It was clear from conversation and his autobiographical Letter to My Daughter (1995) there were aspects of his childhood he did not like: his father’s absences, the constant moving, (within and from Ireland to England, from England to Australia) and later the commuting from Mornington to Melbourne High School. An eldest child with four younger sisters, Graham saw himself as the responsible eldest child, an eldest child fascinated with the story of the prodigal son. In his adult life, transcending his background, he created emotional and geographic stability, living in a strong marriage with his wife, Jenny, for more than thirty years in the same house in North Carlton. Graham, Jenny and their daughter, Jessica, all lived within walking distance of work and school. Jessica has described the family routine of Graham coming in from his study or university each evening to prepare the dinner. An only child, she has been both oldest and youngest yet with no sibling rivalry. In her he created the childhood that he did not have.

This stability was essential to Graham, enabling him to move intellectually from commerce graduate to political scientist, psychoanalytic theorist, and analysand, to non-fiction writer on subjects ranging from politics, autobiography, friendship, and art, to the emotions. He branched out into television with his series of interviews on SBS, Speaking/or Myself. Here his subtle conversational interviewing style meant he actually listened, and they did speak for themselves. He became a commentator in both radio and newsprint on subjects ranging from Princess Diana’s death to East Timor.

Graham was lunching with close male friends when he died, but to understand him it is necessary to recognise the significance and influence of women – Jenny and Jessica but also an astonishing number of close female friends. The way he came to understand feminism in a political way was through the experience of having a talented daughter, similarly his less equivocal anti-Kennett, anti-rationalist voice, the one heard in his last book The Public Emotions: From mourning to hope, derived its force and clarity from his marriage to a dedicated and inspired teacher. He says in a Letter to my Daughter, ‘for sheer interest nothing beat making my mother a cup of tea, lighting her cigarette and the two of us sitting down at the table while she talked about, well, people and what they thought and I’d start telling her what ideas I had about what I was going to do some day and things like that’.

Talk and friendship with Graham did not mean agreement but exchange, fun, and it felt reciprocal. From the beginning he was a gifted teacher. He took leave but he always went back and brought these other experiences into his teaching. I was in his fourth-year class in 1973, a class which was experimental yet rigorous and memorable. He never judged any work or opinion as less because it was by a woman. As his student, it was not necessary to talk in paragraphs, he would hear the abbreviated surgical incisions. His conversational voice was not about dichotomies between men and women, the public and political, the private and domestic. His achievement was to defy such divisions and to insist on talking of one in the language of the other. He has written, ‘In psychoanalysis, the Bible, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Christina Stead and a film like Happiness, to name just a few examples, domesticity is fraught and intense. Indeed the world can appear as an anticlimax, a mere rerun of family life. (Politics is family disputation by other means.)’

His writing was subtle, so it was important he often allowed his entrepreneurial side some play when commenting on his own work. I remember an occasion when, after reading a review of Letter to my Daughter that criticised him for not exploring his anger in the book, he quietly exploded, ‘Didn’t she realise the book is post-oedipal?’

In an essay about my paintings, Graham was able with no art history but by way of an extraordinary intellectual empathy to make interpretations in which it was clear he knew what I was doing before I did. His friend Graeme Garrett had the same experience, but in his own field, theology. Graham Little’s style was not about facts, authority, or obvious knowledge but in the back of his head there was just that: years of reading, thought and experience which means that in losing him we have lost an intellectual authority.