Bradley is one of those Australian intellectuals 8c writers who live cut off from the other arts. I have not met one who showed any interest in painting, no more than one or two who were attracted by music, and then very cautiously. This I find one of the more puzzling and distressing aspects of Australian culture. I must also answer Bradley's accusation that there is no passion in Riders in the Chariot. I feel very little that is passionate in Australia. Intellectual passion seems to rise no higher than the snarling of a mongrel pack in the correspondence columns of the fortnighdies and weeklies. As for physical passion, I sense on the one hand sparrowfucks, and on the other the weekly grind. Surely Voss and Laura were passionate individuals, or perhaps D. Bradley

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will not agree as they were not seen to copulate? I should also have thought the demonstrated a passionate act of faith. But of life of each of the four Riders course I am only the author.38 Overland gradually warmed to White's work. When at the end of 1962 it published a review of his play 'Season at Sarsaparilla', the reviewer, Arthur Phillips, was ready to judge the work on its own ground rather than by some external criterion. White, he wrote, had 'shown a mastery of... the art of revealing the inner movement of his characters through their inarticulateness'. In the following article in the same issue, the Party ideologue J.D. Blake praised The Tree of Man, Voss and Riders in the Chariot as realist novels whose concern for the inner life of individuals distinguished them from naturalism.39 The following year, John McLaren developed Blake's identification of White as a realist. Placing White in the context of the realist tradition, he concluded that his importance lay in the added richness of perception he had brought to this tradition rather than in his supposed opposition to it.40 However, like Martin before him, he failed to recognize that White does not merely deepen our understanding of human character or the Australian tradition, but goes right outside the world of material experience to question its very reality. This limitation of perception was overcome by Audrey Sides the following year in a review of two later plays by White. Sides contended that the male critics who had condemned White for his portraits of the misfits of society missed 'the potential of such people' to draw us into the writer's own uncertainty, and so into a real perception of modern fears.41 Finally, in 1965, Andrew Taylor acknowledged that 'White is central to Australian literature just in so far as he chooses to remain at odds with its society,' and Russel Ward, in an article on colonialism and culture, contended that his work had forced readers to modify the whole context in which they look at Australian literature.42 White's search for permanency, his confrontation of the chaos and destruction of modernity, might have been expected to evoke a sympathetic response from Quadrant, and indeed this was at first the case. However, unlike McAuley, who similarly sought to find in the spiritual dimension the solution to the sterility and cruelty of the material world, White offered no vision of an eternal order that could be emulated in the social. His work was resistant of easy solutions to maintain this sympathy, and eventually earned rejection from Quadrant critics Peter Shrubb and Leonie Kramer, who refused to endorse it as a portrayal of a society that had lost its values.43 Ironically, Shrubb rejected Voss for reasons very similar to those given by Turner and Martin. Like them, he did not like the turns to allegory

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and symbolism, particularly religious symbolism that implies the answers to the questions it raises. Examining White's distinction between materialists and visionaries, he concluded that at its core 'is a dissatisfaction that is deeply drawn to images of destruction and upheaval, deeply dissatisfied . . . with ordinariness' and a mind that 'takes the deepest and most attractive truth to be death'. Unlike McAuley, White offered no divine grace that might bring order to chaos, and no social vision to redeem ugliness. Shrubb concluded that a central element in White's work is 'what could be most simply defined as a reformist vision gone bitter and sour, frustrated, made angry, and thus trivialized'. The loss of this vision leads to his inability to believe in 'the existence of human worth'. Leonie Kramer took the case against White's mysticism further, arguing that, far from endorsing a vision of mystical unity either immanent in the world or transcending it, White's fiction rejects God and moves 'towards an assertion of secular humanism'. White seems to allow a possible secular humanist interpretation in his comment that Alf Dubbo's painting of the chariot 'encouraged an illusion which was also a truth, and from which the timid might retreat simply by changing their position' (Riders, p. 514). Kramer however was not prepared to allow such ambivalence, and objected that he reduces 'the philosophical worldpicture from an orderly God-created system to broken fragments . . . in a real world in the process of disintegration.' Further, she claimed that the vision was derivative and ambivalent, and at best represented a human rather than a divine truth. The novel leaves us no way of knowing which is truth and which illusion. Yet White, who has said that Kramer's essay marked her failure to read what he had written,44 would seem to be showing that it is only the timid who require certainty. The vision, variously and uncertainly granted to Himmelfarb the philosopher, Dubbo the artist, Mrs Godbold the natural and Miss Hare the simpleton, enables them to endure a world of cruelty and ugliness. White sees the world in very much the same terms as Milan Kundera, who has observed that any view that does not allow for shit is mere kitsch, and that the existence of shit is incompatible with the kind of belief in God and goodness found in orthodox Christianity of the kind embraced by such of White's characters as the Reverend Timothy Calderon. If God is not in the shit, or in Stan Parker's much cited gob of spittle, then He is nowhere. But if we can see God immanent in the world, including its shit, spittle and semen, then He also transcends the limitations of His creation and our perceptions of it. The final image of The Tree of Man is not the spittle but the trees, which continue, offering the permanency that Stan had sought in vain through his work in the world. This vision does not order creation, nor does it necessarily make the visionary a

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good person - Elizabeth Hunter has none of the sympathetic qualities of the Riders in the Chariot. Unlike the order of McAuley's God or the incarnation of Buckley's suffering saviour, White's vision of divinity lies outside the order of creation, accessible to those prepared to devote their lives to the search for it, but made substantial only through the mysterious and occasional insight achieved by an artist. Although the novelists who began to gain recognition in Australia in the 1960s were all to a certain extent under the shadow of Patrick White,45 they made their distinctive contributions to the redefinition of the tradition of European civilization in Australia. The radical nationalists had emphasized the opportunity to make a new start free of old oppressions, while the apocalyptic conservatives like McAuley had nurtured a hope of escaping old corruptions and restoring a sacred order. The writers now commanding attention were sceptical of such hopes of the future. White, Stow and Manning Clark all moved beyond the material life to seek a spiritual vision to justify the ugliness, cruelty and injustice they find in history. Their work does not deny the value of material struggle, but questions whether it can satisfy inner need. By forcing these concerns into the journals and on to public attention, they undermined the certainties of both the class war and the Cold War. They turned attention instead to a common human predicament within the contingency of circumstance, thus making the issue of community both more urgent and more precarious.

TEN

From Rhetoric to Eloquence The Generation of '68

Australia's only successful revolution began in 1966, at the height of the Vietnam war, when the American President Lyndon Baines Johnson visited his Coca-colony, the Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt promised to 'go all the way with LBJ' and went on to a huge electoral victory, and the young took to the streets in protest at the conduct of their elders. When they blocked the way of the New South Wales Premier in his car of state, he instructed his driver to 'run over the bastards'. While the Viet Cong dug their tunnels and the President of South Vietnam gaoled his opponents, students around the world inaugurated the counter-culture with its slogan of personal and political liberation, 'Make love, not war.' They got stoned on pot instead of pissed on beer, rocked to the Beatles and the Monkees and the Rolling Stones instead of waltzing to Nelson Riddle and his orchestra, demanded alternative courses and established free universities, and lived a public culture of protest that culminated in the moratoriums and, in Australia, the outraged demonstrations against the South African rugby tour. Politics was never going to be the same. In 1972 Gough Whitlam addressed crowds of enthusiasm with the opening words of the new age, 'Men and women of Australia ...' It was time, and he went on to win a famous victory. Then economic and political reality struck, the government began to unravel in disillusion, place-seeking or excess, and the ground was prepared for the counterrevolution of John Kerr and Malcolm Fraser. Yet if, like all revolutions, the counter-culture devoured its own children, some changes lasted. Fraser was as opposed to racism as Whitlam, and the nation never retreated to its earlier frightened xenophobia. If pot remained illegal, providing the financial basis for a thriving criminal industry, censorship stayed loose. People were permitted to get on with their lives in their own 178

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way. Encouraged by the newly formed Australia Council, the arts grew in vitality, even as a closing economy reduced people's possibility of living freely in the community. The adage 'Tune in, turn on, drop out' was replaced by the imperative, 'Go for it, buckle under or starve'.1 I The split between the Russian and Chinese Communist parties and the Cultural Revolution that began in Beijing in 1966, under Mao Tse-tung's auspices, produced a corresponding rift in the Communist Party of Australia, which eventually divided into three separate parties. The Maoists, led by Ted Hill, formed the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), which was particularly influential among student radicals and members of the American-inspired Students for a Democratic Society. The official organization, the Communist Party of Australia, under the leadership of Laurie Aarons and Bernie Taft, suffered from internal divisions but in general followed the softer, European style of reformist communism, and was highly critical of Moscow's intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The hard-line Stalinists, supported by Judah Waten among others, broke away to form the Socialist Party of Australia. The journals published by the separate parties concerned themselves with ideological and political rather than cultural matters. The most influential publication to emerge from formal Communist sources was Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, which, although banned in Australia, became a handbook for anti-authoritarian behaviour among the young. Amid the wine and rages life and literature were confounded. Poetry and rock were performed in pubs like the Newcastle in Sydney, and in Melbourne La Mama theatre became the centre for the new drama, leading to the establishment of the Australian Performing Group and its home in the Pram Factory theatre. The major chronicles of this time were written outside the Party press in student papers, in the new press - Sunday Review, later the Review, then Nation Review, Tharunka, Digger- and in the

countless ephemeral literary and political journals that sprang up in emulation of the American counter-culture and provided the nurturing matrix for the whole movement. According to Kris Hemensley, there was a distinction between the formal abstraction of the Sydney school and the democratic openness of Melbourne, but this is not evident in the published work.2 In an article in Overland in 1969, Dennis Douglas surveyed ten of these mini-mags, ranging from Lucifer, which he noted ran to only one issue and was believed defunct, to Our Glass, the 'spearhead of the roneoed broadsheets, edited by Kris Hemensley, a young English poet who came to Australia... and [in 1969] began organising poetry readings at La Mama, a meeting ground for writers and dramatists'.3

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Our Glass continued under a variety of names. During a brief sojourn in England, Hemensley produced Earth Ship, which continued after his return to Australia under two further titles Ear in a Wheatfield and The Merri Creek or Nero.4 His editorial rationale for these was to 'create a free area around himself which he could fill with new talent outside the control of both the established media and the academies.5 From the beginning he was in touch with the avant-garde in England, and in the later series extended this perspective from the North Atlantic to the Pacific to produce a dialogue between contemporary writers in Europe, North America, Australia and Japan. The spirit of these writers was summed up by Nigel Roberts, who wrote that we had not come to praise or put down Henry Lawson's ghost / or to dance on Ern Malley's grave / but TO BE / WITH POETRY/ we who saw / poetry as a natural activity - as something to do / amongst many other things ... a poet & a dealer today / a musician tomorrrow / & a front row forward / Saturday6 The ironic gestures to Lawson and the radical nationalists and to Ern Malley and the earlier Australian modernists, and the twist to the Marxist ideal of the man who hunts in the morning, works in the afternoon and philosophizes at night, claim these traditions for the poet at the same time as they proclaim the poet's intention to supersede them. The poem declares a politics of freedom in which the past is there to be plundered to build a life of senses and ideas in the present. Yet this life is also seen to be precarious, a matter of seizing the chances, as suggested by another of the Ear poets, John Jenkins. In 'Slice', Jenkins' perceptions lead him through a journey of grammatical and associational shifts from a chair and a crumpled pillow as he finds that it is difficult to discover beneath their meanings as one would read a line / fishing for horizons see the hook dip through clear reflections


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and clear water parts and drips there as one would study landscapes walk through them with your eyes This poetry establishes a dialectical relationship between poet as reader and world as text, anticipating postmodernism in not reducing either to the other, going beyond both formalists and moderns in refusing to impose any preconceived shape or meaning on the social experience of living. Douglas traces the rise of these magazines to Mok, published from March 1968 by two Flinders University students, Richard Tipping and Robert Tillett. In Victoria the following year, Charles Buckmaster dropped out of school rather than have his hair cut to regulation length. He moved to a flat in Carlton, and began publishing Great Awk. Despite his constant wanderings, he continued to bring this out until 1970, when he admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital and was given electroconvulsive treatment. Two years later he committed suicide, leaving only a handful of poems that were later collected and edited by Simon MacDonald.8 Buckmaster's brief career, with its restlessness, resistance to authority, use of drugs and dedication to the creative and exploratory function of language, is emblematic of the age. II In Parnassus Mad Ward, his study of the poetry of this generation, Livio Dobrez places Michael Dransfield and the painter Brett Whiteley at the centre of this movement of sensibility.9 Dobrez shows how both artists take each work as a new beginning, making its world afresh. Drugs and sex are the great aids to this ambition, yet neither artist is able to escape the past, which returns to haunt him in the form of remembered innocence or, in Dransfield's case, the imagined ancestral estate of Courland Penders. Even the drug poems fail to escape the past - the imagined new future is repeatedly denied by the subject's return to the inescapable order of a death that is not redeemed by the memory that 'there still can be innocents there still can be love'.10 Dobrez, examining the poetics of this attempt to escape into an eternal present, shows how this romantic absolute is constantly qualified by the irony that reveals the author's feeling of entrapment in a world that can never satisfy his desires. If we turn from the poetics to the politics, we can recognize in

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this world the delusions of commodity culture, where the promise of fulfilment is constantly deferred by the need to consume. Poets of the new generation, absorbed in the imperative of creating their own lives, neglected the need to produce their material base. This is evident in the poem that Dobrez offers as the touchstone of Dransfield's work 'First one's free' - where the children come 'far from the schoolworld' to exchange their age of innocence for the delight of experience. The speaker meets their desire on his terms: here you say blow your mind the first one's free.11 The very hope of freedom perishes in the offer that corrupts innocence. In Tipping's work the rock sounds of Mersey and the San Francisco Beats suggest the new drive towards an existential freedom that uses the same gestures to deny the material requirements of existence and the improper demands of authority. Strongly influenced by popular culture and by its source in America, the new poetry was hostile to authority, whether of the state, of tradition, of ideology or of form. The America which gave it its models became also its central symbol of oppressive authority, just as Allen Ginsberg, its presiding elder, gave it its theme: 'I have seen the best minds of my generation driven mad ...' 12 Yet while the new poets took from Ginsberg an openness of form that resembled the patterns Buckley and even Murray were adopting, they eschewed the elevated rhetoric that Ginsberg derived from Whitman and the demotics of generations of American preachers. Rather, they sought, as Hall has written of Dransfield, 'to remain open to surprise, to an adventure of ideas, to pure moments of insight'.13 If they saw the personal as political, they also saw the aim of politics as the freedom of the individual in the present. Their politics was identical with their ideology. They did not seek to find authority or order, but to realize the evanescence of life in the instant that held the whole. In an article on American fiction, Laurie Clancy summed up the ideology of this generation with a quotation from the American poet Delmore Schwartz, that 'Eloquence laughs at rhetoric' and 'smiles being meticulous, / Because truth is ridiculous'. Clancy, who was writing specifically about the black humourists and absurdist playwrights, placed these remarks in an historical and political context: In a world in which about six million members of a people can be wiped off the earth because of the whim of a madman, a world which may be annihilated within a few minutes and where almost no kind of monstrosity or exaggeration is impossible and indeed is reported every day, the black humourists argue that


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no representation of human 14life which rests on principles of order and ripeness can be fully adequate. In these circumstances, the new writers preferred eloquence, the art that was assumed to allow experience to speak directly through the words, to rhetoric, the art of shaping experience in words that gave it order, a pattern of meaning. Yet at the same time they accepted as truth the proposition that the only experience conveyed by words is the experience of the words themselves. What began as a direct engagement with life therefore finished as a pure aesthetics of language. The new generation saw that violence and the madness of power were the critical elements shaping language itself. Like the older poets, they struggled to produce in their work an order that would resolve the contradictions between human creativity and destruction. Two poets of a slightly earlier generation, Rodney Hall and Thomas Shapcott, in an introduction to a 1968 anthology that attempted to capture the new mood, suggested the difference in responses to this common ambition when they wrote that for the great majority of these poets, pre-war and post-war are alien terms. There has been simply war and peace. Most of us spent our childhood in the war, and war was the natural condition of the world. This peace (sic!) is the condition we have had to adjust to. So the political attitudes of the generation are largely those of caution - desiring to avert further conflict, rather than build any sort of Utopia. Everywhere in these poems there is a suspicion of idealism, and an inbred awareness of the consequences of totalitarian beliefs.15 The poets in the Hall and Shapcott collection largely wrote in the established tradition. This caution was not characteristic of their younger contemporaries, the generation of '68 who did not remember the war in any sense. Their childhood was lived in the shadow of the bomb and the light of the television set, and they came into their maturity accompanied by the electronic sounds of rock and the images and prospects of violent death in Vietnam. They grounded their poetics more in an existential than a political view of the world, although it was an existence of action more than abstract ideas. As Carl Harrison-Ford explained, their attitude derived from cybernetics, an interest in what a thing does rather than what it is.16 According to Harrison-Ford, the nineteenth century was dominated by ideas drawn from industrialism and emphasizing purpose. The plot of the novel was not merely a device, but the means by which the author involved himself in formal and direct enquiry into social process. In the twentieth century, Harrison-Ford argued, this sense of purpose has been fragmented by the specialization of formal disciplines and the relativism

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of all forms of enquiry. Cybernetics, which is interested in closed systems rather than linear progression, in relative movement rather than positive existence, expresses the modernist understanding of reality. As single ideas are no longer held in common, there is no commonsense. In literary modernism, this produces poetry that aims at an exact rendering of experienced reality as an expression of subjectivity. If God has withdrawn from the universe, we are left only with words. If these are the only reality, we are alienated from any social being, and left only with the articulation of our subjectivity. The poetic work thus becomes, in Wallace Stevens' words, the 'poem of the act of the mind'. Harrison-Ford cited Robert Greeley's explanation of conceptual poetry as based on the complex principle that 'what is said says "what-is-said"'. This in turn means that the poet frequently reverses the normal order of logical reasoning, working from his conclusion, his mental state, to the premise on which it is based. This insistence on the reality of the subjective present contradicted any adherence to tradition or continuity. Rather than using history as the guarantee of the authenticity of their experience, in what Harrison-Ford scornfully referred to as the dangerous manner of Eliot, Pound or, in Australia, Hope, contemporary poets were seeking a sense of place. Much of what Harrison-Ford refers to here as modernism has since come to be described as postmodernity. Modernism in Australia stretches from Kenneth Slessor at least as far as to Vincent Buckley. These poets were interested in the past as the basis for building a future. By contrast, the postmodernists, or conceptual poets as Harrison-Ford called them, who in Australia began with such writers as John Tranter or John Forbes, saw their work as making a decisive break with the past, whether conceived as a legacy of tradition or as a record of progress. Deprived of the past, and thus of a possible vision of the future, the only politics remaining to them was the politics of power. In making the personal political, they asserted a commonwealth of one. While this fitted the distrust of ideals that Hall and Shapcott had noted, it left them with no defence except their own autonomy against the politics of control masquerading as participation and process.

Ill The shift from the formal literature of control was apparent in Poetry Magazine, the journal established in Sydney in 1954 by the Poetry Society of Australia. In 1964 the society dismissed its editor, Grace Perry, whereupon she took the copy from the printer and used it tofillPoetry Australia, a new journal she established herself. Although Perry introduced some new poets, such as Robert Adamson, Michael Dransfield and


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Rhyll McMaster, as well as some overseas work, the two journals continued on well-established courses.17 All this was to change after 1969, when Roland Robinson first gave charge of a whole issue of Poetry Magazine to Robert Adamson as guest editor, and then in turn was displaced in an internal coup.18 This change did not happen easily. A special meeting of the society called by Robinson to discipline Adamson broke up in uproar after a tied vote. Passions ran high. When Joan Mas flaunted her support from such tribal elders as A.D. Hope, she was greeted with screams of 'Bullshit, so what, so fucking what'. Robinson disowned Adamson as the 'Trojan Horse' he had introduced to destroy the creation of his generation of poets. He recalled that the earlier disputes with Grace Perry had been personal, whereas now the issues were both generational and ideological. Deciding that the fight was destroying his own creativity, he resigned, leaving the field to the new generation. Reflecting on the episode in 1982, he concluded that Grace Perry had been right when she used Adamson's assistance but kept authority for her journal in her own hands.19 Rae Desmond Jones, who had first been published by Adamson in the special issue of Poetry Magazine, commented that the change of editorship made it no easier to obtain publication in the journal. 'I don't know, by the way, that what the new guard was doing was all that different except that it sort of used a hell of a lot longer words.'Jones however identified the takeover as the sign of the arrival of a new establishment that led to a general opening of opportunities for publication. Almost immediately Adamson, Dransfield, Tranter, Tim Thorne, and so on and so forth, they became the establishment; they became people with access to the power which enabled them to publish books, which enabled them to be published in magazines which were a lot broader even than New Poetry, very very rapidly. I mean even Poetry Australia virtually had Tranter as a sort of sub-editor; Grace Perry was much more cunning in this respect than Roland Robinson.20 The new poetry had been gaining its place in these journals since 1969, when Joan Mas had edited a special issue ofPoetry Magazinedevoted to the younger poets. At the head of her selection of lyrics on love and its passing, she set Tranter's 'Parallax', a confrontation with horror: In the frenzy ward, where words are flinted air the loony leaps about, lip-strung trying the taste of light, clutching his hair all electric in a bathe of fright, the lash of self helps his lips stumble out a song his face boils up in a rash Like contemporary American work by Lowell or Berryman, the conventional form fails to contain the violence embedded in the thickness of the

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language. Subsequent stanzas take us into the mind of the patient who in the last lines becomes not an object but T , the knowing subject awaiting the 'wholesome lady* who may, or may not, be his rape victim in his 'kingdom of the dead'. The poem upsets our expectations of a resolution, stranding us in the middle of its frenzy. Adamson's issue of Poetry Magazine, sub-titled a 'Young Poets' Issue Approximately', started with a challenge from the editor, headed 'ernie hates his pater and loves his mummy the black goddess / the slightjumps in syntax obscure the more blatant possible meanings'.21 This had nothing direct and everything significant to do with the remarks that followed. Ernie may well have been Ern Malley, whom Adamson referred to as marking the last moment of modernism in Australia. This would make the pater 'Professor Jim' McAuley, the villain of Adamson's introduction, the negative against which the positive of the poets in the special issue was to be measured. Rodney Hall and Thomas Shapcott were lumped with Judith Wright in ambiguous praise for having 'uttered mighty spells in an attempt to exorcise that peculiar Australian phantom, Ern Malley', but in general members of the older generation were not welcome to an edition that contained 'no grey eminences'. Adamson even chided his patron Roland Robinson for being almost old and powerful, although the older man was allowed a reply in his poem 'The Young Men', a not very satisfactory attempt at satirizing the new style of lines shaped like Mayakovsky and written in the image of Che Guevara to 'discipline the masses'. Adamson explained his own editorial principles with the assertion that he had chosen work that 'probes what's happening beneath the green fuse', and that any failure has more to teach us, more than another minor, well-rehearsed success; now's the time to reach for the autumnalfig-leaf;having mouthed the truism that a poemfindsits form in the individual poet, we've effetely rejected both ends and most of the middle of the whole horrible, magnificent spectrum of what is human. Where's the maim and carrion? In the expression of the time, good poetry was what let it all hang out, although powerfully expressed, as Adamson demonstrated in both his poetic and his editorial practice. The power of the poetry in this selection comes most often from a kind of detachment. Two poems by Andrew Taylor found it impossible to relate either to death or even to life, which left him 'nowhere to go', so that 'you may as well / get out because there's no place for you here'. The search for a place, for a solution, provided the theme of numbers of the poems, but the search invariably fails, leaving only the present. This present was frequently violent. Vicki Viidikas in a prose poem, 'Helen on a Wheel', gradually undid Helen's promise of beauty in a fading from sickly green and black to dope, lethargy, blindness and dead fern. A second poem,


