Frog in the Pond. That did the trick. Pete’s four-year old son, Nikolai, knew what we needed. One packet of Aeroplane Lime Jelly set in the fridge overnight. Add a Cadbury Milk Chocolate Frog for a simple, sweet distraction from life’s sorrows – in our case, a miscarriage at 22 weeks. A friend, Kerreen Reiger, sent us packing to her beach house on Phillip Island, 90 minutes south-east of Melbourne, and told us that a young family were staying there also – the storey above our unit. She said we would like them. She was not wrong. A lifelong friendship was born that day.

Upon knocking on their front door, the domestic tableau that greeted us included Pete sitting on the floor and leaning against a couch, pen and paper in hand, folder perched on his knee, surrounded by piles of books including an up-ended paperback of E.P. Thompson’s (1963) The Making of the English Working Class, or so my mind’s eye reconstructs the scene of our first meeting. He was preparing lecture notes for his first semester of teaching – first year sociology at La Trobe University. Our conversations moved quickly from beaches and bands to books, critical theory, and politics. 

The year was 1988 and I was working as social policy researcher for an Anglican welfare agency in Melbourne. After ten years as a lowly freelance social researcher for various government (local, state) and ecumenical (local and international) agencies, I was keen to undertake postgraduate research. Trouble was I had only half-baked ideas about form, method, supervision, and least of all, pressing material realities. Over the course of the next few months, and many conversations, Pete convinced me that I could do a doctorate in the sociology department at La Trobe, even though my two degrees were multi-disciplinary and did not include a sociology major. As Pete’s own training was history and politics, this made him my ideal mentor. My initial research proposal was on the role of Christian socialism in the rise of the British welfare state – a topic and theme apt for someone of my background, but a history and pedigree that Pete knew much more about than me – that a Marxist knew more about my own familial inheritance was an early clue that I was going to be tutored by an intellectual in the European sense of the word and not just an academic with a single research specialisation.  

Pete also employed me as research assistant on his Australian Labor Party project that later led to his book Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade (Beilharz 1994a), but also to essays on various Australian radical and Labor intellectuals including Childe, Anderson, Evatt, Stretton, and others, later collected in his Thinking the Antipodes (Beilharz 2015). Pete was too well-mannered to say so, but my assistance was essentially a sinecure – of little value to him but of importance in my research apprenticeship. Aside from a deep dive in the history of Australian national development, politics, social movements, labourism, socialism, liberalism, etc., it was also a salutary lesson in how Pete valued his location in the world as an Australian intellectual. These issues and stories mattered not because he was a nationalist (he isn’t), but because this is where he found himself to be living. Australia’s peculiar path through modernity – and its provincial experiments in settler-colonialism and national development, the politics of labourism, socialism, social democracy, and social liberalism – were all worthy of critical understanding. He also took seriously the history of thinkers and their ideas even as he was acutely aware of the dangers of hubris – of interpreters as would-be legislators, and what the Budapest School dubbed ‘the politics of redemption’. This was very attractive to me: Not only was intellectual life undervalued in the Australian public sphere, but the life and times of Australian intellectuals were even more under-appreciated. At the very least, I was ripe for undoing my own ignorance.  

By 1990, I scored a four-year tutoring position, so I was able to witness first-hand Pete’s lectures – carefully prepared, written in longhand with minimal technological mediation (long before the hegemony of powerpoints). Pete had a scopic imagination that seemingly effortlessly embraced big historical epochs and sociological thinking and related these to contemporary local challenges and the quotidian. He never spoke down to the first-year student but rather brought them to the banquet table of all that modern critical thinking in the humanities and social sciences had to offer. It was a sober and dignified form of rhetorical performance – one that respected the traditions of the university as a unique place for thinking aloud and inculcated a new generation into critical discourses for developing their capacity to be autonomous citizens. He inspired students to take seriously their own intelligence and place in the world. Pete was not given to activism, political stunts, or theatrical performance, in or outside of the class. His radicalism was to take students on the path to learning about themselves and the world by sharing with them the learning pathways he was engaged with himself.  It felt like we students (including tutors) were apprentices in a lifelong vocation.  

