Peter Beilharz is the only one of the three founding editors of Thesis Eleven to have remained with the journal over the decades since 1980. Three generations of editors joined him in its progress from the tiny, self-financed Australian journal born in Room 681 of the Menzies Building, at Monash University, but he alone saw it through to its transition into a major international journal of the Left, outlasting many other journals born in the same decade. His early energy and enthusiasm, his tenacity, flair and insights accompanied him through the years. On this account alone, he merits the ‘sobriquet’ of ‘Father of T11’ (Thesis Eleven), inspiring its particular qualities and its enduring connectedness with contemporary debate, while keeping progressive hope alive.

So, I believe that much in the infant Thesis Eleven is owed to Peter’s personal quality of ‘enthusiastic sobriety’; of loyalty to the heritage of those he saw as his sources of inspiration. Despite its pretension that its object was to bring advanced non-Anglo theory to the Australian Left, in fact, T11 was, because of its connections, also very much part of an Australian and global cultural movement, of a transforming Australian and global labour, a world where ‘ethnics’ were taking over in many domains: unions, social organisations, and politics. I will try to evoke that world – the post-68 era – mostly from memory, as it risks being overlooked in a focus on what the jourrnal sought to bring to radical thought. 

‘Sociologically’, Peter was the child of social forces, or, if you prefer, class relations, at a particular time in Australia and the world as well as being the author of his and the journal’s destinies. For me, Peter and the infant Thesis Eleven incarnated a seachange that was taking place in Australia and globally. Peter grew up in this new Australia and, in its gestatory days, so did T11. To my mind, this being in touch with an evolving world is what explains the journal’s success while rival efforts of great worth bit the dust after a decade.

Peter, Before Thesis Eleven

So let me start with my friend, Peter, as I remember him. He came on my horizon late in the 1970s as a MA candidate. I got to know him and whence he came over the next decade when the community between the first editors became clearer in our joint lived battles with the Australian intellectual world that we faced, whose power brokers wished to smash much that he and Julian Triado and I wanted to introduce. Only now does that community seem blindingly obvious.

The 1960s had seen the mass arrival of ‘working class’ students in the academy. They expressed a new ‘common sense’ that the ruling hegemony could not tolerate. In 1980, the ultra-conservative political and academic Australian world still wished not only to roll back the youthful hopes of 1968, but also to stop the change in global class relations that found one expression in mass education.

We need to keep in mind two major shifts of the 1970s that contradicted each other. The change in social relations in post-1968 Australia marked the end of the dominant nationalist framework of ‘old’ Australia for understanding the ‘great and terrible’ world. But by the seventies, the ‘68 generation’ of ‘new’ Australians who embodied that change was living through a period of defeat, not only politically, but culturally.

Peter became an object of discrimination by conservative decision-makers in a very particular way. He had been spotted while a student at Rusden teachers’ college (becoming a teacher was what smart working class childen then did!) as an exceptionally brilliant student. Rusden had become a university in the sea change that was taking place socially. The spotter was a teacher of political theory, a man of the cloth. This very upright, honest, but traditional, man, Dr. Duncan, felt that Peter should be at Monash where – in tandem with his courses at Rusden – he taught political theory. There Peter’s problems began.

The very conservative head of the Department of Politics at Monash, aping Oxbridge, or maybe, LSE, assumed the stance of a defender of standards against the hordes of the mentally unwashed who might make it in through such holes in the dike. He insisted that Peter should pass with honours an impossible number of courses each preliminary year before achieving postgrad status and being admitted to MA candidacy. Well, he did it, convincing even conservative political philosophy teachers of his talent. The Cold Warrior professor was put on the back foot. Indeed, the Augean labour stood Peter in good stead as he had to read, learn, and inwardly digest not only Marx but also Weber in his progress.

His response was to set up Thesis Eleven together with another student, and with me, smiling benevolently in the background. As a young, radical lecturer, I had felt sorry for him and was pleased when he chose me as his thesis supervisor. I too had been victim of the said Professor, who, curiously – and this tells us much about the sea change of which T11 was an expression – had a social background not unlike ours as a child of a European migrant family fleeing conditions in old Europe a generation before. He had chosen to go with the old world, which certainly ruled, but was now being sapped by the waves of new people like us, flooding into Anglo-Irish Australia.

Those were the days when the heady hopes of 1968 were giving way to a need to take stock of the received truths of the Left. What had been worsted in 1968 included the Communist solutions, and its ‘theory’.