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'Punishments and Cures', gradually revealed that the speaker was the victim of a rapist who was also a victim, leaving neither anywhere to go or any escape from violence, disease and the 'private festering' that cannot be cured by a doctor. Adamson rewrote Coleridge to leave us marooned with the albatross in a sea where 'the lines of dawn get redder each day... the sea is so hot, paint's peeling off the keel' (p. 19). Richard Tipping, in a minimalist poem simply entitled '57 Lines / 17 Spaces', emptied Eliot's 'Waste Land' of even its residual meaning, reflecting that at nineteen i should be aware of death but finding only that 'life is very short' and words of the elders fade in salt salt the wastes the arid hopeless void ... my pussyheavy head breaks open in the dirt The 'pussyheavy head' suggests a satiety of the senses and of sexuality that can be tolerated only by accepting the violence turned on itself. IV The new guard could open their pages to new poets, but their readership was not similarly committed. They could extend their audience by reading and selling in the pubs, but to retain their readership, many of whom came from the same generation as Robinson, they needed to keep publishing good poetry from all sources. At the same time, the poets who first found their voice in readings and ephemeral publications soon made their way into the more general literaryjournals. As this interchange supplemented ideological and generational rivalries, Adamson and his colleagues even published one of the greyest of the 'eminences' they affected publicly to despise, James McAuley, whose 'At Penstock Lagoon' appeared in the October 1970 issue of Poetry Australia, just ayear after the coup. This poem is both a rejection of the 'language games' that fill the poetry of Tranter or Tipping and a cry of despair by a man who feels his faith has been betrayed. In tones that recall his commination of the political clergy of Sydney, he declared that the priests of Christ's church had become Gadarene swine celebrating an anti-sacrament as they 'turn blood into wine'. The poem ends with no hope of sunrise heralding a return of light, but only the comfort of 'one small bright patch of red' displayed by a perched robin (pp. 12-13). Despite the formal style, the rage at a world where all things fall apart is not so different from that found in the new generation. The

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difference is that McAuley returned to nature for the detachment the others found in the forms he rejected. The revolution affected the established poets as well as the young. The issue of Poetry Australia that carried Buckley's 'Golden Builders', as innovative in style as in subject, also contained 'Walking to the Cattle Place', the formal sequence that similarly sought to find the past in the present, and John Forbes' verbal prestidigitation, 'tv': don't bother telling me about the programs describe what your set is like the casing the curved screen its strip of white stillness like beach sand at pools where the animals come down to drink and a native hunter hides his muscles, poised with a fire-sharpened spear until the sudden whir of an anthropologist's hidden camera sends gazelles leaping off their delicate slow motion caught on film despite the impulsive killing of unlucky Doctor Mathews whose body was found three months later the film and camera intact save for a faint, green mould on its hand made leather casing22 Here the technological object fuses past and present in a single verbal sequence governed only by association. The set has neither more nor less reality than Dr Mathews and his camera, all of them existing to us only as content within fabricated casing. Metonymy replaces metaphor in a world where meaning is present only in fragments. The poetics of this piece, like its politics, is the antithesis of McAuley's deliberation, his search for a pattern or meaning independent of his own volition. It is the politics of intervention described so vividly in Rae Desmond Jones' recollections of the fight at the Poetry Society. It is the politics that finds in immediate sensation the whole knowable universe. The logic of this poetry was expressed in a review by Martin Harrison in Poetry Magazine ofJohn Tranter's 'Parallax', itself published as a special issue of Poetry Australia.23 Harrison started from the premise that 'a poem ... is a perfectly gratuitous act', and the observation that Tranter's poems are 'quite simply, verbal constructs of a fairly high order of complexity... precise in language but polysemous in his images'. They neither dissolve language in musical sound nor reduce it to the precise meaningful complexity of mathematics. 'Rather than being presented with meaning', he explained, 'we are at liberty to extrapolate a number of alternative and valid relationships between the parts of the poem.' They are written in the language of the electronic world of cybernetics, where meaning is no longer the meaning of the Enlightenment, 'understanding through reorganization of experience, which increases ability to direct further experience', but verbal experience from which we create our own


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relationships. Against the repressive politics of Vietnam, north or south, the poetry is an assertion of the individual as the centre of a universe, decentred by the inexplicable motions of energy. Dransfield addressed the political implications of this poetics directly in the sequence 'After Vietnam'.24 This begins with a pattern of words that leave the reader uncertain about any connections, even the order in which to read them: the

autumn finds

young

the

have

old

learned

to

to

perish

me

among cadences of

fly extinction

Some sense comes if we read each column downwards, but this is only one of the possible sequences: the words provide a field of many meanings, not a single proposition. The subsequent poems in the sequence deal more explicitly with the effects of the war, the industrial world that has produced it, and the horror of Hiroshima that stands behind it. Yet the title poem is no more than a collection of images that juxtapose nature, culture and the war to expose the moral vacuum in which it was being waged: the sea moves, armies move, insects, certainty of autumn, winter perhaps spring, another war. nothing is endless, all is possible. ... By withholding judgement or comment, or even an interpretative pattern that could produce them, the poet threw the responsibility back on the readers to come to their own decision. The absence of formal explanations freed the poem from the lies of politicians and churchmen, leaving our experience of the facts as words to speak for itself. The corollary of the ideology of the individual isolated in words is that the whole of experience is available in those words, and the individual is therefore responsible for all that happens. The responsibility for self thus becomes a responsibility for the whole community, yet it generates the paradox of the collectivity of individual selves that denies community. If I am responsible for everything, I can allow no room for compromise -

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the action of all is mine, and I must ensure that it conforms to my idea of freedom and morality. The collective must obey my dictates. The ultimate means to this end is the violence described by Rae Desmond Jones at the Poetry Society meeting, when Adamson suddenly spat at Robinson with a 'peculiar intense physical viciousness'.25 More commonly, it is the kind of democratic process that uses the numbers to ensure that everyone conforms to the norm - again, the final outcome of the Poetry Society meeting. The insistence on my right to rule myself finishes as another way of demanding my right to impose my order on everyone else. Individualism becomes lost in collectivity.

The New Australian Poetry, the 1979 anthology published by Makar, constitutes a belated manifesto for the new generation of poets, who by then themselves constituted an establishment. In his introduction the editor, John Tranter, boldly declared that the new poets had a unique authority in the field of human action. They had abandoned the roles of moral arbiter and healer that confused earlier generations, and instead take us on a voyage of discovery in a reality 'more solid and intense than the world of objects and sense-perception'. The mental landscape displayed in their work is 'more variable, complex and humanly meaningful than the external, because it embodies the "real world" as one of its attributes'.26 If however the real world exists inside our heads, we can no longer define meaning as a pattern that enables us to direct our future actions. Meaning becomes simply the experience we order, or create, in our words. The substance of Tranter's criticism of the older poets of order is that by seeking a higher order, by exercising responsibility for the world rather than responsibility to themselves, they went outside the function of the poet. Yet, for all his disclaimers, the poetry he collected contained its own prescriptions for action. This became evident when Tranter identified three major faults his generation of poets found in the tradition they rejected: It was too largely derived from enfeebled English models; it was too closely aligned with the reactionary establishment that had dragged us into the shame of the Vietnam war; and it was built upon a mid-Victorian understanding of poetry's role that had been convincingly demolished in Europe and the Americas decades before. He argued that the erosion of the traditional faith in reason and in language as its tool made the poetry of order, whether grounded in classical rationality or romantic nature, impossible. Poets instead turned to drugs to expand their consciousness, and to the 'inherent properties of


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language itself to discover solutions' to the problems of living. But in opposing the rationalism that led to the Vietnam war, and asserting language as a vector rather than a medium, Tranter continued to assert the responsibility of the poet to his time. The ground of his arguments remained in essence the romantic ideal of the poet as seer, the person who sees and reveals truth. Even the idea that truth is discovered first through lived experience was romantic. The difference is that, as Tranter pointed out, the English romantics discarded only the idea that reason alone would reveal the truth, not the idea that truth itself lacked order. The romantics who provided the source for the new poets were French writers like Baudelaire or Rimbaud, consumed by hatred for the bourgeois order and by a passion for destruction and death. Among the poets of the generation of '68, this passion was moderated, as Dobrez suggests, by a sense of their own containment by circumstance, of the ironic absurdity of all human action in an age that can only mock the heroic.27 Rodney Hall and Thomas Shapcott had heralded the new age in their earlier work by insisting on the incompleteness of meaning. Yet both, while opening their poetry to the present, sought to establish within it the continuity of myth and history. Something of this duality is suggested by the epigraph Shapcott chose for the collection he dedicated to Hall, Inwards to the Sun: 'Nous sen tons une image de la verite, et ne possedons que le mensonge'. The collection pursued truth through the images of myth and history, finishing with the invocation of the cedar that both preceded human settlement and provided its furnishings: am the name cedar is, I am becoming wherever the name grows meaningful. This is my place. In the fire that burns to give us light something is said beyond giving, and lasting, not ashes. Each side of now holds us. Kneel in the light even of fires. The cedar burns. Something lights with its fingers and humbles us to reverence.28

Although the poem opens from the originating T, its spaces wait to be filled with a meaning that becomes complete only in the last line, which is also the last line of the book. The reverence to which the poet calls us

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is not merely a reverence for this house and this occasion, but for the whole past that the cedar contains and that the words of the poem bring to us. Similarly, by containing the past, it opens to the future with a responsibility for the whole of life. It thus moves beyond the containment of words and the self they enclose. The poets in Tranter's collection acknowledged both their containment in words and the need to move beyond, but they sought also to break free from the history and myth that provide Shapcott with his point of origin. Even Dransfield's ancestral house, Courland Penders, the guarantee of his connection to a lost world of elegance and responsibility, is a projection from the present, an ideal to be achieved rather than a past to be recovered. It is a part of the poet's solipsistic world, where the external constantly dissolves into an interior of drugs and fantasy. Adamson was equally aware that the nature he perceived existed only through language. Language is the subject of his sequence 'The Rumour', where it becomes both prophecy and Wormwood, the star from the Apocalypse of John the Divine.29 In the Biblical account, this star brings the third of the disasters that come on humanity after the opening of the Seventh Seal. Its name is Wormwood, it poisons the waters and kills those who drink from them. In Adamson's poem it becomes first language, branching itself away from God's inscrutability, then the Final Singer, a 'hand aflame ... restoring / Truth to its original lineaments.' But truth declines to an encyclical, then a song, and finally a mere rumour, bitterness that is also the poet's muse, 'more beast than Cherub'. Yet the words cannot lose their promise of prophecy. Angels may be mere words, but as they fall men shoot out their hands to catch them, finding only darkness and wormwood. The word, the rumour, still sets the poet's hand aflame, seeking amid the midst of disintegration and malignancy the 'Open Song' that will flash free in rapture against the 'proposition of the Law'. Shelley and Coleridge are invoked, as well as the contemporary American poet Robert Duncan. The freedom of poetry from its formal bonds becomes also a freeing of the individual from external oppression, symbolised by war, and internal regression, symbolised by the 'sexual fury' it generates instead of delight: So the ideas slanted against war struggle free; the lyric obstructed by sexual fury breaks forth, leaps insatiable. A distinctive cacophony sounds drowning All in radiant waves, over the objections sounding as the poem flashes brighter than the tree onfire,than the proposition of the law, flames against the carbon Child,


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singing rapturously of the malignant Stamp, of particular anguish. (p. 101)

The poet takes into himself the cacophony and malignancy of the world in order to produce a radiance of song that will produce a splendour of freedom that transcends our anguish at the particularity of evil. Like the other poets in the Tranter collection, Adamson rejected not only Australian nationalism, with its attachment to a particular history and place, but also the European tradition of the Enlightenment and its promise of liberty through the domination of nature. His poetry is an attempt to encompass the whole world within the grasp of his language. Although he makes no pretence of imposing an order on it, or even of discovering an order within it, his ambition is nevertheless imperial. He takes his knowledge eclectically from the whole of history and mythology, accepting whatever language brings him. Many of the poets in this anthology carry this imperialist attitude towards language through to their treatment of other people, and particularly of women. Although few of the male poets are as brutally sexist in their expression as Rae Desmond Jones, or as violent as he recalled Adamson at the poets' meeting, few either are as accepting as Michael Dransfield. More commonly, women appear in their work as vehicles to satisfy male desire. At their most self-knowing, the poets may recognise, like Tranter, their own 'Failure of Sentimentality and ... Evasion of Love', but even in the poem with this title the woman remains victim and the man the object of his own pity: now the girl stands in the concrete yard. her eyes go white, reflecting the sky she has come to love, that has so little of the human in it. her look turns back against her with a jealousy beyond repair. * he said: I could have moved, but only to wound.... much later, the return: his sight broken, drowned, his face soft as water. (pp. 154-5)

In contrast to these male writers, whose language is an expression of their will, the women writers were open to experience, accepting of it not

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as its victims but as products of the dialogue of the inner self with the outer world. Vicki Viidikas was quite explicit about her role: 'making weapons from our dreams' (p. 68). Nor was she illusioned about those she met chasing their own dreams, the addicts absorbed in themselves, like the punk who threatens her: his face broke up yeah you wanna watch your mouth on the pavement breaking glasses you betta watch out someone's gonna get ya (p. 68)

Yet the crudity of his language remains outside her observing self, leaving her safe. Even in 'Future', where the poet is betrayed by her lover, 'You must go, my wife's due back', she remains inviolate, able to turn his words to part of the experience of travel promised by the fortune teller (p. 69). Jennifer Maiden found no such resolution to 'The Sponge' (pp. 133-7), her poem about bondage to the suburban family, where she shows the indifferent yet aggressive husband who cooks his breakfast proudly alone, demolishing his eggs, and her, 'proudly, ... like an argument'. Yet despite her metaphorical existence as a 'sponge' to his moods, the woman is neither passive nor defenceless. He may win the argument at the end, but he cannot take away the power in her own life, pushing her child in its pram 'like / a soldier in a bayonet advance', and building sustenance from her existence as she 'rounds the dough in her hands' and asserts 'I am combining people'. The act of preparing food becomes a metaphor for the poet, creating a community from words despite the hostility of a reality that is outside her volition but not outside her power to shape. VI The forces of reaction that had imprisoned Robert Close and Frank Hardy did not allow the counter-culture to pass unchallenged. In the streets, police battled protests against the war in Vietnam and against the South African Springboks' tour of Australia, although the anti-Vietnam protests attracted such widespread support that hotheads on both sides were constrained to remain within bounds. Nevertheless, the long hair of the student protesters became a symbol of dissent that attracted fear and loathing from the staid and repressed. A comment in Brisbane's Courier-Mail, in what may have been an attempt at irony, called for barbers to be ranged at the state border to shear long-haired southerners coming up to disrupt the tranquillity of Queensland. Queensland radicals proved quite capable of creating their own disturbance. When one of the protesters in a group led by University of Queensland activist


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Dan O'Neill was savagely bashed by a local spectator during a demonstration at a rugby match in Toowoomba, nearby police saw and did nothing. When I arrived in the city some months later, everyone was able to name the alleged basher, a local publican, although police had refused to lay any charges because they claimed not to be able to identify the offender. The local paper, the Chronicle, reported the events as 'a diverting day at Gold Park', and published an editorial, Two Victories at Gold Park', which praised the Springboks for winning the match and Toowoomba for 'its victory over a team of Brisbane visitors'. When the correspondent for the London Times, Stewart Harris, in his book on the tour, criticised police inaction, the Chronicle again defended them. In a front page article, 'our man on the spot', Bart Marney, argued that 'It is not unreasonable to accept police assurances that they did not see the attack'. Niamey's explanation was that O'Neill was distracting the police at the time, and that in any case there were fewer of them watching than Harris had claimed.30 In Sydney, the bookseller Alec Sheppard had in the early 1960s challenged the ban placed by the federal Customs Department not only on the importation of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, but also on the account of the English court case, The Trial of Lady Chatterley. When Sheppard sought to evade the ban by publishing the account of the trial locally, Customs waited until his edition was printed and on the point of distribution, and then suddenly lifted the ban, allowing in the English edition and costing Sheppard the chance of recovering his outlay on the book.31 In Melbourne, the police laid charges against Penguin Books for distributing Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. At the trial, the witnesses for the defence spent more time waiting outside the court while the lawyers argued about the admissibility of their evidence than they did inside testifying that the book had artistic merit and no tendency to degrade or corrupt its readers. In the event, the magistrate held that obscenity was a matter of definition to be decided by him without the assistance of evidence, and that the book was obscene within the meaning of the law. Penguin was convicted and the police ordered to destroy the copies they had seized. When Penguin's publisher, John Hooker, insisted on being present at their destruction, he was informed that the police held no machinery for book burning and would have to hire a municipal incinerator. Turning up at the appointed time, he discovered that no book burning could take place as all the seized copies had disappeared.32 In practice, the trial brought such ridicule on the prosecution and the law that further action ceased and in effect the book became freely available in Victoria and elsewhere. A similar prosecution in Tasmania was allowed to lapse, and only Queensland remained pornography free. The most effective satire came from Michael Leunig,

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cartoonist for the recently established Sunday Review, who drew the scene in court showing every participant, from the presiding magistrate to the watching cop, engaged in actual or symbolic onanism. The contest of the courts was played out even more dramatically in Sydney when Wendy Bacon was thrown into gaol after being convicted for exhibiting an obscene publication. She had appeared in the vestibule of Sydney's Central Court dressed in a nun's habit bearing the words 'I have been fucked by God's steel prick'.33 As Frank Moorhouse points out, this was not part of a deliberate campaign against censorship. Rather, it was an expression of the determination of members of 'The Push', intellectual heirs of the Sydney libertarians, and the group associated with Tharunka and its successors, to live an ideology of personal freedom. They rejected the right of authority, whether state, family, church or university, to decide what they could read or publish. They practised what Peter Coleman named as 'porno-polities', inspired not by greed but by 'a complete loathing of the society we live in and enjoy.' Wendy Bacon's slogan was not a calculated blow at this society so much as an attempt to open its eyes to the repressive nature of virginity and the institutions that exalted it. This lack of either deliberation or piety placed the group outside the comprehension of the system they opposed. Coleman, himself a defender of civil liberties in other contexts, could see them only as agents working to establish a totalitarian state.34 Nothing could have been as diametrically opposite to their ambitions, yet Coleman's charge has its germ of truth. Moorhouse has explained that members of the editorial collectives were agreed that 'pornography or erotica belonged in the paper'. This was sexually stimulating material as distinct from obscene material that which simply broke taboos... There was discussion about whether erotica would have a place in a free society: whether it was a reflection of our sexual hang-ups or whether it was a reflection of human fantasy. But for most of us it was sexual fun and, whether only for now, we wanted it in our publication.35 The emphasis on the importance of the imagination and the delight in fun captures the joyous defiance that took the Push outside the capacity of the authorities to repress. When Bacon was hauled before the court, she refused to comply in any way, pleading neither guilty nor not guilty, because to do either would be to admit the possibility of obscenity. She refused to offer evidence or argument, and withheld even her name and address. In his exasperation, the judge demanded of the policeman, 'Do you mean to say you can't tell me if she's married or single?' and refused to pass sentence without knowing anything about her, remanding her instead in custody until a probation officer could interview her. As in


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Melbourne, the victory was won not by persuading the court but by demonstrating its futility. Yet the establishment has had its revenge despite her qualifications, the courts have consistently denied Bacon the right to practise law in New South Wales. VII The counter-culture's emphasis on personal freedom produced some anomalies, particularly a refusal to recognize others except as objects of desire. The emphasis on desire in turn led to the neglect of the ways that work transforms material reality to satisfy broader human desires. These limitations led to a refusal to acknowledge economic reality - a fault that was eventually to undo the Whitlam government - and to a failure to examine how society produces individuals, and consequently their desires.* The rebellion thus remained middle class, concerned with the distribution and acquisition of emotional well-being rather than its production. The individual has no responsibility to any wider social reality, and consequently collective activity becomes a matter of competitive individualism, leading ultimately to totalitarian social control. As long as the object of the exercise was the use of the latest technology to produce and distribute new publications, this was no problem - if an editorial collective split, it could easily produce new publications to satisfy each faction. But once these publications had also to meet the economic needs of their producers, the control over their resources became a crucial issue. The desire to publish whatever the writers had to say came into conflict with the need to meet the expectations of readers, and eventually led to the demise of most of the alternative press. In the wider sphere, schools and universities that met only the immediate desires of their students failed to prepare them for the productive work, physical or intellectual, needed to satisfy their desires. The counter-culture collapsed from its own contradictions and under the weight of the passionate consumerism that underlay its own individualistic practice. Frank Moorhouse, journalist turned story writer and editor, whose work crossed the bounds between fiction and reportage, decency and obscenity, chronicled this process. In the eyes of the censorious, his words and his actions broke down the standards that held the community together. In the opinion of his supporters, his work broke through the inhibitions that repressed the individual and produced a society held together by fear of others and violence towards its own members. In Moorhouse's own view, he was the teenage communist turned libertarian, dedicated to freeing the individual from social, moral and legal oppression. His chosen means to this end were through his life and his writing. In this stance of taking the personal as political, of generating

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revolution by living it as much as by organizing for it, and by seeing words as revolutionary rather than merely as a means to revolution, he was representative of the counter-culture that he reported. The primary responsibility of his characters is to themselves and their own emotional truth, which he defined ironically in the title story of his first collection, Futility and Other Animals.™ At the beginning of the book, an author's note explaining the idea of his 'discontinuous narrative' described also the nature of his world: These are interlinked stories and although the narrative is discontinuous there is no single plot - the environment and the characters are continuous. In some ways, the people in the stories are a tribe - a modern, urban tribe which does not fully recognise itself as a tribe. Some of the people are central members of the tribe while others are hermits who live on the fringe. The shared environment is both internal - anxieties, pleasures, and confusions and external - the houses, streets, hotels, and experiences. The title of the opening story, 'The Story of the Knife', overlaps one of Judah Waten's most notable stories, T h e Knife'. But in the Waten story, the knife is a clear-cut symbol, even if the reactions it elicits are contradictory. In Moorhouse's story the symbolism is itself ambiguous. While Waten's story is, in the tradition of social realism, a clear-cut metonym for a society in transition from Anglo-Celtic homogeneity to multicultural difference, Moorhouse's is representative only in the sense that its characters are detached from any wider social reality that might provide meaning for their actions. Although the knife in both stories is a symbol of masculinity, Waten connects this to the continuity of family and responsibility, as well as to connotations of threat. For Moorhouse it is a metonym for a strength the characters produce between themselves but thatfinallyeludes them. It is also a symbol of the man's sexuality, which the woman enhances and threatens, just as their love is both enhanced and softened by the haze of alcohol and methedrine within which they explore it. The narrative is framed by the knife's disappearance and the woman's announcement of her departure, two happenings, casual and contingent, that set the bounds to their love's possibility. When, at the end of the story, she decides to stay with him, her decision is a surrender of the independence that has made her desirable, and so signals the end of the relationship she is trying to make permanent. As the author has warned us, within his book 'this is the part called confusion.' For Waten and his contemporaries, truth lay beyond the immediate in the sweep of history, the certainty of faith, or the wider order of society. Confusion and doubt produced comedy and tragedy, but they remained personal, generated by the inability of the individual to find a place in this larger context. For Moorhouse, only the personal is true,


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and personal experience itself is fragmentary, struggling for moments of freedom within the larger confusion of living. The continuing search for freedom, as well as his recurrent return to the bush, links Moorhouse to the politics and nationalism of his predecessors just as much as the music, drugs and sex of his urban environment make him a part of the cosmopolitan counter-culture of the global village. In his second collection, The Americans, Baby?1 the stories show both a greater awareness of the complexities of this politics and a distancing from the characters' attachments and obsessions that adds an edge of satire to the accounts of people caught up in the search for both freedom and community. The narrative of the first story in the collection, 'Dell Goes Into Polities', has almost nothing to do with politics. Its substance is the renewal of the discord between Dell and her parents and her increasing disenchantment with Harry, who remains confined by his small-town experience. The conclusion of the story is the hint that Dell is perhaps already two months pregnant to her city lover. The background to the story, however, is the world of the city lovers, the politics of Vietnam and the unions, the contrast between the sterility of the middle classes, the undirected energy and revolutionary hopes and fantasies of their children, and the economic necessities that drive the few unionists who intrude on their margins. Through discontinuous narratives Moorhouse explores the various negotiations of language between his characters' projections of themselves onto others and their creation of themselves - as lovers, activists, parents - through communication with them. Although he recognizes sexual desire at the centre of his characters' lives, he shows it as alternatively destructive, liberating, or repressed and sterilizing. It becomes destructive for those who use it to control others, as Hugo attempts in 'The Story of Nature'; sterile when it is confined by rules, as the older generation try to do, and only intermittently liberating. The moments of liberation, found by Carl with the American Paul Jonson, or by Cindy with Kim, too often involve the betrayal of others or run aground as one or the other tries to intellectualize feelings for nature simply to destroy the bonds of culture. The politics of personal liberation as the basis of ideology turns out to be as complex as the idea of liberation through ideology, and the revolution remains just as distant. In the title story of Futility and Other Animals, the image of the knife is transmuted into a gun that the man has bought to kill a rival lover, and now keeps with him as a way of keeping his nightmares at bay. His defence of his possession as an act of independence itself turns into a nightmare in one of Moorhouse's most political stories, 'The Machine Gun', where the Maoist Turvey steals a Bren gun to use in the imminent

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revolution. During a mad picnic he and his revolutionary comrade, Kim, surrender to the exultation of firing, counterpointed with recollections of Hemingway that serve as reminders of the true and lethal purpose of such a weapon. Finally, in an act of true futility, Turvey terrorizes a party, drunkenly using the excuse of pure Maoism, 'They have to be introduced to violence ... Someone has to prepare them. I'm ready for the killing.'38 The story shows the limitations of a politics in which individual liberation provides a basis for genuine community, only to be destroyed again by our capacity for self-deception. The satire that Moorhouse directs at the intellectual revolutionaries identifies the greater problem that both his social realist predecessors and the writers of order had always avoided: the problem of power. Kim, revolutionary turned schoolteacher, whether acting as political organizer in the country town, or bringing the folk band to raise the consciousness of the locals, is acting out the role of his student past, trying to keep alive the community he lost on graduation and despatch to the rural outposts of state education. His trip to the city to join in the demonstration, and the 'Revolutionary Kidney Punch' he delivers to the policeman, and boasts of in the pub, momentarily restore his lost community, but at the same time reveal its pretension and its political irrelevance. His lectures to his partners, during and between their lovemaking, reveal the source of his politics in the desire to fulfil himself by creating an order of desire that he totally controls. His political aspirations bring together the competing desires for personal fulfilment and communal solidarity, but at the cost of reducing the other to an extension of himself. This is the same dilemma that Frank Hardy sets up at the beginning of Power Without Glory, but he chooses to trace John West's path to personal liberty and control in purely financial and political terms. By taking these desires back to the bedroom, Moorhouse reveals the human nature of the destructive fears and ambitions that Hardy shows only in their historical contingency.