One assessment exercise was a book review: Students could choose between a diverse range of sociological reportage, investigation and critique. The students only had to read one book for this exercise, but I jumped at the chance to read the whole list – from Victorian era industrial novels to Edwardian poverty surveys, Chicago school ethnographies and contemporary Australian social justice studies – an embarrassment of riches that demonstrated that sociology and its disciplinary incarceration inside the university walls was but a tributary of a much bigger river of social imaginings, critiques, of social justice struggles and projects, and of revolutions and reforms. 

I also took the opportunity to audit Pete’s fourth year ‘honours’ (what northern hemisphere universities would call masters) social theory class on Modernity and its Posts. Instead of the first-year lecture theatre of 250 students, the research seminar format with 10 students was more conversational in style but still with a strong didactic element in content and import. The subject guide provided weekly synopses and annotated reading lists. This was no mere sharing of opinions, but an invitation to scholarship: This approach made it clear that we all needed to come prepared to listen and ask questions, and to develop our arguments based on careful reading. Again, much of it was not stated – his pedagogy reflected his understated manner: a quiet, patient, and inductive teaching approach that was quick to affirm and encourage our better efforts to think on the page. Nearly a decade later, I was privileged to witness this form of teaching again when I sat in on his postgraduate seminars at Harvard where he was visiting chair of Australian studies in the sociology department.

I recall a formative moment. I submitted my first miserable 39 pages for his perusal expecting a long critique and close copy edit. Instead, I received a brief note: ‘Keep up and at it’. I was puzzled since I was used to teachers’ critical exhortations, marginalia and nitpicking. When asked, he simply said something to the effect of – now is the time to get into the groove of writing – just keep doing it. The time for copy edits and critical readings was for later drafting of chapters. Writing was a craft, not unlike any other. Practise, practise. In the meantime, what mattered more was creative and close reading and the critical engagement with ideas, the searching out for articulating good questions.  Pete was always a creative reader of student essays, finding the good ideas in amongst the rubble of their first tentative and clumsy expressions.   

As a writer, Pete was also generous, sharing his manuscripts and inviting comment before final revision. This was a privilege, an act of great trust. Again, I know that they did not need my critical feedback. It was a wonderful window on how he wrote. In the days before writing to a computer screen, Pete wrote longhand fluently… page after page of unblemished copy with nary a scratch or addendum – a stark contrast to most of his contemporaries and students where we would be cutting and pasting, ‘whiting out’ whole sentences, and reshuffling paragraphs and pages, trying to find some sort of order to our first thoughts. Pete was equally at home in all non-fiction genres: the review, essay, report, thesis, journal article, the book. Pete’s style is concise, synoptic, allusive (densely literary and beautifully poetic), with a minimum of adverbs and adjectives cluttering the text. He loves the odd zinger and slips in puns and ironic humour but never without purpose or distraction from his main themes and arguments. One personal favourite is his final line in an essay reviewing the triumph of neoliberal capitalism in the late twentieth century – ‘Game over, Insert Coins’, later made the title of a book chapter, ‘Civilizing Capitalism? Game Over, Insert Coins’, in H. Bolitho and C. Wallace-Crabbe (eds.) (1998) Approaching Australia.  For Victorians living through an economic boom predicated on state taxes of a casino and poker machines, this had a local inflection and provided a perfect synecdoche of late capitalism writ large as well.