Except in its various Communist declensions, marxism had been banned from debate in the academy duing the Cold War. Peter’s thesis marked his coming to terms with such realities and with an erstwhile consciousness that had been informed by Trotskyism. It was published in 1987. Thesis Eleven was also to be a response to the void in such matters. The first number of T11 was entitled ‘Whither Marxism?’ (Editorial 1980). The name of the journal emphasized the theory in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ and the Editorial contained these words: ‘… the struggle for socialism depends on the politicization of theory and the theorization of politics’ (Editorial 1980: 2). With hindsight, more importantly, it emphasised the need to connect with ‘everyday life’ and that marxism establish its truths in an open debate.

The Gramscian and Lefebvrian tonalities, a staple of the seventies Left debate, are not what I wish to highlight. Rather, it is what ‘everyday life’ meant for Peter and, more generally, for the other early editors. It was our ‘everyday life’: that of migrant, or ‘ethnic’, suburban dwellers in a triple fronted brick veneer Australia, which, in 1975, had known its first reactionary coup d’état, peaceful and a bit theatrical, but one in which the ‘rule of law’ ousted the democratically chosen leader! We must acknowledge that we were somehow populists, but we were a new, not an old, Australian populism. The old won the majority in the post-coup elections, anyway!

And what did it mean to be new and yet Australian? It did not mean a rupture with Australia. Australia was changing and we were part of that change, that is, in touch with the evolving world, with its ‘everyday life’. We were ‘new’ Australians; and there were ‘old’ Australians. Peter wrote much later: ‘Growing up in Croydon, in the 1960s, of humble roots, displaced people in a far-flung suburb, it never occurred to me personally that Australian culture was poor, or that we were inferior, in economic or social terms’ (Beilharz 1994 : 220). Nevertheless, the old Australians’ majority was not embedded in Australia in the same way as we were, whether on the Right or the Left. They saw Australia as a world, distinctly theirs, which they had inherited. Their fathers and mothers, brave pioneers, had opened up an ‘uninhabited’ land. They were determined to keep the story that way. Theirs was a British world, whose national history was romanticized and ignored all the negative stories about it. The conservative leader who had mounted the ‘coup’ of 1975 had a favorite saying: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ If only this opposition to change had been limited to conservatives! Peter’s and the journal’s problems were also with the Australian Left, equally convinced that Australia was free of the vices of the old world. In their version of the national story, almost Rousseauian in its nature, they half-believed that it was still ‘a working man’s paradise’! Outsiders should learn from it, like Albert Métin, as they had over half a century earlier. In sum, the line of demarcation was as much ethnic as it was class.

It was not five years later, in 1980, that a ‘new Australian’ captured the outcome of this attitude in a song where ethnics were told ‘shuddup ya face’. The old Left sneer about individuals who were concerned with ‘wanky’ theory found ‘over there’ became an aggressive challenge to T11. It was an incessant reminder that bourgeois hegemony had triumphed in Australia, where nearly all respected theory had been coined in the Mother Country, where the pragmatism of the Common Law held sway. The major significant venture by the old academy into marxism post-68 was in a thesis entitled ‘Marx and Mill’ (Duncan 1973) – a sort of reconciliation of the new and the old.

Let’s come back to Peter. He was born in Australia into a community of postwar immigrants with strong characteristics. They were German Templars, whose history as a Christian sect went back for centuries as they fled persecution of one sort or another. That history was even written down in the Beilharz book, not unlike those family bibles with all the names of the sucessive generations on the frontispiece, but ‘annotated’. This close-knit community, sticking hard to its traditions, had established itself in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs as chicken farmers. The photos show a huge blond haired family, of very Teutonic looks! They intermarried: Peter’s first wife, Dor, also belonged. The ruling virtues of hard work, thrift, and mutual aid made them workers of an almost medieval quality, proud artisans, unlike the factory worker in Marx and Engels, and unlike the Oz worker, though both shared a sort of cross-class, almost ‘petty bourgeois’, position in society as small property owners.

