I duly included reference to two of these Evatt letters in Doc Evatt, with a frank commentary. Griffin now complains that I referred to ‘only two of the letters’ and that I made ‘no serious attempt’ to analyse the correspondence. This is nonsense. What Griffin really means is that he disagrees with my views. Oddly, Griffin fails to mention that I meticulously footnoted my reference to his own Eureka Street article.

In short, Griffin is hopelessly wrong, misleading, and inaccurate. He purports to give a quotation from Doc Evatt that ‘Wren aimed to buy his way into heaven through his close association with Archbishop Mannix’, yet Griffin significantly omits the preceding words, ‘a cynic would say that …’ from this quotation.

More important is Griffin’s assertion that this quotation is a ‘sectarian sneer’ by me. Sectarian? I adhere to no religious sect. I am an atheist, free to ascribe to religious hypocrisy where relevant, as in the case of Wren. It is Griffin himself who is revealing sectarian bias in this accusation, and this extends to his and others’ intense aversion towards H.V. Evatt who, in the 1950s, attacked Catholic Action and Santamaria.

As for John Wren, my historical view is that he was sleazy and engaged in criminal activities to become a millionaire. He was also a skilful operator in dealings with politicians and prelates. The Labor Party would have been better off without him.

Ken Buckley, Balmain, NSW

James Griffin replies to Stuart Macintyre and Ken Buckley

Dear Editor,

I have read of the trendy ‘death of the author’, but Stuart Macintyre is the first I know to self-obliterate (‘Letters’, ABR, July 2001). In a curious way, it reminds me of the former USSR’s encyclopedias. I have sent you a photocopy of an article which he says does not exist but which bears his name. I would appreciate your public acknowledgment of this. It includes the phrase ‘John Wren’s Truth’ and is entitled ‘Football weathers the storm’ on page 91 of 100 Years of Australian Football (1996). At no stage did I suggest the phrase was in his volume in The Oxford History of Australia.

This denial would be baffling even coming from a partisan of the literary hoodlum, Frank Hardy, if Macintyre had not concocted a typical disparagement which falsifies our brief meeting in the foyer, not the Petherick Room, of the National Library on 9 May 1996. I did not have a table there, nor ever a maroon waistcoat. Nor have I been, as he says in fatuous language, ‘rebuffed by the epigones of the ANU’. Although over seventy, I still contribute to academic (including ANU) conferences and publications.

On that day, Macintyre accosted this retiree courteously and asked what I was doing. I mentioned Wren. ‘I hope you’ll leave us some scandals,’ he said. ‘Not so many,’ I replied, and, as a kindly gesture, mentioned the Norton gaffe I had just read in page-proof, thinking he might like to correct it. Instead, he bridled and denied writing it. I realised he was shocked to be in error. He countered with the idiotic Bob Pratt story, at which, naturally, I demurred. This was interesting enough to record immediately. You will note he does not deny his Pratt-fall. His affectation of superior knowledge regarding Theodore and McConville is ridiculous. In his book The Reds, he fancies that Mary Wren ‘eloped’ with a certain Sam White. That, too, is nonsense, as is the statement that I have ‘calumnified’ (= ‘calumniated’ in OED) Wren’s critics. He fails to give even one example. He does not understand the word.

What has understandably irked Macintyre is my review of his A Concise History of Australia, in The Australian (22 January 2000). Preening himself in conspicuous humanitarian weeds, he accuses me of being affronted by his ‘sympathy for Aboriginals, feminists, and multiculturalists’ instead of by his posturing. My supportive academic administration, teaching, and writing on such issues go back long before he could lisp Althusser. It is pathetic to see what used to be the Melbourne History Department’s esteemed flagship Australian Historical Studies (31/115, October 2000) recruiting three encomia of Macintyre’s book followed by a summation by – guess who? – surely not himself!

We are also asked to admire his concern with ‘class’. I suggest readers look at the double standard of Macintyre’s bland entry on Sir John Latham in the Australian Dictionary of Biography Volume 10, where he lauds Latham’s ‘integrity’ and glosses both his conflicts of interest and his appointment as Chief Justice, which even his colleagues saw as a ‘job’. Could subject and author have gone to the same opulent bourgeois school – a fair distance from Collingwood?