His first single-authored books Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism (Beilharz 1987), Labour’s Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism and Social Democracy (Beilharz, 1992), and Transforming Labor (Beilharz 1994a) constitute a trilogy. Arguing about the Australian welfare state (Beilharz, Watts, Considine 1992b) and Postmodern Socialism: Romanticism, the City and the State (Beilharz 1994b) can be viewed as spin-offs from this key project. Whereas his Trotsky book can be viewed as an immanent critique (savage!) of the fundamentalism that haunts rationalist sectarianism (religious or secular), Transforming Labor looks at one tradition of labourism as found in his own society and shows how the social movements and projects (cooperation, guilds, unions, social insurance etc.) have been emptied out in the process of its own party seeking to be the party of government. If Trotskyism is the special example of a form of Marxism turned into a dead-end sect and of the lethal follies of revolutionary political ideology coupled with an inadequate social theory of politics and social change, and Transforming Labor is the applied case study of labourism and non-Marxist forms of socialism, Labour’s Utopias is the classic synthetic overview of socialism in its main guises as alternative modernities: Bolshevism (Russia), Fabianism (Britain), and (German) Social Democracy. He proffers a clear nyet to the former, and ambivalent two cheers for the latter two variants. If reformist politics necessarily condemns its practitioners to heartbreak, disappointment and failure, neither should socialists take for granted the achievements of the labour and socialist movements – education, housing, transport, gas and water, and democratic representation and enfranchisement, labour rights, health and safety, amelioration of poverty, and social insurance. He might share Gramsci’s sense of ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ but to which he adds a concern to ensure that the integrity of the human personality is sacrosanct. That is why, for Pete, socialism is a meaningful signpost of two social and ethical commitments: to democracy and as association of people working together – a necessary condition of political projects but not reducible to them. In my view, Labour’s Utopias (Beilharz 1992a) is a hidden-in-plain-sight gem of Pete’s opus: a classic that deserves a new edition. If his late collection of his essays on Circling Marx (2020) shows a consistent intellectual commitment to a tradition that carries his way into thinking about the world, we should not also overlook his humane sense of why we bother about the human condition in the first place. From the outset, all of Pete’s books emanate how we struggle to give meaning and purpose to our struggles to make our communities and societies better for all its members. Pete has always married his sociological imagination to his critical theory, and this has an ethical dimension and importance.

Pete also expressed his social theoretical interests in his routine commitments as teacher and professional sociologist. This is evident in his conceiving and editing of Social Theory: A Guide to Central Thinkers (Beilharz (Ed.) 1992b). In December, 1989, La Trobe was hosting the annual shindig of the Sociology Association, and Pete organised a social theory section by inviting sociologists from across the nation to speak and then write 2000 words in open prose about one thinker who was important to them in their own work. The book was a local best seller for sociology at the time. Pete made social theory approachable to students and academics alike, and in the process was in small practical ways putting social theory on the map in Australia. This was also the time that the Thesis Eleven team was brought to Melbourne for a major conference on ‘Reason and Imagination’, a stellar array of intellectuals from their network including Cornelius Castoriadis, Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, Peter Hohendahl, Axel Honneth, Martin Jay, Niklas Luhmann, György and Maria Márkus, and Ivan Zelensky. But for Pete, cultural traffic always needs to be two ways and, as he later came to articulate his theory, being antipodean is to have a foot in both places – north and south. Invited to give a paper to the American Sociological Association Social Theory section surveying Australian Social theory, Pete cheekily opened with ‘Australia is an island-continent south-west of Hawaii’ – a pithy encapsulation of sociology and geography knowledge tropes that in characteristic allusive manner puts a polite challenge to metropolitan conceits and ignorance. The essay itself is a magisterial summation of the history and state of play of social theory as practised across the disciplines, in and outside of universities, and of its future possibilities. Like most of Pete’s writings, it stands the test of time. I now realise in hindsight that both the form and content of this early survey essay is also an anticipation of our co-authored ‘The State of Social Sciences in Australia’ essay that was commissioned by the International Social Science Council in 2005. It also points forward to the development of his writings on Bernard Smith (Beilharz 1997) and Zygmunt Bauman (Beilharz 2000). His books and many essays on Smith and Bauman are testimony to Pete’s capacity to think with and through his interlocutors on larger sociological themes. They are in my view major works and not just intellectual biographies about two blokes: Witness his book of essays on Thinking the Antipodes (Beilharz 2015).

June 30, 1995, was the day I submitted my thesis, was granted tenure in the sociology department, and stepped up to the plate as a formal member of the editorial team of Thesis Eleven journal. Pete forever remains a mentor and friend but, from that date, we were now also colleagues. It was our work on all things related to the journal, however, that made us also collaborators and cemented our friendship. Thesis Eleven was and is a journal, but it is better understood as an intellectual sub-culture: a loose association of individuals cooperating on projects revolving around the production of a material artefact – the journal. This kind of journal culture had few comparators, and we might be witnessing the end of such an era of form and genre. Our closest peers that combined an in-person collaborative approach to global reach in both production and distribution in my view include New Left Review, Arena (both journals starting two decades earlier than Thesis Eleven), and Telos. Most other journals in the area of critical theory are more readily associated with a lead editor (Theory, Culture and Society, Mike Featherstone, and Philosophy and Social Criticism, David M. Rasmussen) or have only an online connection between the lead editors (New German Critique, as related to us by Aaron Rabinbach).

