I have known Peter Beilharz since 1983. We first met in post-graduate intellectual circles in Melbourne. For thirty of those forty years I worked with Peter as a co-editor of the social theory journal Thesis Eleven from 1990 to 2020. So, I got to know Peter’s intellectual style pretty well. We generally had cordial relations but sometimes the relations were frosty. In our case the differences that we had were more political than they were clashes of personality, though there was some of the latter as well. Simply put we did not see eye to eye politically. I’m a liberal conservative in the Winston Churchill mode and a sceptical observer of life. Peter is an unabashed social democrat. There is not a lot of common ground between the two. In our case the twain did not meet. Although in certain ways it did meet, adding spice to the story. This article is an account from my side of that ambivalence. Peter I’m sure will have his own views.

The story begins with Peter’s avowed and deep commitment to an Australian-style social democracy, perhaps influenced by his background. His parents were immigrant Germans. German social democracy was the epitome of European social democracy in its glory days. We both grew up in the Australian suburbs; he in Croydon in Melbourne, me in The Gap in Brisbane. But at no point in my storied political evolution did social democracy ever appeal to me. My family background was a mix of nineteenth century Irish-descent Australian pastoralists (Sir Francis Murphy was the first Speaker of Victoria’s Legislative Assembly) and Lebanese Christian rural Queensland small business owners who had exited the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth-century. That family history doubtless had something to do with my sympathies for capitalism and markets.  I remember during 1973, my first year at the University of Queensland, being approached by the head of the campus Labor Club to support their campaign for Labor’s national health insurance scheme (Medibank). My response was to roll my eyes inwardly. I hadn’t thought about it but instinctively my attitude was one of disinterest. Through the 1970s my interests were shaped by an anti-Communist Trotskyism (the root of a lot of the later American neo-conservative movement) and by an intuitive libertarianism that over time would come to identify large-scale patterned anonymous self-organising social orders with civilization. 

I mention all that, so the reader is under no illusion that the politics of the two Peters are at all similar. But over time, through the veil of that divergence, a certain subtle convergence about several keyways of analysing the nature of Australian society emerged. In no small measure this partial convergence is explained by what happened to both of us in parallel in the 1990s. Unknown to each of us at the time, we both underwent an intellectual shift. This was not a shift in politics as such. Both of our long-term political trajectories were set, except for their natural unfolding. Technically, as I drifted incrementally to the intellectual centre-Right, I was more of an apostate than Peter. But both his persistent social democracy and my evolved liberal conservative views were out of step with the post-modern, post-structural, cultural studies and activist-woke currents in Australian universities.

More importantly however, I think that what happened to both of us separately but in unconscious tandem in the 1990s says a lot about the intellectual framing of Australian society and history. We both, unwittingly, without any preconception of this, moved away from a politicised interpretation of Australian society (typical of much of Australian historiography) toward a view that placed art and aesthetics at the centre of social analysis. In the 2010s I dubbed this approach ‘social aesthetics’. Peter independently moved in a parallel direction. Such that in the end the liberal conservative and the social democrat could disagree forcefully and yet enjoy a strange awkward bond of affinity when it came to exploring the deeper recesses of Australia’s mind and society.

Peter’s work of the 1980s found its definitive expression in Transforming Labor (1994). This was a work of disenchantment with Australian Labor Party politics of the 1980s. The Hawke-Keating years were a decade-plus of free market and deregulation policies. The social democrat in Peter objected to this historic shift. He would continue to write papers on the theme in the Howard government years across 1996 through 2008. These papers are collected in his impressive Thinking the Antipodes volume (Beilharz 2015). Two things though stand out about these papers. The first is the self-styled ambivalence of Peter’s critique of Labor. The second is the evolution of Peter away from a politics-focused social inquiry to an art-focused social theory. Peter’s politics remained intact, but fissures opened in it alongside his probing of Australian society through the prism of art and aesthetics.

