ROBERT MANNE: A POLITICAL MEMOIR – INTELLECTUAL COMBAT IN THE COLD WAR AND CULTURE WARS

ROBERT MANNE: A POLITICAL MEMOIR – INTELLECTUAL COMBAT IN THE COLD WAR AND CULTURE WARS

By Robert Manne

La Trobe University Press (in conjunction with Black Inc), 2025

ISBN: 9781760645069

RRP: $59.99 (hb)

Reviewed by Gerard Henderson

Former treasurer Peter Costello launched Frank Knopfelmacher: Selected Writings (Connor Court) in Melbourne last year. Frank Knopfelmacher (1923-1995) was an academic at the University of Melbourne from 1955 until he reached compulsory retirement at age 65 in 1988. He was a brilliant teacher and polemicist, perhaps best known for his anti-communism. Robert Manne was a University of Melbourne student from 1966 until 1969. Manne is also a fine polemicist and was an anti-communist for a decade after the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Both were/are non-practising Jews. The former was born in Vienna and grew up in the Moravian region of Czechoslovakia. The latter was born and grew up in Melbourne.

Towards the end of his book Manne states that writing the memoir has allowed him to feel “more certainly that belonging to the Jewish people has been the most important element of my political identity”.  But, following Hannah Arendt, he regards “love for the Jewish people as a potentially dangerous form of ‘self-love’”.  He writes that he feels “profoundly ashamed, as a Jew”, about Israel’s response to Hamas’ attack of October 7, 2023 and the support this has received “by the majority of the people of Israel and most Jewish leaders through the diaspora”.

In his book Robert Manne: A Political Memoir – Intellectual Combat in the Cold War and the Culture Wars, the author describes Knopfelmacher as a mentor – even though they fell out towards the end of Knopfelmacher’s life.   He is the subject of considerable criticism in this book.

Many of the large audience who attended the Costello book launch of Knopfelmacher’s writings either knew, or were aware of, both men. During his speech, Costello referred to the somewhat ungracious entry on Knopfelmacher in The Australian Dictionary of Biography. And he quoted from the penultimate paragraph:

Although Knopfelmacher wrote many hundreds of often brilliant and original magazine and newspaper articles, to his regret late in life he failed to produce any substantial work of scholarship. His only book, Intellectuals and Politics (1968), was an essay collection.… His greatest legacy was as a teacher, including as a lecturer on political theory for the Council of Adult Education. Among those he influenced were the politician Michael Danby, the publicist Gerard Henderson, the journalist Greg Sheridan, the ideology-maker Ray Evans, the legal academic Martin Krygier, the philosopher Raimond Gaita, and the political historian and public intellectual Robert Manne.

With great comedic timing, Costello paused at the description of Gerard Henderson as a “publicist”, Ray Evans as an “ideology maker”, Manne’s best friend Raymond Gaia as a “philosopher” plus his friend Martin Krygier as “the legal academic” and Manne as “the political historian and public intellectual”. After a slight interlude, Costello then told those in attendance that the author of Knopfelmacher’s entry in the ADB was none other than the “political historian and public intellectual Robert Manne”. It brought the house down – many of whom already had personal experience of the author’s evident pomposity.

The Public Intellectual – With Much Self Esteem

It’s no secret that Manne is a public intellectual. He used to have this news on his website. Lest there be no doubt, readers who get to Page 381 of this 470-page tome will learn this about Manne circa 2004 – around the time he regarded himself as belonging “to the left-liberal progressivist intelligentsia”:

In detailed surveys conducted at this time by Michael Visontay for The Sydney Morning Herald and by Professor Richard Nile for The Australian, I was judged by my peers to be Australia’s “leading public intellectual”. When The Bulletin created a list of the hundred “smartest” Australians … I was awarded the title of Australia’s “smartest social critic”.

As this extract indicates, Manne is not short of self-esteem. Perhaps the most revealing sections about the author’s self-regard are indicated by two instances.

