IPA 'Heart of James McAuley' Book Launch

7/27/2019 IPA 'Heart of James McAuley' Book Launch

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Book launch: The Heart of James McAuley

The Hon. Tony StaleyI am surprised and delighted to have been invited tolaunch this book account o one o Australias great bigmen o the 20th century, by Peter, one o Australias most

distinguished intellectuals.Peter has drawn rom the ideas and ideals in which he

has believed and can now be seen to have been on the rightside o history.

When I was in ull time politics, rst as a member oparliament, then as a minister, and nally as Liberal PartyPresident, which wasnt strictly a ull time job, but awullyclose to it, I was asked Tony, how do you keep in touch

with the real world? I answered, by reading poetry; youcan imagine the looks on their aces!

In the real world o political belie and action, JamesMcAuleys poetry had a huge impact on me. When I hadsome big and lonely decisions to make, James McAuleys

work inspired me, and gave me the courage to act.One example o this is when I made the decision,

entirely on my own, to resign as assistant to Billy Snedden,the Leader o the Opposition, and begin the campaign tomake Malcolm Fraser, (the then Malcolm Fraser!) leadero the party, and ultimately, Prime Minister. Two McAuleypoems gave me the courage to do what I had to do. Oneo which was Innocent by Denition, the other, thesavagely satirical, Letter to John Dryden, in which hecoins phrases like democracy has become democratism,

amongst others.His railing against obsessive materialism withoutconviction or values is as relevant today as it was when he

wrote it many years ago.Most o his lie he was torn between hope and despair,

between joy and sadness, concerned with matters o goodand evil, and the meaning, or lack o meaning, o it all.

He was a great warrior or his belies, as can be seenin Letter to John Dryden. However, he could also write

with intimate poignancy about the human condition. Hewrote these words about his mother and his ather

My ather and my mother never quarreled.

There were united in a kind o loveAs daily as the Sydney Morning Herald

Rather than like the eagle or the dove

I never saw them casually touch,

Or show a moments joy in one anotherWhy should this matter to me so much?

I think it bore more hardly on my mother

Who had more generous eelings to express.

My ather had dammed up his Irish bloodAgainst all drinking praying ecklessness

And stiened into stone and creaking wood

Her lips would make a twitching sound, as though

Spontaneous impulse must be kept at bay

That it was mainly weakness I see now,But then my eelings curled back in dismay.

Small things can pit the memory like a cyst:Having seen other ather greet their sons

I put my childish ace up to be kissed

Ater an absence. The rebu still burns.

My blood. The poor mans curt embarrassmentAt such a delicate proer o aection

Cut like a saw. But home the lesson went

My tenderness henceorth escaped detection.

But James himsel was capable o writing with joy andtenderness:

Wet mirrors covering sot peat.

Swag-bellied graceul mares in oal.

Red-umber bulls on plashing eet

With mild white ace and curly poll.

Crutching time; each heavy eweIs trimmed and slides o down the chute.

The mountains are cut out in blue.

An opalescent sky is mute.

Ducks loiter. Children play beore tea.

In the home paddock a lone goose

Follows the cows or company.

It is a world o sense and use.

But then, nally, a more atypical and pessimistic note

Christ, you walked on the sea,

But cannot walk in a poem,

Not in our century.

Theres something deeply wrong

Either with us or with you.

Our bright loud word is strong

And better in some ways

Than the old haunting kingdoms;

I dont reject our days

Peter, we are deeply in your debt or your extraordinarycomprehension o the lie and times o a great Australian.

Your work is a timely reminder o James McAuleysconvictions, commitment, and his values, and I am proudto launch this book.


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Institute o Public Aairs

The Hon. Tony Abbott

The publication o a new edition oThe Heart of JamesMcAuley testies to the continuing signicance o our

oremost poet/advocate and also to the lasting qualityo this 1980 essay. The writer is a ormer member orWentworth in the Commonwealth parliament, leader othe NSW opposition, state minister o the crown, editoroThe Bulletin and Quadrantmagazines and author o atleast six other books but this extended essay still standsout among the many achievements o Peter Colemanscrowded lie.

Like another author/MP, Sir Paul Hasluck, Colemanwas an under-estimated politician, perhaps because hesought to be judged on his merits rather than his sel-assessment. Its worth mentioning that on the last occasion

Coleman contested party preselection someone who isnow spoken o as a potential uture Prime Minister camesecond! Coleman entered politics without ego and let

without rancour. He is one o the very ew ormer partyleaders never to have made a hero o himsel by takingpot shots at his successors. In every sense, he has been anadornment to our public lie.