Epilogue

If the past is a different country, the near past is utterly strange. Because the causes and passions, and many of the actors, remain with us, we expect it to be familiar, but when we try to return to it we find that everything has completely changed. So, if we turn to the works published in 1950, we find ourselves in a remote world. Hardy's Power Without Glory, and novels by Gavin Casey, 'Brian James', Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard and John Morrison provide a range of social realism in a world that remains quite confident in its certainties. They all look forward to a radical change that will release the human potential of society and eliminate its oppression, but not otherwise challenge our understanding of what it may be to be human. The confidence of the progressives was about to be challenged, both by the exponents of traditional order on the right and by the transcendentalists who looked beyond the material constructions of society for justification for their humanity. Yet this challenge was blunted by the intellectuals and political activists who marginalized themselves by their own extremisms. On both the extreme right and the extreme left, controversialists like Frank Knopfelmacher and Frank Hardy, supported by organizational men like B.A. Santamaria, Richard Krygier, Jack Blake and Ted Hill, used a rhetoric that demonized their opponents and so excluded the possibility of reasoned debate. The Cold War locked them into positions of mutual incomprehension while providing an ideological cloak for the intellectual paralysis of government and public life. This paralysis was ended by the counter-cultural revolution that dragged politicians and the media into active engagement with global economic and political struggles, and with social and cultural change at home. Like all revolutions, it devoured many of the best of its children, like Michael Dransfield, and eventually produced its intellectual reign of 201

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terror in the doctrine of political correctness that, in contrast to the ways of the libertarians, attempts to codify and legalize its hopes. Nevertheless, many of its effects have endured the attempted counter-revolution of the Fraser years and the instrumental managerialism of the Hawke governments. The Keating government's nationalism is rooted in postwar and earlier radicalism, and the interest of both major parties in Asia similarly owes much to the realignment of intellectual and political interests that during the 1960s became publicly manifest in the quarterly, monthly and fortnightly publications. The present policies of multiculturalism are a logical culmination of the postwar immigration program introduced by Arthur Calwell and continued by his successors. This project was however determinedly assimilationist and residually racist. The decline in racism can be traced back to the campaign against the White Australia Policy that was originated by the Immigration Reform Group in 1960, publicized by Nation, and symbolized by Donald Home's act of removing the racist slogan from the Bulletins masthead when he became its editor. The valuation of cultural diversity for its own sake, an extension of our limited tradition of tolerance and now at the core of the new nationalism, owes much to Al Grassby's promotion of the ideal during his terms as Minister for Immigration and then Commissioner for Community Relations. But it is also a consequence of the challenge to orthodoxies and the opening of minds to a multifarious world of possibility that occurred during the 1960s. On the other hand, the obsession of both state and federal governments with new technologies is heavily influenced by the technophilia that subsumed much of the counter-culture during those years. Accordingly, the cultural policy contained in the federal government's 1995 Creative Nation statement pays more attention to the processes and modes of delivery of the arts than it does to their function or substance. Despite continuing economic gloom, and the remaining pockets of racism and reaction it nurtures, Australian society today is more tolerant, open and heterogeneous than it was at the end of the second world war. Apart from the economic rationalists, we recognize culture as an essential part of politics. For much of this change we are indebted to the energies of the counter-cultural writers and their vigorous attack on the shibboleths of their elders. But we also enjoy the benefits that emerged from the conflicts of the preceding generation. The radical nationalists, emphasizing what was distinctive about the Australian tradition, kept alive the spirit of secular egalitarianism that continues to distinguish Australia from its source cultures and from equivalent societies in North America. The radical conservatives deepened our understanding of our British cultural legacy by emphasizing its origins in European Christendom and the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean. Both groups

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prepared us for the breaking of political ties with Britain and closer involvement with Asia. In the last twenty years, women writers, writers from European and Asian backgrounds, and Aboriginal writers have transformed Australian literature. Assistance from the Literature Board of the Australia Council has been vital in enabling these writers to get on with their work. At the same time, Australian publishers - whether locally or internationally owned - have expanded their local publishing programs until these now account for more than half of the general books sold in Australia each year.1 This has enabled them to reverse the pattern of Patrick White's career by developing international reputations after first establishing their work with Australian readers.2 As print comes under challenge from electronic media, the ownership of the major capital city newspapers in Australia has been reduced to two companies, each controlled by a foreign proprietor. Rupert Murdoch, whose News Limited absorbed the Herald and Weekly Times group, has become a citizen of the United States, where he operates a vast multinational publication and communication enterprise. His chief Australian rival, the Fairfax group, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age, went into receivership after a failed internal coup by the young Warwick Fairfax, and subsequently became part of the group of media companies operated by the Canadian publisher, Conrad Black. Their only Australian rival is Kerry Packer, who effectively owns a television network and the Bulletin, as well as a great stable of trade and consumer magazines. The successors to Nation or Nation Review and their ilk are the monthlies, including Quadrant, The Independent Monthly, published by John Fairfax, the surviving member of the Fairfax family still in publishing, and Eureka Street, published by a Jesuit order which has transformed its outlook since the time of Twentieth Century. In addition, there are well-financed right-wing think-tanks, such as the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne and Perth or the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, both generously supported by business. On the left, there are the struggling Evatt Foundation in Sydney, and in Melbourne the two-monthly Arena Magazine, and its annual stablemate of theoretical writing, Arena Journal. The lack of diversity deprives the public culture of sustained and informed debate on such issues as multiculturalism, national identity, Australia's relationships with Asia, or the nature of a future commonwealth. When a topic disappears from the headlines it disappears also from the pages of analysis, debate and opinion. The world of the literary magazines continues to be volatile. Although the flow has somewhat diminished since the 1960s, new titles constantly appear. Among the older magazines, the founding editors are either dead or retired. Quadrant continues successfully as a monthly. The conservatism

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of its earlier years provided a platform for the more strident voices and extreme economic and social individualism of the new right, but under its current editor, Robert Manne, it is providing a forum for thinkers who engage with traditional conservative concerns for the institutional as well as the individual foundations of civil society. The quarterlies are mainly conservative, interested infinewriting and high theory. Westerly continues a dialogue with Asia, and in Canberra Blast engages with radical issues. Meanjin has become ajournal of the liberal centre, and in recent years has been particularly involved in cultural criticism and women's issues. Overland has become more respectable, but maintains its commitment to democratic nationalism and a dialogue of literature and politics. It encourages a range of commentary and reportage that crosses social boundaries as its poetry and fiction cross the bounds of form and genre. As Australia confronts the problems of technological change and the global economy it has produced, both the lessons and the legacy of the 1950s remain pertinent. The absolutist positions manifest then are again emerging in the urgent contemporary debates about conservation and production, individual and collective rights, and are as destructive now as they were then. The collapse of the Soviet Union has led to an unjustified confidence in the ability of capitalism to solve the problems of a world dominated by untrammelled multinational combines and characterized by environmental degradation and growing inequalities between and within individual nations. The Australian tradition identified by the cultural nationalists, and the longer traditions of western humanism, emphasized by their opponents, provide a basis on which we are beginning to construct a form of nationalism that will show the way to an effective basis for thinking globally while acting nationally from the experience of our own particular condition. Our understanding of this condition has been furthered since the 1970s by the great burgeoning of the arts that has occurred with the enhanced government support provided through the Australia Council. Most recently, however, the Council itself has come under attack in the media and by the Australia Council Reform Association, a ginger group convened by, among others, poets Les Murray and Mark O'Connor and musician Roger Woodward. Press criticism, particularly in letters from outraged readers, has tended to concentrate on the supposedly poor aesthetic standards or vulgar moral content of work produced with Council assistance. Within the arts community, criticism has been directed rather at the way grants are awarded. Proposals put forward by ACRA and others have included the replacement of grants to specific artists and organizations with a form of general subsidy on published work, the replacement of the Australia Council by a Ministry of the Arts directly responsible to parliament for

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its decisions, and the delegation of responsibility for allotting moneys for the arts either to state governments or to separate authorities in each state.3 These proposals have however been drowned out by allegations of incompetence, political correctness, discrimination and cronyism, prompting the chair of the Council, Hilary McPhee, to complain of the mean-mindedness and lack of generosity of the artists themselves. The noise from the grinding of axes and the sharpening of knives has drowned out reasoned debate around the central questions: how can Australia maintain its cultural independence; what is excellence in the arts; how might it be nurtured, and can unargued appeals to merit take account of the plurality of criteria by which judgements are made by artists and critics in relation to work from different genders, ethnic communities or marginalized and repressed groups? The philistinism of this debate is abetted by the federal government's Creative Nation policy, which proposes concentrating government support on the glamorous electronic modes of delivery that are supposed to open new markets, rather than on the creators of new modes of thought and feeling. The furore over the Australia Council has erupted into a community already entertained by the deep rifts among critics over two books published during the preceding year. Helen Garner's The First Stone (Macmillan, Sydney, 1995) is a fictionalized account of the events surrounding the accusations of sexual harassment and assault brought by two of his students against the Master of a college of the University of Melbourne. Although the Master was eventually found not guilty, he was forced to resign his position. His accusers refused to talk to Garner, who had indicated her sympathy for the Master, but their attitudes were put in a lengthy article byjenna Mead in Re Publica (no. 2, Melbourne, 1994). Garner suggested that the women refused to take responsibility for their actions or for the subsequent fate of the Master, who at worst seems to have behaved foolishly, and that the case trivialized the real concerns of feminists. I know that between 'being made to feel uncomfortable' and 'violence against women' lies a vast range of male and female behaviours. If we deny this, we enfeeble the language and drain it of meaning. We insult the suffering of women who have met real violence, and we distort the subtleties of human interaction into caricatures that can serve only as propaganda for war. And it infuriates me that any woman who insists on drawing these distinctions should be called a traitor to her sex. (p. 221) Those who refuse to make these distinctions, and who at every turn blocked her attempts to speak to the accusers or even their supporters, she describes as exemplars of a 'certain kind of modern feminism' that has

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become 'priggish, disingenuous, unforgiving' (p. 93). Her book is an extended attempt to go beyond the abstractions of theory tofinda politics grounded in the complexities of human relations, a politics that takes into account the inextricable linkages between learning, maturation, eroticism and authority. The response among younger and radical feminists was to emphasize the need for women to fight their status as victims and criticize Garner for ignoring the unequal power relations between the parties. Garner and her supporters were vilified in terms that recall the contempt heaped by an earlier generation of radicals on those who dared question the complete truth of Stalinism. In this later case also, Garner is accused of not confining her description within a proper theoretical framework. It is as though we have regressed from an insistence that the personal is political to the concept of the politically correct, that nothing may be said unless it fits the framework of what has already been defined. Helen Demidenko's The Hand that Signed the Paper (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994) has attracted a response equallyfiercebut different in kind. While Garner was criticized for trying to find the truth, Demidenko was condemned for her failure to show the whole truth of her chosen subject, the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s and the role of Ukrainians in the subsequent mass slaughter of the Ukrainian Jews. The outrage of the critics was increased by the revelation Helen Demidenko was in fact a carefully contrived but false identity assumed by Helen Darville, daughter of British migrants. Although this masquerade did not affect the status of the text as fiction, it did lend to its history the spurious authenticity of being constructed from the memories of supposed Ukrainian parents. Although a manuscript version had won the Vogel award for writing by a young author, the novel attracted little attention until in 1995 it received the Miles Franklin award for fiction and, later, the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal. The judges for these awards emphasized the novel's literary qualities: its prose style, its success in imagining a particular situation. The novel's critics, on the other hand, led by Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, attacked its lack of historical perspective and judgement. Ivor Indyk, editor of Southerly, and Helen Daniel, editor of the Australian Book Review, insisted that the dishonesty of the book's historical perspective required that its awards be withdrawn. It was left to Robert Manne, in Quadrant and elsewhere, to point out the disjunction between the way the book was evaluated by literary intellectuals on the one hand, and historians and political scientists on the other. His criticism, and Indyk's, deny both the propositions of postmodernism that there are no authors, no values and no truth, and the central assumption of the traditionalists, that a text can be judged purely in its own terms, free of context or connative value.

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Although Garner and Demidenko deal with vastly different orders of experience, each book raises the issue of individual responsibility. This is a matter of both individual morality and public politics. The failure of many Australian literary critics to recognize that every text is a presentation of a moral viewpoint and an intervention in politics is a denial of fifty years of literary endeavour. A narrative, whether historical, autobiographical or fictional, is a statement by its author that this is how the world is, or at least how it seems to the writer. Yet at the same time we know that these statements are provisional, existing only as words that are a product of their culture, lacking any necessary anchor in a reality outside themselves. There is no grand narrative of liberation or order to give them validity, and to give the reader grounds for accepting or rejecting the author's view. We no longer have the luxury of rejecting books according to whether or not, 'objectively', they strengthen capitalism or undermine civilization. We are too aware that in the recent past such grand narratives led to the horrors of nazism and Stalinism. This means that both author and reader have a greater responsibility for the immediate truth and consequences of the small narrative. Jacques Derrida is the latest theorist of language to argue that every statement, every narrative, is both a continuation of past patterns, past writing, and a new departure, an assault on our consciousness that indefinitely defers its own and our meaning. Yet Derrida also shows, in his musings on Nelson Mandela, that we can use the text to escape from its constraints and make ourselves free agents.4 This implies choosing where we place ourselves in the world and taking responsibility for our own actions in it. The act of telling a story places author and reader in a particular relation to the people and events within the story. The author therefore has the responsibility to ensure that the story is true to its origins, whether in documentation, in memory, or in the imagined truth of character and circumstance. If the narrative is historical, the writer is obliged not to go beyond the documents and speculation about them, but is also obliged not to conceal, but to take the documents as far as they allow. The selection of questions to ask and issues to follow decides the truth of the tale. A similar obligation binds the writer of fiction, whose documents may be entirely imaginary, or a mixture of the imaginary and the historical. Regardless of the sources, whether internal or external to the writer, the tale must be true to them. Readers then, in constructing their own truths from these tales, place themselves within their own world and history. If the tales from which they make this construction are false to their own reality, the construction will be warped, placing the reader in a destructive relationship to human possibility. Demidenko's book fails by this test. It presents, not as understandable but as tolerable, a view that allows some people to lead full lives while

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denying the possibility of others having such a claim on our attention. Garner's book, on the other hand, shows different parties caught in a web of entangled but incompatible values, bringing destruction sometimes by ignorance and sometimes by a wilful insistence that partial truths are absolute. Our ability to make these distinctions has been nurtured by a body of Australian writing that over recent years has raised these matters in the most absolute ways. Brian Matthews on the difficulty of understanding another person, however well documented her life, Cassandra Pybus on the issue of historical responsibility for the displacement of the Aborigines and the destruction of their societies, and Drusilla Modjeska on the complexities of understanding and responsibility in personal relationships are three recent examples of Australian writers striking out from the easy refuges of ideology into the troubled oceans of story. In our necessary navigation, we can only guess at the depths beneath the waves that buffet us. The latest challenge to our complacencies comes from the dirty realism or grunge fiction that appears to challenge all morality in favour of the pursuit of constant sensual gratification. Yet this work, which can trace its origins through punk rock to such American writing as William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959) or Hugh Selby's Last Exit from Brooklyn

(1964), and even further back to the romantics who wanted to go beyond all ethical prescriptions to peer into the dark abyss at the centre of the self, is still based on a sense of moral outrage at a world of unfreedom. As one Australian exponent has explained, 'The world IS a really fucked up place sometimes, so why shouldn't artists address that?'5 To which we might respond, certainly they may, but as readers or audience we have a responsibility not to mistake the question for the answer, the outrage for the solution. Ian Syson however argues that the best of grunge writing follows the tradition of social realist writing, and that its outrage is itself the solution, the rejection of an unjust society as the necessary first step to building a new one.6 The quantity of fiction and poetry now being published in Australia defies the attempts of any journal to keep abreast and make the necessary distinctions. Moreover, despite the globalization of the media, we are in danger of becoming increasingly parochial. While British and American work is regularly reviewed, there is scant distribution in Australia of work from Africa, Asia or the Pacific, and correspondingly little attempt by either the popular media or the little magazines to examine it. The paradoxical consequence is that we have more acres of printed matter than ever before, but a reduction in the variety and ownership of the media; a greater acerbity of debate, and a diminished capacity to place ourselves and our work in a global or historical context. Our lack of adequate government policies to promote cultural or economic independence threatens to relegate us forever to the status of

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poor relatives from the provinces. But the continuing crisis in global capitalism means that the provincial relatives may prove to have the key to humankind's survival. This key will not be found if we, along with our neighbours, are forced to be dependants of a capitalist global economy, consumers of culture rather than producers of our own. As Australians, our hope depends on our ability to disentangle ourselves from imperial ties and, with the other marginals, particularly among the peoples, as opposed to the governments, of Southeast Asia, forge an alliance that will enable the dispossessed to take command of their planet. The emerging cultural understandings of our writers and artists offer us the hope of this future that our economic, political and legal theorists deny.

Notes

Abbreviations

LTLV: La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria ML: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales NLA: National Library of Australia Manuscripts cited in the notes AACF (Australian Association for Cultural Freedom) papers, NLA MS 2031 Frank Dalby Davison papers, NLA MS 1945 Ken Gott papers, LTLV MS 13047 Hartley Grattan papers, Library of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Austin at Texas Martin Haley Papers, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, MS 48 Frank Hardy papers, NLA MS 4887 Donald Home papers, ML MSS 3525 MLK 2143 John Latham papers, NLA MS 1009 John Morrison papers, NLA MS 4615 Stephen Murray-Smith papers, LTLV, MS 8272 F.W. Robinson papers, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, MS 5 Ian Turner papers, NLA MS 6206 Judah Waten papers, NLA MS 4536 Prologue 1 Robert Close, Of Salt and Earth: an autobiography, Nelson, Melbourne, 1977, pp. 242-9; Peter Coleman, Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition -100 years of censorship

in Australia, rev. edn, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1974, pp. 39-40; Phillip Knightley, Obituary, Australian, 21 July 1995, p. 21; interview with Ian Mair, 13 Feb. 1984; additional information from Ken Gott. Close's prison sentence was remitted on appeal, and he served only ten days behind bars. He left Australia after his release. 2 Close, Of Salt and Earth, p. 248; Frank Hardy, The Hard Way, T. Werner Laurie, London, 1961, pp. 176-80 and passim. 210

NOTES (PAGES 3-10)

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3 Close, Of Salt and Earth, p. 249. 4 Robert Close, Love Me Sailor, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1955 [1945]. 5 Frank Hardy [Ross Franklyn], Power Without Glory, first published in Melbourne, the author, 1950. Page references to Australian Classics Edition, Lloyd O'Neil, Melbourne, 1972. 6 Details of charges, The Hard Way, pp. 11-12; of Galbally's submission, pp. 17-18. 7 The Realist Writer, Melbourne, vol. 1, no. 1, March 1952. No editor is named, but it was presumably Bill Wannan: see John Tregenza, Australian Little Magazines 1923-1954, Libraries Board of South Australia, 1964, p. 99. 8 Frank Hardy, The Hard Way, pp. 41-2, 112. 9 Ibid., pp. 38-9. 10 Information from Jennie Barrington, interview, North Carlton, 2 February 1995. 11 Frank Hardy, 'Voices Off, Hardy papers, Series 32. 12 Hardy, The Hard Way, pp. 42-4. 13 Ibid., pp. 11,172. 14 Ibid., p. 81. 15 Ibid., pp. 146,182-3. 16 Interview with George Seelaf, Footscray, 20 July 1983. 17 Interview with Ted Hill, Melbourne, 12 Aug. 1986. 18 Hardy, The Hard Way, p. 47; Hardy, Power Without Glory, pp. 664, 669. Jennie Barrington confirms the truth of Hardy's account, citing the Power Without Glory Papers, which were held in the Fisher Library, University of Sydney, but have now been removed. She says that the remnant of the Anstey papers were given to Hardy by Harriet Middlecoat, Anstey's mistress and relict, who told Hardy that Anstey had burned the remainder. Interview. 19 Seelaf, interview. 20 'Voices Off, Hardy papers, Series 32. The chapter is headed 'Fact 1948-51. Written 1978. Truth is stranger than fiction.' At the end of the last page of the existing chapter is written 'DRAFTED BUT COMPLETION AWAITS MATERIAL FROM AUSTRALIA'. Hardy presumably wrote this while living in France. Jennie Barrington says that a handwritten script does confirm the identity of Bill Egan and Bill Evans. She says that these drafts show that Who Shot George Kirkland: a novel about the nature of truth, Pan Books, Sydney and

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

London, 1981, is largely factual. In a television interview replayed on SBS, 7.30 pm, 27 Oct. 1994 [1993], Hardy stated that his information came from Alan Hall, brother of Lucy Egan, who was the wife of Bill Egan, the alleged adulterer. Hall told the story as he remembered it, and Hardy wrote it as Hall told it. Hardy, The Hard Way, p. 128; Hill, interview; Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan: artist and revolutionary, OUP, Melbourne, 1993, p. 224. Hardy, The Hard Way, pp. 128-34. Ibid., pp. 98, 171-4; Hill, interview. Seelaf, interview; John Starke and Frank Hardy, radio interview, The Law Report, Radio National, 8 Dec. 1992. Starke, interview. Hardy, The Hard Way, p. 112. Hardy, Power Without Glory, pp. 9-14. Author's Note, Power Without Glory, p. 719. Hardy, The Hard Way, p. 117. Hardy attributes a greater force to the character of Corrigan than actually appears in the novel. Corrigan's role was expanded

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30 31 32 33 34

NOTES (PAGES 10-20)

in the television series based on the novel. According to Hardy's literary executor, Jennie Barrington, this change was made at Hardy's direction: interview. See for example, Hardy, Power Without Glory, pp. 496-500, on the incident at the Stadium, pp. 526-32, on the Archbishop's role in a contest for leadership of the federal Labor Party. In John Morrison, Black Cargo and Other Stories, Australasian Book Society, Melbourne, 1955, pp. 11-21. See the introduction to his own work in James McAuley, A Map of Australian Verse, OUP, Melbourne, 1975, p. 201. 'The Vicious Fifties', typescript, Frank Hardy papers, Series 32. Barrington, in her interview, pointed out that Hardy always had his doubts about Stalin, and as early as the 1940s published in Radio Times a cartoon of Stalin as dictator that led to the Party ringing the paper to voice its objections. 1 Modernism and Nationalism

1 Reprinted in Brian McKinlay (ed.), A Documentary History of the Australian Labor Movement, Drummond, Richmond, Vic, 1979, p. 149, quoting from report in the Sydney Morning Herald, 29 Dec. 1941. 2 Meanjin founded as Meanjin Papers, Brisbane, 1940; moved to Melbourne, 1945; name changed to Meanjin, 1947, Meanjin Quarterly, 1961; reverted to Meanjin, 1977. All references in the text and notes will be to Meanjin. It is now Australia's second-longest surviving literary quarterly. Southerly, established in 1939, is the oldest surviving journal, but its publication was interrupted. 3 For discussion of Australian culture and the American invasion, see Richard Haese, Rebels and Precursors: the revolutionary years of Australian art, Allen Lane/Penguin, Ringwood, 1981, pp. 104—13; Lynne Strahan,/^ City and the Mirrors: Meanjin Quarterly and the Intellectual Front, 1940-1945, OUP, Melbourne, 1984, pp. 39-55; also early issues of Meanjin and Barjai. 4 Brian Elliott (ed.), The Jindyworobaks, UQP, St Lucia, 1979, Introduction, pp. lxv, xviii. 5 Max Harris, 'Dance Little Wombat', Meanjin, 2/2, 1943; reprinted in Elliott, Jindyworobaks, pp. 259-63. 6 Elliott, Jindyworobaks, p. 158. 7 Rex Ingamells, 'Conditional Culture', in John Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia: a collection of literary documents, 1856 to 1964, OUP, Melbourne, 1969, pp. 250-2. 8 Interview with Bruce Dawe, Toowoomba, 2 Dec. 1991. The lines of poetry, which he quoted from memory, come from 'For the Other Fallen'. 9 C.B. Christesen, radio interview 3AR Radio 2, 8 Jan. 1985. 10 Editorial, Southerly, 1/1, 1939. 11 F.W. Robinson papers, MS 5/251a, H.M. Green to Robinson, 13 May 1942. 12 Ibid., 5/219d, Christesen to Robinson, 10 Jan. 1945. 13 Judith Wright, 'Brisbane in Wartime', Overland, 100, 1985, 66. 14 Smith, Noel Counihan: artist and revolutionary, OUP, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 181-225; Haese, Rebels and Precursors, pp. 99-129, and Michael Heyward, The Em Malley Affair, UQP, St Lucia, 1993, pp. 10-27. 15 See Haese, Rebels and Precursors; Smith, Counihan. 16 Cited by Haese, Rebels and Precursors, p. 99. 17 Tim Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character, Kibble Books, Melbourne, 1978, particularly pp. 116-17, 176-84, 239-45.