First, let’s consider the question of ambivalence. Peter has a root preference for an ‘old’ social democratic Australia, whose most commented-upon source is the 1901-1910 Federation Era and its philosophy of ‘social protection’. Protection, in this account, is a fundamental value. It animates Australian statism. Its outlook says: the job of politics is to institute a large state whose job is to provide forms of social protection, and in particular protection from the workings of the market. This was what Australian intellectuals in the early twentieth century called ‘state socialism’ (Beilharz 2015: 19). ‘Modern Australia’, Peter argued, ‘was founded on a state tradition’ (Beilharz 2015: 20). Its civilisation was a state-founded one. It encouraged state capitalism, agrarian socialism, and social paternalism. Not what you’d call a liberal society. Australia, Peter proposes, is a ‘statist tradition’ (Beilharz 2015: 38, 40). Ironically then, in the 1980s, just as the federal Labor Party entered its period of greatest electoral success, becoming (of necessity) a ‘viable party of State’, it retreated in varying degrees from its own ‘statist tradition’. 

The philosophy of protection in Australian politics evolved over time. It also periodically recessed over time. The most symbolically visceral recession of it took place in the 1980s. It is fair to say that Australian social democratic intellectuals like Peter were shocked by the years of the Hawke-Keating government. They never really recovered from the shock. Peter himself variously and repeatedly argued for the return of the ethos of state protection. He insisted on the importance of state-funded education and health care, juridically determined wages (arbitration), state-sponsored industry development policy, tariffs, import substitution, practical egalitarianism, and a high-wage high-cost economy underpinned by a virtue ethics of loyalty and solidarity, a state-centred culture, and a risk-abating mentality. What makes Peter’s work interesting though is his explicit ambivalence about the thing he defends. He does not treat his own closely held political tradition as an unalloyed good. His political writings are really a hedge.

That hedge is a political ‘what-about-ism’ born of a sense that political ideals interpolate the bad along with the putative good. The lodestar of Australian philosophies of state protection was the first decade of the twentieth century. Yet most of that era’s legislated protection was framed in racial terms. Such illiberalism was not sustainable nor was the idea of the family wage, the barring of married women from the Australian workforce, race-based immigration exclusions, and the costs to industry and consumers caused by taxing imported intermediate and final goods. To his credit Peter is ambivalent about a fair portion of this historic illiberalism. He is happy with his social democratic cake, yet he does not wish to eat its indigestible bits. 

Old protectionist Australia was haunted by powerful questions: Do you really want to keep the larger world out of your own world? Do you want to rely on a medieval Catholic solidaristic tradition for setting wages? Do you want insularity because you are anxious or fearful? Peter responds to this with a sense of ambivalence about the ‘old’ protected Australia and the ‘new’ global Australia, the latter characteristic of the decades of the 1980s through the 2000s. Very sensibly, he objects to the tedious rah-rah lobby of political activists and hacks who see things in black-and-white rather than ambivalent shades of grey. He rejects moralising in politics. He cautions against treating the state as the hero of good and evil rather than a ‘support for collective action’ (Beilharz 2015: 20). But where does that then leave Peter’s statism? What he does is interesting: he wraps his ideal of social protection in a kind of historicism. He assumes his ideal is permanent but that its practice is not. This comes out very clearly in his attitude toward the Federation era and what sometimes is called ‘the Australian settlement’. This was the landmark deal between Deakinite social liberals and the early Labor Party for sweeping protectionist legislation. Peter argues, quite persuasively, that over time there was not one ‘settlement’ but several. These include Australia’s original 1788 settlement (when a colonial settler society displaced the preexisting nomad societies), the protectionist Federation era, Labor’s post-World War II Reconstruction era, the short-lived Whitlam government, and a putative, vaguely sketched, social justice-themed indigenous Reconciliation era.

For me what is notable about this repeating history of the reinvention of the social protection model is its cyclical nature. There’s an inbuilt cycle in Australian society: an underlying wave-like dialectical motion that swings the society between illiberal eras of accelerated statism and sunny upland eras of liberal civilization. Some version of this cyclical tension between state and society has characterised the entire history of human civilization. Six thousand years ago, the first civilization, the Sumerian, was torn between the vertical hierarchical power dynamics of the Sumerian temple-state and an early but nonetheless remarkable horizontal spontaneous balanced order of the city of Uruk with its markets, specialised handicraft industries, technical skills, applied chemistry and geology, writing and accountancy, proto public spaces, long-distance trade, and satellite urbs. Uruk and the Sumerians created the ‘urban revolution’, as the social-scientifically-disposed Australian-British archaeologist V. Gordon Childe (1936) described in Man Makes Himself. Childe is a figure admired by Peter. Childe’s ‘urban revolution’ preceded by six millennia that other great social ‘revolution’: the technological or ‘industrial revolution’ that began in the late eighteenth century. Cities are perhaps the greatest of all human inventions, radically expanding human creative and productive capacities. The state, not least in the guise of modern political ‘revolutions’, many of those disastrous, has always had an uneasy relationship with society and society’s own productive ‘revolutions’. The state is drawn to the latter, yet it also repelled by them.