In view of his unreliable memory, let me spell out what I said about Wren: he was not the Australian equivalent of Al Capone, as Hardy insisted; Power Without Glory was written to malign the Labor Party and the Catholic Church; my old friend Manning Clark and dupes like Macintyre and Dorothy Hewett have digested Hardy sheepishly; the ‘adultery’ of Mrs Wren is a fabrication; Wren is a victim of ethno-sectarianism and class prejudice. But I have not said that his influence in politics was benign. My jury is still out. An unambitious non-ideologue needs time.

Ken Buckley’s memory is also ‘hopelessly wrong’. His co-author, Barbara Dale, was sent to my home to check the authenticity of the Evatt letters. I have never expressed ‘aversion to Evatt’. Quite the contrary. (See my obituary in the Catholic Worker, 1965.) No one has written more scathingly of Santamaria than I. (See Santamaria: The Politics of Fear, 2000, edited by Paul Ormonde.) Buckley squibbed the implications of the Evatt-Wren letters. His otiose reference to the motive behind Wren’s association with Mannix is transparently derisory. Nor should his and Macintyre’s bluff that they are serious students of Wren rather than devotees of Hardy fool anyone.

James Griffin, Canberra, ACT

Gaita on storytelling

Dear Editor,

In his La Trobe University Essay in the July issue of ABR, Raimond Gaita argues the importance of settling whether the forcible separation of Aboriginal children from their parents was genocide. He believes that denying the significance of this question trivialises the moral assessment of what was done. He takes Inga Clendinnen (with whose views on these issues I generally agree) to task for her specific claim that the use of the word ‘genocide’ has had a negative impact on the public appreciation of the enormity of the policy, and for her general thesis that the moral evaluation of any action will be best served by identifying, as fully as possible, its relevant features.

Gaita insists that, while history may contribute to moral judgment, a crucial point will be reached after which it ‘must give ground to discursive argument’ in which philosophical reasoning plays an essential role. Certainly, basic terms like ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ must be employed if we are to make moral judgments, but it is not so clear what contribution is made by intermediate moral categories like ‘murder’, ‘treason’ and ‘genocide’. They have both factual and evaluative content, and are crucial in legal contexts; if certain actions are to be proscribed, we must be able to identify that category of actions. However, legal and moral judgments are not identical, for it is always possible to argue that the law is morally defective in some respect. Gaita acknowledges this point when he tells us that the legal definition of genocide in the UN Convention fails, meaning presumably that it fails to capture the morally important concept. The key issue between Gaita and Clendinnen comes down to whether seeking a precise legal definition of such a concept makes a useful contribution to moral judgments about policies.

The moral relevance of a legal definition must be argued for by identifying the moral status of a range of particular cases that it covers. Thus our ability to make moral judgments about particular cases must be prior to our ability to establish an adequate definition of genocide. Such concepts are not necessary for moral judgments, so any role they play can only be one of convenience. But invoking a legalistic concept in moral discourse can only be a convenience if we are confident about its range of application. Most legal terms, even when introduced by statute, gain precision via the arguments and determinations in an extensive range of court cases. However the definition of ‘genocide’ in the Convention lacks, as yet, this kind of testing, and remains relatively abstract. As a consequence, there is a good deal of controversy about the way it should apply to particular cases. Getting involved in a controversy about how a term can be clarified will certainly complicate, and may very well confuse, our judgment about the rightness or wrongness of a policy, such as one about separating children from families.

Since Clendinnen holds that moral judgments can be made without invoking concepts like ‘genocide’, she believes that the value of introducing this term into public debate depends on the impact it will have. Most of those concerned with the debate will have little interest in technical legal issues, so they will understand a term via one or two paradigms. Claiming that an act is one of genocide will be taken as saying that it is similar in significant respects to the Nazi’s extermination of Jews and Gypsies. Clendinnen believes that many Australians are affronted by this claim and, as a consequence, are deterred from acknowledging what they might otherwise have readily recognised: the cruelty and harm done by the policy of family separation.

John Clendinnen, Townsville, Qld

Exasperating waffle

Dear Editor,

Allan Patience (ABR, June 2001) uses his review of William Coleman and Alf Hagger’s Exasperating Calculators and Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics to argue against importing ideologies, especially economic ones, without adapting to Australia’s ‘astonishing uniqueness’.

