ROBERT MANNE A Political Memoir. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

Robert Manne’s memoir charts the life of a public intellectual and independent thinker unafraid of a fight.

A Political Memoir is an important work that says a lot about Australia and the sort of country we are. As well as some personal history, Robert Manne provides an account of intellectual battles over the last half century in which he has been a major, if not polarising, figure. His insider’s account of what lay behind many of these clashes makes for fascinating reading.

The dominant theme of A Political Memoir is Manne’s intellectual toughness, his unwillingness to resile from a fight. Manne was born in Melbourne in October 1947, his parents Jewish refugees who had managed to arrive in Australia prior to World War II. Both sets of grandparents, and extended family, perished in the Holocaust. His father died in 1958, when Manne was ten, and he, his older sister and his mother moved to Camberwell.

His mother had multiple sclerosis, and young Robert took on the responsibility of caring for her; he found himself making important decisions before he was a teenager. Camberwell Council, becoming aware of his mother’s situation with two school-age children, provided a doctor to look after her medical needs at no cost. Such action predisposed him to support the welfare state. His mother died at the end of his schooling, when he was 18.

While caring for his mother he developed a broader interest in the world of ideas, listened to parliamentary debates and travelled by tram to Speakers Corner on the Yarra River to hear political speeches. Despite having the responsibility for his mother’s care, he was one of the top matriculation students in the state in 1965. He knocked back a generous scholarship offer from Monash University because he didn’t want to travel across town to its campus in faraway Clayton. He was attracted to Melbourne University’s architecture; it looked like how a university should look. The dean of the Faculty of Law, Sir Zelman Cowen, tried to talk him into doing a combined arts-law degree. Manne said no; he wanted to study history, and later won a Shell Scholarship to study at Oxford. He has always known his own mind.

The first part of A Political Memoir provides a chilling account of the circumstances surrounding the death of his grandparents, then the successful refugee experience of his parents in the late 1940s and 1950s, his childhood, his time at Melbourne University in the 1960s when universities experienced a ‘golden age’, his time in Oxford and return to Australia.

Manne found his way to the Department of Politics in La Trobe University. He contrasts two tracks that academics can follow in their careers: the academic track is where one writes learned articles in specialist journals. The second is as a public academic – or what he calls a public intellectual – where you publish for a broader audience in more widely read outlets such as magazines and newspapers.

Manne says he was never able to forget a passage from Kingsley Amis’s novel lampooning university life, Lucky Jim, describing a ‘learned article’ by the antihero:

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallised the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw on non-problems.

Manne decided that he did not want to devote his

intellectual energies to Lucky Jim-style refereed articles in academic journals that only a handful of fellow scholars read.

On a number of occasions Manne refers to George Orwell’s 1945 essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’. Manne equates Orwell’s notion of ‘nationalism’ to ‘tribalism’. Orwell’s essay is an exposition on those who act as spokespersons – intellectuals – for ‘nations’ or ‘tribes’ that they purport to represent, warning that

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakeably being in the right.

A Political Memoir is a series of case studies of the intellectual struggles Manne has had with various tribes of Orwellian intellectuals over the years. He describes one of his battles with News Limited apparatchiks as like being subject to an assault by a ‘well-trained team of attack dogs’. In reflecting on the memory of the murder of his grandparents, and the Holocaust more broadly, he developed an abhorrence of all forms of fundamentalism and a lifelong support for human rights.

What I valued always, were those thinkers who were not a part of any tribe and who were willing to think for themselves.

In the mid-1970s he wrote about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and found himself in a battle with leftists who, during the Cold War, would not truck with any criticism of communist regimes. In time he was appointed editor of the right-wing publication Quadrant. There he adopted a broader, more secular approach, which rankled the old Cold War warriors. The ‘old guard’ sharpened their swords and ultimately forced his resignation.

Manne has commented on virtually every major political issue in Australia over the last five decades. One may not agree with him on everything, but his saving grace is that his position is always well thought out with supporting evidence based on extensive research. In recent years he has been an advocate of Indigenous rights, a critic of Australia’s harsh treatment of refugees, and a commentator on the problems of climate change. With respect to his position on the situation of Indigenous Australians and the treatment of refugees, it might be useful to recall Orwell’s observation that: ‘There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when “our” side commits it.’

This political memoir provides a fascinating insider’s account of major political and cultural issues that have dominated Australia over the last fifty years, including information on the operation of the Right from the mid-1970s to Manne’s departure from Quadrant in the latter part of the 1990s.

Robert Manne was always up for the fight. He has been a constant thorn in the side of those Orwellian intellectuals that pervade Australia; those who are hell bent on telling us what to do and how to think. He refused to be shouted down, and has been an advocate for a kinder, more generous Australia – the society that welcomed his refugee parents and so many more after World War II.

A Political Memoir makes a unique contribution to Australia’s intellectual history and sense of itself.

Robert Manne A Political Memoir: Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the culture wars La Trobe University Press 2025 PB 498pp $45.

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things.

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Tags: academic life, Australian politics, Australian writers, culture wars, George Orwell, memoir, public intellectuals, Robert | Manne