NOTES (PAGES 20-33)

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18 From a letter to Michael Heyward, cited in his The Em Malley Affair, p. 52. The actual words quoted distinguish between 'le symbolisme qui sait' and 'le symbolisme qui cherche'. 19 Heyward, Em Malley Affair. For his analysis, see pp. 148-50, 225-6 and passim. The book as a whole shows the reading and concerns that generated the imagery of the poems. 20 Brian Elliott, Taboo or not to Boo?', Meanjin, 3/3, 1944, 180-82. 21 On Harris' reluctance, see Heyward, Em Malley Affair, p. 216. 22 Em Malley'sJournal, 1/3, 1953, 4-16. 23 Editorials, Meanjin, 1/2 and 4, 1940. -24 Argus, Melbourne, Week End Magazine, 6 March 1948. 25 Argus, 11 March 1948. 26 Heyward, Em Malley, p. 451. 27 Robinson papers, MS 5/219c, Christesen to Robinson, 28 Sept. 1944. 28 Strahan,/ws£ City, pp. 91-6; Jenny Lee, Philip Mead and Gerald Murnane (eds), The Temperament of Generations - fifty years of uniting in Meanjin,

Meanjin/MUP, Carlton, Vic, 1990, p. 58. 29 Christesen, interview, Radio National, 8 Jan. 1985. 30 Strzhan, Just City, pp. 88-92. 31 Quoted from a letter to Christesen, 22 June 1959, in Lee et al., Temperament, MUP, p. 93. 32 Haley papers, Buckley to Haley, 6 Oct. 1954; Buckley to Haley, 12 Nov. 1954. 33 AACF Papers, Box 1, Krygier to CCF, 12 May 1954. 34 Fiona Capp, Writers Defiled, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1993, p. 131. 35 Frederick T. Macartney, The Increased Price of Liberty, Bulldozer Booklets no. 1, the author, Black Rock, Vic, 1955. 36 Haley papers, MS 48/927, Macartney to Haley, 4 Feb. 1958; MS 48/919, Macartney to Haley, 3 Nov. 1956. 37 Vincent Buckley, 'The Poetry of Kenneth Slessor', Meanjin, 11/1, 1952, 23-30; 'The Poetry of Francis Webb', Meanjin, 12/1, 1953, 30-4. 38 Meanjin, 12/1, 1953, 23, and James McAuley, Collected Poems 1936-1970, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1971, p. 73. Page references in this paragraph are to the version published in Meanjin. 39 James McAuley, 'Captain Quiros', in Collected Poems, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1971, pp. 137-215 (first published separately, 1964); Vincent Buckley, 'Land of Our Fathers', in The World's Flesh, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1954, pp. 36-54. 40 Lee et al., Temperament, p. 93; Macartney to Christesen, quoted in Meanjin, 14/4, 1955, 599-600; Buckley to Christesen, 22 June 1959, in Lee et al., Temperament, p. 93.

2 Literary Conflicts and Failed Vision 1 Frank Hardy, Power Without Glory,firstpublished by the author, Melbourne, 1950. Page references to Australian Classics Edition, Lloyd O'Neil, Melbourne, 1972. 2 The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) had had a long interest in promoting working-class culture, and had during the 1930s sponsored such organizations as the New Theatre and the Writers Leagues, and from 1943 to 1946 supported the publication of Australian New Writing, see Julie Wells, 'The Writers Leagues: a study in literary and working class polities', Meanjin, 36/4, 1987, 527-34. Hardy was not one of the founders of the Melbourne

214

NOTES (PAGES 33-6)

Realist Writers Group when it was founded in 1944, but joined soon after: Hardy, The Hard Way, T. Werner Laurie, London, 1961, p. 42. 3 Hardy papers, Series 23, undated manuscript diary, presumably circa 1952-53, gives an account of Hardy's ideas and their genesis. He describes the organizing work for ABS, the success of sales for Journey into the Future, and then contrasts a projected campaign based on trade unions, factory groups, readings and critical sessions, and worker writers, with Party methods of relying on publications by Party journalists which 'mutilated' worker contributions if they were used at all. He seeks instead to cultivate writing talents on the job: 'articles, doggerel, gossip pars, and stories.' 4 Realist Writers Groups were active at some stage in Victoria, NSW, SA, Queensland and WA. The name was usually spelled with an apostrophe, viz., Realist Writers' Group, but later this was dropped. This book follows the later usage. For dates of establishment, see note 30 below. 5 Details of Murray-Smith's life taken from his Indirections: a literary biography, Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Monograph no. 6, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1981: Section I, 'Seven Summers by the Shore', pp. 2-21; war service, p. 23; and Geoffrey Serle, 'A Tribute to the Editor', Overland, 50, 1972, 3-4. Details of Turner's life are taken from 'Foreword' and 'My Long March', in Room for Manoeuvre: writings on History,

6 7 8

9

Politics, Ideas and Play, selected and edited by Leonie Sandercock and Stephen Murray-Smith, Drummond, Richmond, 1982: on war service, pp. 111-19; on membership of the Party, pp. 105, 116; on Peace Council, pp. 127-31; on collaboration between Party members and others, pp. 121-2, 126, 128, 132. Some anecdotes are taken from personal recollection. Murray-Smith, Indirections, p. 28; Turner, 'My Long March', pp. 127-35. Hardy papers, Series 24, copy of undated letter of reply to Bulletin article of 3 Aug. 1963. Ibid., typescript of letter from George Seelaf, convenor, advising of meeting to be held on Friday, 1 Feb., to discuss the 'formation of the Australasian Book Society into a Company according to the regulations of the Companies Act, 1938;' Minutes of Meeting, 1 Feb. 1952, report adoption of resolution to adopt memorandum of association, setting out aims as publisher and bookseller; share capital of £5000 in £1 shares approved. Turner, 'My Long March' p. 136; Hardy papers, Series 24, manuscript 'After Ten years - A.B.S. - Roots deep among the people' by Frank Hardy, no date. The Collins House venue is given in an undated letter written in reply to 'The Red Society Flop', Bulletin, 3 Aug. 1963. See also Jack Beasley, Red Letter Days - notes from inside an era, Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1979, pp. 134—8; Zoe O'Leary, The Desolate Market: a biography ofEric Lambert, Edwards & Shaw,

Sydney, 1974, p. 14. 10 Jack Beasley, Red Letter Days, p. 24: statement that there was no formal decision made by the Communist Party regarding the formation of A.B.S. Some of the Party members, in the normal manner of operation of the time, would no doubt have kept headquarters posted, and certainly no objections were raised.

Nita Murray-Smith, in a personal communication, says that 'It was all planned by the C.P. and its fractions.' Frank Hardy believed that Beasley had been put into the RWG to watch him, Hardy, on behalf of the Central Committee. Jennifer Barrington, interview with JMcL, 2 Feb. 1995. 11 On Wannan's resignation, see Beasley, Red Letter Days, p. 141. 12 Ibid., pp. 137-8. Hardy himself later regarded the book as a mistake.

NOTES (PAGES 36-43)

215

13 Ibid., pp. 139-40; Turner, 'My Long March', pp. 136-9. 14 Andrei A. Zhdanov, 'Soviet Literature: the richest in ideas, the most advanced literature', republished in Problems of Soviet Literature, London, 1953, quoted in Patrick O'Brien, The Saviours, Drummond, Richmond, 1977, p. 35. For the influence of socialist realist doctrines in the CPA and ABS, see Beasley, Red Letter Days, pp. 173-8. Nita Murray-Smith, in a personal communication, emphasizes J.D. (Jack) Blake's relentless imposition of the doctrine. 15 Turner, 'My Long March', pp. 132-3. Hugh Anderson recalls that Party functionaries did not merely dictate what members should write but where they should publish. When he wrote a piece for Bruce Muirden's occasional literary review of the 1950s, Austrovert, he was 'called before the Commissars and told to choose between the Realist Writers Group and Muirden.' He chose Muirden (personal communication to author, April 1994). 16 Information from Jennifer Barrington, interview. See also Hardy, Legends from Benson's Valley, 1963, a slightly fictionalized series of episodes from his youth. 17 Hardy, The Hard Way, p. 112. 18 'Reds Support New Book Society', Herald, Dec. 1953, cited Beasley, Red Letter Days, p. 136; 'The Red Book Society Flop', Bulletin, 3 Aug. 1963. 19 Beasley, Red Letter Days, p. 141. 20 They included four anthologies of short stories, Bill Wannan's pioneering anthology of folklore, The Australian, and fiction by Judah Waten, John Morrison, F.B. Vickers, David Forrest, 'Sutton Woodfield' (Les Haylen), Dorothy Hewett, Donald Stuart and Alan Marshall, as well as memoirs and autobiography. 21 Beasley, Red Letter Days, pp. 176-8; 181-2. 22 Turner papers, Box 4, Turner to Ray Clarke, undated. 23 Ibid., Will F.F.H[udson] to Turner, 9 May 1958. 24 Ibid., David Forrest [Denholm] to Turner, 20 Sept. 1956. 25 Ibid., Turner to Edgar Waters, 24 Oct. 1958. 26 Turner, 'My Long March', p. 138. 27 Beasley, Red Letter Days, p. 146. 28 Morrison papers, Box 2, Folder 17, Morrison to Michael Costigan, Executive Officer, Literature Board, 17 Dec. 1980, citing a letter from Neil Stewart. 29 Murray-Smith, Indirections, p. 30. 30 Hardy papers, Series 23, Box 109, contains various minutes, reports and correspondence of the Sydney Realist Writers Group, including reports from the National Council of Realist Writers Groups held in Sydney, 1964. The report of the secretary (Vera Deacon) to this conference gives the following dates for the foundation of the different groups: Melbourne, 1944; Brisbane, 1950; Sydney, 1952, reformed 1954; Perth, 1960; National Council, 1960; Newcastle, 1963; Perth and Melbourne, reformed, 1964. 31 Ibid., Hardy to Murray-Smith, 2 Jan. 1955, and passim. See Murray-Smith papers also for letters from various Realist Writers Groups, particularly the Newcastle Group. 32 In A.D. Hope, Native Companions: essays and comments on Australian Literature 1936-1966, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1974, pp. 63-6. 33 Murray-Smith papers, Box 3, Bernard Meyer to Murray-Smith, 8 Jan. 1958. 34 Ibid., Box 127,Joan Clarke to Murray-Smith, 28 Sept. 1955 and lOJune 1956; Murray-Smith to Joan Clarke 27 Nov. 1955; Joan Clarke to Murray-Smith, 21 June 1959; Murray-Smith to Ellis G. Reynolds, 24 April 1955. 35 Ibid., Box 1, Vic Williams to Murray-Smith, 8 Sept. 1954. 36 Ibid., undated and unsigned, identified by address and handwriting.

216

NOTES (PAGES 43-48)

37 Ibid., Murray-Smith to Williams, undated [1954?]. 38 Ian Turner papers, Box 71, E.N. Wedlake to Ian Turner, 16 Mar. 1958. 39 Haley papers, MS 48/936, Macartney to Haley, 29 Dec. 1958, and 48/953, circa 1959. 40 Turner papers, Box 38, circular to Overland editorial board, 4 Jan. 1957, and Receipts and Expenditure Statement, 30 June 1957. The discrepancy between total circulation claimed in the circular and that shown in the receipts may be accounted for by copies supplied to supporters for distribution and never subsequently paid for. 41 Frank Hardy, letter in Tribune, 10 June 1959, p. 7. 42 Hardy papers, series 23, Box 109, 'Statement by J J. Coffey, Secretary, The Society of Realist Writers', 30 June 1959. The covering letter says that the statement was 'unanimously endorsed' by the society. This statement was rejected by the other four members of the Overland board: Elizabeth Vassilieff, Ian Turner, Laurence Collinson, and Stephen Murray-Smith, in a further statement attached to an editorial board circular for 11 Aug. 1959. A copy of the circular is also contained in the Ken Gott papers to be deposited in the La Trobe Library, Melbourne. 43 Murray-Smith, Indirections, p. 30. He adds that the money came from a philanthropic fund, not from Party or RWG sources. In a later letter to Waten, Murray-Smith papers, Box 1, 9 Feb 1955, Murray-Smith said that he had understood that the 'subsidy of some £15 you undertook to obtain from a generous patron and well-wisher' would continue, and that without it, it would be 'completely impossible' to continue publishing the journal. This letter makes it clear that the subsidy was not from any official Party source. 44 Murray-Smith papers, Box 120, Murray-Smith to Len Fox, 16 June 1959. 45 Ibid., Fox to Murray-Smith, 29 June 1959. 46 Hardy papers, Box 109, Murray-Smith to Hardy, 11 Sept. 1954. 47 Hardy papers, circular to Overland Board, 1 Feb. 1956; advertisement in Overland 6, February 1956, 15. 48 Murray-Smith, Indirections, p. 37. The night timing of the raid is based on my recollections of conversations with Murray-Smith and Turner. 49 Allan Gardiner, 'Pushed into the Bourgeois Camp: David Martin and the CPA', Overland (forthcoming, 1996), shows the role of the Party bureaucracy in instigating the campaign against the journal and those who, like Martin, continued to write for it in defiance of Party strictures. 50 Hardy papers, series 23, Box 109, Statement by J.J. Coffey, Secretary, The Society of Realist Writers, 30 June 1959. 51 Murray-Smith papers, editorial circular, 13 June 1957. 52 Murray-Smith papers, Box 127, Murray-Smith to Kylie Tennant, 9 June 1960; Sydney committee, circular, 18 Nov. 1960. 53 Hardy papers, Series 23, Box 9, circular from Sydney RWG executive, 25 July 1959 - the statement in this circular that publication of 'our own REALIST WRITER' is imminent must refer to the second issue - Hardy to Morrison, no date [1959?]; Hardy to Murray-Smith, 2 Jan. 1955 and Murray-Smith to Hardy, 12 Jan. 1955 show criticism of Overland by Sydney RWG and plans for a separate publication as early as 1954, cf. ibid., Box 109, Hardy to MurraySmith, undated carbon with pencilled notes, c. 1954. In a letter published after Murray-Smith's death, Hardy acknowledged that Murray-Smith had generally been right over Overland: Australian Short Stories, no. 24, 1988. Cf. Murray-Smith to Hardy, 11 Sept. 1954, replying to Hardy's article in Communist Review. 'Overland is NOT the organ of the Melbourne RWG ...'

NOTES (PAGES 49-61)

217

54 Tribune, 13 May 1959. 55 Murray-Smith papers, Box 120, Murray-Smith to Fox, 18 May 1959; Fox to Murray-Smith, 11 June 1959. 56 Tribune, 10 June 1959, p. 7. 57 Hardy papers, Series 23, Box 109, Morrison to Hardy, 17 June 1959; Hardy to Morrison, n.d., 1959? 58 Murray-Smith papers, Murray-Smith to Fox, 16 June 1959. 59 Ibid., Murray-Smith to Fox, 16 June 1959. 60 Ibid., Murray-Smith to Turner, 2 June 1959; thought of closing magazine, Murray-Smith to Fox, 18 May 1959; partnership proposal, Murray-Smith to Turner, 17 May 1959, proposing himself, Turner, Jim Cairns, Lloyd Davies, John Manifold, Jack Coffey, Betty Vassilieff, Russel Ward, Lionel Stone, Joseph Waters, Geoff Serle, Laurie Collinson, Gordon Bryant and Bill Irwin as possible members - this membership was carefully constructed to allow Communists a voice but not control; Box 127, Murray-Smith to Kylie Tennant, 16 Feb. 1962 and 9 June 1962; Joseph Waters to Murray-Smith, 27 June 1986. 61 Turner papers, Box 111, Murray-Smith to Turner, 20 Jan. 1961. In a later letter, Joe Waters confirmed the outcome of the meeting, but claimed that Coffey and Hardy were 'not willing to make a real fight for it'. He added the memory, confirmed by Murray- Smith, that Judah Waten had warned MurraySmith 'one day in Collins Street' that the Party would 'pour shit over you.' Waters to Murray-Smith, 27 June 1986; Murray-Smith to Waters, 30 June 1986. 62 The present author was then acting editor of Overland and had to organize the dinner and negotiate the personal feuds that still lay dormant. 63 For an account of OverlamTs history by a former Party functionary, sympathetic to the journal, see John Sendy, 'The Story of Overland', Overland, 102, 1986, 35-42. 64 Hardy papers, Series 23, undated ms, notes that circulation reached 900 from an initial 220, but had then declined to 700. These figures correspond with those given in the Treasurer's Report to the National Council meeting, 24-25 Oct. 1964, Hardy papers. 65 Ibid., editorial correspondence, 9 Dec. 1963. 66 Ibid., minutes of Editorial Board, 22 Jan. 1963 and 28 June 1963; letter from Hardy to Editorial Executive, 22 Mar. 1962; letter from Vera Deacon to Executive members, 20 Jan. 1963. The explanation of majority rule is given in an attachment to the National Secretary's Report, 9 Dec. 1963. 67 Ray Williams, 'Truth about Symbolism', Realist Writer, no. 14, June 1964, p. 24. 68 Hardy papers, Series 23, Realist Writer, editorial circular no. 4, Nov. 1965, and attachments. 69 Letter from Ray Verrills toJMcL, October 1994. In possession ofJMCL. 3 The Community of Overland 1 Stephen Murray-Smith, Editors' Statements, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, October 1981, 266. 2 Stephen Murray-Smith (ed.), An Overland Muster, Jacarandu, Brisbane, 1965, pp. v-vi. 3 Stephen Murray-Smith, 'Swag', Overland, 13, 1958, 18; Elizabeth Vassilieff, 'The Critique of Dr. Knopfelmacher', Overland, 12, 1958, 13-15. 4 Overland, 26, December 1962, 36.

218

NOTES (PAGES 62-70)

5 Ian Turner in 'Comment', Overland, 6, 1955-56, 26-7. 6 Review of Overland in Tribune, 13 May 1959. 7 'Khrushchev on Art', Carlos Fuentes, 'Art, Socialism and Life', 'Interview with Yevtushenko', Overland, 27-28, 1963, 33-41. 8 Aleksandra Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 'A Letter to the Union of Soviet Writers', Overland, 37, 1967, 14-16; 'Phoenix 66', and Ian Turner, 'The Pen and the Sword: Soviet writers and freedom of expression', Overland, 38, 1968, 24—26; Editorial and David Martin, 'Letter from Prague', Overland, 39, 1968, 5-9; John McLaren, 'Out of Suffering', review of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer War and The First Circle, and editor's note, Overland, 43, 1969-70, 54-5; John McLaren, 'Tribute to Alexander Solzhenitsyn', Overland, 46, 1970-71, 34. 9 Zoe O'Leary, The Desolate Market: a biography of Eric Lambert, Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1974, pp. 36-9. 10 Quotations from Eric Lambert, The Twenty Thousand Thieves, Frederick Muller, London, 1952. O'Leary in her biography draws attention to the importance of these passages. 11 Realist Writer, 1/2, May 1952. 12 AACF Papers, Box 1, Letter from R. Krygier to F. Bondy, 20 May 1952, report ofJohn Burton's participation in delegation to 'Peace' conference in Peking; cf. ibid., Krygier to Bondy, 17 June 1952, reporting on work with Keon et al. on foreign and defence policy among students, churches and unions. 13 Allan Ashbolt, 'The Great Literary Witch-Hunt', in Ann Curthoys and John Merritt (eds), Australia's First Cold War: vol.1, Society, Communism and Culture, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984, p. 160. 14 O'Leary, The Desolate Market, p. 19. 15 Morrison papers, File 17, letter to the editor, Foreign Literature Magazine, Moscow, 24 June 1966. 16 Hardy papers, Series 23, Box 109, Morrison to Hardy, 15 Aug. 1957. 17 Ibid., Hardy to Morrison, 28 Aug. 1957; Morrison to Hardy, 10 Sept. 1957. 18 John Morrison, Stories of the Waterfront, Penguin, Ringwood, 1984, pp. 45-64. First published in Australian New Writing, 1945; first collected in Sailors Belong Ships, 1947. 19 Turner papers, Morrison to de Boissiere, 21 Dec. 1952. 20 Ibid., Box 3, Morrison to Turner, declining to alter the story to meet 'Big Jim's' objections. 21 James McAuley, Quadrant editor's report to AACF, Dec. 1963. 22 Waten papers, Series 2/23, Davison to Waten, 10 Dec. 1946. 23 John Morrison, 'Our Writers: VI -Judah Waten', Overland, 11, Summer 1958, 13. 24 Details of Waten's beliefs and relations with the Communist Party are taken from an interview with the author, Box Hill, 13 Jan. 1984. 25 Waten, Alien Son, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1952. Page references to Sun Books edition, Melbourne, 1965. 26 Waten, The Unbending, Australasian Book Society, Melbourne, 1954. Page references to Gold Star Publications edition, Melbourne, 1972. 27 Waten papers, Series 2/133, Frank Dalby Davison to Waten. 28 Davison papers, Series 1, Box 2, 1/1222, Nettie Palmer to Davison, 2 Sept. 1954. 29 Waten papers, Series 2/77, Davison to Waten, 20 April 1952. 30 Ibid., Series 2/133, Phillips to Waten, 1 June 1954; 2/135, Chisholm to Waten, 3 June 1954; 2/137, Mann to Waten. 31 Waten, Shares in Murder, Australasian Book Society, Melbourne, 1957.

NOTES (PAGES 71-82)

219

32 33 34 35

Dorothy Hewett, Windmill Country, Overland, Melbourne, 1968, p. 50. Hewett, Bobbin Up, Virago, London, 1985 [1958]. Ibid., p. ix. Hewett, Wild Card: an autobiography, 1923-1958, McPheeGribble/Penguin, Ringwood, 1990, p. 247. 36 Hewett, T h e Hidden Journey', Overland, 36, May 1967, 5-8; and in Windmill Country, pp. 71-5. 37 See for example Frank Hardy,, Legends from Benson's Valley, Ringwood, Penguin, 1984 [1963], particularly the last story, T h e Stranger from Melbourne', or Judah Waten, Time of Conflict, Sydney, Australasian Book Society,* 1961. 38 Hewett, Windmill Country, p. 71. 4 Conspiring for Freedom 1 On Keon, see AACF papers, Box 1, Krygier to Josselson, 14 April 1953, and passim. 2 Ibid., Box 2, File 1, Report of meeting in Brisbane, 9 April 1953. 3 On the Movement, see '50 Years of the Santamaria Movement', proceedings of a conference held at the State Library of New South Wales, 2 May 1992, Eureka Street Papers No. 1, Richmond, Vic, 1992 - particularly contributions by John Cotter and Gerard Henderson. On co-operation between the AACF and the Movement, see for example AACF papers, Box 1, report from Krygier to Congress for Cultural Freedom, Oct. 1952, noting conversation with Santamaria and agreement to co-operate on anti-communism; 26 Aug. 1953, Krygier to Josselson, noting that members of his committee include Santamaria, Wentworth and Short; Krygier to Latham, 23 Nov. 1955, reporting secret discussion between Santamaria and Muggeridge, but assuring Latham that although they share common assumptions there are no commitments on either side. 4 At first the Australian body was called the Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom, but it later adopted the term used by Congress affiliates in other countries. In this work the organization will normally be referred to as the Association, or AACF, unless the context requires specification. 5 Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the struggle for the mind ofpostwar Europe, The Free Press/Collier Macmillan, New York and London, 1989, pp. 13, 15-19, 34, 40-7, 48. 6 AACF papers, Box 1, letter from Krygier to Francois Bondy, 11 May 1952. Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, p. 96. Conversations with Peter Coleman, Donald Home, 19 and 23 May 1992. Krygier's letter says he graduated in 1943, but he must have left Poland earlier than that. 7 AACF papers, Box 1, Krygier to Bondy, 17 June 1952, 20 Aug. 1952; Report to CCF, 27 Oct. 1952; to Josselson, 24 July 1953. 8 Ibid., Box 1, Report of Krygier to CCF, 27 Oct. 1952. 9 Ibid., Box 1, Josselson to Krygier, 3 Nov. 1952. Krygier did not accept Josselson's rejection, writing to him on 18 May 1953 to revive the possibility of a monthly magazine which would be the 'ONLY really democratic (not anti-anti) serious monthly in Australia.' 10 Ibid., Box 1, Krygier to CCF, 29 April 1954. 11 Ibid., Krygier to CCF, 29 April 1954. Cf. Box 2, circulars, 6 June 1954, with announcement of formation and names of persons invited to join. 12 Ibid., Box 1, Krygier to Josselson, 26 Aug. 1953.