From a backyard DIY project started by 3 doctoral students, it has evolved across four decades and more than 175 issues, 2 publishers, and many editors and editorial assistants. The one person at its core since its outset is – yep, you guessed it, Pete. I had the honour of working alongside Pete (because that is his modus operandi as leader) from 1995 to 2020. In the early days of our contract with Sage, we were called upon to draft a mission statement for the back cover. Pete wrote it, the draft, and in a rare case of unanimity amongst the editors, it was left virtually untouched. I quote it here in full as I think it not only encapsulates his own intellectual vision, but also accurately depicts the open yet clear agenda and practice of the journal during our collaborative years as coordinating editors:

The purpose of this journal is to encourage the development of social theory in the broadest sense. We view social theory as both multidisciplinary and plural, reaching across social sciences and liberal arts (sociology, anthropology, philosophy, politics, geography, cultural studies and literature) and cultivating a diversity of critical theories of modernity across both the German and French senses of critical theory.

The identity of the journal, like its location, is multiple: European in the continental sense, but also transatlantic and colonial. The journal translates European social theory, mainstream and marginal, and it also takes theory from the margins of the world system to the centres.

Social theory progresses through substantive concerns as well as formal or textural endeavour; the journal therefore publishes theories and theorists, surveys, critiques, debates and interpretations, but also articles to do with place, region, or problems in the world today, encouraging civilization analysis and work on alternative modernities from fascism and communism to Japan and Southeast Asia. Marxist in origin, postmarxist by necessity, the journal is vitally concerned with change as well as with tradition.

The heart and soul of the intellectual subculture though was our regular editorial committee meetings held at the dining tables of our homes. Our meetings were ‘boysey’, rambunctious affairs made longer than the business agenda demanded due to the irrepressible need of its participants to voice their opinions on all matters great and small, be it running commentary on global affairs, world history, academia, and publishing. It was also productive and fun work in the process – a culture that rests on the long-standing European traditions of informal and cultural entrepreneurial circles and cultures of the salon, the coffee house, the club and the pub backrooms, and specifically those committed to the production of journals – from Edinburgh to London, Weimar to Berlin, Paris to Prague, and for Thesis Eleven, not least, Budapest. This in no way undercut our capacity to review manuscripts and undertake journal issue planning, but it did make Pete’s role as chair a chore that he bore stoically, with just the occasional curl of the lip and quiet ironic comment to indicate his exasperation. In a team of garrulous raconteurs who gleefully embraced the art of conversation and argument, it was perhaps apt that the most circumspect, quietest member had the all too frequent task of tempering our exuberance and calling the room to order.   

The loose organisational structure of the journal was based on a legal independent, not-profit company – a cooperative that exists for educational purposes. By the end of the century, we had developed the editorial collective into an open-ended hierarchy: 3 coordinating editors (initially, Johann Arnason, Pete and me, then later, when Johann retired, Peter Murphy), at least 7 commissioning editors, editorial assistants (usually doctoral candidates who Pete and I were co-supervising), and one or two production assistants (part-time and paid out of the Sage royalties). We coordinating editors were essentially the drivers of the Thesis Eleven project as well as responsible for the administrative, legal, and financial matters. The other editors were more readily concerned with ensuring thematic special issues were brought home to successful completion.

Although the journal was always an independent entity, free from any formal attachment to a university, the fact that we both worked in sociology at La Trobe meant the synergies of journal and university overlapped in increasingly complex ways. Our collaborations on various projects became more intensive and extensive alike. Into this century, we were not only starting to co-supervise doctoral students but plotting more ambitious projects including the establishment of a Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory at La Trobe university with Pete as Director and me as co-director. Although we had no operating budget, we were able to piggyback costs of Centre events and initiatives on pre-existing university research and administrative resources. The centre was our vehicle for organising workshops, seminars, and public lectures, including the Thesis Eleven Annual Lecture under the university auspice as well as bringing international intellectuals who were in our network including such folks as Jeffrey Alexander, Joanna Bourke, Craig Calhoun, Luis David, Mark Davis, Maria Pia Lara, Philippa Mein Smith, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Noeleen Murray, George Ritzer, Donald Sassoon, George Steinmetz, Keith Tester, Stephen Turner, Peter Vale, and Loic Wacquant. It was Pete who was the key cultural entrepreneur and networker who made these connections not only viable projects, events, and publications of the journal and the Centre, they were all, in effect, expressions of his gift for friendship.  If the personal is political, then it must be said in Pete’s case that intellectual projects are also communicative exercises in affinity and empathy. 