In 1989, Manne was co-editor of Quadrant magazine with Peter Coleman. Here is what he writes:

July 14 [1989] was the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille, the event that was customarily taken as the beginning of the French Revolution. I spent several months reading the most influential interpreters of the meaning of the revolution … for a talk I was to give on that evening to the Sydney friends of Quadrant. Coleman probably expected a witty fifteen minutes. What he got was a serious lecture lasting over an hour. He let me know by his silence that I had made a serious faux pas. None of that mattered much but, perhaps inevitably, we finally arrived at a real disagreement.

Well, such behaviour may not have mattered much to Manne. However, the Quadrant dinners in Sydney, usually held on a Friday night, were primarily social occasions attended by individuals with anti-communist, right-of-centre or social democratic views. They commenced with drinks followed by a dinner and a 15-minute speech which was sometimes followed by a brief question/answer. No one would have welcomed a 75-minute dissertation on “the meaning of the revolution”. Indeed, it is a wonder that those present did not revolt during the learned dissertation.

Robert Manne has spent virtually his entire adult life supported by the taxpayer or by  a grant of some kind. First, as a Commonwealth scholarship holder at Melbourne University, then briefly as a post-graduate on a Shell Postgraduate Arts Scholarship at Oxford, then as a Melbourne University tutor and then as a tenured academic at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He has never belonged to a political party, never been employed as a political staffer, never worked in the public service or the private sector and, according to his resume, never chaired a university department.

When Kevin Rudd was foreign minister in Julia Gillard’s Labor government circa 2011, Manne approached him with a view to La Trobe becoming a participatory campus of the United Nations University. Rudd set up a meeting for what Manne terms “a posse of senior people” from the university to discuss the proposal with the officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra. This is how Manne reports the occasion:

On the appointed day our group flew to Canberra and met with several members of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The first question we asked concerned finances. How much money would DFAT be able to set aside to support our bid? We were told there was nothing. All further discussion was pointless. I realised that the only reason Rudd had feigned enthusiasm for my proposal was to have me as an ally in his campaign to replace Gillard.

How’s that for a demonstration of entitlement? Manne had an idea that La Trobe University should become part of the United Nations University based in Tokyo. But he expected that DFAT would fund his proposal. It is noteworthy that Manne does not appear to have approached La Trobe University itself, or any company, to fund his planned project. Elsewhere in his book, Manne refers to his “characteristic naivety”.

Remembering School Days – With a Faulty Memory

Robert Manne’s A Political Memoir is divided into four parts. Namely, Education, Cold War, Quadrant and Culture Wars. It is worth paying attention to each part in turn. But, first, it should be pointed out that this is not just a political memoir since it contains a lot of personal detail.

In “Education”, the author has chapters on his grandparents, his father, childhood and adolescence plus his university days at Melbourne and Oxford universities. There is no chapter on his mother, Frida but she is covered in the text. The author’s tracing of his maternal grandparents who died in the Holocaust is of particular interest and, at times, moving. It is clear that Manne was dutiful in looking after his ailing mother until her death while he was on a hiking trip with friends – one of the few occasions when he was away from home at the time.

The young Manne seems to have had scruples of a certain kind. He believed himself responsible for the death of his father (who died of a stroke) and his mother (who died of complications from multiple sclerosis). Moreover, he relates experiencing “what psychologists call dissociation, the feeling that the mind is floating above the body”. The instances occurred when he was a teenager and also in adulthood.

In his Introduction, the author states that he “would not be able not tell the whole truth about his private life” and, even if he attempted to do so, his memory is not “reliable enough”. Indeed, many of his university “moments have vanished from memory, like dreams”.  Manne also writes: “Whenever possible I have relied on publications – my own and others – rather than on memory”. Just as well – for the evidence suggests that the author clearly has a faulty memory – even to the extent of having “recollections” of events that never happened.  However, there are no endnotes and few specific citations within the text concerning which a reader can check the author’s claims. Moreover, there are many occasions where the author does not rely on his memory – which puts doubts on the validity of many comments.

In his 2021 Alfred Deakin Lecture, Manne (who was born in October 1947) recalled that in one of his first days at Ivanhoe East Primary School in early 1953  – in a grade that was called “the Bubs” – on “one morning” there was an announcement during the broadcast of “Kindergarten Playtime” that George VI had died. As an adult in 2021, Manne related how his teacher “wept in front of us” at the news.  In his memoir, Manne writes how he had reflected in this lecture that “the death of an old man who lived a very long way away was important enough to bring my teacher to tears, [was] something of serious interest”. He had wondered “how had it come to be that the loss of a king would mean so much to one of his subjects”.