220

NOTES (PAGES 82-6)

13 Ibid., Box 9, Krygier to John C. Hunt, 3 April 1958. 14 Latham papers, 71/1, Casey to Latham, 22 Feb. 1954. 15 Ibid., 71/14, Krygier to Latham, 5 May 1954; 71/15, Latham to Krygier, 8 May 1954. 16 AACF papers, Box 1, Krygier to Bondy, 6 May 1954. 17 Ibid., Box 2, File 2, Krygier to Latham, 14 July 1954, 19 July 1954; Latham to Krygier, 16 July 1954, 23 July 1954. 18 Ibid., Box 1, letter from Krygier to CCF, 4 July 1952. Box 2, File 5, 1963 Budget estimate to CCF, 1-2 Dec. 1962. Box 10, budget report to CCF, 29 April 1966. 19 Ibid., Box 2, File 3, letters from Richard Krygier to Sir John Latham, 10 Aug. 1954; 20 May 1954; 12 May 1954; 26 March 1956; 6 Feb. 1956. 20 Donald Home, interview, 23 May 1992; Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. 40-3. 21 Latham papers, 71/324, Duncan to Latham, 23 Mar 1956; 71/325, Latham to Duncan, 4 April 1956. 22 Ibid., 71/120, Latham to Miss [Doris?] Fitton, 9 Feb. 1955. 23 Ibid., 71/136, Long to Latham, 9 May 1955. 24 See, for example, intervention by Latham and Wentworth to ensure favourable treatment from Sydney Morning Herald, AACF papers, Box 1, File 6, Report by Krygier to CCF, June 1954; letter to CCF, 29 June 1954. 25 See, for example, correspondence from Henry Mayer and Newman Rosenthal leading to their respective resignations, AACF papers, Box 2 and Box 5, 1961-2 and 1966; Box 5, Sibnarayan Ray to Krygier, 24 Nov. 1966. 26 Ibid., Box 9, Report from Krygier to CCF, March 1960; Krygier to CCF, 21 March 1960, 22 March 1960, 30 March 1960. 27 Ibid., Box 2, circular from Lloyd Ross, President, to all members, 2 March 1962. 28 For Yugoslav case, see Racnis file, AACF papers, Box 12. On case of US teacher, see Box 4, Executive Correspondence, circular 1961. This circular also reports that the executive has declined to act on reports of bashings by New South Wales police, on the grounds that it lacks sufficient information. It did issue a general statement on police conduct, 7june 1963. On 3 Oct. 1963 Latham sent the Minister for Immigration, Alexander Downer, a letter assuring him of the Association's support of the government's right to deport. 29 AACF papers, Box 1, 29 April 1954, Krygier to Paris office. 30 For an account of the discrediting of Owen Lattimore, see Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the 'Loss' of China, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1992; reviewed by Edwin M. Yoder for the Washington Post, Guardian Weekly, 10 May 1992, p. 19. 31 For details of payments to Knopfelmacher, see AACF papers, Box 9, Krygier to CCF, 30 April 1963; CCF to Krygier, 17 Oct. 1963, advising that it will no longer accept responsibility for Knopfelmacher's expenses; 8 Nov. 1963, Krygier to CCF, reporting Knopfelmacher's complaints. For details of payments for Knopfelmacher's expenses ($440) on trip to Vietnam, see Box 10, Krygier to Josselson, 27 Oct. 1953. Attempt to stop subsidy to Meanjin, reported by Krygier to Secretary, CCF, 22 July 1954. Reference to Christesen, Box 1, Krygier to ICCF, 3 Dec. 1956. Reference to Morrisby, ibid., 19 Sept. 1956. For attempts to ensure that ideologically sound people were appointed to influential positions, see Box 9, Krygier to John C. Hunt, CCF, Paris, 10 Feb 1958: Another matter of great importance in which our co-operation has been sought is that a second university is being organized in Melbourne. Our friends would like to see to it that departments dealing with the social sciences, economics,

NOTES (PAGES 86-90)

32

33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42

43

221

philosophy etc. be organised in opposition to the rather neutralistic set-up obtaining at the University of Melbourne. They plan to write to a number of prominent professors in England and the United States asking that they should help in both organising the departments and in suggesting bright scholars for academic appointments. Krygier adds that he is writing to Sidney Hook, Michael Polanyi, Daniel Bell, [?] Wiffogel and Richard L. Walker, and asks for further names. AACF papers, Box 1, Krygier, report to CCF, Nov. 1952; report to CCF, May 1953. See also Box 2, File 5, Krygier to Sir John Latham, 15 June 1954, asking Latham to intervene privately about an article published in the Sydney SunHerald from the New Statesman, 'a wishy-washy "liberal" magazine . . . proCommunist in many ways'. Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. 13,41,46-7,62,73,162,245,231,239,245. Stephen Spender commented at a Congress meeting that the Australian and Indian committees 'talked too much politics and didn't work enough in the cultural field; he withdrew his criticism after a challenge from Sidney Hook': report by Krygier to AACF executive, Latham Papers, 71/156, enclosure of minutes of meeting on 16 April 1955. AACF papers, Box 9, Krygier to CCF, 30 April 1963. Ibid., Box 1, Krygier to CCF, 29 April 1954, reporting composition of original committee; Josselson, reporting that Keon is being groomed for Labor leadership and not willing publicly to associate with Congress; ibid., 24 July 1953, on association of Keon and Lovegrove; ibid., 26 Aug. 1953, notes support of Laurie Short; Box 5, Ducker to Krygier, 19 Feb. 1965; Box 4, Exec, correspondence, Krygier to T. Desmond McCawley, 24 Jan. 1961, notifies resignation of Spann, Kerr and Wootten, in protest against attack on Melbourne Social Studies Department. Susan McKernan, A Question of Commitment: Australian literature in the twenty years after the war, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1989, p. 56. AACF papers, Box 5, members' correspondence, 1961-1963, includes undated draft protest and letter from Stove to Krygier, 15 March 1966. Ibid., Box 2, File 3. Glover to Committee, 10 Nov. 1954; Latham to Krygier, 11 Nov. 1954; Krygier to Latham, 11 Nov. 1954; Latham to Krygier, 15 Nov. 1954. Ibid., Box 2, File 4: Latham to Krygier, 22 Mar. 1956; Susan McKernan, A Question of Commitment, p. 57. Latham papers, 71/325, Latham to W.G.K. Duncan, 23 Mar. 1956. Individuals singled out by Krygier at various times as dangerously left include, as well as Macmahon Ball, Dymphna Cusack, 'a Communist writer of no importance', C.P. Fitzgerald, 'a leading pro-Communist Chinese scholar', and Les Haylen, identified as leading 'that section of the Labor Parliamentarians... fighting very hard against the present [1960] Labor leadership which is trying to maintain itself free of entanglements with the lunatic left fringe'. Others considered not sufficiently strenuous in their anti-communism included Sir John Crawford - a 'top class bureaucrat with a lust for power' whose solidity on issues of interest to the Congress is 'doubtful' - Geoffrey Sawer andJ.D.B. Miller. See reports and letters to Michael Josselson and other executives of the CCF in Paris, AACF papers, particularly Box 1, Report to CCF, May, 1953; Box 9, letter to John C. Hunt, 5 May 1960; Box 10, to Josselson, 5 Oct. 1966. Ibid., Box 9, Krygier to CCF, 8 Nov. 1956; Box 2, minutes of Sub-Committee on Academic Tenure, 13 Aug. 1958; Box 2, Lloyd Ross, circular to Executive, 2 March 1962; Latham papers, 71/3126-7, John Morris to Latham, 27 March

222

44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56

57 58 59 60

NOTES (PAGES 90-4)

1956. McAuley noted that he had commissioned Wootten to write on the matter, but when the article appeared it dealt only with the issue of academic freedom and the inadequate procedures of the University of Tasmania and other universities: Quadrant, 1/2,1957, 25-9; cf. 71/420, McAuley to Latham, 21 Jan. 1957. Latham papers, 71/329 statement by Latham as President, ACCF, March 1956; AACF papers, Box 2, File 4, Latham to Krygier, 1 June 1961; Box 9, Krygier to Josselson, 8 August 1958. AACF papers, Box 1, File 6, Krygier to Josselson, 27 Oct. 1953. Ibid., Box 9, Krygier to CCF, 24 June 1960, reports Jupp and Gott organizing Peace Action Committee. Ibid., Box 10, RK to J. Hart, CCF, 5 Aug. 1966; RK to I. Kats, 31 May 1966. $461 was paid to Nelson's for the publication. Ibid., Box 9, Report from Krygier to CCF, 8 Nov 1963, records payment of $114.19 for Knopfelmacher's phone bill; Box 13, Krygier to Ivan Kats, CCF, 5 Aug. 1966, reports payment of $US440 to Knopfelmacher for trip to Vietnam. Ibid., copy of letter 25 Aug. 1965 - no addressee or signature, but evidently Krygier to CCF; Box 10,15 Sept. 1965, Krygier to Kats; Box 7, 29 March 1966, Krygier to Kats; 5 Aug. 1966, Krygier to Rats. Ibid., Box 13, accompanying editorial report from McAuley, 8 Nov. 1962. Ibid., Box 4, Krygier to KS. Isles, 3 Nov. 1962. D.M. Armstrong, 'An Intellectual Biography', Quadrant 27/3, 1983, 69-70. AACF papers, Box 10, Krygier to Kats, 15 April 1965; Krygier to T.D. McAuley, 19 July 1965. Box 13 also contains a file of clippings and other papers on the affair. Nation, 1 May 1965, pp. 9-13; 15 May 1965, p. 17. Ibid., Box 7, no addressee, marked 'Confidential', 25 Aug. 1965, reporting visit from Glezer requesting continuing subsidy, Krygier's statement that grants come without strings or editorial influence, but that he considers Dissent's behaviour over Knopfelmacher case improper; Box 9, Krygier to CCF, 30 Aug. 1963; CCF to James Jupp, 3 Sept. 1963; Krygier to CCF, 9 Sept. 1963, reporting that Jupp has left Dissent and the proprietors are now Leon Glezer and Peter Samuel; 13 Oct. 1964, Krygier to Glezer, offering £50 for Peace Congress pamphlet; Box 10, Krygier to Kats, 15 Sept. 1965. Ibid., Box 2, File 1, roneoed circulars; Home papers, File Q2, Report of Editorial Committee, AACF, undated. The report notes that discussions had also been held with D.A.S. Campbell, with a review to the Association sponsoring The Australian Quarterly, but Campbell, its editor, had rejected subsidies 'from any source'. AACF papers, Box 2, File 5, RK to Latham, 1 Dec. 1955. The Latham papers, NLA MS 1009, 71/290, contain a minute of the same conversation from McAuley and Prime Minister, dated 3 Dec. 1955. Ibid., Box 9, cable from CCF, 31 Jan. 1956. Ibid., Box 2, File 2, statement of account for AACF, 1 Mar. 1956 to 31 Jan. 1957; Box 3, Statement of accounts to CCF, March 1961; Financial report to CCF, three months to March 1968. Clem Christesen, letter to A.D. Hope, Lee et al., Temperament of Generations, Meanjin/MUP, Carlton, Vic, 1990, pp. 66-7, Overland, 11, 1958, 2. Christesen's accountants estimated that by 1955 he had spent £7000 of his own money in keeping Meanjin afloat.

NOTES (PAGES 94-102)

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5 The Mission of Quadrant 1 Eric Aarons, What's Lefif, Penguin Australia, Ringwood, 1993, p. ix. 2 James McAuley, Collected Poems 1936-1970, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1971, pp. 7, 23; Collected Poems 1917-1976, new edition, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1994, pp. 9, 30. Subsequent page references in text are to the later edition. 3 On McAuley's politics and religion, see Peter Coleman, The Heart ofJames McAuley: life and work of the Australian poet, Wildcat Press, Sydney, 1980, particularly pp. 34—45, 62, 104, 106. McAuley's comment to Buckley was recalled by Father Roger Pryke in a comment from the floor at a conference on '50 Years of the Santamaria Movement' held at the State Library of NSW, 2 May 1992. 4 Douglas McCallum, 'The State of Liberty', in Peter Coleman (ed.), Australian Civilization, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962, p. 44. 5 In a personal communication. 6 Latham papers, 71/156, report of AACF secretary on his overseas trip, 16 April 1955. 7 'The Grinning Mirror', Twentieth Century, Winter 1956, p. 305; cited by Max Harris in review of Quadrant in Westerly, 1/1957. 8 AACF papers, Box 4, McAuley to Krygier, 16 Aug. 1962. 9 McAuley, 'Comment: by Way of Prologue', Quadrant, 1/1, 1956-57, 4. 10 Ibid., p. 5. 11 McAuley, 'On Being an Intellectual', Quadrant, 4 / 1 , 1959-60, 30 12 Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 302-03; Dante, Inferno, Canto III, line 112; Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI, lines 309-10. 13 McAuley, 'Milton's Difficulties in Paradise Lost' (1974), The Grammar of the Real: selected prose 1959-1974, MUP, Melbourne, 1975, pp. 107-8. 14 McAuley, 'A Visit to Bunhill', Grammar, pp. 117-18.1 have juxtaposed the two tables of propositions that McAuley prints sequentially. 15 McAuley, 'On being an Intellectual', 29-30. 16 Reported by David Armstrong in 'An Intellectual Biography', Quadrant, 27/2, 1983,91. 17 John Anderson, 'The Servile State' (1943), in Studies in Empirical Philosophy, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1962, pp. 328-39. Quotations from pp. 330, 331. 18 First in John Docker, Australian Cultural Elites: intellectual traditions in Sydney and Melbourne, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1974. For McAuley's relationship to this tradition, see Docker, In a Critical Condition, Penguin, Ringwood, 1984, pp. 71-82. For a full account of his involvement with Stewart in the Ern Malley affair, and as assessment of the poems' literary value, see, Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, UQP/Faber, St Lucia and London, 1993. 19 McAuley, The End of Modernity: essays on literature, art and culture, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1959. 20 Quadrant, 1/1, 1956-57, 3. 21 Reference to Meanjin in the submission McAuley wrote for Editorial Committee of AACF in relation to proposed journal; copy in Donald Home papers, file Q2; copy also in AACF papers, Box 2, undated. The same phrase appears in an accompanying circular apparently written by Krygier. Reference to Overland is from McAuley's editor's report to the Association, December 1963: AACF papers, Box 4. The reference to union propaganda appears to relate specifically to John Morrison's fiction.

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22 McAuley, 'Captain Quiros', Collected Poems, pp. 137-215. 23 McAuley, 'My New Guinea', 1961, in Grammar of the Real, OUP, Melbourne, 1975, pp. 162-73. For relationship between his experience of primitive ritual and the Christian faith, see particularly p. 169. 24 Martin Haley papers, 48/981, McAuley to Haley, Christmas Day, 1957. McAuley described the manoeuvres by which the NSW bishops, together with Archbishop Beovich of Adelaide, withdrew official support from Santamaria's Movement, and thus from the Industrial Groups in the unions that it had organized and the DLP that they supported. After explaining the tactics of the Bishops, McAuley wrote that he was not prepared to enter into any 'long correspondence' on this 'vast, painful and complex affair'. He added that it had caused 'incalculable harm within the Church & caused grave scandal outside it'. 25 Quadrant, 1/1, 1956-57, p. 5. 26 In his autobiography, Warner gives more details of the significance with which this conference was viewed in Asia. He cites U Nu of Burma and Pandit Nehru of India as attributing Communist insurgency to the Calcutta conference, and claims that Lance Sharkey, an Australian delegate, Dusan Puhalo, a Yugoslav, and Lee Soong, a Malayan, carried similar messages to the Communist Parties in Singapore and, in Sharkey's case, to Indonesia, precipitating revolts in both countries. He attributes the disasters in Vietnam, however, to the ineptitude of first the French and then the Americans and their local allies. See Denis Warner, Wake Me if There's Trouble, Penguin, Ringwood, 1995, pp. 128-9, 130-3, and 300-11. 27 A copy of McAuley's submission is held by the Mitchell Library in the Donald Home papers, ML MSS3525, MLK 2143,fileQ2; it is undated and addressed to Richard Krygier. 28 Daniel Newman, 'Quadrant 1956-1967: a political alternative for Australian intellectuals', BA (Hons) thesis, History Department of the University of New South Wales, 1980, unpublished, pp. 1-11. A copy is held with the Home papers. 29 Copies of the submissions from Covell and Thompson, as well as those from Kenneth Slessor and James McAuley, are lodged in the AACF papers, NLA MS 2031, Box 2, File 1. 30 Latham papers, Series 71: letters from Campbell, 17 Nov. 1955 and 29 Nov. 1955; from Denning, 27 Nov. 1955. 31 Home papers, File Q2, report of editorial committee, undated. 32 'What Is To Be Done?', Quadrant, 20, 1961, RE. Chamberlain, 'The Need for Democratic Socialism', 3-11; 21, 1962, B.A. Santamaria, 'A Pacific Federation', 25-35; 22, 1962, E.L. Wheelwright, 'Planning the Economy', 49-57; 23,1962, Donald Home, 'The Metaphor of Leftness', 59-66; 24,1962, Colin Clark, 'The Three Faults of Australian Polities', 31-8. 33 Eugene Kamenka, 'Karl Marx and Socialism Today', Quadrant, 28,1963,37-44. 34 See Coleman, Jαmes McAuley, p. 106. 35 T.H. Rigby, 'Western Experts and Soviet Power', Quadrant, 27, 1963, 11. 6 Cold War on Writing 1 Grattan papers, Nettie Palmer to Grattan, 29 May 1946. 2 Australia, House of Representatives, Debates {Hansard), March-May 1947. Earle Page first raises question of Rawling's suitability as recipient of grant, 26 Mar. 1947, p. 1163; Chifley reports that Rawling is no longer Party member but an


225

'active opponent', p. 1500; Leslie Haylen defends Rawling, attacks 'character assassination', 1 May 1947, pp. 1808-09; Page moves adjournment to discuss 'The extent to which the Commonwealth Literary Fund is being used to subsidise Communists and former Communists in the production of Australian literature', 8 May 1947, p. 2100; Evatt provides list of recipients of CLF fellowships and points out that Rawling has become one of the most vocal of critics of CP, p. 2105; Archie Cameron claims that the CLF 'seems to provide a nursing home for Communists' and specifically attacks Jean Devanny, p. 2108; other attackers of the CLF included H.L. 'Larry' Anthony, pp. 2112-13; Scullin defends the administration of the Fund, pp. 2114-15. Report of the debates in The Australian Observer, 17 May 1947. Lynne Strahan,/w.tf City and the Mirrors: Meanjin Quarterly and the Intellectual Front, 1940-1965, OUP, Melbourne, 1984, p. 120, gives the date of Rawling's resignation from the Party as 1938. 3 AACF papers, Box 9, Reports by Krygier to CCF, 31 Aug. 1962, 25 Aug. 1962. 4 Strshan, Just City and the Mirrors, pp. 91-6. 5 Chifley and Scullin remained members, but the leader of the Country Party was added and Menzies became chairman. Scullin's illness meant his participation was only nominal; see Allan Ashbolt, 'The Great Literary WitchHunt of 1952', in Ann Curthoys and John Merritt (eds), Australia's First Cold War 1945-1953: vol. 1: Society, Communism and Culture, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1984, pp. 153-82, specifically p. 158. 6 Judith Brett, Robert Menzies1 Forgotten People, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1992. 7 See Janet McCalman, Journeyings: the biography of a middle-class generation 19201990, MUP, Melbourne, 1993, for a description of the construction of the values of the postwar middle class. 8 Report of the Royal Commission into the Communist Party, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1950-51, vol. 12, 1950, Melbourne, 1950, particularly Commissioner's conclusions, pp. 61-103; and summary offindings,pp. 104-7. For discussion of Lowe's findings and the coincidence of his report with Menzies' introduction of the Communist Party Dissolution Bill, see Brian Fitzpatrick, The Australian Commonwealth, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1956, pp. 131-2. On Power Without Glory prosecution, see 'Prologue' to present work. 9 Ashbolt, 'Literary Witch-Hunt'. Nettie Palmer attributed Vance's ill-health to the long sessions he had with Judah Waten revising the text of The Unbending. See Davison papers, Series 1/1222, Nettie Palmer to Davison, 2 Sept. 1954. 10 See for example, Allan Patience, 'Australia's Hard Culture', Australian Studies, 1990; Paul Hausler, Australia and the Holocaust, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1994. On anti-intellectualism in the labour movement, see James Jupp, Overland, 135, 1994, 78. 11 CPD, vol. 218, pp. 717-79. A full discussion of the attack on the CLF is given in Ashbolt, 'Literary Witch-Hunt', from which the quotation is taken. Strahan, Just City, p. 287, n.l81, says that of 50 CLF Fellowships awarded between 1940 and 1952, '7 went to communists, a figure high only in relation to the number of declared communists in the population.' 12 Waten papers, Series 2, Davison to Waten, 2/71a and 72, 4 Sept. 1951, and N. Zusman to Waten, 2/74, 10 Oct. 1952. 13 Grattan papers, Kylie Tennant to Grattan, 6 Dec. 1970. 14 Ashbolt, 'Literary Witch-Hunt', pp. 160-1. 15 Ibid., p. 160. 16 Turner papers, Box 38, Overland editor's circular, 15 Dec. 1960; AACF papers, Box 4, Krygier to Latham, 12 May 1961.

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17 Ashbolt, 'Literary Witch-Hunt', pp. 160-2; Turner papers, Box 71, undated typescript. 18 Interview withjudah Waten, 24 Jan. 1984. 19 Ian Turner papers, Box 71, typescript report of attack on Waten; Waten papers, 2/139 and 2/140, letters to Waten from Jean Campbell, Secretary, Melbourne PEN, 25 June 1954, and from Arthur Calwell, 23 June 1954. On Browne's contempt of Parliament, with R.E. Fitzpatrick, see Australian Encylopedia, third edition, Sydney, 1977, PARI 70 44; Brian Fitzpatrick, Australian Commonwealth, pp. 123-5. 20 Ashbolt, 'Literary Witch-Hunt', pp. 179-82. 21 Ibid., p. 154, citing report in the Sydney Morning Herald. 22 AACF papers, Box 1, Krygier to CCF, June 1964. 23 Nicholas Whitlam and John Stubbs, Nest of Traitors: the Petrov Affair, Jacaranda, Brisbane, 1974, pp. 74-5; cf. Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: politics and espionage, Pergamon, Sydney, 1987, p. 74. 24 Manne, Petrov, pp. 75, 126-8. 25 Ibid., pp. 79-89; AACF papers, Box 9, R. Krygier to Josselson, 28 Oct. 1957. Wentworth partly corroborated Krygier's account of his role in an interview he gave to Manne: see Manne, Petrov, p. 82. 26 Royal Commission on Espionage, Report, Canberra, 1955. 27 Dorothy Hewett, '1954: Living Dangerously', Overland, 62, 1975, 26. 28 Whitlam and Stubbs, Nest of Traitors, p. 124; Strahan,/ws* City, p. 163. For an example of the prolonged misery caused by the enquiry on an individual and his family, see Bernice Morris, Between the Lines, Sybylla, Collingwood, 1988. On ASIO persecution of Nina and Clem Christesen, see Fiona Capp, Writers Defiled: security surveillance ofAustralian authors and intellectuals, 1920-1960, Ringwood, McPheeGribble/Penguin, 1993, pp. 149-54. For details of the persecution of Throssell, see Ric Throssell, My Father's Son, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1989. For Throssell's appearance before the commission, compare Manne, Petrov, pp. 188-9, a very bland account, and Throssell, My Father's Son, pp. 311-20. 29 AACF papers, Box 1, Krygier to M.F. Bondy, Editor, Preuves, 6 May 1954. The article, an attack on factional rather than Communist politics, was published in the Bulletin, 13 April and 19 May 1961. 30 Frank Hardy papers, Series 23, Murray-Smith to Hardy, 8 May 1955. 31 Editorial comment: 'Culture, Congress and Freedom', Meanjin, 13/4, 1954, 484 and 630-2; quotation from p. 494. The same issue of the journal carried articles on the Congress by, among others, John Latham and Hugh TrevorRoper. 32 Capp, Writers Defiled, pp. 1-3 and passim; p. 130. 33 Meanjin, 13/1, 1954, 109-12. 34 Meanjin, 13/2, 1954, 320. Latham papers, 71/54, Latham to Christesen, 20 July 1954. 35 Latham papers, 71/56, Christesen to Latham, 22 July 1954. 36 Meanjin, 13/4, Summer 1954. 37 Latham papers, 71/109, Christesen to Latham, 5 Dec. 1954. 38 Ian Turner, 'My Long March', in Room for Manoeuvre: writings on History, Politics, Ideas and Play, selected and edited by Leonie Sandercock and Stephen Murray-Smith, Drummond, Richmond, 1982, pp. 105-40, particularly at pp. 131-4. 39 Waten papers, series 2/220, Inglis Moore to Waten, 1 Nov. 1957. 40 In Jenny Lee, Philip Mead and Gerald Murnane (eds), The Temperament of Generations, Melbourne University Press/Meanjin, Carlton, 1990, p. 79.


