REMEMBERING LEONIE KRAMER

Dame Leonie Kramer held the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney from 1968 to 1989 and was dubbed “Killer Kramer” by Nobel laureate and nemesis Patrick White. Dame Leonie was the first woman to be a professor at Sydney University and the first to serve as its chancellor and as the ABC’s chairman. She exerted a formidable influence in Australia’s cultural, intellectual and public life for over half a century, during which time she liked to think of herself as a radical conservative. To reflect on Dame Leonie’s contribution to Australian life, Damien Freeman, principal policy advisor at the PM Glynn Institute of Australian Catholic University and author of Killer Kramer, Dame Leonie – a Woman for All Seasons addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 20 July 2022.

REMEMBERING LEONIE KRAMER

Damien Freeman

In the 23^rd psalm, King David proclaims as part of the litany of divine blessings he has received,  כּוֹסִ֥י רְוָיָֽה – my cup runneth over. I too feel that, whether or not goodness and mercy has followed me all the days of my life, having written about Tony Abbott, Roddy Meagher and now Leonie Kramer, I must give thanks to the Almighty that my basket of deplorables runneth over.

Dear dead Dame Leonie once told me, when we were lunching at the Royal Overseas League in St James’s, that my rise had been “Dickensian”.  I began my career as a clerk in the Crown Solicitor’s Office and was seconded by the Crown Solicitor to the Office of the Special Commission of Inquiry into the Glenbrook Rail Accident.  From there, I became tipstaff to Mr Justice Handley at the Court of Appeal. One day, I happened upon Dame Leonie in the corridor at court, and became so instantly overwhelmed that I dropped the box of wastepaper that I was carrying and rushed over to kiss her.

At the Royal Overseas League, she recalled this encounter and said she had thought that I was the office boy. She enjoyed Gilbert & Sullivan and so I think she might have actually had them in mind, rather than Dickens, when recollecting the office boy who now sat opposite her down the road from the Palace of St James’s. In The Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert & Sullivan have the Lord High Admiral sing:

When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an attorney’s firm
I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor
And I polished up the handle of the big front door …
I polished up that handle so carefully
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navy

Having been invited by Gerard and Anne Henderson to speak on “Remembering Leonie Kramer”, I could spend my allotted time on such recollections, but instead, I should like to focus on one idea that I develop in Killer Kramer – the sense in which Dame Leonie came to think of herself as a radical conservative.

I’ll say something very briefly about the structure of her life, and then I’ll focus on three areas of her life. They are her approach to literature, her approach to education and her approach to public life. I’ll then end by saying something about how I think the idea of a radical conservative can help us understand the coherence between her contributions to literature, education and public life.

The life of the dame

Dame Leonie was born in Melbourne in 1924. Her early years were coloured by the experience of the Great Depression and her university years by the experience of the Second World War. Her parents’ home was middle-class. They were comfortable enough to extend a degree of charity to others during the Depression, but that was the extent of it. Her father was a clerk in a bank and they were not particularly affluent. What stood out for her was her parents’ cultural attainments. Although their education was limited, they cultivated abiding interests in the arts.

She went to the University of Melbourne, where she studied English and philosophy, but her dream had always been to go to Oxford. She found a way to do this and ended up obtaining a DPhil in English, for a thesis on seventeenth-century satire. It was in Oxford that she met and married the South African pathologist, Harry Kramer. He had no desire to return to Apartheid South Africa and so, upon graduation, he accepted an appointment at ANU and the couple moved from Oxford to Canberra with their first daughter. Their second daughter was born in Canberra, before they relocated to Sydney, where they remained for the rest of their lives.

Initially, Dame Leonie did not have an academic appointment in Sydney, but did work for the newly established Quadrant magazine. She worked for some years at UNSW before being appointed Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney in 1968. She was the first woman to be appointed to a chair at that university, and held it until her retirement in 1989.

In her later years at the university, she had become increasingly active in commercial and public life. In 1981-82, she was the Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard and, in 1982-83, she served as the last chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Commission. In 1989, when she retired, she became deputy chancellor of the University of Sydney and, in 1991, chancellor. She remained in office as chancellor for a decade, until a showdown with the Senate of the university forced her to retire in 2001, on pain of being removed from office after the Senate lost confidence in her.

She never really recovered from the trauma of being deposed as chancellor. She remained active for another decade, until dementia set in and she was forced to move into residential care where she died a few years later in 2016.

Literature

Dame Leonie was the second Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University. Her approach to the subject was not without its controversy. To understand this, we need to ask ourselves, “What is Australian literature?” There are broadly two ways that one might answer this question. Dame Leonie’s way would once have been perfectly conventional, but it became more problematic as it could not accommodate developments that others regarded as important contributions to Australian literature.