The Centre was like an exponential multiplier of our journal and individual academic commitments that not only extended our range and outputs, but also proved all-consuming and over-extending of our mere mortal capacities – and this in an epoch of permanent revolutions of university managerialism and corporatism. If we look back across the last two decades merely to report the outputs of Thesis Eleven centre and journal, we have much to be proud of, but it does not record its personal toll. Remarkably, through it all though, Pete still managed to write as well as ever but not always in ways that he had anticipated or on themes or times of his choosing. The irony for both of us was that it was Thesis Eleven that provided the main impetus to endure the horrors and travails of working in the corporate menagerie, but it was also these same projects that multiplied our workloads. 

This can be illustrated by two examples – our expansion of transatlantic cultural and intellectual trafficking to cities and universities and journals in the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean ecumenes (in chronological order) – Manila, Delhi, Trivandrum, Singapore, Bangkok, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Cape Town, Maputo, and Chengdu.  And this is not to mention our commitment to local and regional events in Victoria (particularly exploiting the fact that our own university had regional campuses across the state), but also across Australia, especially in my hometown, Perth. Pete, from the outset of his academic career, was firmly committed to building on his own research interests and Thesis Eleven intellectual networks in Europe and extending these to the Americas. He became – almost despite his own propensity to risk-avoidance – an inveterate traveller, and a very adept and purposive one at that. I don’t think he ever missed the American Sociology Association annual meeting in two decades – and it was through his regular participation in the historical sociology and social theory sections that he became good friends with Jeffrey Alexander, Craig Calhoun, and their like. From there he received invitations to lecture in Mexico City, Brasilia, Toronto, and to bring Americans, south and north, and Europeans alike into each other’s respective orbits and networks via Thesis Eleven. He was carrying the journal’s culture on his back. One example of this was our participation in the International Social Theory Consortium (hereafter ISTC) that was started by Stephen Turner and others but which had pivoted on a transatlantic northern hemisphere axis. Thesis Eleven sent three of us to attend the Sussex conference, and it was there that the consortium organisers asked us to host a meeting in Australia.  We said no, because by then we were committed to shifting our focus to our own corner of the world.  Instead, we offered Southeast Asia as an alternative site. In June, 2005, we linked up with good folks, Professors Habibul Haque Khondker and Hing Ai Yun, Sociology Department, National University of Singapore, to co-host the first and to this date only ISTC annual meeting ever held in Asia. This was but one example of our model for cultural and intellectual traffic: bringing the north back into conversation with the south by people to people encounters in safe and open democratic settings.

Over two decades, we have developed partnerships and projects with universities and journals from across the globe, linking events to special issues of the journal but with a special focus of our energies on the South. If I pioneered this form of work in the Philippines and India, Pete was the initiator of our work with partners in New Zealand, South Africa, and China. Under the auspice of Thesis Eleven, we have organised many workshops, lectures, seminars, festivals, study tours, academic and art exchanges and residencies, and not least journal exchanges, special issues. I now see in retrospect that our model for organising Thesis Eleven teams was partly informed by my early training and employment in the ecumenical movement and the Anglican Communion of Churches: such emphases as ensuring movement between different regions with teams that had senior scholars, special guests, mid-career researchers and postgraduates. This was coupled with our insistence that our team had to stay for at least 10 days onsite and engage in locally organised cultural immersion workshops and tours and exhibitions in the city and its region. Above all, we ensured reciprocity by committing to hosting events in our own backyards that always included our partners from Asia-Pacific. And from Centre to journal, this spun back into establishing a loose confederation of centres associated with Thesis Eleven: Ateneo (Manila), Copenhagen, Delhi, Johannesburg, Leeds, and Yale and ensuring that each centre would send a member to each other’s events and over a longer period take the lead in hosting a workshop/conference with a commitment to publishing a special issue. Perhaps the peak event of this confederation was the ‘Festival of Ideas on Visual Cultures and Popular Media’ in Melbourne, June, 2011, followed by a Thesis Eleven caravan to Manila hosted by Ateneo and having our confreres from Delhi and Johannesburg with us. Two special themed issues of the journal followed in 2012.