Manne has the intellectual honesty to report in his memoirs that the historian and former Labor politician Barry Jones pointed out to him, after his Alfred Deakin Lecture, that it was unlikely that his teacher first learnt of the King’s death on the morning of 6 February 1952 (Australian time). After all, George VI died at Sandringham in the early hours of 6 February 1952 (Greenwich Mean Time) – which was evening in Melbourne on the same day. The ABC Radio’s children program in 1952 was broadcast between 5 and 6pm, well after school hours. In time, Manne’s female kindergarten teacher learnt of his recollections in his Alfred Deakin Lecture and told Manne’s nephew, David, that she was weeping at the time because of a private matter concerning her love life.

Yet, until his middle age in the early 2020s, Manne relied on this “memory” of an event in 1952 to make comments about the Royal Family and the Sovereign’s subjects half a century later.

But there’s more. The author’s only “distinct memory” from his school days is an occasion in Grade 3 when the teacher wrote on the blackboard “Segregation or Assimilation?” to explore the “social divide in the early 1950s between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians”. Really? They were big words for Grade 3 about an issue which was not prominent in the debate in the mid-1950s.

In Chapter 3, the author tells readers that his uncle Hans Meyer’s “cancer was the principal reason I returned to Melbourne from London” in 1974. However, at the end of Chapter 4, Manne writes that “the main reason” he “returned from England to Australia” in 1974 was due to a determination to play a “more active role in the life of the nation”.

The author’s family recollections are of interest, as are those of his school days. But they are not central to a political memoir. Nor is the fact that he names two former female partners.

On Being In Robert Manne’s Political Memoirs

At this stage, it is only fair to state that I have known the author for over 50 years and make an appearance in Robert Manne: A Political Memoir. In his Introduction, Manne brackets me as one of his “political enemies” and tells readers he has spared details of the “vendetta” mounted by me against him – principally because my “lines of attack almost never concerned questions of any general significance or interest” – with the “exception” of Indonesia (which will be covered later).  As those who have read Manne’s work over the years will know, he equates political critics with political enemies.

Yet the name “Gerard Henderson” is cited on 12 occasions in the index and this overlooks a couple of references. On the issues Manne discusses in his political memoir, I was on his side of the argument with respect to (i) communism (after Manne became an anti-communist, (ii) in opposition to the radical campus left, (iii) educational standards of many students at La Trobe University, (iv) Indo Chinese refugees, (v) Cambodia, (vi) the Petrov Affair, (vii) Wilfred Burchett, (viii) Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed The Paper and (ix) the republic (after he ceased being a constitutional monarchist). On some of these issues, I was involved in the debates before Manne entered them. I never got involved with Manne on such issues as Indigenous Affairs.

Manne is fond of using the word “vicious” to describe individuals and organisations who or which he despises. He invokes the word to depict anti-Semitism in Europe in the 20^th century along with China during the Cultural Revolution. On Page 253, Manne claims that a “vicious hatred” has existed between us since I found out that Manne had excluded me from receiving an invitation to a dinner in Melbourne on the occasion of Knopfelmacher’s retirement from Melbourne University in 1988. Yet, at Page 88, he writes that I have “never forgiven” him for rejecting an article I submitted to Melbourne University Magazine in 1969 which he co-edited with Cathy Lowy and Michael Liffman. So the alleged enmity, according to Manne, commenced in 1969 – or was it two decades later?

In his memoir, Manne writes that the Knopfelmacher invitation was declined because Bob Santamaria said that, if I was present, he might not speak at the function. (Manne had already told me this some two decades ago). As to the MUM article, Manne now says that he “favoured its publication” but his co-editors did not. The 1969 MUM was a leftist stack – and my rejected article was published in Quadrant which had a much larger circulation than MUM.

I have always regarded both instances as examples of Manne’s self-absorption and unwillingness to stand up for what he believed when dealing with associates (Santamaria) or friends (Lowy/Liffman). But no more than that.

