Selective Indignation

Book Reviews

Pansy:  A Life of Roy Douglas Wright
By Peter McPhee
Melbourne University Press 352 pages, $45

Civil libertarian:  is there a more depressing oxymoron in our language?  The phrase's very sound conjures up some hirsute teacher-unionist locked in a 1970s time warp, snuffling indignantly through his adenoids about Bjelke-Petersen's Queensland being a "police state".  Was it always so?  Did civil libertarians once take seriously their implied commitment to freedoms other than their own?  The career of Roy Douglas Wright (nicknamed "Pansy" for his extreme ruggedness of physique, much as redheads are nicknamed "Bluey" and giants "Tiny") might help answer such questions.  In some respects Wright, though he died only in 1990, seems to have inhabited an age now impossibly far-off.  In other respects he appears bang up-to-date.  In all respects, he clearly deserved the honour of a full-length book devoted to his life.

Born in 1907 on a farm near Ulverstone, Tasmania, Wright never lost his consciousness of origins at once unglamorous and remote.  (Manning Clark's description of the Apple Isle as "the nursery of eccentrics and outsiders, the school for training men and women in adversity" represents a presumably unique instance of Clark getting his facts right).  For a boy as intelligent as Wright clearly was, his background must have inculcated that fear which marks all gifted people from the boondocks:  the fear that he excelled merely by local standards, not by the wider world's requirements.  In fact, his apprehension on this score proved needless.  The layman writing these words is, putting it mildly, incompetent to assess the true value of Wright's career in medical science.  But his -- at times quarrelsome -- dealings with Howard Florey, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, the anatomist Sydney Sutherland, and the pathologist Peter McCallum indicate something of the stature which he obtained in his specialism.  His talents belonged, it emerges, to the fields of exposition and consolidation rather than stunningly path-breaking research.  Certainly his is not among the greatest names of modern medicine.  Yet if lacking the originality that makes world headlines, he clearly deserved his plaudits as an admirable member of the discipline's second rank.

For every Australian who could speak authoritatively of Wright's professional achievements, however, there were a hundred who knew of him as a flamboyant spokesman for political freedom.  Had he not shone in this area, he might not have attracted Melbourne University Press's attention at all.  One suspects that Peter McPhee -- whose own previous publications include studies of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France -- values Wright less as a scientist than as a sort of antipodean Zola, forever bubbling with indignation at overweening governments.  Wright's attitudes in this area deserve closer inquiry.

The regrettable conclusion to which at least one reader has been forced after examining Dr McPhee's account is that Wright's much-vaunted moral courage, far from being a damn-the-torpedoes enthusiasm for pulling down the mighty and exalting the meek, derived from the world-view which Cocteau cynically articulated:  "I know how far I can go too far".  To Cocteauism he added (the evidence indicates) a delusion familiar in scientific circles, and more particularly familiar in Australian scientific circles:  the belief that expertise in one technical area automatically spills over to expertise in remaking the world "nearer to our heart's desire".  He never reached the wilder shores of political foolhardiness amid which Linus Pauling so gleefully paddled.  Still, when it came to thinking at what Ortega y Gasset called "the height of our times" -- especially thinking of liberty's nature, totalitarianism's nature, and any other topic capable of drawing on his wider cognitive powers -- he scarcely earned a bare pass-mark.

Take Communism.  Wright was, as Dr McPhee shows, no Communist himself.  Apart from the fact that his talk's constant, proto-South-Park smut would have tested even the most forbearing commissar's patience, Wright lacked that cosmic envy which the true acolyte of Marx requires.  (As Li'l Abner's creator Al Capp summarised Communist doctrine:  "If you got it, I deserve it").  His favourite politician was Victoria's old-style Labor Premier John Cain Snr.  But once Menzies introduced his Communist Party Dissolution Bill in 1950 -- when Stalin already ran half of Europe, and North Korean troops would soon be sweeping across the 38th Parallel -- Wright began bellyaching about our dictatorial leadership.  Communist operatives, apparently, must in every case be given the benefit of the doubt, and in every case have their freedom's privileges preserved.  Since the idea of preserving freedom's privileges for those whose entire raison d'être is to destroy freedom makes about as much sense as the idea of preserving vegetarianism's privileges for those whose entire raison d'être is a proselytising cannibalism, Wright hardly carried intellectual conviction.  But his stance was nothing if not popular in academic circles, not least at the University of Melbourne, where he taught;  and, swept up in the crowd's enthusiasm, he could safely ignore pettifogging logic.  The world since 1917 (and above all since 1936) appears to have left Wright with the overwhelming impression that Communists were no worse than a bunch of ratbags, deserving the same gratifications as other ratbags, and possessing a distinct moral advantage in being atheists, therefore fit to chinwag with in the Senior Common Room.  After visiting Red China in 1971, he published an exercise in fellow-travelling fantasy which -- judging by Dr McPhee's allusions to it -- makes Meeting Soviet Man resemble the apogee of hard-boiled realism.  Later he called Mao the greatest leader of our time.