If we had engaged in a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis of our journal (membership, network, themes, genre, and forms) in 2000, it would have arguably been in our rational interests to stay on our historic pathway of development by simply doing what we had always done – i.e., continue to build on the journal’s transatlantic and local bases and connections – this would have been more materially comfortable to us personally and intellectually. It was much harder to shift our personal energies and resources to developing readers, writers, and networks in the Asia-pacific and Indian ocean ecumenes, and it was all about learning in dialogical settings, a challenge to received habits, experiences, and knowledge. It was in some sense a quixotic albeit productive adventure into trying to build a different geography of knowledge with new cultural traffic lines for critical theory.

In practical terms, because of our embrace of alternative networking and cheapskate budgets and modes of transport, Pete has had to tolerate many misadventures on the road: an emergency overnight 10 hour drive at high speed from Vigan, northern Luzon to Manila, picked up by the police for speeding twice in one day on a road trip between Auckland and Wellington (I might point out that he was but the passenger and I was the guilty party), all-consuming fiery curries and hotpots in Bangkok, Delhi and Trivandrum, Singapore and Chengdu, lost at night in one of the most dangerous districts of Johannesburg. But then again, stories from on the road are perhaps best left to dinner party recollections over some of Pete’s own favourite wines.  

The second example of our doubled intensive and extensive projections of our Thesis Eleven journal and centre was intimately connected to our immediate teaching responsibilities and researching interests. Pete’s commitment to teaching is an immanent expression of his vocation as scholar/intellectual. It is not uncommon for academics to teach subjects that are essentially an extension of their own research projects but, for Pete, it was also a form of knowledge production in and of itself. This can be seen by tracing the development of our textbook projects and how they related to his own books on Australia. As the biggest sociology department in the Australian national university system in the nineties, Oxford University Press (OUP) approached us to develop a first-year, general sociology primer modelled on the big English textbooks. The challenge was to find some commonality amongst over 30 sociologists and anthropologists with a very diverse set of research interests and methodologies. Whether of a left- or right-wing ideological disposition, baby boomer academics are frequently highly entitled possessive individualists with a profound allergy to cooperation amongst themselves. A successful solution was found first in an elegant conceptual structure provided by – yep, you guessed it – Pete. Social Self, Global culture (Kellehear (Ed.) 1996) was organised like a Babushka nesting doll set: a four-part structure working out from the social self to community to the nation (and state), to globalisation. This structure lent itself readily to teaching a first-year subject – self and community in first semester, nation and ‘globo’ in second semester. Each staff member was granted opportunity to contribute at least one chapter each. Alan Kellehear took on the thankless task of dragooning, marshalling, directing and editing our colleagues’ individual approaches and perspectives from a gesellschaft into some sort of gemeinschaft. When Alan left the department, OUP commissioned Pete and me to edit a second edition (Beilharz and Hogan (Eds.) 2002) and, when they returned again for a third, we said we had a better idea… Well, it was Pete who had the idea in the first place. His big idea he sourced to Bernard Smith (1960) whose book European Vision and the South Pacific is a sui generis classic that has transformed ways of seeing and thinking about the antipodes for historians and anthropologists alike and, as Pete’s own book Imagining the Antipodes (Beilharz 1997) demonstrates, historical sociology and social theory also. Our first edition of Sociology: Place, Time, Division (Beilharz and Hogan (Eds.) 2006) takes its inspiration directly from the title of Smith’s first book on the history of Australian Painting: Place, Taste and Tradition (Smith 1988 [1945]).  As Pete thought of it, we were putting space and place (geography), time (history) back into sociology that for too long had become a specialisation focusing on contemporary forms of sociological division (power, inequality, alienation). I recall the day he first put the proposal to me. With his characteristic penchant for scribbling agendas and ideas on the back of envelopes, he outlined what the textbook might look like. As we were travelling on the ninety-minute train from London Victoria station to Brighton (we were enroute to the ITSC hosted at Sussex University, I think), we thrashed out concepts, themes, titles, authors, aesthetics. With over 85 leading authors from across the disciplines and nation, it took a lot more time and people to bring the project to fruition. Author workshops for one, editorial assistants also. Rules: 2k – 3k-word chapter length, no jargon (any specialist terms had to be defined), only 4 questions and 4 readings listed for each chapter, with the readings as further reading on the subject, not for citation purposes. Photo and map essays. Chapter titles were pithy subject indicators – for part one on place: cities. suburbs. Communities. Regions. Wilderness. Sea lanes. All of this was followed by a series of chapters on specific cities, towns and regions. Edges (Pacific islands, Wellington, Auckland), empires (Britain and Australia and America and Australia). From part two on time: after a section on historical spans of time, there are three sections on culture: living culture (growing up, children, women, men, family), doing culture (work, education, law, consumption, food, religions), performing culture (art, music, sport), live-in culture (e.g., cars, backyards, houses and homes). Part three on division was thematically organised into: movements, margins and identities (migrants, exiles, aboriginal Australians, regulating difference: aborigines in the settler state, freedom rides, the incarcerated), cycles of social division (gender, sexuality, ageing, death, poverty, class, greedy institutions), and instituting public culture (sustainability, social movements, citizenship, solidarity and the state, bureaucracy, policies of inclusion).