The idea of a great literary tradition was at the centre of Dame Leonie’s approach. The scholar studies the masters of this tradition to understand the way that they had contributed to its development. The great contemporary author is one who possesses a personal style that extends the tradition in a new way.

The literary tradition involves a specific activity. It is the investigation of the human condition, the soul or the psyche, through literature, primarily through the novel, the drama and the poem. So great literature has something to tell us about ourselves as human beings, and it discloses these insights about being human through some literary form. The greatest authors in the tradition are the ones who have something new to show us about the human condition and who do this through extending existing literary forms in new ways.

If this is the approach that you take to literature, then the study of Australian literature is a study in the way the English literary tradition developed and was extended, when it was transplanted into Australia, in order to reveal new insights into the universal human condition.

That’s one way of understanding what matters about Australian literature, but it’s not the only way. Another way of understanding what is important about Australian literature is the way in which literature helps us to understand what it is to be Australian, or to live in Australia.

Literary nationalists, such as Vance Palmer, attach literary value to literature that promotes nationalistic sentiments. Henry Lawson was thought to be doing this in the 1890s, when certain virtues of life in the bush, such as mateship, were celebrated as being quintessentially Australian. This isn’t a matter of describing Australian life as it actually is, but a romanticised vision of how we might like to imagine it to be.

Social realism, on the other hand, attaches literary value to literature’s capacity to articulate the actual social or political condition of people. Literature then becomes a vehicle for documenting the world around us and advocating for reform. Kramer says that this sacrifices artistry to “mundane detail” and the exploration of character to “assertions about stereotypes” and what Patrick White described as “dun-coloured” journalism.

Literary nationalism and social realism cannot readily be accommodated in Dame Leonie’s literary tradition. They seek to tell us something about the Australian spirit (rather than the human spirit) or to offer a critique of the oppressiveness of the social order that prevails in Australia (that is a claim about society rather than about psyche). Dame Leonie felt confident in downplaying the significance of the literary nationalists and the social realists, as she did the feminists and those working in Aboriginal studies. She did not believe that it was the purpose of literature to offer social and political critique. In short, it was not the business of an artist to try to change society through the creation of literature.

Her criticism of Patrick White was of a different order. Unlike the literary nationalists and social realists, White is working within her understanding of the tradition. He is primarily concerned with understanding the human condition. Furthermore, in examining the human condition, he makes formal innovations that extend our understanding of how novels are written in the literary tradition, and he does this in order to give expression to his vision of the human condition. So, in a sense, White is the kind of author whom Kramer ought to celebrate.

And yet she believes that his work is ultimately unsuccessful. In a series of articles for Quadrant, she offers an assessment of several of his key works and explains why they cannot be considered masterpieces. White’s writing is complicated as is Kramer’s criticism of it. But, to give you a sense of it, she believes that other critics have misunderstood his novel, Riders in the Chariot, as an essay in transcendentalism; or the idea that people can gain a knowledge of the spiritual world that transcends what their senses reveal about the world. Kramer argues that White rejects the idea that there is anything beyond the physical world to be discovered; that he believes there is only the world of the senses. Yet White’s use of religious language encourages the reader to think he is gesturing towards something more; something that he does not think is there. This, Kramer argues, is a weakness:

White’s intellectual commitment is to humanism and to scepticism of transcendent or mystical notions and sanctions, but the novel discloses an emotional attraction to mystery and the irrational. Anxious though White is to give substance and depth to purely humanistic values . . . he also wants to represent them as more-than-ordinary. . . This can be accomplished by applying the language of religion to the mundane affairs of his illuminates. But it is difficult to use the language of religious experience without seeming to suggest that it has content as well as form. . . In this way his style subtly undermines his subject, and there are many instances of verbal effects masking a weakness in observation or psychological motivation.

White did not take kindly to this sort of critical writing. He took to referring to her as Killer Kramer.

Education

The 1960s and 1970s were a time when the idea of “progressive education” took root amongst educational theorists, increasing numbers of teachers and public servants in charge of education policy. This was something that Dame Leonie came to oppose quite prominently, in particular as president of the Australian Council for Educational Standards.

The idea of progressive education can be traced back at least to the nineteenth-century American educationalist and philosopher, John Dewey. Dewey conceived of education not as the acquisition of a body of received knowledge, but as a journey of experiences for the child which are intrinsically rewarding. By the 1960s, this had developed into the idea that education was a journey of self-discovery, in which students developed themselves as individuals.