As is documented earlier, we were on the same side in many events over the years. I wrote a favourable review of his most important and only long book The Petrov Affair in The Australian and The Wall Street Journal. I played social squash with him at La Trobe University (when we were on the staff in 1975). Unannounced, he visited our home in Hawthorn in the early 1980s with his wife Anne and infant Kate. In the early 1990s, he stayed at our home in Sydney over a weekend.  At the time, he was unable to obtain suitable accommodation; he even gave me life-changing advice about how to start a reluctant lawn mower.

When I was chief-of-staff to John Howard between 1984 and 1986, I introduced Manne to Howard. He attended a lunch in Melbourne put on by Howard, which I arranged, along with his Vietnamese Australian friend, to advance the cause of Australia accepting Indo Chinese refugees from the communist dictatorships in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Some years after I left Howard’s office, Manne visited The Sydney Institute where we had a brief exchange about how he might get corporate support for Quadrant, which he was then editing. When asked by La Trobe University to produce a reference for Manne’s application for a promotion to an associate professor position, I strongly recommended the promotion on account of my view that he was an accomplished historian and a fine teacher.

Manne knows all of the above – but he maintains in his memoir that I have enacted a personal grudge against him since the late 1960s. I do not let personal feelings interfere with my professional work.  Moreover, Manne seems to regard virtually all his critics as “enemies”.  He even has a “little list” (to borrow a phrase from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado) naming 13 columnists who allegedly “hated” him at the time of the 2004 election. He quotes a female supporter as forwarding a “succinct” email from Cambridge stating “may your enemies perish”.

As to Manne’s claim that I have conducted a vendetta against him, this is a self-serving statement.  With the help of others, I set up The Sydney Institute in the second half of the 1980s. Since that time, I have analysed the media initially in the Institute’s publications and later in my Media Watch Dog blog – focusing on a critique of leftist “progressive” media types.

Manne’s views and allegiances over the years have been so inconsistent – very few individuals put out a collection of essays titled Left Right Left covering two decades – that his published work made for great copy.  As did his evident pomposity.

My critique covered Manne’s newspaper columns – he wrote for The Herald in Melbourne between early 1988 and early 1990 and intermittently for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald from 1993 to 2004 when he commenced writing for The Monthly – and more besides.

Apart from Manne’s time at Quadrant, his essays overwhelmingly appeared in publications of his friend Morry Schwartz – Black Inc’s The Monthly, Quarterly Essay, and The Saturday Paper along with La Trobe University Press (which is also published by Schwartz Media’s Black Inc).

Some time ago, Manne falsely claimed that I sent a fax to The Age’s  Opinion Page editor Paul Austin urging him to sack Manne as a columnist.  The alleged fax was never produced and no one at The Age supported the claim.  The truth is that, as a media critic, I wanted “More Manne” and certainly not “No Manne”.  The claim, presumably an instance of the author’s poor memory, is not repeated in his Political Memoirs.

At Melbourne University

I was at Melbourne University between 1966 and 1969 when Manne was a fellow student – and at La Trobe University in 1975 on the Politics Department staff.  We were both appointed to the University by Professor Hugo Wolfsohn – who was in the Melbourne University Political Science Department  for a time when I was a student.

At Melbourne University in the second half of the 1960s, there were six main political clubs – the Democratic Socialist Club (which had split from the Labour Club), the Labour Club (which had historical connections with the Communist Party of Australia and was on the far left), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS – which was part of the international New Left), the ALP Club (an anti-communist social democratic organisation intent on reforming the extreme left’s domination of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party), the Liberal Club and the Democratic Labor Party Club (of which I became president).

According to Manne, when he arrived at Melbourne University in 1966 he joined the Democratic Socialist Club.   In September 1966, he joined the Labour Club – regarding the Democratic Socialists as too moderate for his liking and too “Whitlamite prone”.  The reference was to Gough Whitlam, the right-of-centre leader of the Labor Party from 1967.  Manne makes this point on Page 61 – but on Page 67 states that he was allowed to sit-in on Labour Club meetings, despite being a member of a different political club.  In time, the Democratic Socialists (or DemSocs as they were called) merged into the Labour Club

I had always regarded Manne as a Labour Club member and, in more recent years, wrote that he was a member of the Labour Club when, in June 1967, it advocated that Australia should send aid to the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. The NLF, in effect the political arm of the Viet Cong, was controlled by the communist dictatorship in North Vietnam.  When Manne emphatically told me that he was not a Labour Club member  in June 1967, I accepted his assurance.