The first edition was a hit. At the time, I was teaching first year sociology, so I structured the course accordingly. It was a boom time for sociology with numbers ballooning up to between 700 and 900 students across four campuses in Melbourne and regional Victoria. OUP came back for another edition. Second time round, we made the argument more explicit in our synoptic introduction and concluding (‘The Australian settlement and the New Century’) chapters and changed the subtitle to ‘Antipodean Perspectives’ to make it clear that this was more than a second edition. It represented another 7 years of thinking and teaching about Australian antipodean experiences in a post-nationalist optic – a new world settler capitalist society at ‘the arse end of the world’. It was a challenge put to the discipline of sociology on at least two fronts: 1. sociology’s putatively methodological nationalism of assuming a domestic status of the discipline as teaching about a society contained neatly inside the box called ‘nation state’) and 2. the received pieties of canonical sociology pedagogy – that introductory courses consisted, first, teaching the 3 patriarchs (Marx, Weber, Durkheim as sieved through third hand text book summaries), to focus on 3 or 4 structures of power and inequality (gender, class, ethnicity, and sometimes, disability), and applied  qualitative and quantitative methods. 

This exercise was both grounded in and inspired further projects and initiatives and ideas and writings: not least in Pete’s own essays like ‘Six Ways to Think about Australian Civilisation’ (Beilharz 2015), studies on settler-colonialism and capitalism, and postmodern socialism. But it also can be tracked in our special colloquium and issue on George Seddon, our Trans-Tasman meetings and studies co-hosted with Philippa Mein Smith and Peter Hempenstall at University of Canterbury, Christchurch, caravans to and from south Africa with Peter Vale (Johannesburg) and Noeleen Murray (Cape Town). Perhaps above all, this approach is encapsulated in our co-authored book with Sheila Shaver (with significant research assistance by Amanda Watson) The Martin Presence: Jean Martin and the making of the social sciences in Australia (Beilharz, Hogan, and Shaver 2015). These textbooks, though, are arguably one of the most pleasing legacies of our belated attempt to reinvent the tradition of textbooks at the end of its era in university teaching. Sociology: place time division and Sociology: antipodean perspectives – two iterations that are same but different (like different seasons in the same tv series); they are great fun to read. Both are full of rich overflowing ideas, critical insights and empirical findings, and above all, a kind of ragbag encyclopedia for the twenty first century informed and propelled by some big ideas tucked inside a clear argument developed immanently and explicitly. At the risk of hubris, I played Engels to Pete’s Marx in these projects: the populariser and streamliner of his emergent arguments and thinking. 