The tensions between state and society are indelible. The forms that underpin those tensions (the forms of hierarchy and equilibrium) are buried deep in nature. They repeatedly insert themselves into society and their uneasy relationship endlessly mutates. This expresses itself in ever-new guises, shapes and unstable relations of attraction and repulsion. As John Anderson (who was the leading philosopher of the Australian twentieth century and another figure singled out by Peter for close attention) put it: ‘the state is not representative of the general interest but is itself a particular interest’ (Beilharz 2015: 131). An early intellectual attraction to syndicalism left Anderson with a life-long preference for a producers’ ethics and a model of society focused on production and creation. His evolving political positions (from syndicalist to Trotskyist to a certain kind of freethought conservative) made little difference to this enduring view. He preferred productive ‘movements’ (science, industry, freedom) to all kinds of social and political moralism and had little patience with statism which he equated with human servility.

The sunny upland of liberal civilisation, I hear you say: don’t you mean eras ravaged by the free market? Well, you could read Peter that way. After all, he is no friend of markets nor as it happens was Anderson. But neither is Peter a one-dimensional thinker. That’s his strength. He doesn’t talk much about the liberal critics of statism or (aside from the 1980s) the periods in Australian history that have swung away from statism. These periods include huge swathes of the nineteenth century from 1820 to 1880, the second half of the 1930s, and the paired decades of the 1950s and 1960s and the 1990s and 2000s. Each of these eras interpolated phases of turbo-charged economic growth. Despite that, Peter has an unusual take on Australia’s social protectionist imaginary. He defends it explicitly and yet ambivalently. Peter’s ambivalence hits the sweet spot of the Australian mind. Personally, I prefer the term ambidexterity but no matter. The underlying point is the same. A good example of the classic Australian ambidexter is one of Peter’s intellectual heroes, the social democratic thinker Hugh Stretton (1924-2015). Stretton wanted a large and active government but one combined with effective markets. In the language of the time, this was called ‘the mixed economy’. Peter would be unlikely to agree but the successful Hawke Labor and Howard Liberal governments echoed this latent ambidexterity. Spanning the 80s, 90s and 00s they drew on the Australian opposable mind in markedly different but nevertheless markedly effective ways.

Peter’s own ambivalence comes out in the way that he offsets the image of a strict social protectionist Australia with its opposite. His key concept of ‘Australia as the Antipodes’ illustrates this well. The protectionist ideal has often encouraged the idea that Australia ought to be a closed society, one that is immune from the outside world. Peter tries a different tack. He proposes that Australia properly understood is a society neither closed to the world nor mindlessly open to it. It treads a middle path. Australia developed neither as the echo of an imperial voice nor as the plaintive bleat of the lonely kangaroo, a proud or pathetic immaculate conception. In its better moments, Peter observes, it reconciles imagination and experience, and curiosity and memory. In an ontological sense Australians are comfortable negotiating (or trafficking) between art and science, the exotic and the mundane, the fox and the mouse, light and dark, paradise and purgatory. Their dominant intuitive attitude is not either/or but rather both/and.

Australians are antipodean in the sense that they shift fairly easily in Peter’s reading if often unconsciously between here and there, yesterday and tomorrow, city and earth. Their mentality and their situation incline them to bridge between local and international, sea and aridity, needs and capacities, wealth and poverty, coastal habitus and uninhabited land mass, home and away, urban edge and rural heart, and between outward and inward looking. They look for a ‘middling’ between excess and deprivation (Beilharz 2015: 29). Theirs is a ‘dual-natured, contradictory being’ (Beilharz 2015: 33). They try to avoid zero-sum games. In my terms they intuitively search for a union of opposites. In Peter’s terms, that meant historically (at least in some quarters) hopes were held that social egalitarianism and economic efficiency could be reconciled and that a distributive ethos could be blended with a productive ethos and leisure with education. In its underlying deep structures, the Australian mind is an opposable mentality tacitly drawn to imaginative syntheses. You might want to argue that this is a normative view of things. But any norm that is not rooted in facts is worthless.