Melbourne caught up with the semi-rural periphery, and Peter went to Croydon high school. This is where his ethnic past blended with old Australian realities in many ways that I think are important. Of the three first editors of T11, he was the most accultured into everyday life as it was transforming itself in the postwar migratory waves. Julian Triado was a middle class Australian lad of non-Anglo descent. He had not known what it was to flee. I was born into the motley imperial settler class of the British Empire and only migrated on a ten pound fare in 1958. Neither of us shared in the popular culture of the suburbs that Peter did: He was a longhaired, Jesus-like drummer in a successful pop band that played on TV in the much watched competition of amateur bands. His brother was really into the rock scene. Nevertheless, there began in him that curious cultural symbiosis of immigrants, looking sideways as well as backwards for guidance and also establishing roots in everyday life, in an unexperienced past and a common future with those around. Metaphorically, the ideological world of ‘new’ Australians was both geographic and historical. Old Australians’ horizons stopped geographically at the national frontiers. We came from ‘over the horizon’. And we were taking over culturally: There were just too many of us to be obliterated as had been the fate of the Aborigines. Peter’s siblings and peers moved up socially over the years in what was called an aspirational progression: Peter became a university professor of international note.

Peter’s personal formation at school encapsulated many of the nuances of this history. Of course, not all old Australians were reactionaries attached to Anglo values or full of resentment against the new world. Peter had the fortune while at high school to have one of the anomalies as his teacher: Norm Saffin. He interviewed him for the first issue of T11. Here are some of his words: Saffin

… was fortunate to find at Croydon High School an administration which, recognising his talents, allowed him to teach only Sixth Form histories as well as literature – an old and constant love – without the tedious routine of yard duty and the associated encumbrances. Saffin’s practice in these years was to cultivate students, turning those enthused and approved of (including the interviewer) onto a long and winding road of radical scholarship. Scattered throughout Melbourne and further afar are students who still speak with great affection of Doc Saff , who still feel an incommunicable debt to him for the enlightenment which they were to receive in the deserts of the eastern suburbs.

Beilharz 1980a: 121

Peter noted Saffin’s ‘tragedy’: his written work was often ‘met with rejection or silence’ because of his ‘lack of entrepreneurial publishing initiative’ (Beilharz 1980a: 122). This disgraceful coda reminded me of the treatment that Raphael Lemkin, to whom we owe the definition of genocide, knew in postwar New York, in a society much less closed than Australia. Lemkin’s death went almost unnoted. So how did Peter’s first mentor attach him to Australia while providing him with a new way of seeing it?

Norm Saffin

Norm epitomized a story of struggling small farmers in the Western District of Victoria, dominated by ‘squatter’ landlords, sometimes of Scottish stock, who had sometimes converted to Presbyterianism on the boat out. Not having finished school, he left to work as an agricultural labourer and then in the Depression as a rabbiter and a mail contractor, to end as a primary school teacher in Cobden in order to have some security. He was a classic ‘battler’, and, at first, an autodidact. He understood his own economic and social world as it was seen by the Australian Left. He was ‘agin the system’ but admitted to having a nationalist attachment. Despite eschewing political attachments, he was greatly affected by the Spanish Civil War and was clearly a Left sympathizer in the thirties and during the Cold war years. He pursued his education part time, gaining an MA and then, on scholarship, a PhD in London. Postwar, most people of that experience returned almost automatically to university chairs in Australia. Not Norm, who ended up working as a high school teacher for the battlers he knew.

The social origins that pushed him Left did not free him entirely from the Anglo solutions to the ‘great and terrible’ world. A.J. Ayer was a hero even in 1980. At Melbourne and later in London, he had studied history and philosophy, imbibing that curious Anglo mix where English history and political theory went hand in hand. He found novelties like oral history, which is, after all, what the working class has in the absence of formal training, too undisciplined. Yet, in all this, we can distinguish a quality that liberated him from rigid adherence to British historiography and political thought. Rather, he went beyond such limits. This is what enthused his students.

Certainly, he had been introduced to the Greeks at Melbourne University, like all those who went to Oxford. But he remained more a historian than a philosopher, if being a historian demands more than an attachment to clear scientific thinking. Saffin recalled in the interview in T11:

… the Melbourne University History School was further to the left then than now. Under R.M. Crawford, a good stalwart left-liberal, the attitude to marxism was fairly friendly, using it as an ideology which helped to make sense of a conflicting world. I don’t think Melbourne History was rigid in its interpretation of marxism – the staff weren’t dogmatic, but students could be dogmatic without being penalised.

