Mark Finnane

This is a highly intelligent collection of essays by some of the nation’s finest minds about the ebb and flow of intellectual endeavour in the humanities since the institution of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1969. In the thirty-one essays – built around keynotes, panels, and responses – there are too many gems among them for me to be willing to pick out individual contributions for particular attention. If you care for the life of the mind and for our culture, download the e-book and peruse it, according to your interests. These are mainly stories of success, in transforming disciplines and the like. Less flatteringly, they are also a reminder that the humanities were more central in Australian universities back in 1969 than now.

‘I am really only an oppositionist, distrustful of power wherever I see it,’ wrote Jack Barry (1903–69) in 1951; and perhaps his oppositional instincts held him back from the heights of power to which he sometimes aspired. Instead, this biography argues, his impact was that of ‘a public intellectual before the term was invented’.

Both a scholarly resource and a good read, Castieau’s diaries, effectively edited, enliven and enrich our sense of colonial Melbourne. Castieau’s modest standing adds to the diaries’ significance as they record the dailiness of life, combining the public and the private: work, life around town and ‘the domestic minutiae of everyday life captured in his relentless record’. What makes Castieau exceptional are the span and detail of the diaries: ‘His workaday life does not obscure the more important issues of colonial life – getting on, enjoying oneself, establishing a reputation, being part of the world.’