Sir, when you speak, the word takes fire and the shapes of thought partake of new and glorious light. You reveal much of what is true of earth and heaven and you do not hide what moves your heart. (p. 73)

Conway was also an incomparable counsellor, ‘probably the only layperson in the entire Victorian Catholic school system who could freely devote a class period to the topic of masturbation without dropping through the floor with embarrassment or reducing a class to ribald hysteria’ (p. 65). Alas, he does not tell us what he said but the claim is fatuous and shows only how limited his range of acquaintance was.

In 1961 Conway ‘was indeed summoned, however unworthy, to the task of anointing human sorrow and anguish’ (p. 100). In other words, he became a routine clinical psychologist working mainly in St. Vincent’s Hospital but he dramatizes it as ‘a great stretch of more than twenty-five years in dealing with intimate human difficulties … [lying] ahead of me, like a horizonless Nullabor Plain’. However, in case he inflicted ‘more than was necessary of my own [alas, unspecified] personal defects upon future patients or clients’, Conway had himself therapeutically analysed. His analyst told him: ‘Stable? God, yes! In the Freudian sense you’ve got an ego like the Rock of Gibraltar’ (p. 101). No wonder he had the self assurance to experiment with LSD and every Conway aficionado should read his account of his ‘cosmic experience’ in the third part of his trilogy on Australian society, The End of Stupor (pp. 193-9). Apparently God and Conway got on well together after (for Conway) an awe-inspiring start. Conway does not mention that in the early 1970s he was dabbling in ‘mind dynamics’ at least according to Santamaria’s News Weekly. Since then he has dabbled in non-Christian religious movements; he visited the Rajneesh ashram and saw the Bhagwan as ‘spiritually insightful’ (p. 148) and at this point in his odyssey he calls himself a ‘Christian Sufi’. Alas, it is not clear what this is but it makes excellent commodity differentiation for an egoist who is scornful of ‘grubby cut-rate mystagogues’ (p. 43).

Writing of post-war Melbourne University there are pretensions and inaccuracies which space doesn’t allow me to specify. Even writing of Melbourne Catholics he betrays his lack of insight. A page on Daniel Mannix contains mistakes. He is quite unaware, one hopes, that his mentor, the late Denys Jackson, could compile his know-all columns in The Advocate by plagiarising from Time. He tries to obscure the fact that he was a supporter of Santamaria and the Movement because this is unfashionable today. He likes to portray himself as some kind of reasoned ‘conservative’ when he has no developed political philosophy and, as his columns in The Advocate showed, he approached most issues with an open mouth. His attitude to the Vietnam war was allegedly a ‘moderate’ one, whatever that means, while he could still say he supported the ‘Nixon-Agnew’ view. He refused to believe Agnew could be corrupt and even today he calls the USA ‘the least colonially-inclined of nations’. This is from an ‘historian’! (If we have to be ridiculous, what about Switzerland!)

Almost comical from someone who claims he can ‘smell charlatans at fifty paces’ is a remark on the preceding page where he compares his own spiritual quest to that of Carl Jung who, however, ‘ducked the challenge’ of encountering the ‘aura of lofty and drenching (sic) beauty’ of the Indian mystic, Sri Ramana Maharishi. ‘Oddly enough,’ says Conway, in all humility, ‘I suspect that I had done a similar thing by avoiding meeting Padre Pio — for reasons that I still do not wholly comprehend’. This reviewer can help Conway here, if only a little. By the time Conway in middle age left parochial Austral shores for the first time (1971, he says), the Italian stigmatic had ceased to expect him; he had been dead for several years. (NB: where matter-of-fact people simply ‘go overseas’, Conway has now ‘circumnavigated the globe three times’. Is this why he’s all at sea?)