Once last comment on Pete as reader – homo academicus as subgenus member of the book culture ecosystem. A modest, careful steward of his own material needs, his only immoderate indulgence is arguably his love of the book as material artefact. Pete is not a bibliophile as antiquarian. Rather, he is immersed in book culture as reader, author, editor, producer, and consumer alike, and, indeed, as a generous informal distributor in the gift economy. Archives, libraries, bookstores across the cities of the world, are equally searched out, lived-in and treasured. Above all, his joy is shared generously with everyone who comes into his circle. Perhaps the best index of Pete as bibliophile is not an admiration of his library (as impressive as it is), but rather Pete as book reviewer (and as book review editor for Thesis Eleven). His range of interests is illuminating, his concision ever-clear in meaning as in expression, his empathy for the intellectual task of critique, revision, imagination, and above his ethical commitment to fairness to author, reader and to the imagined community of the public sphere – all can be found in this much too under-read genre of writing. Pete writes as he reads, reads as he writes, and we are all the richer for it.

Pete is currently teaching postgraduates critical theory, Sichuan University, Chengdu. As I write this encomium, I picture Pete and Sian in their apartment: a domestic tableau of working at a common dining table surrounded by piles of books, tapping away on their computers – with glasses of Riesling at hand. Pete lives as he works, works as he lives – reading, thinking, writing, teaching, reviewing, editing, and sharing generously with colleagues, students and strangers alike. A cosmopolitan at home in the world with his own sense of place: here and there. He ever remains to this day, the quiet, humble, ambivalent (he, after all, gets the blues and especially the sweet doleful tones of BB and EC, of Phil and SRV), ethical, sagacious, ironic, and decent person.  

Long may you run, Pete. And to quote you one more time: ‘Thanks, pal!’.  

References

Beilharz P (1992a) Labour’s Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy. New York: Routledge.

Beilharz P (1992b) Social Theory: A Guide to Central Thinkers. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. 

Beilharz P (1994) Postmodern Socialism: Romanticism, City and State. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. 

Beilharz P (1997) Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Beilharz P (1998) Civilizing Capitalism? Game Over, Insert Coins. In Bolitho, H and Wallace-Crabbe C (eds.) Approaching Australia: Papers from the Harvard Australian Studies Symposium. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp 217-223.

Beilharz P (2000) Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity. Thousand Oaks: Sage. 

Beilharz P (2015). Thinking the Antipodes: Australian Essays. Clayton: Monash University Press.

Beilharz P (2021) Circling Marx: Essays 1980-2020. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 

Beilharz P (2021) Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism. New York: Routledge.

Beilharz P, Considine M, Watts R (1992) Arguing About the Welfare State: The Australian Experience. Sydney: Allen & Unwin

Beilharz P, Hogan T (2002) Social Self Global Culture 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beilharz P, Hogan T (2006) Sociology: Place, Time and Division. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Beilharz P, Hogan T (2012) Sociology: Antipodean Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Beilharz P, Hogan T, Shaver S (2015) The Martin Presence: Jean Martin and the Making of the Social Sciences in Australia. Randwick: NewSouth Books. 

Curtis DA (1997) Introduction. Thesis Eleven 49(1): iii-v.

Hall J (1989) The State. Maidenhead: Open University Press. 

Kellehear A (Ed) (1996) Social Self, Global Culture: An Introduction to Sociological Ideas. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Rasmussen D (1997) Philosophy and Social Criticism. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Smith B (1960) European Vision and the South Pacific. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Smith B (1978) Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian since Seventeen Eighty-Eight (2nd Edition). Melbourne: Oxford University Press.  

Smith B (1988 [1945]) Australian Painting: Place, Taste, and Tradition (2nd Edition). Melbourne: Oxford

University Press. 

Thompson E P (1963) The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Biographic Information

Trevor Hogan undertook his doctorate under the supervision of Peter Beilharz (1989-1995) where he also taught in sociology at La Trobe University between 1989 and 2020 and is currently an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow. Trevor was an editor of Thesis Eleven journal for 25 years and Deputy Director, Thesis Eleven Centre, La Trobe University, 2003 to 2014. When Peter Beilharz retired in 2014, he took on the Directorship until his own retirement in 2020. Trevor was also founding Director, Philippines Australia Studies Centre (2003-2020). His research interests are in historical and cultural sociology. Many of Trevor’s scribblings can be found on researchgate.org.