Robert Manne has told us more than once how deeply the end of the Cold War had shaken him. He was exhilarated by a sense of release from the unavoidable burdens of anti-communism. But he was also unnerved by the intimation that soon old friends would become his enemies and old enemies friends. It became a time for “intense self-scrutiny “ as he rethought all the “fundamental questions”, one by one.
A new period of “passionate public engagement” also beckoned. The Cold War had led him to turn a blind eye to such compelling issues as racism, feminism, environmentalism and multiculturalism. Now he would respond freshly to all of them.
The greatest of these causes, the one that would come to engage him most emotionally, was the aborigines, their dispossession and its “legacy of unutterable shame”, their “stolen generations” and what he saw as the policy of genocide. It would lead him finally to “break ranks with the right.”
If his repositioning produced some confusion on the right, there was great rejoicing on the left over their new recruit (apart from a few cranks who will not forgive or forget his earlier anti-communism). For let there be no mistake: Manne had brought to his anti-communist polemics—on Petrov, Burchett, the Combe-Ivanov case—a sensitivity to the curse of communism, refined by an horrific family experience of Hitler’s National Socialism, that was beyond the comprehension of most Australian commentators. They are his best work. Look them up in The Shadow of 1917: no Australian journalist comes close. The late Austin Gough compared him, in these pages, to George Orwell. It was these studies and his early books, The Petrov Affair and The New Conservatism in Australia, that had led me to appoint him co-editor of Quadrant with a view to him succeeding me soon after.
Almost all of Manne’s old collaborators shared his relief in saying goodbye to the Cold War and all that. They were less delphic and had less moral swagger than Manne but were just as committed as he to the reconsideration of doctrine and policy.
They trusted and welcomed him in 1990 as the new editor of Quadrant who would open it pages to the necessary debates about the future of liberalism. Quadrant had published most of his major essays. It had indeed created Manne the public intellectual.
But their satisfaction was short-lived as they saw the magazine which owed its survival to their loyalty and sometimes their sacrifice delivered to the left that they had spent their lives combatting. They felt hurt and wondered why he had wanted the job.
Manne began his editorship by banning a widely admired paper on race that had been delivered to the Russellian Society by the philosopher David Stove. He ended it banning a reasoned reflection by the poet/ lawyer Hal Colebatch on the anti-semitism he believed he perceived in Manning Clark’s treatment of such figures as Frank Anstey and P.R.Stephensen. In its almost 50 years, Quadranthas had no more intolerant editor.
In between these little scandals, the man who had declared: “I must admit to having no competence in economics whatsoever” and referred his readers to the free-trade Centre for Independent Studies , now espoused a policy of economic Hansonism and edited a protectionist manifesto, Shutdown. [He later edited a useful symposium on the One Nation Party, Two Nations] When in 1995 the judges of the Miles Franklin Award ridiculously declared The Hand that Signed the Paper to be the best novel of the year, Manne led a posse pursuing Demidenko/Darville with a passion that most Quadrant readers regarded as unbalanced. [No one questioned his judgment of the book’s nihilism or the depth of his feeling about the Holocaust that had shaped his life. Who could not be moved when hearing how, in a lecture on the subject, tears had choked his voice?]
All these disputes culminated in the great debate over the “stolen generations.” Now not only the readers but the patient Quadrant board that quarreled with him. It is a moral issue, he said with a certain sanctimony, on which compromise is not possible. He resigned.
But the sore festers to this day. It became the theme of his recent book, In Denial. The Stolen Generations and the Right, published in the first issue of Peter Craven’s innovative The Australian Quarterly Essay. Rarely in the history of magazines has a former editor so savaged his successor.
Craven’s second issue, now on sale, carries retorts to Manne by three of the several writers he targeted. There is no comment from Quadrant’s editor Padraic McGuinness.
In Denial is in two parts. The first defends Bringing Them Home, the report of the inquiry into the “Stolen Generations” conducted for the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission by Sir Ronald Wilson, formerly of the High Court, and Mick Dodson.. He accepts some criticisms of the report. It exaggerated, for example, the number of children involved. [The estimate of one in three is certainly wrong. One in 10 is closer to the truth. That still means 20,000 to 25,000 separations.] He also agrees that the often heart-breaking memories of some of the “stolen children” were likely to have been “simplified and even distorted by the passage of time.”
