Dear Simon,
Thank you for inviting me to your King’s Birthday BBQ! As Donald Horne’s key message of The Lucky Country, “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.” We, as an Australian Monarchist and an Australian Republican, would not put ourselves in that boat of the 1965 public discourse. Like many Australians, we assume that we have escaped of the past. Oh, that it was so.
There is progress in that Australian modernity, of which Horne played a significant role in the narrative development, has both Australian good versions. Monarchism and Republicanism has escaped, at least, the worst of other worldly forms: the worst of British smugness and American arrogance in political form. The educated Australians can civically discuss the spiral history of Anglo-American-Australasian ideals and nonsense, without the horrible Australian derivativeness, colonial-mindedness, and cultural cringe (Cropp 2023: 224). Unfortunately, the vast majority of Australians are extremely uneducated when it comes to history, sociology, philosophy, and education. Australian universities had killed intellectual history courses and squeezed out the researchers from the system (a general statement, and thus a general truth).
It is for this reason Horne, in the late 1970s, argued for the future in the elite model. A re-constitution for Australia, democratically elected, small directive, governance (232). I myself prefer, from the same era, the New Left’s horizontal, participatory structure; (232) that is the historical background to my Level Playing Field Thesis. As my colleague, Dr Neil Peach, argues: Participation is the key for politics to work in favour of the goals of humanity. We must participate in the Humanist Project with the most inclusiveness to our understanding of humanity and persons.
Thus there is a general and a particular narrative here: global political systems and Australian aspirations for a better life. Working the two together, requires education, the education of intellectual histories and cognition sociology lost to, and from, the universities. It is the story of Donald Horne’s republican battle in the light of “The Dismissal”; to use a double meaning that includes the anti-epistemological political response, and as told in Ryan Cropp’s chapter, “Shock Therapy” (212-233). My argument is that the spiral of Australian history has returned, in new form, back to that moment. At the end of the chapter, Cropp stated, “The System that had produced the prosperity of the post-war years now appeared to have broken down.” (232) We are now in the parallel moment, as the end of the Neo-Liberal Economy. Whether Harris’ ‘Opportunity Economy‘ will emerge and what come from it, I dare not say.
However, what needs to happen, irrespective of the calculating mindset of the economically obsessed, is a re-constitution of Australian politics. Would it not be creative, innovative, and intellectually harmonious if Australia could take particular features of the two global models, to create a new Australian political landscape, one that was inclusive of both educational elitism — meaning that unless you are educated on the educated themed topics, your comments is “talking out of your ass”, and democratic level playing field model — meaning a severe backlash against political corruption at all levels of governance. Yes, like the Cromwellian Commonwealth, it IS (and was) a negative spiral, as a republican model, but the spiral history appears to me necessarily overreactive: the challenge and response thesis on steroids. The War in Gaza and Lebanon, a case in hand; which by the way, is no justification for the war as a sound argument — we also make choices not to be captive to historicism while declaring its truth.
The idiot academics will dismiss my argument as Dr Frankenstein creating the multi-part monster. But through many better epistemic arguments, they are the losers as grossly poor thinkers; Horne’s now luckless second-rate people. Knowledge is finally comprehensive.
I look forward to your monarchial BBQ, and your good counsel.
Kind regards,
the “Cromwellian Roundhead”
Neville Buch
Historian,
Professional Historians Australia (Queensland).
Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society (ANZHES).
President, Sea of Faith in Australia Inc. (SoFiA)
Convenor, Sociology of Education Thematic Group, The Australian Sociological Association (TASA).
President, Southern Brisbane Suburban Forum (SBSF).
Director, Brisbane Southside History Network (BSHN).
MPHA (Qld), Ph.D. (History) UQ., Grad. Dip. Arts (Philosophy) Melb., Grad. Dip. (Education) UQ.
Call: 0416 046 429
ABN: 86703686642
Bibliography
Bongiorno, Frank (2014) Book Review: Project Republic: Plans and Arguments for a New Australia, Australian Historical Studies, 45:1, 129-130, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2014.877782
Cropp, Ryan (2023). Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country, La Trobe University Press.