Todays launch is an act o ealty to some o the greatideas and individuals that have shaped our society andormed our lives. It is the acknowledgment o a culturalindebtedness or which we should be grateul rather thanresentul. This is the kind o debt that makes us rich not

the debt that makes us poor.Whether as a conservative Catholic raging against

the world, an indulgent radical tearaway, a poet osoaring emotional power, or a sympathetic student odevelopment in the third world, McAuley is a modernman or all seasons. The combination o passion andreason, poetry and politics, aith and sin, conservativeinstincts with total immersion in the contemporary

world should keep his lie instructive and interesting tonew readers, especially those who are, as Robert Stovesays o McAuley in his muscular introduction, neverquite comortable . . . inside (their) own skin.

Reading biography is, o course, one o the principalways in which the living pay tribute to the great departed.It can also help successive generations avoid making atleast some o their predecessors mistakes. It is a soundconservative instinct with a good practical outcome. Aliving persons lie is largely what he makes o it. It is hispossession. A historical gures lie belongs to the world.In this way, the glorious dead can sometimes be moreeective inspirations and role models than the people

who might orget to return our phone calls. In this sense,the communion o saints can be no less necessary thanthe company o the living.

McAuley must have done much right because the

academic let is still trying to exorcise his ghost, mostnotably in a book called The Devil and James McAuley.The reissue o the Coleman essay is an overdue antidote.Coleman has enough on each aspect o his story to whet

the appetite or a ull biography. He has a good ear orthe poetry which is at the heart o McAuleys lie andstruggle and, no less important, a clear sense o what thepoet really meant.

From the McAuley tapestry, permit me to pick onethread o particular relevance to the current debate aboutreligion and politics.

Doe Evatts 1954 denunciation o the industrialgroups did not just lead to a ght inside the Labor Partybut also to a ght inside the Catholic Church. Essentially,it pitted those (like McAuley) who believed that theChurch should back activists inside the party against

those (like Archbishop James Carroll) who thought thatthe Church should back the Labor Party itsel. Eventuallythe Vatican decided that Church organisations could notbe involved in politics and that political organisationscould not be endorsed by the Church. In Rome, theChurch resolved the matter by reiterating the ullseparation o church and state. In Sydney, the Churchhierarchy continued to regard itsel as the religious wingo the ALP, leading McAuley (in his epic poem CaptainQuiros) to describe a cardinal whose right hand blessedthe victims o his let.

McAuley and his allies switly discovered that theircrime was not to bring religion into politics but to allyreligion with the wrong side. The groupers had plentyo reasons to oppose communist infuence in the unionmovement, reasons which had nothing to do withreligion. Their mistake, in seeking the bishops blessing,

was to give people the impression that their motivationwas primarily religious. For their part, the grouperscritics ailed to appreciate the dierence between religiousarguments and arguments by people who happened totake religion seriously. They ailed to notice not onlythat the groupers arguments had nothing to do with

religion but also that the groupers religion explicitlyprecluded them rom claiming religious validation ortheir position.

At least since the great social encyclicals startingwith Rerum Novarum in 1891, it has been an axiom othe Church to keep religious arguments out o politicaldebate. Catholics in politics were encouraged to promoteCatholic social teaching not because it was taught by theChurch but because it conormed to the best humanreason; not because it was religious but because it wasright. A dictum attributed to Cardinal Newman is thati truth and Catholicism appear to be in confict, its

not really Catholic, its not really true or theres no realconfict.


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Deep down, I suspect that the nervousness towardsreligion-in-politics is about the concept o truth as much asreligion. People could respectully reject, or instance, theCatholic position on human cloning but tend to react

with urious indignation when what they regard as a merereligious construct is presented as a universal truth; whenthe ethical objection to human cloning, or instance, ispresented as a truth binding on all, not just on Catholics.

The modern world is not comortable with notions otruth that are not attended by sets o inverted commas. Itis especially uncomortable with any truth that a venerableinstitution (rather than sovereign individuals) might havediscerned over centuries o observing human olly andrening human values. The critics o religion-in-politicshave largely ailed to notice that in making universal claimsor its moral teaching the Church has explicitly abandoned

any reliance on religious revelation. Like QuadrantunderMcAuleys editorship, the Churchs social teaching isdesigned to command respect even rom the dubious. Itis the argument that counts, not the act that the Churchis putting it.