There is much to be commended in progressive education and, indeed, plenty that the conservative educationalists could agree with them about. There were, however, at least four main areas of disagreement, and Dame Leonie was a prominent spokesman for the opponents. She led the opposition, which focussed on the following issues:

1. The progressives valued choice and saw this as meaning that students should be liberated from requirements as to what needed to be taught and learnt, whereas the conservatives thought that the requirements were there for a good reason, and “choice” was not a good enough reason for doing away with them;
2. The conservatives saw the progressives as engaged in a Utopian project that sought the ideal form of education, whereas, the conservatives believed projects that aimed at realising some ideal are fundamentally mistaken when it comes to human affairs;
3. The progressives advocated a shift away from subject-centred learning to student-centred learning, whereas the conservatives maintained that there was subject matter that had to be learnt and that this should be at the centre of learning;
4. Finally, creativity was all important to the progressives, who saw choice as important for stimulating the student’s capacity for being imaginative, whereas the conservatives rejected the idea that one could exercise creativity before one had mastered the subject about which one was aiming to be creative, so students needed first to develop the capacity to evaluate options.

Dame Leonie valued the idea of “criticism” that she takes from the nineteenth-century English critic, Matthew Arnold, which is the capacity for judging well. The problem with progressive education is that it doesn’t promote this kind of criticism. It encourages free thinking in students without giving them the capacity to judge well. What is the good of thinking for yourself, she asks, if you don’t really know how to think properly at all? Secondly, progressive education downplays the significance of the acquisition of knowledge in education. Again, Dame Leonie rejects this. A body of knowledge is required, she believes, before it is possible to judge well. Students cannot think for themselves about any subject matter until they have some basic understanding of the subject matter.

Dame Leonie and the Australian Council for Educational Standards had a measure of success. In particular, they were successful at demonstrating the significant level of opposition to progressive education at a time when it was very fashionable and it might have seemed that no one opposed it.

Although she regarded it as a success, others are not so sure. Today, those who share her conservative approach to education tend to believe that the progressives ultimately did triumph completely in Australian schools and universities. Indeed, the Ramsay Centre, which shares her view of education, was established precisely to address the shortcomings that are apparent in the aftermath of the triumph of progressive education.

Public life

Dame Leonie’s prominence owes more to her contribution to public life, I think, than her contribution to the academy. She was broadcasting with the ABC in the 1960s and one of its commissioners in the 1970s and then chairman in the 1980s. She was the director of many large public companies including Western Mining, where she enjoyed a close relationship with Hugh Morgan. She contributed to many public debates and was increasingly associated with the politics of John Howard, although she was never a member of the Liberal Party and rejected an invitation to run on its NSW ticket for the Senate.

She was a defender of the integrity of institutions. This was evident during her time as chairman of the ABC. She was appointed by Fraser and earnt the ire of Hawke before he became prime minister. He and Senator John Button criticised her for being biased in her handling of a number of matters involving Labor figures at the federal and State levels, including Neville Wran. She rejected this on the basis that the objections were objections to decisions of management. She believed that the commissioners’ role was to set policy and ensure that management complied with the ABC’s legal obligations. She was very clear, however, that it was not her job to second guess the decisions of management.

Some staunch conservatives were disappointed that she didn’t do more to kerb the lefties at the ABC. Labor complained when she did not oppose management decisions that challenged Labor. Her point was that she believed in the ABC as an institution and that as chairman she was going to defend it as an independent broadcaster, but also one which maintained the highest standards in public broadcasting.

She believed in reason, rationality and argument in public life. This is seen at its best in her contribution to the Constitutional Convention in 1998, and at its weakest in her handling of the Demidenko affair in 1995.

Dame Leonie was a staunch monarchist and a signatory to the charter of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy drafted by Michael Kirby. To see her at her best as a public intellectual, it is worth reading the speech she gave at the Constitutional Convention. Even committed republicans have told me that she accurately identified the intellectual flaws in the republicans’ position. There is no sentiment in her speech. She explained why it was not correct to say (as many were) that it is inevitable that Australia will become a republic, concluding, “As Keynes said, the inevitable never happens; what happens is the unpredictable.”

The second point she addressed was the nature of symbolism:

Some of the resentment expressed by republicans against the system focuses on matters which it is entirely in our power to change – and they know that very well and I do not know why they do not concede it. For example, a great fuss was made and repeated today about the toast to the Queen at public functions such as the visit of President Clinton. The Prime Minister set another example this week by toasting Australia. We could also if we wished toast the Governor-General. In this, as in other matters, we have a free choice and are not bound, as the republicans seem to imagine, by irrelevant archaisms.

