Graham Little

Graham Little (1939-2000) was a leading Australian political scientist who made a lasting contribution to our understanding of political psychology as well as psychosocial life inside the university. He published a number of scholarly works, such as The University Experience (1970), Political Ensembles (1985), and The Public Emotions (1999), and an autobiography, Letter to My Daughter (1995). Little perhaps remains best known for the series of interviews he conducted for SBS, later published as Speaking for Myself (1989).

National Library Australian Voices Essay | 'Counting Myself' by Graham Little

June 1994, no. 161 • 01 June 1994

There is one kind of writing that, unfailingly, moments after I start it, stiffens my wrist till it’s too painful to go on. It must be genetic because my daughter has the same condition. Diary-writing, filling up a Daybook or whatever. Consequently, I keep no journal or notebook of any kind. I did once, in a red exercise book, for a month, on the Strathnaver from Tilbury in 1954. I’ve read it. ... (read more)

Graham Little reviews 'Sailing to Australia: Shipboard diaries by nineteenth-century British emigrants' by Andrew Hassam

May 1995, no. 170 • 01 May 1995

‘There was nothing in particular to write about either yesterday or the day before, as, indeed, there is not today.’ Fifteen-year-old Arthur Clarke speaks, in 1868, for many of us whose diaries didn’t live up to our hopes of them. Why do we write them? Andrew Hassam’s researches into the diaries of nineteenth-century emigrants to Australia yield a lot of small answers and one big one. To ... (read more)

Graham Little reviews 'Partners' edited by Ross Fitzgerald and Anne Henderson

July 1999, no. 212 • 01 June 1999

In Partners, the unstated question is how relationships can last if they are equal – that is if they are free as well as binding. There’s a suggestion that it was easier in the old hetero-patriarchal marriages where our parents accepted inequality and could turn to authority, within and outside the relationship, to see that it lasted. Not that most of the contributors address the question dire ... (read more)