The act that 63 per cent o Australians (accordingto a very detailed Swinburne University study)are uncomortable, and 30 per cent prooundlyuncomortable, with scientic research using clonedembryos suggests that the Church does not just make thesepositions up.

Something the anti-groupers ailed to notice in

MeAuleys time (and has equally escaped contemporaryworriers about religion-in-politics) is the centrality oreligious inspiration to our most cherished secular values.The idea that each individual has inherent rights andintrinsic dignity, along with the injunction to treat others asyou would have them treat you, are at the heart o modern

western society. Both propositions are central to Christiansocial teaching although they can also be discerned romhuman reason alone.

In Chapter three, Coleman well summarises the lighttouch o Christianity on politics:

. . . There is no particular Christian orm ogovernment but a requirement that, whatever ormit takes, it respects the moral law and the rights othe person; no peculiarly Christian commerce butan insistence on honesty and justice; no Christianbiology but a requirement that the soul and the unityo the human race are not denied. Within such limits.. . the institutions o society are let ree to developaccording to their own principles and traditions. Notto understand this and the reedoms involved is not to

understand Christianity and the West.

Its no accident that the chie eatures o the modernpolity: reedom under the law, welare systems or people

struggling to cope, impartial public administration, and

so on all developed rst and most ully in societies understrong Christian infuence. The Wests modem versiono human rights is almost inconceivable without theinsights o Erasmus, Thomas More and the other Catholic

humanists.The Enlightenment was, in part, a reaction against

religious dogmatism but many o its leading thinkers werepersonally devout. Christianity eventually accommodatedits lessons and also helped to temper its excesses. Itcan hardly be a coincidence that the values o theEnlightenment took root in Christian countries. Ater all,it was not Rousseau but Jesus who rst proclaimed loveyour neighbour as you love yoursel. Indeed, this secondcommandment fowed rom the rst because everyone wasequally Gods creature.

As Hobbes recognised, in a state o nature there are

only two rules: might is right and look ater your own.Those concerned about religion-in-politics should alsopose the alternative question: what might a polity withoutany Christian inspiration actually look like? This is not tosay that explicitly Christian values should dominate publiclie let alone that the best politicians are sel-consciouslyChristian. Political debate should turn on human valuesnot religious teaching. Its just that, in this sense at least,the keep-religion-out-o-politics brigade and the Churchare in urious agreement.

The modern challenge is not a sureit o religionin politics but whether love thy neighbour political

pluralism can survive without the religious values thatspawned it. Religion doesnt make people perect but itusually improves them. Rather than worry obsessivelyabout the religious right commentators might moreoten pause to consider whether business ethics, amilylie, or personal motivation is likely to be improved in asociety with less Christian consciousness. They shouldponder the loss o Kevin Rudd and Tim Costello, as wellas that o Brian Harradine and George Pell, beore seekingto exclude religious believers rom our public space.

It was McAuley s ate to be the advocate o traditionalvalues throughout the time Francis Fukuyama has dubbedthe great disruption. Perhaps the social consequences othe permissive society might soon prompt the conclusionthat theres something to be said or traditional values aterall. As McAuley put it in a poem thought to have beeninspired by the experiences o his riend, BA Santamaria:

Nor is ailure our disgrace:

By ways we cannot know

He keeps the merit in his hand,

And suddenly as no one planned,

Behold the kingdom grow!


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Peter ColemanOne o the rst things that struck you about Jim McAuley

was his sense o un. The world remembers him as poet,critic and editor. He was indeed a serious poet -- tragic,

sentimentalisch. But he was a very unny man too. Onlya great humorist could have written Ern Malleys poems.How can you help laughing as you read Erns preposterousnonsense?

Princess, you lived in Princess St.,

Where the urchins pick their nose in the sun

With the let hand.

Another o Jims sallies that deserves to be better celebratedwas his project o setting up Poets Anonymous, modelledon Alcoholics Anonymous. It would help the clapped-out poet who has nothing to say but who just cant beatthe demon verse. Every day he reaches or the pencil,

no matter what pain his addiction inficts on amily orriends. But at a meeting o Poets Anonymous, he will hearellow suerers, who have conquered the habit, stand upand declare rankly: I am a poet. One small lyric is toomuch or me, and one endless epic is not enough. I usedto write sonnets, two, three or even our a day. Then odes,then epics. Then I ound Poets Anonymous.... Jim said he

was also having talks with Treasurer Bill McMahon aboutgiving grants to poets who undertake not to write a wordor the period o the grant. That might help them give upthe addiction.

