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Peter Coleman : Memoirs of a Slow Learner before purchasing it in order to gage whether or not it would be worth my time, and all praised Memoirs of a Slow Learner:

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Memoirs of a Slow Learner - Australian Politics in the Dark AgesBy Daisy Mae/Jan SmithMemoirs of a Slow Learner - Five starsReviewed by Daisy MaeThis book is more than a case of dog walking on its hinder legs - the wonder being not that it is done well, (and it is, with grace and style) but that it is done at all. A memoir of political coming of age, perhaps even a life of the mind, by an Australian who isn't any of the 50 shades of pink.Disclosure - like Peter Coleman, I too was not born in Sydney. Unlike him, I learnt immediately, indeed as a Queenslander I'd learnt at my father's knee that both sides of politics were equally bad and nowhere more so than Down South. He wasn't far wrong. But he had nothing against journalism, and by the time I was in Sydney, on the fringes of the Fourth Estate, (see below) it was obvious Gilbert and Sullivan had got it completely wrong about every child being born either Liberal or Conservative. Any boy born east of the Great Dividing Range and capable of stringing two sentences together had started out as a member of the Eureka Youth League, born 1942 (see below).In the mid-1950s, Australian politics was pretty much a boy thing. There were a few very old, or recently deceased, political women like Dame Enid Lyons or Dame Mary Gilmore, who'd even had children (imagine!) and journalism, outside women's magazines, was little better, with the ABC not hiring married women and The Sydney Morning Herald, until 1968, only employing females on the social pages. Even those who churned out novels at home, or freelanced, were left-wing.So after 1966, when Donald (The Lucky Country) Horne famously told Australia it was run by second-rate people, I spent the next fifty years thinking he was left-wing too, when it seems he wasn't. Or just a whiter shade of pink, having once attacked Meeting Soviet Man, for its `pretension, confusion, vulgarity and downright naivete'.Its author, Professor Manning Clarke, was an even bigger surprise. Coleman tells how he called one night to find him watching The Third Man, speechless with admiration at Harry Lime/Orson Welles's cuckoo clock scene, and giving every impression of a man who might jump the good ship secular humanism or convert to Catholicism, like poet James McAuley.Coleman likens politics to a viral infection, not at all the same as adopting a political philosophy . But even so, how did he wind up a Liberal? Was George Bernard Shaw right, conservatism was just a natural part of ageing? No way.A survivor of family break-up by age two, Coleman was 11 when he was packed off to live with his father, where Oedipal rebellion wasn't an option because his father rarely voiced an opinion about anything, even when drunk. But in an era when nice people didn't discuss religion or politics at dinner, were silent fathers all that unusual, and were they that much of a problem, when there was always Big Daddy, ie God? Coleman senior did, though, occasionally boast that his father would have gone to help William Lane and Mary Gilmore found a socialist paradise in Patagonia, if his wife hadn't put her foot down.`It may even have been true' , Coleman writes, subtly underlining what he's made clear in the previous chapter, that his adored maternal grandfather, the Argus- reading man of property in Melbourne, the lapsed Catholic with the harp in the drawing room, would have done no such thing, Not surprisingly, he hadn't volunteered for the Boer War either.So as WW2 approached, it was his father's boozy mates in advertising and journalism who filled Coleman in on who were the good guys and who were the bad. Half his luck! You think any Australian man wasted time explaining international politics to pretty young blondes? Though it wasn't too hard to figure that Uncle Joe actually wasn't a cuddly old chap, the Soviet Union was not a worker's paradise, and any organisation to do with peace, culture, youth or women was almost certainly communist.The larrikin sense of humour was still alive, and a teacher at North Sydney Boys High encouraged his class to write their own modernist poetry, coming up with `styptic kookaburra' and `broken-winded moon'. So Coleman soon realised the tragically-unrecognised poetic genius, the late Ern Malley, was actually his hero James McAuley, and , taking the piss out of Max Harris, editor of the avant garde literary magazine, Angry Penguins.Coleman's luck continued at the where the Philosophy department was still run by Professor John Anderson who, while Left, was trenchantly opposed to Lenin, the welfare state, and what was then called the New Class, the managerial professionals and central planners of social policy who proliferated after WW2, (Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascists, whom he says had been lurking in the wings since 1914, when they were called Progressivists). Again, I was a grandmother, and UoS post-graduate, before I realised Professor Anderson hadn't just attacked wuzzy Anglican bishops, supported free love and inspired the Sydney Push. Coleman also mentions Anderson saying FDR had `delivered Central Europe to communist gangsters,' whereas the way I heard it was there was no bad American presidents until LBJ (`all the way with') in 1966.Admittedly Central Europeans weren't always much better about wie es eigentlich gewesen, the first I heard the Poles won a war against the Russians in 1920 was last week, thanks to Lonely Planet. But for a boy like Coleman, age 20 in 1948, it sounds like very heaven, endless deep and meaningful discussions over strudel and sauerkraut with Eugene Kamenka, Professor Heinz Arndt (father of the more famous sexologist Tina), George Munster (later the editor of the liberal Nation), Richard Krygier (publisher of Quadrant), and various Dunera Boys - the 2000 German-Jewish refugees who'd arrived on a ship of that name, ex- UK, in 1940, only to be considered Nazis and promptly interned at Hay.They probably even taught him to play chess.As Vincent Buckley, editor of the liberal Catholic Prospect, told Coleman, the chief evils of Australian life included humbug, provincialism, self-righteousness and stereotypical thinking, and at The Observer, Coleman not only championed homosexual law reform, but more crucially, the abolition of censorship. Not just Lolita, Ulysses, and Lady Chatterley's Lover were banned, but most mortifyingly of all, The Catcher in the Rye. Any woman who ever sewed them into the lining of her fur coat to get past Customs will definitely remember Coleman fondly for his Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition. Though as the Sixties wore on he developed misgivings.The Observer died in 1961 when Australian Consolidated Press (the Packers) acquired The Bulletin, then on its last legs, and appointed Donald Horne to rebirth it as modern, as opposed to paleo, radical conservative magazine. Five seconds later they'd fired him, as was their wont, and before long Coleman was editor, resigning in 1968 to stand for the seat of Fuller. `You quickly learn how little interest parliament has in your philosophic ideas, heartfelt speeches and insights. One day he'd be accused of spreading Communist ideas in schools, the next day it was the media fearing he'd reintroduce the cane.By 1975 Coleman was Chief Secretary, responsible for police, prisons, pornography, boxing and the Government Printer, with big plans for a royal commission into prisons. By 1977, he was Leader of the Opposition - Clyde Packer, phoning from California, recommended he buy a greyhound immediately (??) - but within a year the Liberals were thunderously defeated. After much harrumphing about the end of civilisation, they'd agreed to okay Kerry Packer's night cricket telecasts, provided he gave them a better press. As if! Talk about slow learners.Coleman spent a few months at South Carolina university, as a visiting professor of international affairs, followed by two years as Administrator of Norfolk Island until James McAuley invited him to edit the literary magazine Quadrant, after which he settled down to writing The Liberal Conspiracy: the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (1989).There was no struggle for the mind of post-war Australia, everyone knew Quadrant, via the Congress of Cultural Freedom, was funded by the CIA. But Coleman's right about politics being a virus which can recur at any time, like Ross River fever, and from 1981 to 1986 he was again stricken, becoming the Federal Member for Wentworth. And while it's nice to know that in 2008 the University of Sydney made him Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) for services to Australian intellectual life, one can only wonder whether they did it for the right reasons.As Coleman once said to a concerned Labor Party friend, what's the point of being in Parliament if you can't say what you think about important issues? He might just as well have said `of going to university' , or `of being in journalism', where he still does, in The Spectator, though I don't always agree with himLet's keep it that way.