She did not acquit herself so admirably in the Demidenko affair. Dame Leonie chaired the Miles Franklin Literary Award committee in 1995, when the prize was awarded to Helen Demidenko for her novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper. The author purported to be an Australian of Ukrainian ancestry, but was subsequently revealed to be Helen Darville of English ancestry, who had pulled off a spectacular hoax.

Her novel appeared to be based on the Demidenko family history which was a complete fabrication. The hoax amused many in the literary world, and it does seem that Dame Leonie and her colleagues fell for the trick, but that is the less serious point.

The more serious point is that the book dealt with the role that ethnic Ukrainians played in the murder of ethnic Jews during the Second World War. Depending on your reading of it, the book appears either to avoid making any moral judgment about the Ukrainians culpability, or else it seems to suggest that they were morally justified in assisting the Germans in the extermination of the Jews because they believed that Jewish Stalinists were responsible for oppressing them before the war.

Understandably, a lot of people found the book morally problematic and many argued that it should not have been awarded Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. Jill Kitson, who was on the committee with Dame Leonie said that the expression of antisemitism in the novel “was not one of the things that concerned us. We were much more concerned about literary qualities.” Dame Leonie was reticent to discuss the matter publicly, but when she did, she said, “I am puzzled by the rage of some of the commentators” and that “this sustained and vitriolic attack on the book and its author. . . calls into question our claims to be a tolerant and fair-minded society.” She even went as far as to suggest that criticism of the novel and the award constituted a cultural fatwa.

It is an open question whether a novel’s ethical flaws constitute literary flaws. Perhaps Dame Leonie and her colleagues genuinely believed that whatever ethical flaws an antisemitic novel has, these do not amount to literary flaws. The larger problem seems to me to be that she could not acknowledge that readers were justified in their moral response to the novel’s treatment of antisemitism. If she really believed that this was not relevant to the novel’s literary qualities, she needed to explain why she and her colleagues believe ethical flaws do not constitute literary flaws. Her comments failed to take seriously other people’s legitimate concerns. It cannot be said that, on this occasion, she displayed the calm and careful approach to public discourse that she did when it came to the republic. Of course, in this case, her own judgment was called into question, and perhaps that affected her approach.

Radical conservative—what it is and why she was one

In an interview for the Sydney Morning Herald in 1982, Dame Leonie explained to Richard Coleman that she did not regard herself as a “traditionalist” so much as a “radical conservative”. This, she believed, captures both her commitment to traditional values and the necessity of reforming institutions. She was aware of the difficulty that this seemed to present, explaining to Coleman, “One thing I find hard to explain is my sense of a necessary connection between a regard for traditional values and change. Because you can’t preserve interest in the past simply by trying to hold on to it.”

I found this idea of being a radical conservative particularly useful, so much so that I took this as the title of an occasional paper that was published by the Centre for Independent Studies last week.[1]

What is a radical conservative? The radical conservative is one who accepts that there is a need for change and that change is not something to be opposed. What matters is how change is made; that it should be change in conformity with tradition; that it should affirm traditional values and ways of life. This is the approach taken by the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish philosopher and politician, Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. I think that, properly understood, Dame Leonie does indeed fit this mould.

I am indebted to Dame Leonie for this idea, because I think it is useful in thinking about what we need in politicians today. You can read my paper for the CIS to see why I think this is so important. More relevantly for this evening, I think it is also useful for understanding Dame Leonie’s intellectual and public life. I think you can see this at play in her contribution to different spheres. She opposes ideological change but affirms the need for measured practical change that ensures institutions are able to address the needs of a changing society.

I was invited to write Killer Kramer for the Australian Biographical Monographs series. That series focuses on former Australian prime ministers, premiers, and other significant statemen and women. For the most part, they are people that will not easily be forgotten, but who might be misunderstood by future generations. Dame Leonie is not really in that category. She is someone whose contribution could easily enough be forgotten. Hers was a significant contribution, however, and it is worth remembering. In doing so, I suggest we need to overcome some of the misunderstandings of her that she acknowledged prevailed in her own day. She offers us the model of the radical conservative. In this regard, her approach to society, politics, and culture is as important now as ever.

But let us end by remembering Leonie Kramer’s personal qualities, as they were set down by her fellow living national treasure, Michael Kirby:

Leonie Kramer was a voice of rationalism . . . she abhorred arguments of envy, of old enmities and emotional nationalism . . . She was always cool and self-possessed. She never descended to personal vituperation . . . She kept an historical perspective. She also kept her sense of humour. Working in the same cause with Leonie Kramer is fun . . . She was boundless in her energy to promote a true debate . . . Dame Leonie’s commitment to reason, calm persuasion and an honest statement of beliefs cannot be doubted.

[1] Radical Conservatism: 
Tradition as a guide for managing change (cis.org.au)