So, it came as some surprise to learn in Manne’s political memoirs that, while he was not a member of the Labour Club in 1967, after attending a Labor Club meeting in 1967 – he wrote a letter-to-the-editor (presumably to be sent to Farrago, the Melbourne University student magazine) sympathetic to the Labour Club’s decision to support aid to the NLF.  This is how it came to pass that the letter was drafted:

I was strongly opposed to Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War. I recall seeing a propaganda anti-war film produced by Wilfred Burchett that greatly moved me.  Even though I was a member of the Democratic Socialists I was allowed to sit in on the Labour Club’s tense and tightly packed meeting in the small Raymond Priestley Room – besieged by a large and angry student crowd outside the locked doors – that discussed the question of providing non-military aid to the NLF. After this meeting, I wrote a letter-to-the-editor (never sent).  “Dear Sir”, it began. “Are the members of the Monash and Melbourne Labour Clubs who propose aid to the National Liberation Front traitors?” I tried to show that they were not by drawing a distinction between the war with Japan in the 1940s and the Vietnam War in the present.  In the case of Japan, Australia’s security was at risk.  In the case of Vietnam – “a virtually unwinnable war because of considerable civilian South Vietnamese support for the National Liberation Front” – we were fighting to strengthen our “defence pact” with the United States and to entangle the US forces in South-East Asia….

What this letter overlooked was that in June 1967 Australian forces were being killed and wounded by Viet Cong/NLF forces supplied by Hanoi. Manne acknowledges that, at the time, he believed that the NLF “was under the control of the North Vietnamese leadership and that once the North took control of the South there would be such killing and persecution of the communists’ political enemies”.  Even so, he was sympathetic to the Labour Club’s idea of providing aid to the NLF – even if he elected not to say so in writing.

In May 1970, before leaving for Oxford, Manne and his friend Rai Gaita marched in what he calls “the large anti-Vietnam War Moratorium in Melbourne”.  The aim of the Moratorium movement was to bring about the total withdrawal of all military forces and all support of the United States and its allies from South Vietnam – in other words, the leaders of the Moratorium movement, led in Melbourne by the Labor Party’s left-wing politician Jim Cairns and supported by the Communist Party of Australia, wanted North Vietnam to win. Which it did on 30 April 1975.

Manne used to claim that, at the Moratorium, he and Gaita marched “under the banner ‘Neither Washington Nor Hanoi’”.  There were tens of thousands in the Melbourne march and it would have been difficult to locate such a flag in the crowd.  I queried Manne’s recollection in my article “Robert Manne – Is This Your (Academic) Life?” in The Sydney Institute Quarterly, Issue 32, March 2008.

In his memoirs, Manne downgraded this claim to state that he and Gaita “gravitated to the banner” (probably of a Trotskyist grouplet) which read ‘Neither Washington Nor Hanoi’”. It’s not clear how the Manne-Gaita duo “gravitated” towards such a banner.  Nor is there evidence that any such flag existed. This is an instance where the author relies on his memory – which, as he concedes in the Introduction, is not reliable.

By the way, at a Quadrant seminar at the Australian National University in August 1981, which I attended, Manne supported the Australian commitment in Vietnam – and was criticised by Labor Senator John Wheeldon for having done so.  In the printed version of his speech, published in the March 1992 issue of Quadrant, Manne backed away slightly from this position.  But he was highly critical of “the left-wing mythology concerning the war” which prevailed in the Moratorium Movement. Another Manne U-Turn.

To Oxford and on to La Trobe University

At Oxford’s Magdalen College, Manne took what he describes as “the prestigious and demanding Bachelor of Philosophy degree”.  It is a valued degree and Manne studied under such leading historians as A.J.P. Taylor. His thesis was on the negotiations between Britain and the Soviet Union “from the disintegration of Czechoslovakia in mid-March 1939 to the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in late August 1939”. Manne’s supervisor R.A.C. Parker suggested that Manne seek a publisher for his 50,000-word thesis.  But Manne declined – stating that he had not yet found his “voice”. He never did a Ph.D.