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41 Turner papers, Box 38, notes on submission, 1955. 42 AACF papers, Box 9, Krygier to Josselson, 28 Oct. 1957. 43 Ibid., Box 2, File 2, Statement of account for the period 1 Mar. 1956 to 31 Jan. 1957. 44 Ibid., Box 9, Krygier to John C. Hunt, Sec, CCF, 3 April 1958. 45 Turner papers, Box 111, Turner to S. Murray-Smith, 27 Apr. 1959. 46 AACF papers, Box 9, report to CCF, 29 Oct. 1959. 47 Ibid., Box 9, Krygier to Scott Charles and to Hunt, CCF, 17 June 1959. 48 Turner papers, Murray-Smith to Turner, 29 June 1959. 49 Turner papers, Box 38, Murray-Smith, editorial circular, 15 Dec. 1960, based on 'talk' with A.A. Calwell and 'other reports of the proceedings'. Cf. report in Overland, 21, 1961, 11, and expressions of support for Overland from writers of all political views, ibid., pp. 11-13. 50 AACF papers, Box 4, Exec, correspondence, Krygier to Latham, 12 May 1961; Latham to Krygier, 16 May 1961. 51 Turner papers, Box 38, editor's circular, 23 July 1962. 52 W.R. Stent, 'An Individual vs. the State: the case of B.L. Cooper', Overland, 79, 1980, 60-8. Cooper's account of his activities and of his arrest was published in Overland, 20, 1961, 31-6. Murray-Smith's strong supportive comments are in the same issue, pp. 32-3. 53 Overland 27-28, Winter-Spring 1963, 15, 16; 30, September 1964, 29. On Westerly, see the Critic (Perth), 19July 1963, p. 70. 54 Independent, Perth, 1 June 1969, p. 14. 7 Proprietors at War 1 Australian, no. 1, 15 July 1964. 2 Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia, CUP, Cambridge/New York/ Melbourne, 1990, pp. 228, 230. Cf. Australian, 12 Nov. 1964. Hasluck's view was consistent with the explanation of Asian revolutions developed by Denis Warner and spread through the AACF: see references in Chapter 4. 3 Colin Bednall, autobiography, manuscript in possession of Bednall family. 4 Telephone interview with Reg Neale, 12 Oct. 1994. 5 Interview on ABC Radio, 24 Dec. 1993. 6 Michael Leapman, Barefaced Cheek: the apotheosis of Rupert Murdoch, Hodder and Stoughton, Sydney/London/Auckland/Toronto, 1983, pp. 21-5. 7 For an account of Rupert Murdoch's earlier business dealings, see Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, pp. 13-40. 8 Harold Levies 'Voice, from Ideas to Practice', Quadrant, 26, 1963, 13-20. 9 Levien, 'Voice, pp. 15-18. Voice asked its subscribers to complete a questionnaire which provided Levien with a good index of their affiliations. 10 See, for example, the condemnation of Overlandiov publishing an advertisement for Outlook, Tribune, 13 May 1959, p. 7. 11 Ian Turner papers, Box 111, Murray-Smith to Turner, 23 Oct. 1959. 12 K.S. Inglis (ed.), Nation: the life of an independent journal of opinion 1958-1972, MUP, Carlton, Vic, 1989, pp. 5-7. 13 AACF papers, Box 9, file 3, report by R. Krygier to CCF, 8 March 1960; Donald Home, Portrait of an Optimist, Penguin, Ringwood, 1988, pp. 171, 189, 206-7, and interview with author, 23 May 1992. 14 See Murray-Smith papers, Box 120, Murray-Smith to Len Fox, 25 April 1959. 15 Both journals were distributed through newsagents. The Observer was distributed through Packer's company, Consolidated Press. Nation was owned

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16 17 18

19 20 21 22


by Tom Fitzgerald, then working for the Sydney Morning Herald, but the Fairfax proprietors took a benevolent attitude to its distribution. Home, Portrait of an Optimist, makes the point that the Observer, unlike the later Bulletin, was never financially profitable. Donald Home to JMcL, letter, 19 Jan. 1994. Figures supplied by Donald Home. Patricia Rolfe, The Journalistic Javelin: an illustrated history of the Bulletin, Wildcat Press, Sydney, 1979, pp. 301, 307, suggested the figures of 6,000 and 30,000 respectively. Peter Coleman (ed.), Australian Civilization: a symposium, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962; Donald Home, The Lucky Country, Penguin, Ringwood, 1964; quotations from second revised edition, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1978 [1968]. Tim Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character, Kibble Books, Malmsbury, Vic, 1978. Home, The Lucky Country, p. 220. Geoffrey Dutton, Snow on the Saltbush, Viking/Penguin Australia, Ringwood, 1984, pp. 239, 255-75. Australian, 14 Oct. 1964, p. 10. 8 New Little Magazines

1 Rex Chiplin, 'OVERLAND - where's it being taken?', Tribune, 13 May 1959. Cf. response by Stephen Murray-Smith, 29 May 1959, roneoed circular, copy in Ken Gott papers. 2 The attack was noted and Turner's letter partly reproduced in 'Precis of Editor's Report' in the 'Report of Overland Meeting Held in Melbourne on 28 April', dated 29 April 1959. A copy of the report is among the Ken Gott papers in the La Trobe Library, Melbourne. 3 Vincent Buckley, Cutting Green Hay, Penguin, Ringwood, 1983, pp. 248-9. The description of the Apostolate is also derived from this book. 4 Twentieth Century, Spring 1972. 5 See Prospect, 7/2, 1964, for the debate between Vincent Buckley and James McAuley over Frank Knopfelmacher's article on 'Catholics in Polities', published in Twentieth Century, Winter 1960. For the journal's more extensive views, see editorial, 'Religion and Mr Santamaria', presumably by Buckley and Paul Simpson, Prospect, 4/4, 1960, 2-4, a discussion of B.A. Santamaria, 'Religion and Polities', Twentieth Century, Winter 1960. 6 J.F. Cairns, 'Socialism and State Aid', Dissent, 2/4,1962, 5-6; Peter Wertheim, 'Freedom and Socialism', Dissent, 3/1, 11-13. 7 John Patterson, 'A Red-blooded Issue', Prospect, 6/4, 1963, 12-15. 8 D.J. McKenna, 'Churches and State Aid in Australia', Prospect, 3/4,1960,26-7. 9 Buckley, 'The New Neutralism', Prospect, 4 / 1 , 1961, 2-3. 10 Buckley, 'Threats to Freedom in the Universities', Prospect, 5/2, 1962. Buckley's view of the function of a university, derived from Leavis, Arnold and Newman, also underlies the critical attention he and other Prospect contributors paid to Victorian teachers' colleges and institutes of technology. 11 Tony Coady, T h e Church - for man's sake', Prospect, 4/2, 1961, 12-18. 12 Buckley, Prospect, 4 / 1 , 1961, 12. Cf. Editorial, 'The New Neutralism', signed VB, 4/1, 1961, 2-3. 13 Peter Kelly, 'Suckling the Left', Prospect, 7/2, 1964, 32. 14 A.D. Hope, 'The Activists', Prospect, 3 / , 1960,4-7. Reprinted in The Cave and the Spring, Rigby, Adelaide, 1965, pp. 29-37; long quotation from the latter, p. 37.

NOTES (PAGES 147-56) 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

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Bruce Dawe, 'Five Poems', Prospect, 5/1, 1962, 16-17. Prospect, 6/2, 1963, 16-17; 7/3, 1963, 16-17; 7/3, 1964, 26-7. Prospect, 3/2, 1960. Helen Prideaux, Prospect, 3/3, 1960. Margaret Aughterson, 'The Way Through Suburbia', Prospect, 5/1, 1962. Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987. Andrew Bear, 'Intellectuals and 007', Dissent, 7, Winter 1966, 23-7. Donald Home papers, Folio Q4, Home to John Hunt, CCF, Paris, 30 May 1962. Nevertheless, the AACF at a meeting on 4 June 1963 both approved funding for Dissent ^nd accepted Peter Samuel as a member: minutes, Home papers, Folio Q4. Also AACF papers, Box 9, Krygier to Jupp, 3 Sept. 1963; Krygier to CCF, 8 Nov. 1963. James Jupp, interview, Canberra, 25 Feb. 1994. I must declare an interest here. As a member of the Fabian Society, I volunteered to distribute copies of Dissent where I was then living, in Wodonga. On reading through the AACF files, Box 5, I discovered a list of subscribers that showed that the six copies I took, pre-paid, made me the journal's biggest distributor. Despite these unsavoury connections, I was a member of the Victorian ALP's Central Executive during 1962-63. See Outlook, April 64, 'The Right Rides Again', an editorial based on a report from an unnamed Melbourne correspondent, for the kind of account of the supposed alliance of the university Labor clubs, Victorian Fabian Society and Dissent that was current in official Labor circles at the time. The following issue of Outlook partly corrected this simplistic position in a series of articles on the role of intellectuals in the Labor Party. However, the main contention of the original article, that Dr Knopfelmacher had attended the CCF Congress Assembly in Vienna and now had the money to establish a school to train young leaders in 'intellectual warfare', although overstated, is borne out by the AACF correspondence that shows he was funded to conduct seminars in opposition to Communists in general and the Peace Congress in particular. See AACF papers, Box 9, Krygier to CCF, 12 Dec. 1957; 8 Nov. 1963, reporting Knopfelmacher's complaint that CCF is no longer meeting his expenses; Box 5, 16 Oct. 1963, approving establishment of University of Melbourne Summer Study Groups - leaders include Knopfelmacher, Lauchlan Chipman, Peter Samuel, Vincent Buckley and Leon Glezer. Cf. Turner papers, Ken Buckley to Turner, 7 Mar 1962, which reports much the same details and may be source of the Outlook reports. Dissent, 3/1, 1963. At an Overland Board meeting at the time, Phillip Adams suddenly exclaimed, 'My God! Have we missed an entire war?' AACF papers, Box 7, Krygier to Kats, 5 Aug. 1965. Geoffrey Fairbairn, 'Notes on Guerilla War', Dissent, 14, 1965, 18-21. AACF papers, Box 7, Krygier to Ivan Kats, CCF, 29 March 1966. Gregory Clark, 'The Bulletin's Courage', Dissent, 19, 1967, 30-5. S. Encel, 'Socialist Ideas - the sixties', Dissent, 2/2, 4-8. John Patterson, 'Up the Centre', Dissent, 3/1, March-April 1963, 8-10. Graeme Duncan, 'In Defence of Political Utopias', Dissent, 20, 1967, 23-33. Denis Pym, 'Youth and Bureaucracy', Dissent, 23, 1968, 3-8. Dennis Altman, 'America: the dream under siege', Dissent, 25, 1970, 7-16; Harry van Moorst and Frances Newell, 'Prison Experiences', ibid., 17-23; Michael Hamel-Green, ibid., 30-6; Special Issue, no. 28, Winter 1972.

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37 Vincent Buckley, 'Threats to Freedom in the Universities', Prospect, 5/2,1962, 10-14; figures on p. 11. 38 Symposium: 'The Student Mood', Dissent, 23, 1968, 26 ff, contributors included Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving, on Sydney University, Jeff Doube on Monash University. 39 Michael Wilding, 'Literary Critics and the Mass Media', Dissent, 19,1966, 4-7. 9 Opening the Pages 1 G.M. Wilkes was first Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney and was succeeded in 1966 by Leonie Kramer to what is still the only designated chair of Australian Literature in Australia. Although Roderick was appointed to a chair in English, he immediately established the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, which remains associated with the chair; Editorial, ALS, 7/3, 1976, 227. 2 Donald Home papers, Folio Q3. 3 Details of editorial responsibility supplied in interview by author with Donald and Myfanwy Home, Sydney, 23 May 1992. In MS notes written in 1966, Home, commenting that Nation and the Observer had changed Australia's reading habits, expressed his 'profound dissatisfaction' with the gap between possibility and performance in the bi-monthly Quadrant, which remained generally amateurish. Its failure he attributed to the lack of time available for its editing and the failure of Australian intellectuals to sustain serious discussion. Home had previously been editor of Free Spirit, and when he resigned from Consolidated Press Krygier proposed to Congress, unsuccessfully, that Home be paid to expand it to a monthly, with a budget of £7300 p.a.: AACF papers, Box 4, executive circular, undated. 4 AACF papers, Box 13, contain letters sent to potential advertisers and Krygier's summary of the results, 2 Dec. 1963. 5 Ibid., Box 13, Rodd to Quadrant, 16 March 1965. A reply from Krygier explains the reasons for the delay in publication, and confirms that despite this subscribers will get the six issues promised. 6 Ibid., Box 5, Rosenthal to Lloyd Ross, President, AACF, with copy to John Latham, 27 Dec. 1966. For Rosenthal's first resignation, see Box 4, Exec, correspondence, letters from Rosenthal objecting to Sydney 'coterie', 18 Dec. (including resignation), 20 Dec, and 25 Dec. 1962. Rosenthal's complaint about the drift to neutralism had been anticipated by his colleague Sibnarayan Ray, whom the AACF had subsidised to make his first visit to Australia and who with the Association's assistance had secured a post as head of Indian Studies at Melbourne University. His worry about the AACF's drift to neutralism was occasioned by its abandonment of the Peace with Freedom groups. Krygier's reply explains that they were no longer considered relevant. See Box 10, Ray to Krygier, 24 Nov. 1966; Krygier to Ray, 24 Nov. 1966. On Ray's sponsorship by AACF, see Krygier to CCF, 20 Nov. 1963, reporting grants of £322 and £133, and passim. 7 Donald Home, The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties, Penguin, Harmondsworth and Ringwood, 1964. 8 These included the cases of Sydney Sparkes Orr and Frank Knopfelmacher that had already engaged the attention of Krygier and the AACF, but not cases of discrimination against members of the left, some initiated by Krygier himself. The important cases of discrimination against academics on the left included the treatment of E.L. Wheelwright and Russel Ward at the hands of


231

the University of Sydney and the NSW University of Technology (now UNSW). Some of Krygier's attempts to influence academic appointments are documented in the AACF papers, for example Box 10, Krygier to Kats, 9 June 1966, re possible appointment to Monash of a Founding Professor in Japanese who is 'not a completely safe person politically'. 9 Norman Podhoretz, 'In Defence of Editing', Quadrant 45, 1967, 68. 10 Interviews by the author with Donald Home, Sydney, 27 May 1992; Peter Coleman, Canberra, September 1993. McAuley's recommendation, Home papers, submission by McAuley to AACF Executive, 7 June 1963. Home's complaints, ibid., Home to Krygier, threatening resignation, 28 June 1964; Home to Krygier, 30 Dec. 1966, including recommendation that his successor be paid at least £2000 p.a. At this time, the editors were paid £1200 p.a. between them. This compared with McAuley's professorial salary of £5000 p.a.: AACF papers, Box 10, Krygier to Josselson, 29 Sept. 1965. Krygier description of Home's resignation and Coleman's appointment as 'neat switch': undated statement, Home papers, Folio Q3. 11 Quadrant, 1967-68, contributions by Patrick Morgan, Christopher Koch, Geoffrey Fairbairn, Kenneth Gee, Sibnarayan Ray, Colin Hughes, Gerard Henderson, Ferdinand Mount, and Ormsby Wilkins. 12 Home, interview; Latham papers, 71/47, Krygier to Latham, 10 Aug. 1954. 13 See for example AACF papers, J. Hunt to Krygier, 2 Nov. 1966, insisting that there was no Congress line on Vietnam. McAuley admitted this in his Quadrant editorial, but expressed the opinion that among Australian members there would be general support for the US position. Information on Josselson as CIA operative from Home, interview. 14 AACF papers, Box 10, report by Krygier to I. Kats, CCF, 31 May 1966, and to J. Hunt, Congress, 5 Aug. 1966; Hunt to Krygier, 3 Oct. 1966, advising that Congress will cover bills for Nelson's Vietnam book. The book, Vietnam Seen from East and West, edited by Sibnarayan Ray, was eventually published by Nelson in 1966. 15 AACF papers, Box 10, Hunt to Krygier, 3 Oct. 1966, advising of support for Home's visit; RK to I. Kats, 5 Aug. 1966, advising he had issued US$440 in travellers' cheques to Knopfelmacher for his visit. For further details of contacts between Congress and Krygier, and funding of individual visits to and from Australia, see Chapter 4 and notes. 16 McAuley, 'C.I.A.', Quadrant48, 1987, 4-6. 17 Home, interview. 18 AACF papers, Box 10, Circular from International Association for Cultural Freedom, Paris, 2 Oct. 1967; further circular, 2 Dec. 1967; Krygier to Paris, 30 Jan. 1968; letter to Krygier, 3 April 1969, asking confirmation for auditors that these amounts have been received; IACF Circular, 31 May 1968, advising details of Ford Foundation grant; IACF to RK, 6 Jan. 1969, advising of emergency grant to Quadrant. 19 H.P. Heseltine, 'Australian Image 1: the Literary Heritage', Meanjin, 21/1, 1962, 35-49. 20 Meanjin: Vance Palmer, 'Fiction Chronicle', 17/4, 1958, 433; H.P. Heseltine, 'Fiction Chronicle', 20/4, 1961, 489-91; A.A. Phillips, 'Short Story Chronicle', 21/4,1962, 511-12; Jack Lindsay, 'Autobiographical', 23/4,1964, 443; John Barnes, 'New Tracks to Travel: the stories of White, Porter and Cowan', 25/2,1966, 160-4. 21 'Hal Porter's Australia: South Gippsland and its Towns', Australian Letters, 6, 1964, 22-50; reprinted in Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris (eds), The Vital

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

NOTES (PAGES 171-7)

Decade, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1968, pp. 162-91 (page references to latter); In an Australian Country Graveyard and Other Poems, Nelson, Melbourne, 1974. Characteristically, Porter does not acknowledge the prior appearance of 'The First-Comers' in Overland, 50-51, 1972, 11-16. C.M.H. Clark, A History of Australia, vol. II, 'New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land', Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1968, p. 349. A.G.L. Shaw, 'Clark's History ofAustralia', Meanjin, 22/1, March 1963,117-19; Shaw, 'Manning Clark's History of Australia , Quadrant, 54, 1968, 74-82. Michael Roe, review, Quadrant, 25, 1963, pp. 73-6. Ian Turner, 'Australia - a beginning and an end', Overland, 24, 1962, 41-2. Ian Turner, 'Manning Clark: the history and the prophecy', Overland, 44, 1970, 13-20. For a survey of White's reception by Australian reviewers, see John Thomson, 'Australia's White Policy', Australian Letters, reprinted in Dutton and Harris (eds), The VitalDecade, pp. 159-61. First printed in the Sydney Morning Herald; reprinted in A.D. Hope, Native Companions: essays and comments on Australian literature 1936-1966, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1974, pp. 75-9. Alan Lawson, 'The Unmerciful Dingoes? The Critical Reception of Patrick White', Meanjin, 32/4, 1973, 379-92. Stephen Murray-Smith to David Marr, cited by Marr in Patrick White: a life, Random House Australia, Milsons Point, NSW, p. 309 and note 24, p. 685. Quadrant, 1,1956,87-8. Lawson, 'Unmerciful Dingoes?', 382. Cecil Hadgraft's CLF lecture on Patrick White had been published as a monograph in 1951: Alan Lawson, Patrick White, Australian bibliographies, OUP, Melbourne, 1974, entry 415. Marjorie Barnard, 'The Four Novels of Patrick White', Meanjin, 15/2, 1956, 156-70. Turner, 'The Parable of Voss', Overland, 12, 1958. David Martin, 'Among the Bones: what are our novelists looking for?', Meanjin, 18/1, 1959, 52-8. Martin, 'Three Realists in Search of Reality', Meanjin 18/3, 1959, 305-22. David Bradley, 'Australia through the Looking-Glass: Patrick White's latest novel', Overland, 23, April 1962, 41-5. Murray-Smith papers, Box 127, White to Murray-Smith, 26 Feb. 1962. A.A. Phillips, 'The Dogs Have Their Say', Overland, 25,1962, 33-4; J.D. Blake, in 'Comment', ibid., 34-6. John McLaren, 'The Image of Reality in Our Writing', Overland, 27-28,1963, 43-7. Audrey Sides, 'Patrick White's New Plays', Overland, 30, September 64, pp. 46-8. Andrew Taylor, 'White's Short Stories', Overland, 31, 17-19; Russel Ward, 'Colonialism and Culture', ibid., 15-17. Peter Shrubb, 'Patrick White: Chaos Accepted', Quadrant, 53, 1968, 7-19; Leonie Kramer, 'Patrick White's Gotterdammerung', Quadrant, 83, 1973, 8-19. Although Kramer's essay falls just outside the chronological limits of the present study, it is too representative of its school of criticism at the time to ignore. In a remark to the author, Overland dinner, 1973. The phrase is used by Vincent Buckley as the title of an article on the work of Randolph Stow and Christopher Koch, Meanjin, 20/2, 1961, 144.


233

10 From Rhetoric to Eloquence 1 For a sceptical view of the counter-culture, see Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett, Seizures of Youth: the Sixties and Australia, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1991; on the rugby tour, see Stewart Harris, Political Football: the Springbok tour of Australia, 1971, Goldstar, Melbourne, 1972; on Moorhouse, see Frank Moorhouse, Days of Wine and Rage, Penguin, Ringwood, 1980, pp. 3-4, 78-85, and passim. 2 Kris Hemensley, 'The Beginnings - a note on La Mama', in Robert Kenny and Colin Talbot (eds), The Applestealers, Outback Press, Melbourne, 1974, pp. 15-19; Leonard Radic, The State of Play: the revolution in the Australian Theatre since the 1960s, Penguin, Ringwood, 1991, pp. 51-67. 3 Dennis Douglas, 'Mini-mags and the Poetry Explosion', Overland, 41, 1969, 46-7. 4 Kris Hemensley (ed.), The Best of the Ear: the Ear in a Wheatfield 1973-76, Rigmarole Books, Melbourne, 1973. Bibliographical details of the journals in the publisher's preface, by Hemensley's associate and fellow poet Robert Kenny, p. 9, and the editor's introduction, pp. 10-12. 5 Quoted by Douglas, 'Mini-mags'. 6 Hemensley, Best ofEar, p. 109. 7 Ibid., pp. 24-5. 8 Michael Dugan, 'Charles Buckmaster: a memoir', Overland, 119,1990, 67-73. 9 Livio Dobrez, Parnassus Mad Ward: Michael Dransfield and the New Australian Poetry, UQP, St Lucia, Qld, 1990, particularly pp. 7^30. 10 Michael Dransfield, 'Parnassus Mad Ward' in Collected Poems, edited by Rodney Hall, UQP, St Lucia, Qld, 1987, p. 28. First published in Bum's Rush: poems, 1969. 11 Michael Dransfield, Collected Poems, UQP, St Lucia, Qld, 1987, p. 123. 12 The opening line of 'Howl', in Allen Ginsberg, Howl and other poems, City Lights, San Francisco, 1956. 13 Rodney Hall, Introduction to Michael Dransfield, Collected Poems. 14 Laurie Clancy, 'Dangling Novelists', Dissent, 19, 1957, 12. 15 'Introduction' to Rodney Hall and Thomas Shapcott (eds), New Impulses in Australian Poetry, UQP, St Lucia, Qld, 1968, pp. 7-20. 16 Carl Harrison-Ford, 'Notes on "Conceptual Poetry"', New Poetry, 20/1-2, 1972, pp. 7-20. 17 For publishing details, see entries in Michael Denholm, Small Press Publishing in Australia: the early 1970s, Second Back Row Press, Sydney, 1979. 18 For accounts of the dispute, see interviews with Roland Robinson and Rae Desmond Jones, Kangaroo IV (fifth Neucleus Arts Supplement), Armidale, NSW, 18 November 1982, pp. 14-16, 18. 19 Ibid., pp. 14, 18. 20 Ibid., p. 16. 21 Poetry Magazine, Special Issue, April 1969, p. 3. 22 Poetry Australia, 42, 172, p. 29; reprinted in John Tranter (ed.), The New Australian Poetry, Makar Press, St Lucia, Qld, 1979, p. 262. Further page references in the text are to this anthology. 23 John Tranter, 'Parallax and other poems', Poetry Australia, 34, June 1968; reviewed by Martin Harrison, Poetry Magazine, August 1970, pp. 41-3. 24 Michael Dransfield, 'After Vietnam', Poetry Magazine, August 1970, pp. 3-7. 25 Jones, Kangaroo IV.

