Peter Murphy is one of Australia’s leading conservative thinkers. He has singlehandedly generated a body of work of astonishing depth and breadth. This is a result, or a series of results which began with boyhood radicalism, the Trotskyist variety of student activism in Brisbane fifty years ago. It led to a long period of highly creative work on this journal, Thesis Eleven, over several decades. This was and is an intellectual legacy which is difficult to fathom. He was a gifted editor, and a challenging colleague.

What follows especially over later years is a massive body of work that is simultaneously innovative and imaginative; this because of its own power, but also because of Murphy’s personal commitment to innovation and creation. Forensic in detail and driven by lateral logical association, from ancient Greece to contemporary science, its most recent deposit can be found in this book, Stranger Cities. Australian Creation and the Ambidextrous Mind, A Profile of Portal Modernity. Murphy gives us a lot to chew on.

Conservative – what might that mean? Daniel Bell famously quipped that he was a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture. Bell’s presence hovers in this book, but only as one among many others. I shall not put words in the mouth of a thinker so stubbornly independent as Peter Murphy, but you get the drift. There is nothing predictable about the thinking in this book. It is not by any means conventionally conservative. But he is nowhere near the Dreamers of the Absolute. The book stretches the mind, and is given to constant query of the doxa. It challenges the reader at almost every point. Nils Bohr? Percy Grainger? Halford Mackinder? Boolean algebra? Richard Clapton? you got it. Murphy’s library is a toybox.

This book is impossible to summarise, or to represent. More literally, it is impossible to review, like Borges’ map of the world, 1:1 scale. It employs a kind of dialectic between the axes of classicism and romanticism, the former dominant and in Murphy’s reading happily so. What follows, here in this review, is necessarily selective. It is also partial. For while Murphy’s reach is long and classical, my own is modernist and more attracted to romanticism. Some notes, nevertheless, are possible.

Murphy’s approach is contrarian, sometimes reminiscent of the voice of Robert Hughes. A strong claim is made, for example in opening: ‘Australia is a conundrum.’ This leads on to many other considerations, but also itself invites further dissent, ‘No, it’s not!’ ‘Australia is a happy society.’ ‘No, it’s not!’ but …

The voice is authoritative, but it is not delivered in the first person. It is lacking in stridency. It suggests rather that most important human value , curiosity. The voice is rather that of the wise and astute observer. Sometimes, especially in the footnotes, it is encyclopaedic, running over pages.

Behind Hughes, behind Murphy, so to speak, is another eminent Australian contrarian: John Anderson. As I have indicated, Murphy works on massive canvas – quantum physics, the meta of architecture, the endless nuances of language and precedent in western thinking. It’s an explosive show of virtuoso talent and fifty years of patient reading and thinking, of walking, talking and observing. Its heroes are suggestive, stimulating, sometimes surprising; the earliest New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie and his architect, Francis Greenway for example. Later the artists Russell Drysdale and especially Jeffrey Smart; intuitively Clive James, the gifted and elegant librettist David Malouf, the head turning painters Dorrit Black, Grace Cossington Lewis, Clarice Beckett – not Sam – then Utzon and those Sydney sails. In photography, Dupain maybe more than Sievers. Icons, all, waiting to be deciphered.

Australian modernity here begins with Macquarie, and a certain kind of foundational optimistic classicism. Does Australian modernity begin here? ‘No, it doesn’t!’ Murphy has Macquarie as the first great builder. The institution building pioneers of twentieth century Australian modernity are relatively absent here: Essington Lewis, H V McKay and H B Higgins, Frederick Eggleston through to H C Coombs and postwar reconstruction, Chifley and the ‘48 Holden; differently Laurence Hartnett, or for Murphy, a serious national hero in Robert Menzies, who does get a cameo. The national story, for Murphy, is embedded in Gallipoli. Macquarie, Gallipoli, Menzies offer landmarks of orientation for his thinking. More broadly speaking, Murphy’s heroes are those of uncanny but often pedestrian, or motile ways of seeing. Again like Hughes at his best, say in American Visions, you can feel yourself alongside him on the sidewalk, or footpath, awaiting insight, linguistic compression and the aerial touch of pigeon shit.

‘Australia is a relaxed country’. ‘No, it’s not’. So this is an to invitation to enter debate, or conversation. For Murphy also wants to insist that truth and falsity are constantly mixed, or mixed up. There is a possible echo here of the Melbourne philosopher Graham Priest, and the notion of dialetheism, that some things may be both true and false, which Murphy signals directly in the text. On a different account, then, Macquarie might be more an anticipation than a foundation of Australian modernity. But we can disagree, and often in the process of disagreement there comes agreement, or rather the elucidation of judgement and distinction, and the sense of complex contradiction of words and things.

Can this book be summarised? ‘No, it can’t!’ But to return to the arcs of Murphy’s framing: cities of strangers can work, and may represent the best of modern possibilities; creation and dexterity can come of the mundane, and surprise, especially when there is caution regarding the possibility of overreach; portal modernities may show, as in the Australian case, the best possibilities afforded by the accidents of geography, land and water, and of culture, the artifice of human potentialities. This is a contribution of lasting consequences, and a provocation that will last. Peter Murphy is good to think with, as this volume illustrates. You can expect a workout. Don’t forget to smile.