Still, it is Jim McAuley the poet I want to talk abouttoday. When I began writingThe Heart of James McAuley,

Jim had only recently diedin October 1976. His legendwas resh in memory and he was widely and deeplyhonoured. My contribution to the obsequies then was tobring out a memorial issue oQuadrant.

Looking back on it nowQuadrants March 1977editionit conrms the general goodwill towards Jim atthat time. It begins with a tribute by his riend, the poet

A.D.Hope:

Standing on this late promontory o time,

I match our spirits, the laggard and the swif:

Though we shared much beside the git o rhyme,

Yours was the surer git.

It ends with a note by Douglas Stewart, another poet andliterary editor, on the Requiem Mass held or McAuley atSt Johns College at the University o Sydney. How wellthe Catholic Church can do these things! Stewart wrote.

No Catholic himsel, and perhaps more humanist thanChristian, he was, he reminded his readers, something o aconnoisseur o uneralshe had attended the services orHugh McCrae, Mary Gilmore, Kenneth Slessor, NormanLindsay and many others. McAuleys was, he said, themost beautiul service, the most perectly in keeping o

them all. This was because McAuleys poemsread by

Ron Haddrick and Peter Steeleand his hymns pervadedthe whole event.

Between these tributesHopes and Stewartswere the homages o other poets (Vivian Smith, Peter

Skrzynecki, Les Murray); old New Guinea hands (HarryJackman); political collaborators (Richard Krygier, BobSantamaria); and a number o riends and critics (DonaldHorne, Peter Hastings).

There are too many to list them all, so let me mentiona couple. The scholar Grahame Johnston describedhis desolation at what he and our country had lost byMcAuleys death. Behind the poetry, Johnston elt thepressure o all that Europe and Western civilisation meantand still means. The poet Gwen Harwood, in a dierentmode, wrote o the simple, generous and compassionateman that I came to love, the riend who knew it was better

to be vulnerable, and wounded, than to hold onesel alooin critical reserve. The composer Richard Connolly wrote:Ah, James McAuley. Strange, great, loving, knowing,lonely man. I shall have other riends, but none willremotely resemble you. I think I shall not know antherman remotely like you. Vale. Pax tecum.

All that was barely thirty years ago. Butand this isthe pointwhat an extraordinary transormation a NewDunciad has wreaked on McAuleys reputation in thoseew years!

Today it is the received view among most OzLitscholars that he is a poor poet, o reactionary politics, and

o bad character: no calumny is too gross but someonewill pass it on. He is, they tell us, deservedly orgottenwhile at the same time they produce a library o books andarticles that keep his memory vibrantly alive.

Why these bitter attacks? Where do they come rom?One squad o critics is the modernists and postmodernistsstill seeking revenge or the enormous success o the ErnMalley hoaxplayed on them by Jim McAuley andHarold Stewart.

Having licked their wounds since 1944, they nowpretend that Erns orced rhetoric, absurd bathos and banalideas are not only advanced high art but McAuleys (andHarold Stewarts ) best work. They republish or anthologiseit and sponsor magazines devoted to its genius.

The hoax can be read at several levels. At one level isthe great joke at the heart o the aair. Only the humourlesscan ail to laugh at Erns demented Faustian. At a deeperlevel there is the hoaxers sel-purging. The real target othe hoax is McAuley himsel and the sort o poetry heused to write at a younger man. Michael Heywards TheErn Malley Aair overlooks this essential point and evendisposes o McAuleys key to the hoax, his The End of

Modernity, in one dismissive sentence.

At another level stilland this is a lasting


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achievementErns story, as told in the poems and inthe letters o his sister Ethel, is one o the great creationso Australian ction: the tragic-comic tale o the dying,despairing bohemian poet nursed by his loving sister

as he coughs out his last masterwork, sixteen spasms ogibberish. The modernists miss all these readings.

A second cohort o campaigners against McAuley hasbeen the liberal humanists, the reethinkers o AustralianOrthodoxy. Early in the 1950s McAuley abandoned theanarchist secularism o his youth and returned to Christ.

Worse still, he even wrote poems about it. But as LesMurray warned us all, the non-god o Australian atheismis a jealous absence, and the unbelievers will smite theChristian aithul, hip and thigh.

They may tolerate Buddhism or Islam or anysuperstition rom astrology to scientology to the Da Vinci

code... but not the aith o our athers. Michael Ackland,or example, in his Damaged Men, writes with sympathyo Harold Stewarts unworldly Buddhism but shows nosympathy or McAuleys unworldly Christianity.