But Manne accepts the basic conclusions of the report. These children had not been rescued from degradation to give them some hope in life but had been [with a few exceptions] forcibly and cruelly removed from their families. The underlying policy was not welfare but genocide, either by intention before the War or in its effects after the War. The children were also subjected to physical, sexual and moral abuse in the child institutions.. There should now be a solemn apology and financial compensation.
The media and churches overwhelmingly welcomed the report. It stimulated plays, films, songs, Sorry Books and public demonstrations. It swept the country.
Gradually, however, a range of critics or sceptics emerged—anthropologists, administrators, teachers, journalists. None denied the devastation that white settlement had inflicted on the aborigines or the high priority that must still be given to countering it. But they came to believe that, as the anthropologist Ron Brunton put it, Bringing Them Home is “one of the most intellectually and morally irresponsible documents produced in recent years.”
They could find few outlets for their views in the journals of opinion which almost unanimously supported the report without reservation. Inevitably they looked to Quadrant which was willing to listen to them -- and their critics .
It is to this development that Manne turns in the second part of his book/essay. The unquestioned bete noire of his story is his successor as editor of Quadrant—P.P.McGuinness. He is “the general” in charge of “the campaign”. In an extraordinary spasm of hate-speech, Manne charges McGuinness with turning Quadrant into an organ of “denialism in the David Irving mode”.
In the years since he became the editor, McGuinness published over a dozen critical articles and organised a major seminar on the “stolen generation” and related issues. Their basic theme has been that the “stolen children” were, in the vast majority of cases, rescued children and that to describe the policy of assimilation as genocide is preposterous unless you regard all intermarriage as genocide. (Some do.) More generally McGuinness has encouraged exposure of the “aboriginal industry” and its white “parasites” who, by maintaining the disastrous policies of communal land rights, traditional culture and permanent welfare dependency, are standing in the way of aboriginal self-modernisation.
A number of prominent newspaper columnists (including Frank Devine, Christopher Pearson, Michael Duffy and Piers Akerman.) have followed up Quadrant’s lead.
Manne is quick to bad-mouth if not defame them all. Peter Howson talks “racist nonsense”, Ken Minogue is “supercilious”, Ron Brunton “mean-spirited”, Piers Akerman “vicious”, Christopher Pearson “pompous” , Roger Sandall ‘intellectually shallow and morally shabby”, Douglas Meagher QC “bombastic” and Keith Windschuttle is a “sinister” denialist and “an ersatz New York neo-conservative”.
These writers were once among Manne’s collaborators. Is this what he meant when, as the Berlin Wall fell, he experienced those intimations that soon his old friends would become enemies and his enemies friends? In any case, this is what it has come to.
Some have responded to Manne’s insults. In the current issue of The Australian Quarterly Essay, Duffy icily dismisses Manne’s “parody”. Brunton ridicules his scholarship. The journalist/historian Rod Moran courteously corrects it. Elsewhere the anthropologist, Sandall, sees Manne as suffering from a sort of “mental aberration” that involves “ a downright refusal to see things as they are.”
But these critics have also been joined by some of his quondam allies. The aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has described the whole “stolen children” controversy as fundamentally “destructive.” It is fixated on the past which in any case it oversimplifies.
In an interview in the Courier-Mail, he says it reinforces the debilitating ideology of aborigines as victims. The real culture war is about the future. What is needed are practical policies to change “our place in the Australian economy”, to eliminate the culture of welfare dependency.
Equally significantly, the Boyer Lecturer Inga Clendinnen, deplores the invocation of genocide as “a moral, intellectual and political disaster”. She also warns Manne that his “moralism” and “adversarial politics” are “discouraging both subtlety in analysis and patience and generosity in judgment”.
Manne’s self-image is the Virtuous Outsider. He will shrug off these critics. But the rest of us will continue to seek a surer way to a decent reconciliation -- and a new liberal consensus.
Originally published in The Adelaide Review . 2001
