Landmark histories: response by Judith Brett

Abstract

It is very gratifying to have Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People included in History Australia’s Landmarks series, and I thank the editors for the honour and Sybil Nolan for her thoughtful discussion of the book and its reception. I thank her too for publishing a second edition in 2007 with Melbourne University Press which has kept the book in print. I wrote a long introduction to this second edition, in which I reflected on the book’s origins in a course I was teaching on political parties at the University of Melbourne in 1980. Back then, I was looking for readings on the Liberal Party – its history, what it stood for and the reasons for its electoral success. Everything I found was from the left, describing the party as a vehicle for capital and the ruling class. I wanted something from inside, which captured the party’s self-understandings, when I found a copy of Menzies’ 1942 radio broadcast, ‘The Forgotten People’, in the basement of the Baillieu Library. I had just finished my PhD on the fin-de-si ecle Austrian writer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which used a close reading of Hofmannsthal’s writing to develop a psycho-biographical argument about his transition from a gifted young lyric poet to Richard Strauss’s librettist. I was good at close reading, and I started to apply my skill to Menzies’ broadcast, mostly to the ‘Forgotten People’ broadcast itself but also to other of his writing, including his occasional verse. At the beginning I was not especially interested in the place of the broadcast in Menzies’ biography but in reading it as ideology – as a paradigmatic example of the imagined representation of the real experience of the mid-twentieth-century Australian middle class. The linguistic turn was well underway, with its focus on understanding the way patterns of representation shaped the social world and the selves which inhabit it. Nolan has pointed to the influence of British cultural studies on the book. Also important were American literary critic Kenneth Burke on rhetoric and anthropologist Clifford Geertz on ideology as a cultural system. I want to take this opportunity to reflect on another, less obvious influence: the work of the French anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss. Before I embarked on my PhD, I studied for a postgraduate Diploma of Social Anthropology at Oxford University. My supervisor was Rodney Needham who, along with Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach, introduced the ideas of the French structural anthropologists to British social anthropology. The first essay question he set me was ‘What is a person?’ The second was on left and right, and the foundational role of binary oppositions in