Morag Fraser

Martin Krygier’s deft, discursive prose could persuade anyone except an ironclad ideologue that it is exhilarating as well as healthy to examine one’s prejudices and complacencies. Krygier is also a writer possessed of a frank openness that gives credence to the idea that you can judge a book by its cover. I suspect he’d also enjoy the piquancy of maxim busting. The cover of Civil Passions is a particularly beautiful one: a detail of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s 1338–40 fresco, the Allegory of Good Government. Its Giottoesque precision and its colour – those luminous Sienese pinks and reds – would be reason enough to use it. But there is a deeper fitness to the choice, and it has to do with what Krygier describes as his destined mode of being: one of hybridity.

Years before I had set foot in Italy, Masaccio’s frescoes, even in flat reproduction, opened a bright chink into a time and place not my own. There were the indelible faces, the bustle, colour, the human jousting – life so vivid, foreign and shockingly familiar. Vintage is the literary harvest of ten years of a writers’ festival in Mildura. If, like me, you have never been, this is your Masaccio ticket of entry into a decade of conversations, poems, stories, essays, recipes, letters, music and song. Vintage could be a ragbag, but it isn’t. It could be a self-congratulatory riff, but it isn’t, because the writing is of such quality and because the presiding figure of Stefano de Pieri gives the volume coherence and verve.

Should the recent turbulent history of one university in one state of Australia matter to us? Some of the critics of Cain and Hewitt’s Off Course think not. Australian higher education has ‘moved on’, they claim. There is no question that the right ‘On Course’ for one-time public entities – from gas companies to universities – is to graduate from public ownership and statutory obligation to marketplace and deregulated freedom. Cain and Hewitt have simply missed the boat.

But have they? In the helter-skelter of change since the Dawkins ‘reforms’ of the late 1980s (which saw the abolition of the binary divide between universities and colleges, and a vast increase in the numbers of students undertaking tertiary education), there has been much movement at the top but not an equivalent acceleration of public enlightenment. There is a residual, stubborn, Robert Menzies-inspired public conception of what a university means and what nation-building role it should play in a democracy.

Peter Craven calls up an echo of W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ at the conclusion of his introduction to Germaine Greer’s highly charged and instantly controversial essay Whitefella Jump Up. ‘It is an essay about sitting down and thinking where all the politics start,’ he writes.

Nugget Coombs never accepted a knighthood. The reason, he told his one-time English teacher, the essayist and academic Sir Walter Murdoch, was that it would be ‘out of character’ for him to do so.

Nugget Coombs never accepted a knighthood. The reason, he told his one-time English teacher, the essayist and academic Sir Walter Murdoch, was that it would be ‘out of character’ for him to do so.

There is no shortage of calculated modesty in Australian public life. We cultivate it. Even the most self-absorbed of our sporting heroes can manage a spot of winning self-deprecation. But in Nugget Coombs – public thinker, public servant, economist, social reformer, Governor of the Reserve Bank, Aboriginal advocate, cultural initiator and great Australian – modesty was the genuine article. He was a man with enough distilled wisdom to know himself and enough shrewdness to know what fitted. And he was right: ‘Sir Herbert’, or, worse, ‘Sir Bertie’ would have been risible.

Much current debate on crucial issues facing Australia – the economy, race relations, foreign affairs, for example – is conducted in the opinion pages of metropolitan daily newspapers. And ‘opinion’ pages they now are – with a vengeance. It is a symptom of the times that opinion-page editors have less and less recourse to disinterested authorities ...