Peter’s expansive interpretation of Australia is based on the notion that Australia, in a good sense, is an ambivalent society. This constructive ambivalence is probably best captured in Australian visual art. Arguably, Jeffrey Smart is the greatest Australian painter of the twentieth century. In his life, art, and personality, he condensed all the elements of Peter’s trafficking mentality. With a professional artistic life spent largely in Italy, Smart travelled widely and returned regularly to Australia. He was also probably the greatest painter of twentieth-century urban, industrial, portal, and logistic modernity all underscored by a deeply understood Renaissance sense of harmonic geometry, a brilliant case of successful trafficking between the old and the new, tradition and modernity. In the same vein, Australians are most likely to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. As the mid-twentieth-century Melbourne artist Clarice Beckett captured exquisitely, everyday life in cities is their metaphysical rock.

In Peter’s eyes, Australia properly understood is neither a national-chauvinist society nor a second-class version of America or Europe. It mostly avoids (and is wise to do so) the extremes of ultranationalism and self-hating abstract cosmopolitanism. It is neither an authentic culture untutored by external forces nor is it a dependent appendage of larger and more influential nations. If it is neither of these then what is it? It is a product, Peter argues, of cultural traffic. In other words, it is not the expression one-sidedly of here or there but rather of here and there. It can’t be properly defined in terms of origin or result, seed or fruit. Australians are European and not, European and more. Australians may be part of a European tradition but at a distance. Likewise, they might be found in the landscape, but they are not of it.

Australia did not make itself nor was it made by other countries. Rather it evolved through a process of interaction or traffic between itself located on the world periphery and European, North American, and Asian global centres. This traffic, Peter argues, is two-way. It is reciprocal and mutually constitutive. Australians take and give. On the giving side, it is notable that per capita Australia has one of the largest diaspora populations in the world, mainly a professional diaspora. Paradoxically, as Peter observes, centres need peripheries. They help revitalise tired centres. Exports from peripheral societies ‘renew the jaded hearts of empire’ (Beilharz 2015: 8). Australia thus is best understood as an antipodean society: as a relation rather than just a place or even a nation. It is constituted by a back-and-forward movement in time and space rather than an ethnos. One might also add, this is a kind of motion that culminates paradoxically in settlement. The pendulum motion of Australia’s transmarine migratory society is deftly intertwined with the motionless heart of a society of people who happily settle down.

The antipodean character of Australian society, Peter notes, makes Australian nationhood a difficult concept. For while Australia most assuredly is a nation and has all the usual accoutrements of a nation (flag, anthem, pride, national stories, ceremonies, etc.) it is not really a nation-state in the classic European sense. There is something different and exceptional about Australian nationhood. This is a subtle matter that is not easy to nail down. In general, as Peter says, Australian modernity seems ‘different’, yet this difference is also difficult to convey (Beilharz 2015: xix-xx). Australia is not another America or another Britain. But in a positive sense what is it?

Understandably an enormous amount of attention is paid to large nations: the US, China, Britain, France, and Germany in particular. Yet it is notable that many of the most successful nations in the world are relatively smaller nations scattered around the world’s inner maritime circumference. Australia takes this peripheral status a step further. For while most of its comparable peers (size and success-wise) are located on the world’s inner maritime periphery, it sits on the world’s outer maritime crescent, deep into the far reaches of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Australians, despite the great distances involved, regularly travel to far-away overseas places for work, recreation, and residence. By per capita kilometrage they are the most travelled people in world. Most return to Australia sooner or later. Distance defines the nature of Australia. This is true not only in the case of the weary traveller or the opportunity-seeking exporter. It is also true of the society in general. It can pick and choose and adapt the most interesting ideas from the world centres. For while distance involves challenges, as Peter observes it also bequeaths advantages.  Intellectually, distance is crucial for genuine insight. Seeing the trees but not the wood is an enduring problem of knowledge that distance helps abate.

