One response to this threat is that of Ronald Conway, who quite properly emphasises the virtues of traditional society. We do not answer this case by claiming that it is against the grain of history, which will inexorably move us on whether we like it or not. It is certainly true that we cannot avoid change, but our choice is between accepting change blindly, which ultimately 1s what the conservative argument amounts to, and choosing its direction for ourselves. We have a chance of doing the latter only if we are prepared to discard all the ideas we have inherited from our past, and then try to learn from the past what we really are.

The Women’s Liberation Movement is only one of the forces compelling us to re­examine our ideas of society. Changes in the economy and our awareness of the limits of natural resources have forced us to reconsider the assumptions of progress which have underpinned western society for four hundred years. The collapse of employment is forcing us to think again about the meaning of work. The Women’s Movement itself is in part a reaction to the changed ideas of individuality and family which have been made possible by the contraceptive pill. The transisitor has transformed our relations to time and space, and with the pill has probably made a greater change to the way we live and the expectations we have than two centuries of revolutionaries and philosophers. Yet inevitably we still face these new circumstances with the concepts of yesterday. The only thing we know is the past, and so we are doomed to march into tomorrow with our eyes fixed firmly behind.

It is however the shocks that we receive from the world we are moving into which force us to look again at the world behind us. Admittedly, we do everything in our power to avoid these shocks, and consequently all too often our new awareness comes too late to be of any use. We waited twenty-seven years after the second world war before we were prepared to elect a Federal Government which would make use of our prosperity to meet social ends, and by the time we did so that prosperity was coming to an end. Our electoral reaction to this was not to look for new possibilities, but to choose a government which promised a ·return to the security we imagined belonged to the past. As we all now realise, life was never meant to be secure, and the present government is making more drastic changes to our society than any of its predecessors, while still µsing the rhetoric of conservatism. This new conservatism maintains power while changing everything else. A genuine conservatism would look for ways to maintain our established values by acknowledging the changes in our circumstances.

It is, as we should expect, in the universities that we can find the most strenuous efforts being made to think again about the lessons of our past, and to try to free us from the ideological blinkers which mask the public debate which is carried on through the greater part of the media. This is not to deny that universities also maintain positions of power and privilege, but the traditional independence which they have enjoyed, and which is now under attack from a new alliance of philistinism, has enabled them to provide places for many social critics whose combined efforts may provide the guide we need to find our way out of our present social impasse. The common complaint made against these critics is, of course, that they talk only to each other through their specialist journals. This complaint can however also be interpreted as a condemnation of the public media, whose servants accept no responsibility for interpreting, or even knowing, the work of those who are trying to find solutions to our problems.

Yet, while we may condemn the media for their failure to give serious and sustained attention to the problems of our time, we must recognise that the academics themselves bear a large share of the blame. The organisation of academic life places a high premium on research publications, regardless of quality or importance, and gives very little credit for participation in public debate, or even for teaching. Moreover, some of the most penetrating critics of the academic and social establishment choose to cloak their criticism in a jargon so esoteric that they can address only those who are already fully paid-up members of their mystery. The consequence is to strengthen the arms of those who already believe that thought is a luxury this country cannot afford. It is not surprising that so many of those who put this argument are themselves in receipt of tax-supported largesse.

The recent Brisbane conference of the Australian Universities Languages and Literature Association (AULLA) was an excellent example of these contradictory tendencies in the academy. The very name of this association suggests exclusiveness, yet its function is concerned with the central issue in our society – how we see ourselves, and how we talk to each other to refine this image. The papers which dealt with the theories behind this issue were, however, the most dense and esoteric of the conference. The conservatives dealt with hermeneutics, the way in which a text is itself a way of discovering the world, and the radicals promoted varieties of structuralism, examining the ways in which the text oppresses the reader by reflecting the society from which it is produced. Neither approach suggested that the speakers had ever been involved either with literature or with the reader who discovers or is oppressed. Then there were the polite and often illuminating papers on authors whom everyone already knew. These were often superb examples of scholarship and criticism, but there was scarcely any sense of urgency, any feeling that people write because they have something to say, and read not as an escape but as a way of understanding. Finally, there were the papers, particularly in the Pacific literature section, which suggested that in this century, at the other side of the world from the makers of our institutions, we have to find new ways of speaking and new ways of reading. These were the papers which demonstrated how the results of scholarly and critical study can help us to live successfully in the world that has been made for us. This finally is the only criterion by which we can judge writing or speech of any sort.

The problem of a great deal of the radical writing which endeavours to re-examine the assumptions on which society is built is that it fails to examine its own assumptions. Behind much radical criticism lies an unspoken aspiration to absolute freedom, the feeling that we should be able to be whatever we want. Lyn Richards, for example, in Having Families, reviewed recently in these columns, shows precisely the kind of pressures young parents are under because the ideas they have acquired about marriage and children no longer correspond with social reality or with their own aspirations. They therefore feel trapped by something they cannot understand. Yet, when she comes to write of the kind of changes that society might make to overcome these problems, Richards talks of how ‘the taking of roles would be a matter of choice, not the result of unquestioned assumption’. While the actual process of thought and education to which she refers is quite possible, this remark seems to extend the aim to a state of freedom outside any form of social determination. While this is a more humane stance than that of those who believe we are entirely determined by environmental chance and genetic necessity, it is equally unrealistic. What we become is the consequence of our choices, individual and social, but these choices can only be made from the opportunities presented by our time and place. These opportunities and constraints include those produced by culture and by the social institutions, including language, in which it is contained. The interaction between these is what the structuralist would call dialectic, and in this lies the only freedom we can have.

We are pleased this month to welcome a new contributor and a new feature. Nancy Keesing, a member of our editorial board, will each month contribute ‘Centrepage’, in which· she will review books of her choice and write generally about recent publications and literary matters. Nancy Keesing has published poetry and short stories, prepared many anthologies of Australian literature, including, with Douglas Stewart, the standard volumes of Old Bush Songs and Australian Bush Ballads, and is the past Chairman of the Literature Board.

The National Book Council Awards for Australian Literature for 1978 were announced at a Book Council dinner on October 12, during Australian Book Week. We are grateful to the N.B.C. for permission to publish the Judges report on these awards.