Quarterly Essay 1 In Denial by Robert Manne

Author:Robert Manne [Manne, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Discrimination, Indigenous Studies
ISBN: 9781921825002
Google: SMoLEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2001-04-01T05:31:20+00:00

In cultural politics every campaign is well served by the presence of a general. In the anti-Bringing them home campaign, the general was undoubtedly P. P. McGuinness, the Sydney Morning Herald opinion columnist and Quadrant editor.

McGuinness was appointed to Quadrant after I resigned the editorship in November 1997.Technically my resignation was triggered by the unwillingness of the old guard on the Quadrant Board of Management, Dame Leonie Kramer and Professor David Armstrong, to offer support when Les Murray, Quadrant’s literary editor, began to conduct, in his own words, a “feud” against me. In fact the resignation was more a consequence of the bad blood caused by articles and editorials written in 1996 and 1997 by myself and a close friend, Raimond Gaita, on Aboriginal politics in general and the question of genocide and the stolen generations in particular. In the letter Les Murray sent me in June 1997, which convinced me that our working relations were at an end, Murray wrote that he regarded as my “most serious” failure my behaviour on “the Aboriginal front”. According to Murray, I had started to take “the received leftist line on Aborigines … letting the man Gaita trumpet against dissent on this matter. I began to wonder, if the Melbourne left succeeded in duchessing you and getting you to bring Quadrant over to them, where voices on this matter not as yet howled down by the claques, voices like say Geoffrey Partington, might hope for a platform.” Nor was Murray alone. At the November 1997 meeting of the Quadrant Committee of Management, where I resigned, the criticism from the Kramer–Armstrong old guard was dominated by discussion of Quadrant and the Aborigines.

In the last issue of Quadrant I edited, I published as my parting shot a long essay on the stolen generations. In the same issue the newly appointed editor, P. P. McGuinness, made clear the new direction the magazine would take. He intended, he wrote, to discard the “mawkish sentimentality” that had overtaken discussions concerning the Aborigines in recent years. While McGuinness promised “genuine debate” on the stolen generations and Bringing them home, he was also very critical of the report, characterising its call for an apology to the “stolen children” as “pharasaical breast beating” and even as an attempt at “thought control”. At the time I wondered whether characterising those with whom McGuinness disagreed as mawkish sentimentalists and totalitarian thought police was the best way to encourage “genuine debate”.

My scepticism was not misplaced. Over the next three years Quadrant became devoted to ever wilder and more extreme attacks on every cause and belief of the contemporary Aboriginal political leadership and its support base. In March 1998 Quadrant published a highly personal attack on Sir Ronald Wilson by Rosemary O’Grady which argued, absurdly enough, that Sir Ronald’s sympathy for the stolen generations was in fact a cover for his indifference to Aboriginal land rights. In May it published Ron Brunton’s article on genocide and the “unconceived generations” which I have already discussed, and

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