Patience’s argument here is just the kind of waffle Exasperating Calculators spends several hundred pages attacking. In saying that economists don’t question that economics is a theory of ‘a high capitalist’ moment in history, he says that Tibetan Buddhism would never have thrown up a Keynes. While true, it is also irrelevant. I am reasonably sure Keynes never offered advice on Tibet. Other economists have ideas more specific to underdeveloped economies like Tibet’s. For ‘high capitalist’ economies like Australia, Keynes’s ideas (and Friedman’s, and a large number of other economists) are clearly relevant to the subject matter, though controversial.

As an example of Australia’s ‘astonishing uniqueness’, ‘barely noticed’ by local economists, Patience mentions ‘ancient and modern Aboriginality’. Could it be that economists don’t discuss ancient Aboriginality very much because, unlike Patience, they can tell relevant from irrelevant? Ancient Aboriginals were even less interested in modern economies than Keynes was in Tibet.

Patience cannot even get his critique consistent. Within four paragraphs he complains that ‘positive economics’ is an ideology that is ‘short-term’ and that a version of it, economic rationalism, likes the time-frame ‘ultimately’. Could it be that economists do look to the long term, after all, and advocate short-term pain for long-term gain?

Patience might not like economics, but there is no sign he knows anywhere near enough about it to write reviews of two books by economists. The last thing Patience wrote that I recall reading was his contribution to a booklet on universities. In his chapter he confuses macro- and micro-economics, discussing micro- matters such as vocational training within universities and replacing academics with computers under a macro-economic heading.

Is it any wonder that the authors of Exasperating Calculators find the contributions of Arts academics to economic debates worthy of scorn and ridicule?

Andrew Norton, Melbourne, Vic.

Sylvia Kelso and science fiction

Dear Editor,

I have for some years been following Sylvia Kelso’s career as a writer of science-fiction criticism, with just the appalled fascination one might use to track the oncoming barbarian hordes. All that energy! All that ignorance!

Let’s, for the sake of brevity, omit analysis of the many reasons why, in her review of Earth is But a Star (ABR, July 2001), her overall argument is ludicrous and – coming from an academic – shameful. We’ll stick to the factual material:

1. The writer spells his name differently from the electrician. It is E.R. Eddison.
2. The pseudonym is Nevil Shute, not Neville Shute.
3. Camille Flammarion (1842-1925), it is usually accepted, pretty well invented the far-future sub-genre. To call him a near-future writer is deeply misleading.
4. Kelso writes of ‘the usual suspects for Australian SF and SF Criticism – Blackford, Gillespie, Rousseau, John Clute, Stableford, Zebrowski’. Of these six ‘Australians’, three, so far as I know, have never even visited: John Clute (Canadian), Brian Stableford (English) and George Zebrowski (American).

Peter Nicholls, Melbourne, Vic.

When in doubt, make it up

Dear Editor,

Brian Matthews’s review of Meg Tasker’s work Struggle and Storm (ABR, July 2001) seems to encourage a worrying trend among biographical writers. To put it bluntly, the trend appears to be – when in doubt, make it up.

Writers can transcend the absence of facts with a fictional reincarnation that is both literary and entertaining, but how well does it serve the subject? In an age when writers are almost desperate in their need to find novelty in self-expression, I am reminded of Margaret Atwood’s timely observation that the world’s first postmodernist work was the Bible.

What I believe is more important and relevant to our own predicament is the constant rewriting of our history. Past myths like Gallipoli deserve a measured reassessment, but when writers are encouraged to exercise their flights of fancy in an effort to create a deeper understanding I suggest that there is a real risk of turning the whole business of writing non-fiction into a nonsense.

Val Wake, Port Macquarie, NSW

Letter from Maningrida

Dear Editor,

I have read Mary Ellen Jordan’s ‘Letter from Maningrida’ (ABR, June 2001) and did not read fearless journalism as Bruce Pascoe did (‘Letters’, July 2001). Courage, yes. Jordan made no bones about her having been out of place in Maningrida, but the guns and crossing boundaries were as real as they were in her childhood home, it appears. If we can’t voice these sorts of connections, then what can we say?

Melissa Mackey, Melbourne, Vic.