Cambridge University Press

Lionel Murphy was a prominent and colourful figure in the ALP renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, and a significant legal intellectual. The extraordinary saga of his final years, when he was hounded by political foes and the press, created a farrago of misunderstanding and innuendo that clouded his reputation. Jenny Hocking has set out to recover Murphy’s public life and to correct the record. Curiously, her emphasis on philosophy and consistency works against the interest of this story: the larrikin edge and the complexity of the man are smoothed away.

There is a Melbourne school in the study of politics, a group of scholars whose work in biography, and in public opinion and public administration studies has been strongly influenced by psychoanalysis, and stresses the importance of unconscious motivation. The Melbourne school is a loose grouping; some of its members would deny that it has a leader, but it owes its existence, and much of its success, to Professor A.F. Davies of Melbourne University’s Political Science Department.