Left to Right

Saturday, 31st July 2010

The Last Intellectuals: Essays on Writers and Politics
by Peter Coleman
Quadrant Books
pp. 326, ISBN 9780980677829

Although Peter Coleman is undoubtedly the grandfather of Australian conservatism, like so many of us he started his adult life as a man of the Left. His latest collection of essays, The Last Intellectuals, contains a sharp, funny and sometimes stern series of meditations on a career spent in the domestic and international culture wars.

He asks: ‘Am I really that raw youth of 17 who in 1946 co-edited with a communist friend a magazine called Left Forum for the communist-dominated Labour Club at Sydney University (and tried to liven it up with jokes)? I have absolutely zero memory of the episode… And am I also that 21-year-old who in 1950 debated the Menzies government’s plan to ban the Communist party with my friend, the late David Stove? By this time I was loudly denouncing both the Communist party and those Liberals who wanted to ban it. I have a better memory of this great affair because I can distantly hear my own voice, however confused.’

The point is, as he says: ‘It takes you a while to sort yourself out.’ Just how long was the subject of a rueful autobiography, Memoirs of a Slow Learner. Coleman’s learning curve encompassed journalism and editing two influential weeklies, the Observer and the Bulletin. After a long stint in the New South Wales Parliament and a brief but memorable ministerial career, he served for a while in the Federal Parliament. For 20 years he also edited Quadrant, Australia’s major conservative monthly.

Perhaps the most significant turning point in the development of his worldview was his involvement with the Congress of Cultural Freedom, a post-war haven for Lefties who’d been mugged by reality and could no longer take the Eastern Bloc’s claims about itself at face value. ‘Its mission,’ he tells us, ‘was to open the eyes of the fellow travellers to the facts of totalitarianism. Its leaders and supporters understood this struggle. They could speak the ideological dialect. They were the Spanish Civil War generation, veterans whose god had failed. They knew the fellow travellers (and non-party communists) intimately because they themselves had come from their ranks. They also knew that the writers and intellectuals they wanted to reach had a hunger for cultural and intellectual freedom — and they did reach them.’

1 | 2 | 3 Next page