After two years in Oxford, Manne moved to London and attained a job as history teacher at Dulwich College.  He returned to Melbourne in 1974 and took up a position tutoring German History at Melbourne University.  Manne applied unsuccessfully for a lectureship in the department – but Professor Greg Denning advised him “to think about trying for a job at a teachers’ college”.  According to Manne “this so outraged Frank Knopfelmacher…that he decided to take my future in hand”.  Knopfelmacher recommended Manne to Wolfsohn and he was appointed lecturer in Politics at La Trobe University in late 1974. As Manne puts it:

On Knopfelmacher’s recommendation, Wolfsohn appointed me in late 1974 to a lectureship in the department of politics at La Trobe University. I doubt that Wolfsohn had read a word I had written. I was not asked to submit a formal application. I was not interviewed. I did not have a doctorate. I had published just one academic article. I was twenty-seven years old. And yet I had been appointed to a position from which, because of academic tenure, I would not be able to be removed – short of criminality or madness – for the remainder of my working life. The reign of the God Professor was already almost over but, at least in the person of Hugo, not yet entirely dead.

Unlike Manne, I never objected to god professors – provided they were not false gods.  Wolfsohn ran an efficient department and he was a first-rate teacher.  Nor did I oppose Manne’s appointment.  Like Wolfsohn, he had a thin publication record at the time but, like Wolfsohn, he was a good communicator – and was destined to become a fine teacher.

There is a certain feline nature to Manne which comes out when dealing with his treatment of Wolfsohn in his book.  And, earlier in his chapter titled “An Academic’s Dozen: 1975-1988” in the collection From The Paddock to The Agora: Fifty Years of La Trobe University (La Trobe University Press In Conjunction with Black Inc, 2017). I reviewed his book in The Sydney Institute Review Online in November 2018 – see here.

Manne’s article in the La Trobe University publication is littered with errors – which Manne and La Trobe authorities have refused to correct.  Some are repeated in his Political Memoirs. For example, Manne claims that, when he commenced teaching at La Trobe University in 1975, the Department of Politics “was seriously unhappy” due to “the strange personality of Hugo Wolfsohn”.  He continued:

Hugo was a German Jew who had escaped from Nazi Germany to Italy as a young man, had been interned as an enemy alien in 1940 in wartime Britain and had then been transported on the HMS Dunera to Australia and the detention camps in Hay and Tatura. Although he hardly published anything, Hugo was appointed the foundation professor of politics at La Trobe – almost certainly because of glowing references from his University of Melbourne colleagues. Once I got to know him, I wondered whether his colleagues had an additional, secret reason for their recommendation. The prospect of departmental life without Hugo would undoubtedly have been alluring.

I was on the La Trobe University staff between 1973 and 1974 before Manne arrived in 1975.  I did not detect any serious unhappiness.  In early 1975, Wolfsohn promoted Joan Rydon to the rank of professor – the other professor in the department was Ross Martin.  I believed that Rydon was qualified for the job and supported the appointment.  Others, for whatever reason, opposed it.  A normal academic disagreement, in my view.

As to Manne’s suggestion – given without any evidence – that Wolfsohn was appointed the inaugural Professor of Politics at La Trobe because he “almost certainly” obtained “glowing references from his University of Melbourne colleagues” to whom “the prospect of departmental life without Hugo would undoubtedly have been alluring”.  Well, this is just abuse. Terms like “almost certainly” and “would undoubtedly” are ahistorical and unprofessional.

Manne did not state –  and it would seem does not know –  the names of Wolfsohn’s referees of over half a century ago. For my part, Wolfsohn was the best lecturer I had during my Arts (Hons) and Law studies at Melbourne University.  I also understood that Wolfsohn was well regarded by his colleagues in the Melbourne University’s Department of Political Science when he was on the staff between 1947 and 1965.  For a balanced assessment of Wolfsohn see the entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography by John Power and James Jupp.

