The Devil and James McAuley by Cassandra Pybus

Author:Cassandra Pybus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-12T12:21:40+00:00

8 The End Of Voyaging

McAuley’s role as a proselytiser for the DLP and his closeness to Santamaria attracted hostility from the very intellectual sector he had sought to woo with Quadrant. Increasingly he was bracketed with Frank Knopfelmacher as a fanatic whose mode of discourse was as intellectually offensive as that of his communist opponents. This point was made in a letter to the editor of the Observer by Heinz Arndt, professor of Political Science at the ANU, who had been deeply offended by McAuley’s slur on ‘the sort of liberal mentality’ of academics who disagreed with his interpretation of international affairs. ‘With what hubris he besmirches the traditions and values to which he once owed allegiance’, Arndt wrote, ‘how recklessly he flirts with the anti-Christ’. By reducing liberalism to a kind of pathological aberration to be treated with venomous contempt, McAuley’s zealous anticommunism was leading him into the same mindset as his ideological enemy. If liberalism and its works were so contemptible, Arndt wondered, what was McAuley’s point in opposing the communists?464

Arndt was giving public voice to a distaste for McAuley’s strident anticommunism that was widespread among academics. Geoffrey Serie believed he was speaking for a large number of intelligent anticommunists, many of whom were members of the AACF, when he complained about the fanaticism of Quadrant’s editor to Sir John Latham. Serie was ‘appalled at the poverty of its thought … the level of abuse and simple bad manners’; what was needed was ‘new dimensions to one’s thinking about Communism’ rather than the crude propaganda McAuley published. ‘We are now thoroughly antagonised by its contemptible yahooism’, he wrote.465 Latham wrote a defensive response to Serie, whereas McAuley would not have cared. He recognised this as the talk of dupes and fellow-travellers who were caught in the Devil’s snare. He took heart from his daily contact with Richard Krygier, who saw the terrible peril facing the country as he did. They gave each other reassurance. ‘We used to say’, Krygier recalled, ‘if we find ourselves in the salt mines in Alice Springs together at least we will know we tried not to allow that to happen’.466

It did bother McAuley that some of this hostility came from Catholic intellectuals, especially those at Melbourne University associated with the Catholic Worker group. In his correspondence with Martin Haley, who he knew had good relations with this group, he raised the issue several times, expressing his dismay that the Catholic Worker people had become so hardened in their feud with Santamaria ‘to display the irresponsible malice … as to have received the favourable attention of the Communist Review’.467

In a paper presented at the 1959 Christian Social Week McAuley took his intellectual critics to task, including his Catholic adversaries. He did not expect to emerge unscathed from this action since he was ‘touching a class of persons … with an astonishing measure of complacent arrogance and skill in gang-warfare if subjected to criticism’. He thought it was one of the ways in which they resemble a priesthood.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.