Australia is deeply peripheral in another important and exceptional sense. Unlike practically no other society in the world, most of Australia’s population lives in large cities on its own maritime periphery. Peter remarks that Australia’s economy and society was built on the back of transport systems that connected distant cities and towns in a logistic web. These distances simultaneously formed the society’s connective tissue. Conversely most of the island continent that makes up Australia’s national territory is empty. As a result, Australia is less a European-style nation-state and more a society of cities. As Peter notes, its character as a colonial society, one that was structured around a series of large cities on its coastal periphery, precedes the birth of the Australian nation, and as he further observes, the late arriving inland national capital Canberra became the only Australian city deeply invested in national ritual and display. Cumulatively one might even call all this a case of Australian exceptionalism.

I would observe in addition that the in-out economic traffic of Australia’s large cities is not only a distinctive and key aspect of Australia’s buoyant political economy, but that this has been the case since the early colonial Macquarie era. Lachlan Macquarie’s visionary investment in quality urban infrastructure kick-started a four-decade economic explosion that caused Australia to become the Singapore of the nineteenth century and laid the basis for Australia’s long-term economic prosperity. Intellectually the spirit of Australia’s nineteenth-century political economy is brilliantly captured in William Hearn’s (1864) work Plutology published in Melbourne in 1864 and in London in 1865. It should be noted that this explosion of general prosperity occurred in an era of limited government that focused on essentials. Its tailing off occurred as the twentieth century experimented in the Australian ‘social laboratory’ with economic and social statism. Not all experiments are wise or fruitful.

Peter’s idea of traffic is drawn from his reading of the work of the Australian art historian Bernard Smith. That raises a puzzling question: Why would you conceive a theory of society based on the insights of an art historian? Surely, these two are chalk and cheese. Peter explains it this way: In the early 1990s, he needed to jump intellectual ship. All his previous work and inspiration had been bound up with socialism and the labour movement. That was disappearing before his eyes. The project of socialism had collapsed worldwide. He needed something new to work on. He found that lifeline in Smith’s art history. That’s a partial explanation but it does not explain why an art historian might provide intellectual nourishment for a social theorist?

On the face of it, Peter’s choice appears confusing though, in fact, I don’t think it is confusing at all. For in retrospect, it is clear to me that what Peter did (and what I did at the same time) was a prototypical echo or reflex of the paradigmatic Australian mind. We arrived at different though similar ways of describing Australia’s collective opposable mind. Peter describes it as being a mentality that is expressed through traffic: a mind that shifts back and forward between external source and local habitus, metropolis and hinterland, country and civilisation, continent and ocean, gains and losses, long and short views, arrivals and departures, peripheries and centres, old and new, fast and slow, local and global. I have described it in terms of a Janusian mentality underpinned by the in-out, entry-exit motions of large portal cities and the inclination of a society to prefer horizontal equilibria to vertical hierarchies when tapping into the basic forms or patterns that structure a society. My teenaged libertarian temperament evolved. I developed an intellectual interest in how societies anonymously achieve dynamic equilibria (or fail to). Australia’s exceptionalism, I concluded, was its long-run bias toward large-scale social systems of anonymous equilibria.

Irrespective of the terms and methods we used, and the diverging paths we took, there ended up being, between Peter and myself, a significant degree of consensus that the distinctive deep background of the Australian mind was drawn to a dialectic that interpolated all manner of backwards-and-forwards motions. Our strictly political views remained divergent. In that case there was no dialectic at work, no assimilation and overcoming of differences. Nevertheless, should there be a God, it is the God of Irony. For unexpectedly, in our mutual case, a hidden hand forged an unlikely consensus from a manifest dissensus.

My own experiences may offer some kind of explanation of how that happened. I began my academic life in political science. I expected to spend a lifetime as a political theorist. I did that for fifteen years. The last political theory article I wrote was published in 1994. Like Peter I transitioned in the 1990s. Unlike Peter the cause of my transition was not the decline of socialism. Long before I’d exited that boat. Rather mine was the growing sense that politics did not adequately explain society or even politics. I had quietly come to share that widespread Australian vernacular but barely articulated scepticism about politics. Society though, I thought, needed explaining. I still do. But explaining social patterns or behaviours through the medium of political actions I decided was pointless or fruitless. Even the interesting debates in the 1980s about small government versus big government, or as Peter puts it, about economic rationalism, I found missed a lot about the larger trajectories of state and society.