Curthoys, Ann (2016) Book Review: Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada, Australian Historical Studies, 47:2, 332-334, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2016.1162684
Davis, Glyn (2011). The Boyer Lectures 2010: The Republic of Learning: Higher Education Transforms Australia, Bolinda Publishing
DiIulio, J. (2007). The Nation’s Spiritual Capital. In Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future: A Former White House Official Explodes Ten Polarizing Myths about Religion and Government in America Today (pp. 153-190). University of California Press. Retrieved May 9, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pnvq2.9
DiIulio, J. (2007). The President’s Bipartisan Prayer. In Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future: A Former White House Official Explodes Ten Polarizing Myths about Religion and Government in America Today (pp. 116-152). University of California Press. Retrieved May 9, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pnvq2.8
DiIulio, J. (2007). The Republic’s Faith-Based Future. In Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future: A Former White House Official Explodes Ten Polarizing Myths about Religion and Government in America Today (pp. 191-222). University of California Press. Retrieved May 9, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pnvq2.10
Hudson, Wayne & Brown, A.J. (2004). Restructuring Australia : regionalism, republicanism and reform of the nation-state. Federation Press, Annandale, N.S.W
Kim, David W. and Duncan Wright (2024), Socio-Anthropological Approaches to Religion: Environmental Hope (Rowman & Littlefield)
James Walter (2018) Book Review: This Time: Australia’s Republican Past and Future, Australian Historical Studies, 49:4, 564-565, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2018.1520186
Mansfield, B. (1953) The background to radical republicanism in New South Wales in the eighteen‐eighties, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 5:20, 338-348, DOI: 10.1080/10314615308594959
Marilyn Lake (2007) ‘The brightness of eyes and quiet assurance which seem to say American’: Alfred Deakin’s Identification with Republican Manhood, Australian Historical Studies, 38:129, 32-51, DOI: 10.1080/10314610708601230
Matlack, S. (2014). Confronting the Technological Society. The New Atlantis, 43, 45–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43551405
Milbank, Dana (2022). The Destructionists : The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, Random House USA Inc.
Mills, C. Wright (1959). The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press
Nussbaum, Martha Craven (2018). The Monarchy of Fear : a philosopher looks at our political crisis (First Edition). Oxford University Press, Oxford
Pickering, Paul A. (2003) ‘Ripe for a republic’: British radical responses to the eureka stockade, Australian Historical Studies, 34:121, 69-90, DOI: 10.1080/10314610308596237
Plato (BCE; translation 2012). Translated by Christopher Rowe. Republic, Penguin Books.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2018). #Republic : Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, Princeton University Press.
Potts, E. Daniel & Annette (1968) American republicanism and the disturbances on the Victorian goldfields, Historical Studies, 13:50, 145-164, DOI: 10.1080/10314616808595366
Roberts, P. (2015). Chapter Four: Paulo Freire and the Idea of Openness. Counterpoints, 500, 79–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45178205
Stone, L. (2018). Nel Noddings: Courageous Philosopher and Reformer. The High School Journal, 101(2), 100–107. https://www.jstor.org/stable/90024233
Wehner, Peter(2019). The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump, HarperOne
Zaretsky, R. (2010). 1945: A Moralist on the Barricades. In Albert Camus: Elements of a Life (pp. 47-78). Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press. Retrieved May 22, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt7zhqk.6
Ziolkowski, E. (1996). Slouching toward Scholardom: The Endangered American College. College English, 58(5), 568-588. doi:10.2307/378757
Zora Simic (2010) The Margins of Suburbia, History Australia, 7:2, 47.1-47.2, DOI: 10.2104/ha100047
Zuckerman, M. (1993). Faith, Hope, Not Much Charity: The Optimistic Epistemology of Lewis Mumford. In Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (pp. 239-259). University of California Press. Retrieved May 8, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pnnmx.11
Neville Buch
Latest posts by Neville Buch (see all)
- How are we dying? Data from SMH - October 11, 2024
- Change from the western Anglo-American world - October 10, 2024
- The Problem of Australian Sandstones Universities - October 9, 2024