234


26 Tranter, 'Introduction' to The New Australian Poetry, quotations from pp. xxv and xxiii. 27 Dobrez, Parnassus Mad War, pp. 10-11 and passim. 28 Thomas Shapcott, Inwards to the Sun, UQP, St Lucia, Qld, 1969. 29 Robert Adamson, 'The Rumour', New Poetry, Sydney, 1971; reprinted in Tranter (ed.), New Australian Poetry, pp. 85—101 and in Adamson, Selected Poems, UQP, St Lucia, Qld, 1990. Page references to last. 30 Harris, Political Football, chapter 1; Chronicle, Toowoomba, 4 Aug. 1971, and 15 June 1972. References to the Chronicle supplied by courtesy of Mr Bart Marney. I have not been able to trace the comment in the Courier-Mail, and rely on my memory. 31 Alec Sheppard, personal communication to author. 32 Based on information given by John Hooker and on author's own observations. The author was first witness for the defence, arguing for the book's literary merit, and was followed by the former police psychiatrist, Alan Bartholomew, who sought to testify that there was no scientific evidence to suggest reading the book could harm the reader. 33 See Moorhouse, Days of Wine and Rage, pp. 6-7. Peter Coleman has since explained, in Memoirs of a Slow Learner, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1994, pp. 145-6, that his book Obscenity Blasphemy Sedition (1962) was written 'to advance the total abolition of censorship of any kind', but that almost as soon as it appeared he changed his mind. In response to a 'a new coarseness and nihilism' in speech and writing, he came to the view that 'a minimal censorship preserved the capacity of the community to express, however symbolically, a protest, a gesture, against degradation.' 34 For accounts of the trial and gaoling, see Frank Moorhouse and Wendy Bacon in Moorhouse, Days of Wine and Rage, pp. 13-21. 35 Ibid., p. 12. 36 Frank Moorhouse, Futility and Other Animals, Gareth Powell, Sydney, 1969. 37 Moorhouse, The Americans, Baby, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1972. 38 Ibid., p. 94. Epilogue 1 See John McLaren, 'Publishing in the Twentieth Century', in D.H. Borchardt and W. Kirsop (eds), The Book in Australia, Historical Bibliography 6 Monograph no. 16, Australian Reference Publications/Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 66-87. 2 Some examples are Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, Peter Carey and Georgia Savage. 3 For example ACRA newsletter, no. 3, Michelangelo, NSW, September 1995; 'Woodward Blasts Australia Council', Age, 14 Sept. 1995. 4 Jacques Derrida, 'The Laws of Reflection: in admiration', in Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili (eds), For Nelson Mandela, Seaver Books, New York, 1987. 5 Leonie Stevens, 'Writing on the Edge: Dirty Realism or Real Dirty?', Blast, 28, Winter/Spring 1995, Canberra, p. 10. 6 Ian Syson, in a personal discussion of an article in preparation for Overland.

Index

Tides of works cited are indexed under authors' names. Endnotes are indexed only for first bibliographical references. AACF, see Australian Association for Cultural Freedom Aarons, Eric, 95,179; What's Lefl, 223 n.l ABC, see Australian Broadcasting Commission Aborigines, 38, 69,103,130,172; Aboriginal Dream time, 15, 16; issues concerning, 124, 154, 208; writers, 203 ABS, see Australasian Book Society Adams, Phillip, 151 Adamson, Robert, 184-6,189,192,193 Adelaide, 14,15,130,158 aesthetic standards, 15, 20-1, 55, 69, 101 Age, The, 129, 134, 203, 206 AIF, see Australian Imperial Force Alley, Rewi, 60 ALP, see Australian Labor Party Altman, Dennis, 155 America, see United States of America American Federation of Labor, 80 anarchism, 4, 19, 20, 95, 101, 159 Anderson, Hugh, 57 Anderson, John, 100; Studies in Empirical Philosophy, 223 n.l7 Angry Penguins, 13, 14-20, 22 anti-semitism, 61, 68, 85 Apostolate, the, 145 Arena; Magazine and Journal, 203 Argus, The, 7, 23, 129-30, 135 Armstrong, David, 88, 91, 92 Arnold, Matthew, 144, 157 arts, 16,19, 26, 204; Australian Letters, 158; Overland, 76, 77; Prospect, 142-5;

encouragement of, 136,179; popular, 157 Ashbolt, Allan, 115, 136 Asia: Australian policies to, 127, 131, 203; changes in attitude to, 139,140, 154, 208-9; changes in, 32, 102; communism in, 105, 163, 166; journalists in, 130; war in, 109; see also names of countries ASIO, see Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Auchterlonie, Dorothy, see Green, Dorothy Aughterson, Margaret, 148 Australasian Book Society, 33, 35-8, 45-7, 65, 72,121 Australia Council, The, 179, 204 Australia First Movement, 17, 39 Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, 28, 161; attitude to communism, 86, 120, 125, 167; beliefs, 79, 96,100,122; catholic support, 89; connection with Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, 82-3; connection with Central Intelligence Agency, 166-7; control of, 82-5; criticism of, 133, 149; establishment, 80, 82,115,167; failure of, 86; financing by, 114; financing of, 91, 122, 167; interference by, 120; publications, 81, 93, 97,107; reports from, 86, 96,122, 133; sponsorship of, 78; support for, 117,120 Australian Book Review, 140, 206

235

236

INDEX

Australian Broadcasting Commission, 85, 124, 136, 138, 166 Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom, see Australian Association for Cultural Freedom Australian English Association, 18 'Australian Image, The' series, 161, 168 Australian Imperial Force, 34, 64, 70, 116 Australian Labor Party, 6, 7, 12, 34, 68, 77, 81-2, 131, 133, 150; and Meanjin, 26, 27; and universities, 129; anticommunist wing, 80, 81; attacks on, 142, 152; factions, 81, 133; in opposition, 139 Australian League of Rights, 91, 116 Australian Letters, 123, 140, 158-9, 170, 173 Australian Literary Studies, 159 Australian Peace Council, 34, 35 Australian Performing Group, 179 Australian Quarterly, 82, 108 Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, 28, 82-3, 117, 120 Australian tradition, 1, 140, 202; Meanjin, 24, 112; Overland, 61, 74, 112 Australian, The, 13, 56, 127-9, 131, 140

Buckmaster, Charles, 181 Buddhism, 4,95 Bulletin, The, 37, 56, 62, 92, 111, 116, 134, 164-9, 202-3 bush yarns, 56-7 Button, John, 154, 155

Cairns,J.F. (Jim), 32, 63, 125, 144 'Call to the Nation', 81 Calthorpe, Mena, 38 Calwell, Arthur, 78, 116, 123, 139, 202 Cameron, Archibald, 113 Campbell, David A.S., 82, 107 Campbell, Donald. M., 8 Canberra Times, The, 128 Canberra, 48, 117, 127 Capp, Fiona, 120; Writers Defiled, 213 n.34 Carroll, Paul, 44 Casey, Gavin, 201 Casey, Richard G. (later Lord), 12, 82, 85, 117-18 Catholic Action, see Movement, The Catholic Church, 37, 139, 142-4, 166 Catholic Movement, see Movement, The Catholic Social Studies Movement, see Movement, The Bacon, Wendy, 196 Catholicism, 4, 90, 95; anti, 7 Ball, W. Macmahon, 85 Cato, Nancy, 48 ballads, 4,57,59, 64, 71, 159 CCF, see Congress for Cultural Freedom Barcan, Alan, 97 censorship, 2, 5, 76, 85, 125, 134, 195, 196; Barjai, 14 opposition to, 28, 125, 159, 162; Barnard, Marjorie, 173 support for, 162, 166; see also Barnes, John, 170; (ed.) Writer in Australia, Communist Party; control Tie, 212 n.7 Central Intelligence Agency, 80,83-4,166-8 ChifleyJ.B. (Ben), 12, 26-7, 113-14 Barwick, Sir Garfield, 125 China, 27, 60, 151, 163; and Calcutta Bear, Andrew, 149, 157 Bearlin, David, 90, 132 conference, 105; and intellectuals, 79, Beasley, Jack, 35-6, 38, 54; Red Utter Days, 85,124 214 n.9 Chiplin, Rex, 48, 49, 63, 119 Chisholm, A.R., 70 Blake,J.D. (Jack), 175, 201 Christeson, Clem: and Australian Blast, 204 Association For Cultural Freedom, 86, Bloom, Harold, 148; Ruin the Sacred Truths, 229 n.2O. 158; and Commonwealth Literary Boissiere, Ralph de, 33, 35-7 Fund, 114; and Meanjin, 14, 18, 22-8, Borchardt, D.H. and W. Kirsop (eds), Book 31-2, 173; and Petrov, 78, 119 in Australia, The, 235 n.l Christeson, Nina, 119 Bradley, David, 174 Chronicle, The (Toowoomba), 195 Brett, Judith, 114; Robert Menzies'Forgotten CIA, see Central Intelligence Agency civil liberties, 32, 124, 143, 196 People, 225 n.6 Clancy, Laurie, 183 Brisbane, 14, 26, 79, 194 Clark, C.M.H. (C. Manning), 138, 158, Browne, Frank, 116 Buckley, Brian, 151 169,171-2,177 Buckley, Vincent, 27-31, 94, 97, 147, 177; Clark, Gregory, 151,155 and McAuley, 95; and modernism, Clarke, Joan, 41 183-4; and Prospect, 142; and Sydney, class, 19, 20, 64, 69, 128-9, 199; appeal to, 138; and tradition, 144-5; on 114, 129; enemies, 64; exclusion of, universities, 156; Cutting Green Hay, 61, 137; struggles, 64-5, 157, 177; see 228 n.3; World's Flesh, The, 213 n.39 also working class

INDEX CLF, see Commonwealth Literary Fund Close, Robert, 1-4, 194; Of Salt and Earth, an autobiography, 210 n.l; Love Me Sailor, 211 n.4 Coady,Tony, 142, 145 Coady, Patrick, 173 Coffey, Jack, 46-8, 50, 51 Cold War, 11-3, 29, 63, 78, 93, 100, 109; and literature, 112, 126, 177; and new journalism, 127, 133; and Quadrant, 162, 163; in Asia, 32, 105, 163; in Australia, 23, 26, 32, 55, 79, 139, 141, 201 Coleman, Peter, 96, 110, 164, 196; and Quadrant, 165-6; (ed.) Australian Civilization, 223 n.4; Australian Tradition, The, 32; Heart of James McAuley, The, 223 n.3; Liberal Conspiracy, The, 219 n.5; Memoirs of a Slow Learner, 234 n.33; Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition - 100 years of Censorship in Australia, 210 n.l Collins, Betty, 51 Collinson, Laurence, 14, 41, 60, 122 Comerford, Jim, 58 Common Cause, 48 Commonwealth Crimes Act, 125 Commonwealth Literary Fund, now Literature Board of the Australia Council, 63, 112-16, 120-6, 159, 203; and Meanjin, 27, 28, 45, 114, 120-3; and Overland, 57, 74, 112, 114, 116, 122-6; and Quadrant, 94, 116, 122-4 communism, 1, 19, 27, 60-3, 87, 95, 105, 121, 143, 150; anti-communism, 11, 12, 21, 37, 78-8, 86-7,106, 130, 135, 137, 139, 166; attempt to ban, 114; ex-communists, 47, 49, 65, 70, 141; fear of, 23, 27, 60, 117; in Asia, 105, 151; royal commissions on, 114, 118 Communist Dissolution Bill, 125 Communist Party of Australia, 5, 8, 11, 33, 150; break from, 48, 68, 72, 90; Communist Party of Australia (Marxist Leninist), 179; communists, 3, 8, 19, 33, 34, 66, 80; control, 34-7, 46, 47, 54, 60, 66; democratic centralism, 58; doctrine, 3, 6, 37; dogma, 63, 72, 73; fractions 35, 36, 46, 51, 179; front organisations, 28; influence, 32, 34, 35, 73, 142; membership, 3, 10, 27, 34, 38, 48, 65, 118, 150; organisation, 28; policies, 37, 55, 106, 139; publications, 33, 34, 46,48, 66, 131; splits of, 179; sponsorship, 33; supporters, 27, 28; Victorian branch, 7, 132; see also Socialist Party of Australia

237

Communist Review, 46 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 28, 65, 79; American affiliate, 32, 87; approval from, 94; break with Central Intelligence Agency, 168; criticism of, 135; finance, 80, 91, 123, 167; funding of, 166; in Australia, 81, 120; Indian, 85; international, 80, 89; origins, 109; rationale, 121; reports to, 83, 117, 149, 151; see also Australian Association for Cultural Freedom; Central Intelligence Agency conservatism, 4, 10, 11, 13, 29, 31, 78, 81; liberal, 137; neo-conservatives, 88; radical, 137; values, 77, 121, 130, 177 Counihan, Noel, 7, 19, 76 counter-culture, 194, 197, 201, 202 Country Party, The, 113,123 Courier-Mail, 194 Covell, Roger, 94, 107, 160, 166 Cowan, Peter, 169, 171 Creative Nation, 202, 205 Critic, The, 135 Crouch, Harold, 91 Curthoys, A. and J. Merritt (eds), Australia's First Cold War: vol 1, 218 n.l3 Curtinjohn, 12, 14 Czechoslovakia, 35, 63, 73, 179 Daily Mirror (London), 129 Daily Mirror (Sydney), 83, 116, 130 Daniel, Helen, 206 Dante Aleghieri, 30, 98, 148 Darville, Helen, Hand That Signed The Paper, The, 206-8 Davies, Bryn, 158 Davies, Lloyd, 59 Davison, Frank Dalby, 67, 69-70, 114-15 Dawe, Bruce, 17, 147, 162 Deacon, Vera, 51 Demidenko, Helen, see Darville, Helen democracy, 1, 3, 12, 34, 55; assertion of, 58, 150; denial of, 52, 78, 93; freedom of, 80, 88; fundamental principles, 118; in Australia, 61, 62; parliamentary, 101; radical, 156; rights, 49; social, 159 Democratic Labor Party, 77, 78, 139 democratic socialists, 132, 137, 151 Denholm, Michael, Small Press Publishing, 234n.l7 Derrida, Jacques, 207; and Mustapha Tlili (eds), For Nelson Mandela, 235 n.4 Digger, 179 Dissent, 76, 141-3 , 151-7; and Australian Association For Cultural Freedom, 91-3, 149 DLP, see Democratic Labour Party

238

INDEX

Dobrez, Livio, 191; Parnassus Mad Ward, 181,233n.8 Docker, John, 101; Australian Cultural Elites, 223 n.l8; In a Critical Condition, 223n.l8 Douglas, Dennis, 179 Dransfield, Michael, 181, 184, 189, 192-3, 201; 'After Vietnam', 189; Collected Poems, 233 n. 11 Ducker, John, 87 Duncan, Graeme, 150, 154 Duncan, W.G.K., 84 Dutton, Geoffrey, 140, 158; Snow on the Saltbush, 228 n.21 Dutton, G. and M. Harris (eds), Vital Decade, The, 232 n.21 Ear in a Wheatfield, 180 Earth Ship, 180 editorship: advisory bodies for, 48, 50, 107, 108; appointment of, 45-6, 51-3, 94, 107, 111, 134-5, 142, 149, 165, 185; control over, 35-9, 45-50, 52, 130, 167-8; criticism of, 46,47; independence of, 39, 47, 73, 133; interference with, 86, 92; policy of, 39, 43, 52, 97-8, 144-5, 150, 186; qualifications of, 28; responsibility, 46, 106; see also names of editors; names of literary journals Elkin, A.P., 26 Elliott, Brian, 15, 16, 20; (ed.) Jindyworobaks, The, 212 n.4 Encel, Sol, 152, 153 Encounter, 97, 120, 166 Em Malleys Journal, 20, 21; see also Malley, Ern Eureka Street, 203 Europe, 180; eastern, 60, 63, 87 Evans, Ray, 92 Evatt, Dr Herbert Vere, 12, 57, 77, 113, 116,132 Fabian Society, Victoria, 150, 152, 154 Fabianism, 32 Fadden, Arthur, 113 Fairbairn, Geoffrey, 151, 162 Fairfax group, 203 Fairfax, John, 128 fascism, 39, 63, 68 feminism, 64, 72, 205 fiction, 3, 4, 6, 8, 36, 52, 64, 68; see also names c writers '50 Years of the Santamaria Movement', 219 n.3 film, 62 Financial Review, The, 128

Fitzgerald, C.P., 151 Fitzgerald, Tom, 132, 133 Fitzpatrick, Brian, 58 folklore, 4, 60, 71, 154 Forbes, John, 184 Ford Foundation, 168 Ford, Roger, 83, 108 Forrest, David, 38, 59 Fox, Len, 46, 48, 50 Fraser, Allan, 131 Fraser, Malcolm, 178, 202 Free Spirit, 81, 93, 94 Furphy, Joseph, 32, 58, 76, 158 Galbally, Jack, 3 Gale, Betty, 151 Garner, Helen, 205-8 Gerster, Robin, and J. Bassett, Seizures of Youth, 233 n.l Gibson, Ralph, 6, 7 Glezer, Leon, 90-3, 149, 151 Golden, SJ Father Jerry, 92, 142 Goossens, Eugene, 82, 89 Gorton, Sir John, 77 Gott,Ken,90,91, 132 Graham, Jock, 59 Grano, Paul, 21 Grant, Gerry, seeJoseph, Joe Great Awk, 181 Green, Dorothy, 26, 161 Green, H.M., 18 Green, Judith, see Rodriguez, Judith Greenfield, Les, 38 Grey, Jeffrey, Military History of Australia, A, 227 n.2 Gribble, Jennifer, 153, 157 Guardian (Melbourne), 6 Guillain, Robert, 163 Gullett, H.B. MHR, 65 Hadow, Lyndall, 32 Haese, Richard, Rebels and Precursors, 212 n.3 Haley, Martin, 27, 28, 103 Hall, Rodney, 147, 160, 183-6, 191; and T. Shapcott (eds), New Impulses in Australian Poetry, 233 n.l5 Hall, Stuart, 157 Hamel-Green, Michael, 155 Hardy, Frank, 3-11, 115, 200, 201; and Commonwealth Literary Fund, 126; and Overland, 45, 46, 48-50, 57, 58; and social realism, 63-8; Australasian Book Society, 35-8; Hard Way, The, 210 n.2; Legends From Benson's Valley, 215 n.l6; Power Without Glory, 211 n.5; Realist Writer (Sydney), 51-4; realist

INDEX

239

Bulletin, 134; and Dissent, 149; and writers group, 33, 36, 41, 72, 73; 'Voices Off, 211 n.2O; Who Shot George Observer, 132; and Quadrant, 106, 108, Kirkland, 211 n.2O 111, 160-1; Lucky Country, The, 231 n.7; Portrait of an Optimist, 228 n.l 3 Harney, Bill, 74 Howarth, Guy, 114 Harries, Owen, 160, 163, 164 Harrington, Edward, 57, 58 Hughes, Colin, 166 Harris, Max, 14-5, 19, 22, 125, 140, 162; Hughes, Helen, 61 Australian Letters, 123, 158 Hughes, Mary Kent, 116 Harris, Stewart, 195; Political Football, 233 Hughes, Robert, 134 n.l Hughes, Tom, 92 Harrison, Martin, 188 humanism, liberal, 19, 31, 55, 56, 100, 204; Harrison-Ford, Carl, 183 anti-humanism, 120; Christian, 31; Harwood, Gwen, 147, 161 secular, 105, 106; traditional, 98 Hasluck, Paul, 125, 127 Hungary, Soviet invasion of, 48, 65, 72-3, Hastings, Peter, 134, 136 78, 85, 128, 141 Hausler, Paul, Australia and the Holocaust, 225 n. 10 ideological debate; absence of, 78; anti communism, 17, 28, 61, 81, 96, 179, Hawke, R.J., 155 209; anti Labor, 81; anti unions, 81; Hawkins, Gordon, 162 conservative, 112, 137; defeat of, 121; Healy, Jim, 67 differences, 158, 185; ideology, 69; of Hellyerjill, 159 communism, 118, 163, 179; on Helmerjohn, 163 freedom, 93; on funding, 113; Hemensley, Kris, 179, 180; (ed.) Best of the Ear, The, 233 n.4 personal freedom, 196; right wing, 86, 107, 115; social order, 31; social and Henderson, Gerard, 166, 206 socialist realism, 36-45, 53, 54, 208; Herald and Weekly Times Limited, 129, Soviet, 118; themes, 121, 152, 154, 130,203 Herald, The, 37, 114, 116, 129, 133 156,183 Herbert, Xavier, 17, 18, 24 Immigration Reform Group, 202 Herring, Sir Edmund, 1, 2 Independently Monthly, The, 203 Heseltine, H.P, 168 Indonesia, 127, 133, 161, 163 Hewett, Dorothy: and Critic, 136; and Indyk, Ivor, 206 Katharine Susannah Prichard, 70; and Ingamells, Rex, 15, 16, 17 Meanjin, 26; and Overland, 70-1; and Inglis, K.S. (ed.), Nation: The Life on an Soviet Union, 73; Petrov Royal IndependentJournal of Opinion, 228 n.l 2 Commission, 119; poetry, 70-3; social intellectual debate, 98—100; approaches to realism, 38, 43, 64; Sydney Realist 161, 164; good versus evil, 103-6; Writers Group, 51-3; Bobbin Up, 53, humanities, 144, 145, 168; 72, 219 n.33; Wild Card, 219 n.35; individualism, 137, 149, 189; lack of, Windmill Country, 219 n.32 139; outlets for, 132, 141; redemption, Heyward, Michael, 20; Em Malley Affair, 146, 147; science, 145; styles of, 109, The, 212n.l4 148, 149; Sydney tradition, 101, 138; Hill, Ted, 7, 179, 201 visionaries, 102 . Ho Chi Minh, 60 Japan, 2, 3, 154, 163, 180 Hoggart, Richard, 157 Japanese, 12, 14, 18 Holmes, Cecil, 43, 76, 162 Jenkins, John, 180 Holt, Harold, 77, 113, 178 Hook, Sidney, 96, 167 Jindyworobaks, 13, 15, 16, 17, 20, 22, 31 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, visit of, 178 Hope, A.D., 18, 24-5, 97, 135, 146-7, 160, 185; and David Martin, 40-1; and Jones, Evan, 97, 147, 161, 162 Overland, 57; and Patrick White, 173; Jones, Rae Desmond, 185, 188, 193 Cave and The Spring, The, 229 n.l4; Joseph, Joe'M.E., 61,62 Native Companions, 178, 215 n.32 Joyce, James, 2, 5, 53 Hope, Francis, 140 Jupp, James, 90, 91, 149, 150 Home, Donald, 109, 132-4, 139, 164-7, 202; and Australian Association for Kamenka, Eugene, 109, 111, 153, 162 Cultural Freedom, 84, 100; and Kelly, Gwen, 162