Beilharz 1980b:126

In sum, it was not unlike its British models at the time. Crawford himself was one of those super- erudite specialists of the Italian Renaissance who dazzled Italians with his knowledge of details of Italian history. Later, he became a fervent anti-Communist, denouncing colleagues during the Cold War. But, while in the History Department, Norm had a whiff of an Anglo intellectual world that in the thirties and during the Cold war was being ‘contaminated’ by marxism and Italian historicism before reverting to type with Lewis Namier. Saffin, again synthesing what he learnt in those years, said:

All [those AD] facts tended to congeal into what I’d call natural law thinking. It seems tome that people – up against an amazing variety of evidence tend to choose that which gives meaning in terms of their own lives. Over and over again I came across this tendency for people to argue that ‘this is the way it is, it can’t very well be any other way, there is your evidence, how could you interpret it otherwise?’- and strangely enough my first volume in the labor history, I come across as a natural historian, but on an empîrical basis.

Beilharz 1980b: 127

 On my desk in front of me is a typescript by Norm Saffin. Its title is ‘Australia and the Enlightenment’, written long after his university years, in the 1980s judging from the footnotes, in which he relates pre-French Revolutionary thought to Australia. It merits publication. His extensive learning in the English language literature in such domains is clear, and, maybe, also that Peter was already feeding him other ways of thinking of French provenance, like Roland Barthes. He knew how to listen. In his mind, Australia was becoming part of a ‘Pacific’ history. So, the young Peter, on his way home after school, meeting the Australian workers leaning on their shovels at Croydon station in a caricature of their own self-image – everyday life – was also exposed to French or ‘enlightened’ thought.

Norm was, then, both a point of contact with ‘everyday life’ for Peter, and a bridge to new ways of thinking about it. Norm was so ‘old’ Australian and yet he was evolving towards something new, carried there partly by his own everyday life. Outside Norm’s house, a typical suburban home, with Norm greeting us in tie and dark suit (Peter remembers that I wore a red tie back then; shorts in seminars came later!), he expressed, like most Leftists of his generation, a connection with working life as it had been until after the Second World War. He reminded me of all the old Comms I had interviewed twenty years earlier, in the 1960s: serious but smiling. Inside was the most magnificent private library I had ever seen in Australia, not only packed with Labour history sources but also with ways of interpreting that story, sadly now dispersed.

Alone, his influence might not have amounted to much except as a process of benevolent integration of the newcomer into an ‘old’ Australia. But, there were many influences in T11’s early years that reinforced Norm’s bridging or ‘cross-over’ influence. A particular friend of Peter was Julian (Jules) Triado, his founding co-editor. Despite the ‘ethnic’ name, Jules was a scion of a leading Melbourne legal family and his father a notable of Roman Catholic Victoria. Being a Catholic was not a pass to success in ‘old Australia’. ‘Old’ Australia was ruled by White Anglo-Irish Protestants. The first Catholic Minister of Government was appointed in 1966 to a furore! But Jules turned out to be influential in T11 and unexpectedly useful through the contacts he provided in the legal and political Left of the Labor Party.

The journal needed money to survive, and Jules found solutions. One aspect highlighted how much we were part of an Australian counter-culture, despite our aspirations to bring new theory to our readers. The background to that story is this: Jules’ dad had spent some time in Rome at the Australian embassy and consular services, as the first waves of southern Italians, fleeing la miseria, made Australia their destination. Ray Triado began a life-long love affair with Italy and matters Italian. He even translated Trilussa, the Roman dialectal poet and columnist whose folkloric stories in romanaccio enthralled Italian readers of the early 1900s. None of that was particularly radical and Trilussa was at best apolitical. But he did know how to mock even the fascists and get away with a general laugh. It was a tradition that could be traced back to Boccaccio (he died on the same day as Boccaccio had, centuries earlier), incarnating a populist tradition of mocking the powers that be, also a legendary Austaralian quality for Left populists. Besides being highly cultivated, Ray opened up to Italian migrants while ‘old’ Australia still saw them as factory fodder. Jules was brought up in that environment.

I emigrated to Australia in 1958 on a ship that also brought that generation of Italian migrants to the great south land, the place of hope for us all. The experience of the miseria was marked on their depressed faces and in their custom of hoarding the breakfast leftovers in their pockets for a rainy day. Their main attitude to the world was the menefreghismo I had known in 1950s Rome. It was this populist attitude that, through Jules and me, reached Peter, to complement his suburban experience.

To get some money and because of our contacts with Italian migrant associations like the Federazione italiana di lavoratori emigrati e famiglie, we embarked on the short-lived adventure of the Osteria, where early T11 meetings took place, alongside spaghetti and rough red. A bit of a shambles, like all of us. If I remember rightly, Osteria got some sort of grant for young entrepreneurs from the Labor government and some of us were part of that: of the post-68 culture. Jules and I were the links.