Part autobiography, part cultural history, some will read Memoirs of a Slow Learner as a comic anatomy of the corpse of Australian small-l liberalism. Others will see in it a journalistic record of the times. Yet others a moving personal statement. It is a unique departure in Australian autobiography. Commenting on this new edition, Coleman writes: 'Looking back across twenty years I see more clearly than I did at the time that the real origin of Memoirs of a Slow Learner was my immersion in the poetry of James McAuley (my co-editor at Quadrant.) I had already written one response to his work and genius, The Heart of James McAuley (Connor Court). His autobiographical poems moved me deeply, especially his 'Letter to John Dryden'. It distantly echoed a similar family background to mine (freethinking father, Protestant mother), a similar education in a secular state grammar school and Sydney University, infatuation with Marxism, mysticism and Christianity. But whereas McAuley found a resolution of his quest in the Catholic Church, I persevered with secular liberalism, in the belief that imagination and feeling could still moisten its parched landscape. Several writers published rejoinders to McAuley's poem - Jack Lindsay, Amy Witting, A.D.Hope. Memoirs of a Slow Learner was mine. It could be called 'A Letter to James McAuley'. In the years since I have come to accept many of McAuley's criticisms of my liberal secularism - many but not all. I am now more sceptical of the freethinkers who influenced me in my youth such as the philosopher John Anderson and far less sceptical of church leaders who deplored their influence. The conversation continues.'

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