240

INDEX

Kelly, Peter, 146 Kenny, Robert and C. Talbot (eds), Applestealers, The, 233 n.2 Keon, Standish Michael, 65, 69, 78, 81, 115 Kermode, Frank, 166 Kerr, Sir John, 85, 87, 89, 178 Khrushchev, N.S., 63, 72, 78, 110, 132 Kiernan, Brian, 158 Knopfelmacher, Frank, 61, 142, 163-6, 201; and Santamaria, 90; assistance to 86, 92, 167; failure of academic appointments, 91-3; influence of, 90, 150 Koch, Christopher, 166 Korean War, 12, 86 Kramer, Dame Leonie: literary standards, 124, 158, 162, 168; on Patrick White, 175-6 Krygier, Richard, 79-86, 87, 90-1, 96, 115, 133, 201; and Meanjin, 28; and peace movement, 65; and Quadrant, 93-4, 106, 108, 121-2, 161, 167; Dissent, 92-3, 151; Knopfelmacher, 91-3; Petrovs, 117 La Mama, 136, 179 la Motte, Eric, 46, 47, 51, 56 Labour Club (Melbourne), 34, 90 Lambert, Eric, 35, 48, 57, 63-5, 115; Twenty Thousand Thieves, The, 218 n.lO larrikins, 56, 57 Latham, Sir John, 94, 108, 115; Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, 82-5, 88-90, 94; and Meanjin, 120-1, 158; University of Tasmania, 90 Lawler, Ray, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, 61 Lawrence, D.H., Lady Chatterley's Lover, 195 Lawson, Alan, 173 Lawson, Henry, 32, 180 Lawson, Mick, 59 League of Rights, 116 Leapman, Michael, Barefaced Cheek, 227 n.6 Leavis, F.R, and Q.D., 144, 147, 157 Lee, Jenny et al. (eds), Temperament of Generations, The, 213 n.28 Lenin, V.I., 47, 58, 68, 109 'Letters to Tom Collins', 26 Leunig, Michael, 195 Lever, Susan (McKernan), 88, 89; Question of Commitment, A, 221 n.36 Levien, Harold, 131-2 Leyden, Peter, 52 libel, 1-6 Liberal-Country Party coalition, 77, 114, 126 Liberal Party of Australia: and arts, 77; and universities, 129; external policies, 12, 127; in government, 57,129,139, 202;

leadership, 7, 77, 113, 115; members, 34, 80; opposition to grants, 113, 115; state, 136 liberalism, 79, 98, 107, 110, 138; criticism of, 32; opposition to, 106; radical, 137 libertarianism, 57, 93, 196-7, 202 Lilley, Merv, 56 Lindesay, Vane, 76 Lindsay, Jack, 32, 170 Lindsay, Norman, 16, 76, 101, 102, 135 'Literary Heritage, The' series, 168 Literature Board of the Australia Council, see Commonwealth Literary Fund literature, 1; Australian, 16, 55, 61, 164, 168; bourgeois, 36; connection with politics, 18, 45, 57, 68, 166, 206; criticism of, 40, 41, 65, 140; debate, 51, 55, 56, 146; dirty realism, 208; function of, 40, 70, 74, 143-5, 173, 207; populist, 76; realism in, 159, 175, 208; socialist, 33-42, 53, 54, 55, 68; Soviet, 36; symbolism, 176; traditional, 169; see also criticism, literary; social realism; types of literature Little, Leo K.C., 1 Lloyd, E.D., 121 Lockwood, Rupert, 119 Lucifer, 179 Macartney, Frederick, 29, 45; Increased Price of Liberty, The, 28, 213 n.35 McAuleyJames, 11, 26-32, 101-10, 147, 187-8; and Em Malley, 24, 25; and new poets, 186, 187; and Quadrant, 94, 121-5, 160, 165, 166, 167; and radicalism, 32; and social realism, 67; and universities, 90, 91; beliefs, 4, 11, 177; formalism, 21; modernism, 16, 20, 26; poetry, 29-31, 110, 147, 187-8; Collected Poems 1936-1970, 213 n.38; End of Modernity, The, 223 n.l9; Grammar of the Real, The, 223 n.l3; (ed.) Map ofAustralian Verse, A, 212 n.32 McCallum, Douglas, 96, 138 McCalman, Janet; Journeyings, 225 n.7 McCarthyism, 61, 121 McCrae, Hugh, 16 MacDonald, Simon, 181 MacKenzieJ.D., 16 McKernan, Susan, see Lever, Susan Mackie, J.A.C., 32 McKinlay, Brian (ed.), Documentary History of the Australian Labor Movement, A, 212 n.l McLaren, John, 175 McLeod, Don, 125 McLuhan, Marshall, 109, 154

INDEX McMaster, Rhyll, 185 McPhee, Hilary, 205 Maiden, Jennifer, 194 Mair, Ian, 2 Malley, Ern, 20, 24, 101, 180, 186 Maloney,JJ., 82, 83 Malouf, David, 159 Manifold, John, 52-3, 56-7, 60, 74-5 Mann, Leonard, 36, 70 Manne, Robert, 204, 206; Petrcw Affair, The, 226 n.23 Mannix, Archbishop, 10, 81 Mao Tse-tung, 85, 179 Marcuse, Herbert, 109 marijuana, 166, 178 Marr, David, Patrick White: a life, 232 n.3O Marshall, Alan, 8, 32, 36, 56, 63-4 Martin, David, 74-6, 159, 162; and A.D. Hope, 40, 41; and Australasian Book Society, 37; and Patrick White, 174, 175; and Stalin, 75; social realism, 43, 59, 63, 64, 174 Martin, Mr Justice, 2, 8 Marx, Karl, 36, 109 Marxism: and Lowe, 118; and Outlook, 141; and social realism, 19, 72; and socialism, 154; and Stalinism, 68; dream of, 153; fear of, 118-19; opposition to, 90 Mas, Joan, 185 mateship, 4, 57, 58, 64 Mathers, Peter, 44, 76, 159 Mathews, Race, 76, 150, 155 Matthews, Brian, 208 May, Frederick, 91 Mayer, Henry, 85, 92 Mead, Jenna, 205 Meanjin, 18, 22-32, 158, 162, 204; and anticommunism, 27-9, 86, 102, 168; and Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, 86, 93, 94, 112, 120-1; and Commonwealth Literary Fund, 27, 114, 115, 122-4; C. Manning Clark, 171; Patrick White, 170, 173-4; social realism, 174; Vietnam, 151 media, 157, 202, 203 Medley, John, 26 Melbourne University Magazine (MUM), 27 Melbourne, 114, 128, 129, 179, 195; and Meanjin, 26; and Overland, 33, 48, 50 Menzies, Sir Robert, 12, 14, 57, 114-19, 121, 139; and Australian Broadcasting Commission, 130; and British Empire, 77, 114; and Commonwealth Literary Fund, 113-16; and Meanjin, 94; and Overland, 125; and Papua New Guinea, 125; and Quadrant, 94, 122; Petrov Royal Commission, 116-17

241

Meray, Tibor, 90, 167 Merri Creek or Nero, The, 180 Meyer, Bernard, 41 Miles Franklin award, 206 Miles,J.B.,37,54 Milliss,Roger,51,52 Milton, John, 32, 98-9, 102, 104, 146, 148, 157 Mindszenty, Cardinal, 27, 28, 29 modernists, 1, 12, 19, 26; and Angry Penguins, 20-2; and nationalism, 15, 16; anti, 95, 101; secular, 97 Modjeska, Drusilla, 208 Mok, 181 Molnar, George, 97 Monash University, 91, 129 Moore, T. Inglis, 61, 122 Moorhouse, Frank, 196-200; Americans, Baby, The, 234 n.37; Days of Wine and Rage, 233 n.l; Futility and Other Animals, 234 n.36 Morgan, Patrick, 166 Morris, Bernice, Between the Lines, 226 n.28 Morrison, John, 32, 33, 65—8; and Overland, 49, 56, 58; and Realist Writer Group, 6, 10, 38; Black Cargo and Other Stories, 212 n.31; Sailors Belong Ships, 218 n.l8; Stories of the Waterfront, 218 n. 18 Mortier, Paul, 50, 53 Moscow, 58, 65, 66, 82 Movement, The (generic name for the Catholic Social Studies Movement, later National Civic Council), 7, 79, 90, 103, 145; and Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, 81; and Prospect, 143; and Twentieth Century, 142; catholic action, 132; industrial groups, 139; Labor split, 77; see also Santamaria, B.A. Mudie, Ian, 17, 159 Munster, George, 133 Murdoch, Rupert, 127, 130, 203 Murdoch, Sir Keith, 129, 130 Muirden, Bruce, 39 Murray, Les, 183, 204; 'Walking the Cattle Place', 188 Murray-Smith, Stephen, 34-6, 68, 78; and Commonwealth Literary Fund, 121-4; and Knopfelmacher, 92, 93; editorial policy, 41-7, 55-8, 74; Overland, 38, 39, 47-51; Indirections: a literary biography, 214 n.5; (ed.) An Overland Muster, 56 myth; in ritual, 104; mythology, 3, 15-17, 69, 101, 191, 193 Nabokov, Vladimir, 134 Nation, 13, 130, 132, 133, 202, 203

242

INDEX

Nation Review, 179, 203

National Bank of Australia, 23 National Civic Council, see Movement, The nationalism, 17, 146, 164, 204; Australian, 39, 74, 101, 193, 203; cultural, 102; literary, 107; nationalists, 15, 19, 31, 80, 177, 180; popular, 15; radical, 1, 12, 15, 37, 55, 58, 71, 202; radical nationalists, 20, 55, 62, 112, 137, 202 naturalism, 37 nazism, 64, 68, 80, 207 Nelson, publisher, 91, 167 neutralists, 85 New Guinea, 76, 124-5, 133; and McAuley, 102, 104; war service in 34, 38 New South Wales, 81, 108 New Zealand, 32 Newcastle, 24, 135, 179 Newell, Frances, 155 Newman Society, 90, 142 Newman, Daniel, 106, 224 n.28. Newman, Robert P., Owen Lattimore and the 'Loss'of China, 220 n.29

News Limited Group, 203 News, The (Adelaide), 130, 135 Newton, Maxwell, 128 Nolan, Sidney, 20 Normington-Rawling, James, 113, 114 Norton, Ezra, 116 Observer, The (Sydney), 13, 111, 132, 133, 134 O'Brien, J., 136 O'Brien, Patrick, Saviours, The, 215 n.l4 O'Connor, Mark, 204 O'Leary, Zoe, Desolate Market, The, 214 n.9

O'Neil, Robert, 163 O'Neill, Dan, 195 obscenity, 2, 20; publications, 85, 196; trials, 1-4, 195, 196 Old, Nell, 58 Oliphant, Marcus, 74 Olympic Games, Melbourne, 61, 128 Opera House, Sydney, 61, 88 Orr, Sydney Sparkes, 89 Our Glass, 179, 180 Outlook, 61, 132, 141, 149, 151; on Vietnam, 151 Overland, 11, 13, 33-51, 55-63, 73-6, 111, 121, 132, 134, 141, 159,162, 168, 179, 204; and C. Manning Clark, 172; and Dorothy Hewett, 70-3; and Judah Waten, 68; and liberalism, 20; and McAuley, 102; and Menzies, 116; and Soviet Union, 63; Commonwealth Literary Fund, 114; and Patrick White, 173-5; Vietnam, 51 Oxlade, Boyd, 140

Pacific, 80, 109, 208 pacifism, 63, 85 Packer, Kerry, 203 Packer, Sir Frank, 132, 134 paganism, 101 Page, Sir Earle, 113 Paine, Arnold, 154 Palmer, Helen, 132 Palmer, Nettie, 56, 69, 113 Palmer, Vance, 56, 69, 113-15, 170 Partridge, Percy, 91 Pasternak, Boris, 48, 49, 63 Paterson, A.B. (Banjo), 56, 57 patriotism, 23, 69, 114 Patterson, John, 76, 150, 153-5 peace movements, 26-7, 65, 135 peace, 29, 34, 61, 85, 88, 90, 142 Penguin Books, 140, 195 Penguin New Australian Writing, The, 140

Penton, Brian, 129 Perry, Grace, 184, 185 Petrov, Evdokia, 117 Petrov, Vladimir, 116, 119 Petrov Royal Commission, see Royal Commission into Espionage Petty, Bruce, 63, 76, 159 Phillips, Arthur A., 32, 36, 62, 70, 168, 170, 175 Picot, James, 22 Podhoretz, Norman, 165 Poetry Australia, 184, 187, 188 Poetry Magazine, 184, 185, 188

Poetry Society of Australia, 184, 185, 188 poetry, 15, 20, 29, 43, 59, 60, 108, 110, 182; by unionists, 59; criteria for, 53; discourse, 97; imagery, 29, 73, 95; landscape in, 15, 58; lyrical, 26, 71, 76; modern, 14, 26, 39, 180, 186; narrative, 76; of experience, 182, 183, 184, 190; political, 52, 70, 71, 72 ; postmodernism, 181, 184; relation to politics, 61; role of unconscious, 21, 22, 53, 181; symbolic, 25, 53, 102, 192; tradition, 22, 25, 180, 183; values in, 21, 22, 28, 29, 41, 59, 181, 191; see also names of poets; names of magazines Polanyi, Michael, 89 politics, 28-9, 37-8, 58, 88, 150; involvement in literature, 18, 28, 36, 49, 59, 68, 93; see also names of political parties; communism; conservatism; liberalism; socialism pornography, 89, 162, 166 Porter, Hal, 134, 169, 170-1; Cats of Venice, The, 134; In an Australian Country Graveyard, 232 n.21

postmodernism, 206

INDEX postwar reconstruction, 12, 26,96,114,131; immigration, 70, 139; writing, 38, 70 Potts, David, 162 poverty, 44, 45, 60, 69 Pram Factory Theatre, 179 Preston, Margaret, 26 Price, Sir Archibald Grenfell, 116 Prichard, Katharine Susannah, 49, 63, 70, 201 Prideaux, Helen, 147 propaganda, 18, 65, 116 Prospect group, 90 Prospect, 40, 141-3, 147-9, 151 'Push, The' (Sydney), 196 Pybus, Cassandra, 208 Pym, Denis, 154 Quadrant, 13, 60-8, 78, 91, 93-100, 121-3, 158-68, 203, 206; and C. Manning Clark, 171-2; and Central Intelligence Agency, 166-8; and Patrick White, 175-7; change to bi-monthly, 161; Commonwealth Literary Fund, 67, 122-4 Queensland, 194, 195

243

Rigby,T.H., 110 Rivett, Rohan, 130 Roberts, Bev, 140 Roberts, Nigel, 180 Robinson, DrF.W., 18, 27 Robinson, Roland, 17, 183, 186, 187 Rodd,L.C, 161,162 Roderick, Colin, 159 Rodriguez, Judith, 160 Roe, Michael, 172 Rolfe, Patricia, JournalisticJavelin, The, 228 n.l7 Rosenthal, Newman, 90, 161, 162 Roskolenko, Harry, 14 Ross, Lloyd, 85, 87 Rowse, Tim, 20; Australian Liberalism and National Character, 212 n. 17 Royal Commission into Communism (Victoria), 114, 118 Royal Commission into Espionage (Canberra), 78,117, 119, 121, 126 Russia, see Soviet Union Russo, Peter, 130

Samuel, Peter, 91-3, 149, 151 Sandercock, Leonie and S. Murray-Smith racism, 62, 69, 202 (eds), Room for Manoeuvre: writings on Radic, Leonard, State of Play, The, 233 n.2 History, Politics, Ideas and Play, 214 n.5 radicalism, 70, 155 Santamaria, B.A., 77, 79, 81-2, 92,109, 201 Ray, Sibnarayan, 85, 90, 163 Sargeant, Philip, 154 Schlusser, E., 136 Realist Writer, The: Melbourne, 4, 33-5, Scott, Bill, 159 45-9, 65; Sydney, 11, 48, 51-4 Scullin, James. H., 113 Realist Writers Groups, 6, 10, 51, 66, 68; security, see Australian Security Intelligence and Australasian Book Society, 33, 35, Organisation 36; and Overland, 33, 35, 36-42, 45-9, 51, 73, 112; and Realist Writer, 51-4; Seelaf, George, 6, 7, 8, 35 Selbach, Udi, 15 Sydney, 52, 58, 72 Serle, Geoffrey, 34, 122 realist writers, 4, 5, 32, 40, 43, 169; see also Shadbolt, Maurice, 63 names of writers; social realism Realist, The, previously the Realist Writer, 52, Shapcott, Thomas, 161,183-4,186, 191-2; 53 Inwards to the Sun, 234 n.28 Reed, John, 19, 20, 22 Shapiro, Karl, 14 Reed, Sunday, 19 Sharpley, Cecil, 114 Reid, Barrett, 14, 20, 21 Shaw, A.G.L., 171,172 religion: Christian values, 29, 30, 31, 176; Sheppard, Alec, 195 Shrubb, Peter, 175, 176 faith, 95, 110, 142, 143, 145; in Sides, Audrey, 175 writing, 29; political stance, 143; Simpson, Paul, 142 prayer, 30, 31; Protestant, 37, 81; Simpson, Ron, 147 redemption, 30, 103—5; symbolism, 176 Singapore, 163; fall of, 12,14,17, 23,114 Slessor, Kenneth, 22, 29, 94, 184 reportage, 76 Smart, Peter, 140 republicanism, 137, 140 Smith, Bernard, 26, 154; Noel Counihan: Reserve Bank, 137 Review, previously Sunday Review, 179, 196 artist and revolutionary, 211 n.21 revolution, 36, 60, 74-5, 103; China, 125, Smith SJ, W.G., 142 179; Hungary, 65, 141; Russia, 60, 63, 'Smoko', 56 68, 69, 152; Spain, 152 Snedden, Billy Mackie, 126 Richmond, Hilary, 59 Snow, C.P., 145

244

INDEX

social democrats, 79 social realism, 1, 5, 11, 201, 208; and A.D. Hope, 40; and F. Moorhouse, 198, 200; and Hardy, 66; and Hewett, 72, 73; and Marxism, 19; and Morrison, 65, 66; and Waten, 68; socialist realism and art, 63 socialism, 12, 36, 68, 70, 80, 95; alternate forms, 141; community based on, 153; in Australia, 32, 37, 55 Socialist Party of Australia, 68, 179 socialist realism, 11, 21, 34-7, 43, 54, 63, 73 South Africa, 141, 142 South African rugby tour, 178, 194 Southerly, 22, 114, 123, 206; conservatism, 78; literary emphasis, 18 Soviet Union, 5, 63, 87, 110, 117, 204; and Communist Party of Australia, 48, 54, 141; and Hewett, 72, 73; and Manifold, 60; and Overland, 60; and Waten, 60, 68-9; Cold War, 12; espionage, 118, 119; good will towards, 27, 32; ideal society, 11, 21, 35, 36; invasion of Hungary, 48; writers, 124 Soviet Writers' Union, 34 Spain, 61, 76, 81, 103 Spanish civil war, 61, 152, 160 Spann, D.K., 85, 108 'Speewah', 56 Spender, Stephen, 96 Spry, Colonel (Director ASIO), 82, 117 Stalin, Josef, 68, 70, 78, 132; and J. Manifold, 60; and D. Martin, 75; and sectarians, 47; and Zhdanov, 34, 36; influence of, 103; Stalinism, 163, 205, 207 Staples, Mick, 51 Starke, Sir John, 8 Stephensen, P.R., 17, 39 Stewart, Harold, 16, 20, 101 Stivens, Dal, 56 Stockholm World Peace Congress, 88 Stone, Professor Julius, 86 Stonier, Brian, 140 Stove, David, 88 Stow, Randolph, 169, 174, 177 Strahan, Lynne, Just City and the Mirrors, 212 n.3 Stretton, Hugh, 19 strikes, 69, 114 Stuart, Donald, 32 Stuart, Rupert, 130, 134 student culture, 154, 156 student protest movements, 166, 178, 179, 194 subversion, 27, 85, 115, 125, 142, 155, 166

Sun, The (Melbourne), 129 Sun, The (Sydney), 86 Sunday Review see Review

'Swag', 56, 74 Sydney: Australasian Book Society move, 38; failure of The Movement in, 103; individualism, 138; libertarians, 196; Opera House, 61; Petrov protest, 117; Realist Writer, 11; scepticism, 90,100; Southerly, 18; Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship, 35 Sydney Morning Herald, 40, 86, 129, 132, 134, 203, 206 Syson, Ian, 208 Tabberer, Jane, 51 Taft, Bernie, 179 Tanner, Les, 170 Tasmania, 89, 91, 108, 110, 195 Taylor, Andrew, 175, 186 television, 62, 127-8, 160; impact of, 155, 183; proprietorship, 131, 203 Tennant, Kylie, 48, 113, 114, 161 Tharunka, 179, 196 Thatcher, Charles, 37 Thompson, John, 94, 107 Throssell, Ric, 119; My Father's Son, 226 n.28 Tillett, Robert, 181 Times, The (London), 195 Tipping, Richard, 181, 182, 187 Toowoomba, 195 totalitarianism, 79, 88, 93, 106-9, 145, 154, 196 Trade Union Defence Committee, 150 tradition, 4, 60, 157; cultural nationalism, 15; overseas sources, 32; social realism, 1, 5, 11, 19; socialist realism, 21; theory of, 109 traditionalists, 21, 206; challenge to, 140 Tranter,John, 184, 187, 190-3; (ed.), New Australian Poetry, The, 190, 234 n.22; Parallax, 185, 188, 234 n.23 Tregenza, John, Australian Little Magazines, 211 n.7 Tribune, 48, 49, 63, 66 Truth, 83, 116, 130,135 Tucker, Albert, 19 Tullipan, Ron, 51 Turner, Ian, 34-8, 44-8, 92, 121; and Overland, 75, 141; as critic, 173, 175; as historian, 62, 74, 159, 172; expelled from Communist Party of Australia, 68,78 Twentieth Century, 92, 142, 203 Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 72, 78

245

INDEX unions, 48, 58, 67, 86, 102, 121, 143; publications, 48; support of writers, 34; unionists, writing for, 39, 58, 62, 141 United Kingdom, 14, 58, 114, 157 United Nations, 12 United States of America, 12, 32, 78; attitudes to, 14, 58, 61, 162, 164; foreign policy, 79, 151; popular culture, 180, 183; publications in, 24, 203; student culture, 154 University of Melbourne, 34, 50, 154; communist infiltration, 83, 120; Labour Club, 90-2; Newman Society, 142; publications from, 27, 28, 149 University of New South Wales, 129 University of Sydney, 91, 159 University of Tasmania, 89, 91, 108 University of Western Australia, 135, 138 Utzon, Joern, 88 van Moorst, Harry, 155 Vassilieff, Elizabeth, 20-1, 27-9, 41, 61, 124 Veliz, Claudio, 32 Verrills, Ray, see Williams, Ray Vickers, F.B., 37 Victoria, state, 5, 44, 65, 81 Vietcong, 151, 163, 178 Vietnam war, 12, 13, 60, 163, 189; attitudes to, 77, 105, 111, 134, 191; challenge to liberalism, 109; media images, 183; opposition to, 155, 157, 194; politics of, 149-54, 199; support of, 139, 166 Vietnam, 91, 134, 142, 162, 167 Viidikas, Vicki, 186, 187, 194 Villiers, Alan, 97 violence, 105, 163, 183 Vision, 101 Voice, 94, 131,132 Wallace, Victor, 61 Wallace-Crabbe, Chris, 147, 159, 162 Wannan, Bill, 35, 39, 56 war, 19, 26, 74, 75, 147; see also names of countries, places; names of wars Ward, Russel, 175 Warner, Denis, 105, 166; Wake Me if There's Trouble, 224 n.26 Waten, Judah, 32, 33, 38, 63, 68-70, 198; attacks on, 116-17; conflict with Overland, 50-1; Stalinism, 179; support for Overland, 46; Alien Son, 218 n.25; Compiler, S.M. Stewart

Shares in Murder, 219 n.31; Time of Conflict, 219 n.37; Unbending, The, 218 n.26 Waters, Joseph, 50, 51. Waterside Workers' Federation, 67 Webb, Francis, 29 Webb, Leicester, 32 Wedlake, E.N. Bob Burns, 44, 45 Wentworth, W.C., 69, 80-2, 92, 115, 117, 120

Wertheim, Peter, 144, 149 Westerly, 123, 126, 158, 204 'What Is To Be Done' series, 109, 168 Wheelwright, E.L., 109, 152; White Australia Policy, 134, 202 White, Patrick, 11, 39, 53, 147, 158, 161, 169-77; Australian publication of, 32, 203 Whiteley, Brett, 181 Whitlam, Gough 77, 139, 150, 155, 178 Whitlam, Nicholas and J. Stubbs (eds), Nest of Traitors, 226 n.23 Whitman, Walt, 76, 160, 183 Wilding, Michael, 157 Williams, Ray, 52, 53 Williams, Raymond, 153, 157 Williams, Vic, 42, 43 Wilson, Ian, 151 Wolfe, Elizabeth, ^Vassilieff, Elizabeth Wolfsohn, Hugo, 152 women writers, 193-4, 203 women's journals, 135 Wootten, Hal, 85, 87, 89 working class, 68, 72, 157, 172; and nationalism, 62; and Overland, 13; and Seelaf, 6; cultural work, 5, 37; nurturing, 33, 39, 49; revolutionary, 41, 43, 44; Sydney Realist Writer, 51-4; writing for, 121; see also social realism World War I, 61, 64, 70, 116 World War II, 12, 23, 38, 61, 80 Wren, Ellen, 3, 5, 7, 8 Wren, John, 6, 8 Wright, Judith, 4, 18, 25-9, 53, 97, 159, 186 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 63, 163 Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship, 35,65 Yugoslavia, 85 Zhdanov, Andrei. A., 34, 36, 37 ZubrzyckiJ., 162

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