Osteria

The cooks, waiters, and clients of the upstairs restaurant/drop in centre came mostly from Fitzroy and Coburg, the area where incoming Italian migrants lived. T11-ers went there, too. Ofttimes, the Italians were ex- or current PCI members who had set up the Australian Federation of that party, leading to memorable battles with the state in the seventies. Symbolically, Osteria bridged the suburbia Peter grew up in, where he felt at home, and the new places for migrants. Once, his parents, new migrants, had lived around there. Our Italo-Australian friends went into local politics while keeping us in contact with what was happening in Italy, as all sorts of Lefties, feminists and others arrived on mission or simply to see the new Italy that was emerging in Melbourne. Many of the names associated with the baby T11, effaced by time, came from that world. I recall, in addition to those who are today household names in Australia, Stefano de Pieri and Frank Schiavoni, who lived just up the road, and experienced, despite his qualifications and culture, an embittering exclusion from the still Anglo-dominated academy, although he later made a successful career in government. Peter has maintained close contact up to this day with some of the Italians who drank with us, became Italo-Australians, and carved out a different ‘everyday (Australian) life’ from that of 1980.

Peter did not become a Gramscian as a result. What he did get was ‘everyday life’ as it was changing in an Australia where soon newcomers, immigrants like many around Osteria, would amount to 27 plus percent of the population. We took for granted their points of reference. In the first number of the journal, Jules presented the now famous debate between Gramsci and his colleagues about the anti-Parliament, which we saw as opening up a reconsideration by marxism of democracy. The close-to-the-ground pragmatism of the new migrant mass, including some of our friends at Osteria, led them to join the Australian Labor party (ALP), to seek to push it leftwards in a classic base-level democratic progress. By keeping in tune with their ‘everyday life’, Peter was keeping up with the times. La Trobe University opened in the eastern suburbs in 1967: That is where Peter made his career. It became the ‘Greek’ university because of its catchment area, but some of our Italo-Australian friends went there to study. 

I remained the Neanderthal about such matters as culinary politics, a firm defender of ‘marxism’ in the face of such post-68 frivolity! What do I mean by that? I mean that I remained an apostle of an activist marxism that had been appropriate once, while Peter, through remaining more immersed in the new ‘everyday life’, lived its defeat quite early. Marxism of my sort was on the way out in the 1980s, so too was Gramscism. Peter said as much by 1990 when he wrote:

As regards the specific status of marxism itself, the death of communism ought to be applauded, but the passing of marxism asks for a good wake, the emphasis of which remains on the living, their hopes and their fears. For it was such hopes and fears which orginally brought the labour movement and its successors into being, and it is such hopes and fears, each duly heightened, which remain the central motifs of the human condition into the new century … As Karl Kautsky once wrote, if capitalism could give us our hopes and deliver us from our fears, socialists would then be obliged to become capitalists. The chances would seem to suggest something else, and so long as this remains the case, there will be something like socialism and something like radical scholarship in Australia, for there will remain in the European tradition intellectuals who identify themselves as socialists.

Beilharz 1990: 8-9

With hindsight, I think Peter took the better path and kept T11 on the up and up. The Communist Australian Left Review, which took roughly my approach in the eighties, has disappeared and the new journals, like Intervention, on whose editorial board I sat, inspired by Althusserianism, quickly bit the dust because of their divorce from what was really happening in the population of Australia and globally. Attempts to unite with our main rival, Arena, came to nothing. It is interesting to note the more ‘old’ Australian composition of its editorial board and its attachment to a certain rural working class legend.

After I had left T11 in 1984-5, Peter devoted his work as an intellectual in the late eighties and early nineties to reconsidering the social democratic possibilities in an evolving ‘everyday life’ (e.g. Transforming Labor (Beilharz 1994), Labour’s Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy (Beilharz 1992), ‘The Australian Left – Beyond Labourism?’ (Beilharz 1986)). His references were to continental European thought. Only much later did he look to the Anglo, US and British, traditions. He does not appear to have considered an active political career. But, seeking guidelines in that ‘European [non Anglo AD] tradition’ raised the question of what it was to be an antipodean, which he had apparently not thought of as complicated as a Croydon suburbian.

So this brings us to the ‘young’ Lukács school, whose participation in T11 he had sought from the outset.