Wright's behaviour towards other victims, less modish than Communists, differed greatly.  Dr McPhee notes Wright's enthusiasm for defending "due process and individual rights".  Such enthusiasm failed to manifest itself when P.R. Stephensen found himself interned from 1942 to 1945 for alleged collaboration with the Japanese, despite the fact that Stephensen's captors never formally charged him with any crime whatever, or gave him a chance to defend himself.  Unlike Sir Paul Hasluck and the maverick leftist MP Maurice Blackburn, Wright remained totally silent about the denial of Stephensen's civil liberties.  Nor does the consignment of his depressive sister Phyllis to the oubliette of mental institutionalisation for three decades bespeak a sleepless vigilance on Wright's part concerning psychiatric patients' fundamental dignity.  (Then again, how many divisions did either Stephensen or Phyllis Wright have?)  Say what you will about Wright's failure to reach the highest scientific levels;  in his gifts for selective indignation, Wright shot straight to the top of the class.

Wright achieved his greatest fame defending the rights of yet another fashionable victim:  this time Sydney Sparkes Orr, dismissed in 1956 from his Hobart philosophy lectureship on charges of seducing a female student.  While Wright's self-sacrificing dedication to Orr was laudable, his forensic diligence perhaps fell short of the Perry Mason league.  He simply asked Orr whether Orr dunnit.  No, said Orr.  Thus satisfied, Wright devoted to Orr's rehabilitation time and money which he could ill spare, and to which Orr responded with furious legal action against his champion.  As Clive James observed of F.R. Leavis, so Wright found with Orr:  that the admirer's tongue had scarcely time to make contact with the beloved's boot-polish before the boot itself was firmly lodged among the admirer's teeth.

At least Wright enjoyed, unlike Orr's other loyal backer Harry Eddy, a post-Orr life of some consequence.  During the Swinging Sixties, which in Australia lasted until the early 1980s, Wright flourished anew.  Feminism, for example, had a strong -- if largely theoretical -- appeal to him.  In language worthy of Eva Cox, Wright maintained that "a proper society" would make sure all mothers were economically conscripted, "using their brains and abilities" rather than undergoing the obscene horrors of staying with their children.  (How "a proper society" could ensure this utopia -- tax-breaks?  Forced abortions?  Re-education camps? -- he never condescended to explain).  Alas, his Brave New World ebullience did not long outlive his first meeting with Germaine Greer, whom he memorably described as being even worse than the "yuppie" (his epithet) Dame Leonie Kramer.  Even granted that he was -- like most Australians with the gift of the gab -- a rhetorician rather than an empiricist, he revealed a decided inability to follow up his own pronouncements' implications.

From 1980 to his death Wright served as Melbourne University's Chancellor.  His tenure warrants attention for two characteristics above all:  his refusal to espouse in public any "due process and individual rights" for the University's -- indeed, Australia's -- greatest historian, Geoffrey Blainey;  and his ill will towards his own Vice-Chancellor David Penington.  Penington had arrived at the shocking conclusion that, if university teaching was to survive, it would have to start abandoning Alice's Wonderland and paying some slight attention to market forces.  (Adam Smith had by this time been dead for a mere 190 years.  Fast learners, these Aussies ...)  Nothing could have horrified Wright more than such reasoning.  Overseas, the Berlin Wall might have collapsed, and simple economic reality might have reduced even Sweden's nanny-state culture to a smoking ruin.  But in good old Australia, Wright's belief that the clapped-out jalopy of welfarism was the triumphal car of all human progress remained as strong as ever.

The present reviewer, who to his sorrow never met Wright, inevitably finishes Dr McPhee's account echoing the verdict Somerset Maugham is supposed to have passed on Hugh Walpole:  "easy to like, difficult to respect".  Many, not being content with liking him, loved him.  For an Australian academic he did remarkably little harm.  (Sexual predations and intellectual bullyragging à la John Anderson had no discernible counterpart in Wright's career).  The question remains, of course, why mere harmlessness should guarantee an entire working life spent cosily nuzzling the taxpayer's teat.  It does not look as if Wright even bothered to postulate this question, let alone to acquire the philosophical ammunition needed for answering it.