I never shared Peter’s frustrated sense that the size of government, large or small, was a function of political discourse, though I could hardly be said to shy away from such debates. After all, I published a book titled Limited Government (Murphy 2019). Nevertheless, I had long ago concluded that politics was cyclical and subject to the anonymous undulating moods of society, some of them, the deepest ones, of epic scope. These moods or atmospheres shift periodically and dramatically, and are subject to deep ambivalent, ambidextrous and Janusian motions that political discourse does not drive. In fact, these subterranean motions drive political discourse and make it an epiphenomenon of tacit buried shifting social patterns. I was interested to read Peter’s comments that Bernard Smith was significantly influenced by the cyclical theories of Toynbee and Spengler. Coming to it by an entirely different route, I ended up with the same cyclical outlook.  

I’m not alone is this. In large part, Australians do not take to politics. They prefer leisure before civics, the mirror opposite of the Americans. As Peter puts it very well: the closest Australians get to the agora is the beach. Theirs is not an ‘associative democracy’ (Beilharz 2015: 26). They associate for the sake of sports, and thereby (by the way) avoid the often-unhinged rancour of American politics. Peter looks on the ‘civic privatisation and lifestyle ghettoes’ of Australians as a weakness (Beilharz 2015: 43). I see it as a strength. I think at least I have the numbers on my side.

And the role of art in all this? I first taught an ‘art and society’ course for a number of years (1991-1996) in the 1990s. I did it, and did it successfully, because I found that I could more easily and productively explain the structure and dynamics of society by looking visually at its architecture than by ploughing through its verbal self-representations which so often amount to little more than delusional, bloviating, self-satisfied or banal catechisms, or in Peter’s terms boosterish and moralizing pabulum and sentimental nostalgia. Peter makes a very important point. He has in mind the Australian Labor Party, but it applies to parties of all stripes. Do not assume, he says, that the world is divided into a boring present and an adrenaline-fueled future or else a comfortable past and a dystopian future. So much political rhetoric is either mindless positivity or negative doomsaying. It entails self-congratulation or moralising claims about betrayal. This is what you get when politics is played as a verbal confidence game. This can’t be taken that seriously for, as Peter argues, life is too contradictory for single-minded imperative positive or negative stands. In short, he says, the essential attribute of modernity is its ambivalence.

Peter’s analysis of Paul Keating’s election defeat in 1996 is a case in point. I raise this because, for me, that election was personally significant and memorable. I switched my vote for the first time from Labor to the Liberals in that election. I literally did it the moment I walked into the voting booth, though I had been weighing options for some time. I never changed my vote back. Peter’s explanation of why Keating lost the election is telling. In Peter’s account, Keating offered the electorate the future but without a plausible reference to the past. After a decade of reform, many Australians found themselves in a paradoxical state that Peter beautifully describes. They were ‘unable to change and yet unable to contemplate being unable to change, both aware of possibility and yet afraid of its impossibility’ (Beilharz 2015: 33). Keating’s was a politics of the future without any traffic with the past, a new Australia that was unable to synthesise an effective relationship with the old Australia. In fact, John Howard the Liberal Party leader was much more effective in doing so and remained so for most of his decade-plus in power.

Very few political actors in Australia get this balance right. My version of Peter’s old-new balance is the liberal-conservative balance. This is the balance of modernity and tradition. Peter and I would disagree on what ‘tradition’ is. For one of us, it is statism. For the other, it is liberal civilisation. In either case the old-new balance is a tricky one to strike, though there are many possible ways of striking it. Some of these are attractive and compelling. Others less so. Most of Australian politics is a strategic confidence game. It works until it doesn’t work. When the game runs out of puff, a connection must be made with something deeper in the Australian mindset. Peter’s lasting achievement has been to open a door onto the structure of Australia’s latent collective mind and the way it frames things in terms of traffic between opposites. This is a significant achievement, the lessons of which ought to be returned to repeatedly.

References

Beilharz P (1994) Transforming labor: Labour, tradition and the labor decade in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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

Childe V G (1936) Man makes himself. London: Watts and Company.

Hearn W E (1864) Plutology: Or the theory of the efforts to satisfy human wants. Melbourne: George Robertson.

Murphy P (2019) Limited government: The public sector in the auto-industrial age. London: Routledge.

Biographic Information

Peter Murphy is Adjunct Professor of Social Sciences at La Trobe University and Adjunct Professor in The Cairns Institute at James Cook University. His most recent books include Stranger Cities: Australian Creation and the Ambidextrous Mind, the co-authored Science Fiction and Narrative Form, and The Political Economy of Prosperity.