When McAuley, or example, published his Letterto John Dryden with its appeal, deep in the hearts abyss,to the ground-plan o the Christian mystery, the godless

were urious. Some remained unorgiving. Jack Lindsay,Amy Witting and A.D.Hope ridiculed him in song andballad. His old collaborator, Harold Stewart, the otherhal o Ern Malley, called him a Popish pomposity.Max Harris alerted Quadrantreaders to the tell-tale detail

that McAuley was rumoured to contribute to a Jesuitjournal. These poets orm a sort o unity ticket withthose smorgasbord Christians, the liberals who pick andchoose among doctrines as their ancy suggests. McAuleyhad satirised them in his 1963 poem Liberal or Innocentby Denition:

Unbiassed between good and evil...They can never be convicted,

They have no record o convictions.

A third and vocierous cohort o the New Dunciad ispolitical. McAuley was one o the ew Australian poets,

perhaps the only one, whose lies quest comprehended notonly poetry and religion but also politics and social lie. Hewas or over teen years deeply involved in the crisis inNew Guinea and wrote some o the most enduring essaysin the literature o decolonisation. When he then movedto academia, he wrote wisely and urgently on the crisis inour schools and universities.

His polemics provoked controversy. But the mosturious critics o all have been the Let, enraged thatMcAuleys anti-Communism turned out to be right allalong. He was one o the very ew Australian writers whoengaged with the great theme o his age -- the totalitarian

temptation that gave the world Auschwitz and the Gulag.At every stage o his lie rom youthul anarchist to ALP

pamphleteer to DLP cold warrior to sel-styled riend othe Liberal party, he let behind poetry and polemic opermanent value.

In his last public statement, a sort o dying declaration,

he was able to say:I am now ortunate enough to be able to say that neverin my lie have Ibeen an advocate or an apologist ormovements or regimes that trample systematically onliberal principles and human rights and are essentiallybased on murder and lies. I have never deended themisdeeds o any terrorist organization or dictatorialregime o any complexion. I have never been a retailero propaganda made in Moscow or Peking or Hanoior any other centre devoted to the subversion o reecountries like Australia. I have never blurred thedistinction between ree and unree systems or exaltedan unree system above ours. I have never denied that

oensive action by a totalitarian power is aggression; Ihave never stigmatized deensive action by the victims

as provocation.

For some letistsCassandra Pybus in The Devil andJames McAuleyis a recent casethis merely demonstrateswhat a neurotic Cold Warrior he was. He must have been,she thought, a repressed homosexual. Such critics set thetone.

There have been exceptions. One is Dame LeonieKramers James McAuleyher selection o his poetry andessays and her perceptive commentary on them. Another isLyn McCreddens James McAuley Her style is, or my taste,too burdened with the arcane argot o poststructuralismbut she responds to the beauty o McAuleys poetry andcommunicates this to readers.

In writingThe Heart of James McAuley, I set out todo what Graham Johnston had called or in the 1977memorial issue o Quadrant, that is, to do justice to allaspects o Jims work - his poetry, his politics, his religion:the whole man. I am grateul that Anthony Cappellodecided to republish it ater some 26 years. My hope is thatit will do a little to combat the dunces who are determinedto devalue or nulliy the work o one o Australias greatest

poets, perhaps its greatest.But I do not want to close on too combative a note. It istime or reconciliation. Time or Jims partisans to recognizethat he was sometimes too dogmatic, even abrasive. Timeor Jims critics to acknowledge his greatness. So let me end

with a story rom an eyewitness (me) o the rst meetingo those old combatants, Jim and Max Harris, many yearsater the Ern Malley hoax but while the passions, rage, andhatred it had aroused still reverberated. (Remember SidNolans venomous painting o Jim.)

The meeting was in the old Quadrantoce. Each othem had been putting out eelers to the other. Jim plainly

had respect or Max as a critic. What would be the point ohoaxing a ool? Still, the tension was tangible as we waited.


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Institute o Public AfairsLevel 2

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Finally Max strolled in, large as lie in bow-tie and cane,looking like Bunyip Bluegum in The Magic Pudding. Jimlooked a bit like Rumpus Bumpus the Poet.

Max stood in the middle o the oce, silent. Work

stopped. Jim looked up. Each caught the others eye. Jimnodded Hullo Max. Max nodded Hullo Jim... andthey settled down to discuss the article Jim had askedMax to write or Quadranton the achievement o Maxsmagazine Angry Penguins. Each recognized the othersintegrity. Theres a lesson there or all o us.

IPA 'Heart of James McAuley' Book Launch

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