The ‘Young’ Lukácsians

In the late seventies, many prominent intellectuals whom we knew as the ‘young Lukács’ school’ (also known as the Budapest School) had moved to Australia. In Melbourne in 1980, there were Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér in NSW, György and Maria Markus, and in South Australia, Iván Szelényi. The Lukácsians were mainly sociologists, except for György Markus. But they wrote political theory and philosophy of a very high quality. Several of these disciples of Lukács wrote for the journal from the outset. So did their friends, like Johann Arnason. We saw them on an almost weekly basis, and some shared holidays, kids, and illnesses with us. However, despite their presence, the young Lukács school did not dominate the baby journal. We were simply open to a wide range of radical thinkers of continental European provenance. Only later did their influence become overwhelmingly obvious, especially to our critics.

Our networks, which antedated their presence, but now included some of them, were, on reflection, all somehow ‘new’ Australian, either personally or through marriage, and frequently Communist sympathisers. The young Lukácsians slotted in easily into those networks despite the fact that all the Lukácsians were disillusioned Communists who had lived under ‘real’ Communism. Agnes Heller was already almost deified by Italian Communists and some Leftists. Certainly, the young Lukácsians were bearers of a European tradition that was way more than marxism-leninism, which they hated. They were heirs to György Lukács’ interpretation of marxist philosophy, though themselves not tainted by his notorious compromise with the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Communist regime.

Their prestige and their erudition were such that, though not editors, T11 was seen by many Australians, me included, as providing a vehicle for their sort of theory. We were a sort of antipodean Telos, albeit less sophisticated. Feri Fehér’s thunderous anathema against Jacobinism in all its forms was in line with a certain idealist hegelo-marxist tradition which, grosso modo, we endorsed. New Left Review and Perry Anderson’s critique of Western marxism were not T11’s model. Our personal contacts in Europe were frequently with the Lukácsian’s friends like Cornelius Castoriadis. T11 became a place of high theory discussing world problems. It was, I write in defence of T11, a period when, faced with a dearth of native traditions of radical thought, we all tended to seek solutions from elsewhere. 

Australian ‘everyday life’, that is, us, was not the Lukácisans’ major concern. Nor did they look there to find theoretical solutions. Admittedly, I too was guilty of wanting the then variety of Gramsci to become a passe partout. But my express hope was that T11 would also be a way of rediscovering native traditions, which showed another Australia whose worldviews were more than those of old Australia and of Communist Party doctrine. This quickly became a pious hope, or so I thought. For example, in T11, I, Steve Wright, another postgraduate in Peter’s cohort, wrote an article on John Dawson, who had been responsible for the introduction of council communism in Victoria before marxism-leninism became the only marxism in town. It was both novel in its content and its interest, but little similar followed. Steve slowly distanced himself from T11, later becoming a major scholar of Italian Left Communism. He, incidentally, married into an Italian migrant family and years later regaled me with when to buy the leftover tomatoes at the Vic Market. His migrant family used to turn them into sauce in the backyard, to much mirth and drink. We were surprised ‘old’ Australia had not banned that activity as it had with raising chickens: chickens in the backyard were not part of right-wing Australian popular culture, although they did continue on the Left! In sum, Steve too belonged to a ‘new Australia’: he ‘outmarried’.

In 1984, my error, as a Communist sympathiser and as a Gramscian marxist affiché, was to confuse the Lukácsian’s role in T11 with the contents of their work: Their solutions were too consumerist and individualist for my taste and too in tune with what was happening in North America where Communists were persecuted, as I knew from personal experience. I continue to believe that individualist solutions are ineffective and will lead to disaster for humanity in the long run. On the other hand, today, I realize that, methodologically, sticking to my revolutionary guns was no different from the Lukácsians sticking to theirs. We were all looking backwards for inspiration – for masters and mistresses and thus for mastery of an everyday life that had gone beyond such solutions. It led us to the same impasse vis à vis the journal.

The Lukácsians understood their task as that of preaching the idea of power from below, a sort of Leninism in reverse. So, curiously, we – the Lukácsians and me – were in agreement. We remained attached to the idea of a journal of ideas, which Iskra-like would be the spark for a fire of social change. The inherent elitism of such a conception of a journal and its role was not at the front of our minds and it sat ill with an Australia, which, whether old or new, Left or Right, took a much more prosaic view of things: a journal was read and, then, used as TP (toilet paper) in the thunder boxes on the building sites on which I worked in Canberra! Going back to the shearer’s strikes of the 1890s, this dual function had not been seen as a lack of respect: the printed word was not a Bible; some of its ideas might remain because they rang tru-ish but then ….