Manne also has this to say about his introduction to the La Trobe University environment:

At La Trobe, Hugo regarded the department of politics as a small community – or a Gemeinschaft, as he might have put it – over which he enjoyed unchallengeable authority. My first vision of the department was of a human caravan, made up of its members, on the walkway that led to the staff club. Perhaps they had been summoned to greet their recently appointed colleague. One of Hugo’s peculiarities was the expectation that, whenever possible, members of his department, especially junior members, would take their lunch together and with him. Because of this, I became friendly with Hugo’s curious choices of departmental tutors.

That’s Manne’s story in 2025.  Here’s what he wrote, around a decade earlier, in his 2017 essay “An Academic’s Dozen: 1975-1988”:

At La Trobe, Hugo regarded the Department of Politics as a small community – or a gemeinschaft, as he might have put it – over which he enjoyed the right to exercise unchallengeable authority. One of the peculiarities of Hugo’s department was the expectation that all members would take their lunch together. My first vision of the department was of a human caravan, made up of its members, on the walkway that led to the Staff Club. Unhappily for Hugo, he had recently appointed two quite conservative young English political theorists, Michael James and John Chiddick. Their presence seemed to have upset the departmental equilibrium; shortly after my arrival they led a rebellion. The issue was whether or not minutes would be taken at departmental meetings. For some months, over this grave matter, the department was in turmoil. Hugo was supported by a reader [by then, Rydon was a professor] in the department. Joan Rydon, a pedestrian accumulator of information about Commonwealth parliamentarians, and by Gerard Henderson, a tutor who was still working on his doctorate on B.A. Santamaria and the Australian Roman Catholic bishops. I sided with the rebels….

For the record, Wolfsohn was not inclined to use words like “gemeinschaft” – he did not feel the need to do so.

Here Manne has another clear “recollection” of an event that never happened – as a fellow academic at the time, Colin Rubenstein, will confirm.  No such “human caravan” ever existed. Young academics, like myself and Colin Rubenstein, simply did not have the money to eat every day at the La Trobe Staff Club – we brought our lunches to work.  I would have had lunch with Wolfsohn and Rydon six times a year – at the most.  Some of my colleagues rarely did so.

In his political memoirs, but not in his earlier essay, Manne maintains that he was present at these lunches and became friendly with Hugo’s “curious” choice of departmental tutors. He made no such claim in his 2017 essay. I was one of those tutors in 1975 – and was better qualified than Manne at the time. I disagreed with some of my fellow tutors but found that all were very professional and hard-working. None were “curious” – that’s just a feline put-down.

As to the claim that, in 1975, I was “still working” on my doctorate – the fact is that I only commenced it in 1973.  It was completed while working full-time without academic leave, research grants and so on – which Manne enjoyed throughout his academic career.  And it was published as a book, unlike Manne’s D.Phil.

Then there is Manne’s criticism of Rydon as “a pedestrian accumulator of information”. I attended some of Rydon’s lectures – she could communicate a message and spoke in a way that students could understand –  unlike a few lecturers in the department.  By the way, the “pedestrian” claim does not appear in Manne’s memoirs – he seems to have downgraded his abuse in this instance. Sure, much of Rydon’s research was of the empirical kind – but it was valuable.

Manne reports that he participated in “revolution” by siding with “the rebels” against Wolfsohn and Rydon. Believe it or not, the big issue was “whether or not minutes would be taken at departmental meetings”. Since nothing of significance happened at these boring and pointless meetings, I sided with Wolfsohn and Rydon. By the way, in his memoirs, Manne acknowledges that most of his recollections of the La Trobe Politics department in the time of Wolfsohn and Rydon are based on memory.

Manne writes that after Hugo Wolfsohn died in 1982 during a heart-bypass operation, for the next 35 years the collective life of the Department of Politics “was happy, and from one point of view, rather boring”.  But, at least the minutes were taken of (boring) staff meetings, apparently. The author remained on the La Trobe staff until his retirement in 2012 – after which he became an emeritus professor and a vice-chancellor’s fellow.  He is a board member of the La Trobe University Press, which published this volume.

The Cold War – Cambodia, Wilfred Burchett, The Petrov Affair and the Author’s Conservative Decade

In this section of his political memoirs Manne discusses Cambodia, Wilfred Burchett, The Petrov Affair and “The 1980s – My Conservative Decade”.