For exuberantly naive boastfulness, comparable to Conway’s, this reviewer has to hark back to fictional characters like Tartarin of Tarasconor Toad of Toad Hall. Conway testifies that he has been a dutiful son and a loyal friend; an anthropologist (well, he has claimed to have read a little Malinowski and Mead); a deep reader of philosophy, theology and oriental sacred books; an accom­plished actor, producer and innova­tor in mise-en-scene (p. 123); a ‘defiantly middle brow’ but expert film critic; something of a musicologist; a brilliant TV and radio commentator of excellent wit; a playwright and poet who can compose ‘real iambic pentameters’; one of Australia’s two ‘star’ Catholic journalists (p. 133); a mystic, etc. Alas, not all his gifts have been recognised or fully developed. Others who sang in St. Patrick’s Cathedral Choir in the 1950s may have thought of him as a worthy make-weight barreltone (as Joyce might say) whereas, in fact, ‘shyness’ prevented him from using it for ‘solo work’ (p. 66) (Not so Tartarin and Toad!). Moreover, ‘sad to say’ (not alas, this time) ‘the free-wheeling, off-the-cuff, talk-back broadcasting 1have done recently has ruined most of the breath control and richer resonance’ (p. 113).

Space will not allow dealing with Conway’s theatrical genius in the service of minor Catholic groups and mass pageants. Needless to say when his ‘multi-media’ event on the life of Talhard de Chardin for the 1973 Eucharistic Congress turned out to be a fiasco, it was the fault of a ‘pseud’ of ‘breathtakingly illiterate self-confidence’ who had been ‘inflicted’ upon Conway’s script. Conway spends much time evening up scores, rapping knuckles, moralising. But he sure knows the argot of the theatre: Euripides' Trojan Women ‘is an absolute dog of a play'.

God has been gracious to Conway in his ancestry but not as yet in his posterity. His first chapter describes his ‘distinguished lineage'. Plantagenet blood, no less, via Conway Castle, though roguishly from the wrong side of the blanket. Strangely, however, the chapter is almost wholly given over to his grandfather, John Conway, a cricketer and Test Team manager — not quite aristo­cratic enough, some would think. Moreover, John was an unpleasant bully who blighted all but one of his progeny’s inclination to marry. Anyone who can be bothered can consult Great Australian Stupor (p. 32) for a now strangely suppressed incident in his life. Ronald is the last of this distinguished line because he has been too busy to wed and raise a family, he says. He used, in his mid-forties to boast of his celibacy in The Advocate (see Overland) and once wrote to this reviewer that he ‘chose neither to marry nor to burn’ (lucky devil!). While he thinks celibate clerics ought to shut up publicly about sex (p. 70) this obviously did not apply to lay virgins. Nowadays (see Preface) Conway is more reticent about his celibacy. This is a pity because some leaders will look for the motivation behind the lambasting of the Australian male and family life in Conway’s books as well as the loss to the na­tional gene pool and social context of one who might have modelled for us the role of ‘a tender loving sire’, as he puts it. His failure to reproduce will also be a loss to any antipodean Debrett.

It is to be hoped that Conway will not blame his stylistic infelicities on his ‘soul-mate and affectionate spar­ring partner’, the Baroness Lois Hohenfels, to whom his book is dedicated. Not every author, he says, ‘can boast the critical services (and typing skills) of a member of the ancient House of Hapsburg’. However, a sexagenarian Plantagenet who boasts of being an expert on language can surely excise a few adverbs from ‘stickily pious’, ‘elaborately coy’, ‘growingly sceptical’, ‘impossibly baroque’, ‘wholly predictable', etc. Alas, it is difficult lor less verbose souls to see how ‘a Calvanistic torpor’ can have a ‘deadweight’ or how ‘the marginal excellence of the Victorian education system’ can produce ‘a galaxy of lay talents’ or how ‘loony liturgical frolics and rubrical diddlings’ can be ‘pulverising’. However, as Conway is now threatening to devote his talents to creative writing, we can expect less verbal bullying especially as his goal is to ‘love quietly, modestly and steadfastly’.