Seen from today’s perspective, my 1984 fear that Peter and the journal were losing themelves in extreme theoreticism had no basis; his apparent fickleness – he had many and changing sources of inspiration – was a source of strength whose significance can be seen when linked to another quality, already there from the beginning: his sociology as history, and antipodean history redefined at that. Peter and his T11 were emancipating themselves from both Lukácsian and Gramscian theory and looking forward, thus renouncing control of the debate. For the journal and for Peter, even if we were unconscious of the fact, the Lukácsians thus were one way of establishing bridgeheads connected with everyday life in a new form, raising new problems. They were Leftists who were fleeing official doctrine. And so, it became clear, was T11.

By the new century Peter had, of course, found new theoretical inspiration and new sources of theory though he duly acknowledged all the previous ones. One, for example, was Zygmunt Bauman (Zygmunt Bauman: Dialect of Modernity (Beilharz 2000)). These added new visions to those promoted for Australia and the world by the Lukácsians. But they were desacralised. He had also established his particular style of writing, free from the themes and jargon of our ‘Left’ debate. This enabled him to reach new audiences who found our work too difficult or too stodgy.

Because of his historical sociology bent – his interest in ‘everyday life’ in Australia – Peter accompanied the theoretical dérive of the 1980s (my view at the time) with detailed studies of Australian movements and figures. So, in early years, nearly all his articles, and books, and they were an impressive list by 2000, were much more sociological history than ‘theory’ understood as coming from a Lukácsian high. His ‘historicism’ would be his abiding strength and ultimately make his post-marxism consistent for me with my marxism. To paraphrase Gramsci: you can only remain faithful to marxism by not being a marxist, by not being faithful only to the letter of the master! It took time for that to sink in, but it did. For example, in 1992 Peter became a friend and near disciple of Bernard Smith, ‘Australia’s greatest living thinker’ according to Paul Hirst, once a marxist and always progressive. This new interest hinted at Peter’s innovating strengths: his readiness to bridge disciplinary frontiers, to break hermetic rules of ‘scholarship’. By his own admission, the near decade of work of the 1980s brought him face to face with the need to address post-modernity in a heretofore modernist journal where too much was measured by the past and not enough by the future.

By the mid-1990s, he was asking what it was to be an Australian, raising to a conscious level what I have argued was unconsciously in question from 1980. I like to think this interrogation went back to Saffin’s assertion in the first issue of T11 that Australia was part of a wider international history, a result rather than an author of its nationhood, of its particularity. More realistically, it seems that Saffin was on a trajectory where Australian history became part of Pacific history, an idea which joined up with Bernard Smith’s genial views. Understanding national history and identity, thus came back to ‘perspective’ for both (in Beilharz 1980a). Consider these lines from Imagining the Antipodes:

What might it mean to be an antipodean? To be other, displaced, a reflex of metropolitan culture, and yet part of it, elsewhere? In Smith’s way of thinking, to be antipodean is to be constructed into a relationship; the antipodes is not a place, though its image is often projected upon a place away from Europe, like that which we inhabit. Being antipodean, within the British frame of reference, was like a punishment of some kind or another, to do with the place felons were sent, or idiotic cousins or reprobates. Yet Australians were also exiles, in some way or another, as well as invaders. The antipodes are invented by imperialism … The antipodes are not nowhere, they are at the other pole, the other end, connected vitally to the centre because imagined and held by it. Our antipodes, our Australia, is not just anywhere invisible ‘down there’, they are specifically Europe’s antipodes, unspeakable European embarassments or else laughable local oddities.

Beilharz 1997: 97

For me this marks a ‘self-awareness’ of the unconscious social relations that I have suggested existed unconsciously for baby T11: we were not really thinking like master or slave but like both. Little ideas from a periphery could take on a global importance because of the new perspectives that were being created.

With Peter’s individual segue from how to renovate the Australian Labor Party into interest in local thinkers like Bernard Smith came changes to T11 that seem significant. Peter pointed out that the first generation, including the Lukácsians, moved on at the end of the 1980s, losing the near daily contact that was so important in explaining their influence. Feminists and ecologists joined the inner circles even before the 1990s. New editors like Trevor Hogan marked an extended geographical focus on Southeast Asia, emerging as a major force in the region and the source of a new migrant influx to Australia after the end of the Vietnam War and Hong Kong’s return to China. To that we can add Peter’s new connections in South Africa.

I believe his thought and, the raison d’être of T11, was broached in the 1990s with his meeting with Smith, when he tried to link national to the universal. As his mentor, Saffin, explained back in 1980, because of its vastness, history, the universal, cannot be grasped positively: There is no final truth, just contesting visions, one of which will become dominant in what I would call a hegemonic process. No longer can there be Bibles of any sort, not even Marx. There are just recipes, proposed solutions, of infinite variety, of whose value the mass of humans and, maybe, all living beings, must decide in an endless struggle of ideologies, some or one of which may persuade a sufficient majority to act in a particular direction. Without that enlarged political process things will remain as they are. All ideas or theories are, thus, subject to the condition – something that Peter states in his last lines of Imagining the Antipodes – that they must be debated with everyone.

Given where intellectual debate is today, with its irreverence for old shibboleths, this was a very early intimation of the human concerns that come to vex us twenty years later. Where even the nature of nature is in question, only the most benighted of reactionaries can believe that by trotting out the opinion of the ‘expert’ they will win the debate. The mass must be persuaded of one’s point of view, in a host of conflicting perspectives. That means talking to them in their languages. Moreover, one point of view may throw light on the other and vice versa. None are completely wrong, they just become inadequate. Those who are horrified at this ‘everybody’s’ philosophy, have not grasped that, even as the role of ‘those who know’ (T11?) apparently changed and diminished (there is little or nothing in it of the ‘twelve wise men are worth a hundred fools’ of Lenin’s (1901) What is to be Done? left in today’s T11), debate has in fact become much more open and addressed a much wider audience, a real public where everybody is a ‘philosopher’.

So Peter, who expressly grasped the importance of straddling cultures in the conclusion to his book about Bernard Smith’s vision, shifted from theoretical to ideological concerns in the 1990s – I like to think in a Gramscian way – of which many traces remain with him and with T11. It is in the ‘commonsense’ of everyday life that we will find what is good sense through mutual exchange and persuasion. The era of expertise ending in the Hidden God is over. 

Peter’s interest in local thinkers was already there by 1990. Those who figure in his 1990 article on marxism and its future were all recognizably on the Left. Contrarily, in the new century, Peter became interested in the sociologist Jean Martin, the pioneer of the study of ethnic and refugee minorities in Australia, to my shame unknown to me. Together with Hogan and Sheila Shaver, he published The Martin Presence: Jean Martin and the Making of the Social Sciences in Australia (Beilharz 2015) whose contents and theme reflected orientations that went back to the foundation of the T11 Centre at La Trobe University in 2001 and to Sociology : An Antipodean Perspective (Beilharz and Hogan (eds) 2012), published with Oxford University Press in 2012. The early marxist theoreticism is barely discernible anymore. He was, and is, fascinated by everyday life, difference seen in perspective. Like everyone he has a ‘point of view’. So does T11. Is it ‘Green is the tree of life, dust grey is theory’?

References

Beilharz P (1980a) N.W. Saffin: Presentation. Thesis Eleven 1(1): 121-122.

Beilharz P (1980b) Politics in History: An Interview with N.W. Saffin Thesis Eleven 1(1): 123-135.

Beilharz P (1986) The Australian Left: Beyond Labourism ? Socialist Register (1985-86): 210-232.

Beilharz P (1990) Australian Radical Scholarship in the Wake of Marxism’, Political Theory Newsletter, 2: 1-9.

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

Beilharz P (1994) Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade in Australia. New York: Cambridge University Press. 

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

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

Beilharz P and Hogan T (eds) (2012) Sociology: An Antipodean Perspective. 2^nd ed, New York: Oxford University Press.

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

Duncan G (1973): Marx and Mill : Two Views of Social Conflict and Social Harmony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Editorial (1980) Thesis Eleven 1(1): 2-6.

Lenin, V (1901) What is to be Done? Stuttgart: Dietz.

Biographic Information

Alastair Davidson is an Emeritus Professor, Monash. He has been Raoul Wallenberg Professor of Human Rights, Rutgers University, Member of the Human Rights Program of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Professor of Government, University of Sydney. He was a founding editor of Thesis Eleven, Intervention and Australian Left Review. He is one of the fathers of English-language Gramsci studies. He is the author of Antonio Gramsci: The Man His Ideas (1969); Antonio Gramsci: Towards and Intellectual Biography (1977); ‘Gramsci, Hegemony and Globalisation’, Kasarlinan, 2005 (20(2) : 4-37) ; and ‘Gramsci, Stuart Hall e popolo inglese’, Critica Marxista, May-August 2007 (3-4 :25-35); among others.