Having marched in the May 1970 Moratorium which effectively called for the United States to withdraw from Indo-China and a victory for the communist forces in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos – by 1975 Manne was concerned about the victims of communist totalitarian rule in the three nations.  Along with others, including Greg Sheridan (who, later in the book, Manne accuses of being “breathtakingly vicious” and “reliably wrongheaded”), Manne advocated that Australia accept Indo-Chinese refugees.

This was the author’s decade when “liberal anti-communism was the political movement to which I belonged”.  He criticised members of the left intelligentsia who effectively denied the Khmer Rouge’s murderous rule under the leadership of Pol Pot – and named Ben Kiernan (until he changed his mind), Derek Roebuck, Gavan McCormack and Noam Chomsky. He also refers to his time as Victorian president of the Indo-China Refugee Association between 1976 and 1986.  He was, for a brief period, also president of the Committee for Cambodian Refugees.

There is one serious error.  In 1975 Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam declared in cabinet that he was not going to have “F-cking Vietnamese Balts coming to Australia after the fall of Saigon.  Whitlam has never denied saying this.  But Manne claims that Whitlam’s reference was to “yellow Balts” – see Page 142. This is a serious error that should be corrected.  Whitlam, for all his faults, never used the word “yellow” as a term of abuse. (This is documented in Gerard Henderson’s article The Whitlam Government & Indo Chinese Refugees in The Sydney Institute Quarterly, March 2003 – see here).

In 1984, Richard Krygier, the person behind the Australian Association of Cultural Freedom which published Quadrant magazine, suggested that Manne write about the Australian Wilfred Burchett who supported the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe and reported the Korean War from the North Korean side.  Burchett’s sympathisers in Australia comprised leading members of the left intelligentsia – including Gavan McCormack, Ben Kiernan, Stuart Macintyre, John Pilger and Phillip Knightley.

Manne was not the first to tackle Burchett but had the time to do new research for the August 1985 issue of Quadrant.  After the collapse of European communism, Manne discovered documents which proved Burchett was in the pay of the Communist bloc.  At the conclusion of his Burchett chapter, the author writes: “There are several causes I supported and opposed in the ‘80s that I now regret – but not the case I mounted against Wilfred Burchett”. He does not name any others.

Once again, Robert Manne was a late entry into the debate of Vladimir Petrov, the third secretary of the Soviet Union’s embassy in Canberra who defected, along with his wife Evdokia, in 1954.  The left-wing myth was that the defection of the Petrovs had been engineered by Coalition prime minister Robert Menzies to embarrass Labor Opposition leader Bert Evatt on the eve of the May 1954 election (which Menzies won). Manne was asked by Sam Lipski to be the historical adviser for a TV miniseries to be shown on Channel 9 in 1987.

Manne knew little about the Petrov Affair at the time.  However, he was lucky that the Channel 9 proposal coincided with the decision of Bob Hawke’s Labor government to open the National Australian Archives on the matter. The end product of the research was Manne’s book The Petrov Affair.  The miniseries, however, flopped when shown on Channel 9 in May 1987. But Manne’s book, published in March 1987, was most successful. It demolished the left-wing claim that the defection of the Petrovs was manufactured by the Menzies government to help it win the May 1954 election. Moreover, it demonstrated that Vladimir Petrov had determined the timing of his defection and that the Petrovs were significant defectors who provided most valuable intelligence to the West.  The Petrov Affair was reviewed favourably by such leading Labor Party figures as Jim McClellan.

Most of Manne’s publications have been collections of his own essays – along with some relatively short books or monographs. He has never written a biography or compiled a book of interviews. Without question, The Petrov Affair has been Manne’s most important contribution to the history debate in Australia. However, the chapter on Petrov in his memoirs is spoilt by some feline references relating to the family of Sir Charles Spry (1910-94), the head of the Australian Intelligence and Security Organisation at the time of the Petrov defection. Elsewhere, Manne refers to a deceased intelligent “prominent Catholic intellectual” as a “closeted gay man”. Why?

By the way, Manne refers to Anne Manne, along with one other reviewer, as being of the view that The Petrov Affair “was written with artistry”. In a soft interview with David Marr on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live program on 5 December 2024, Manne declared that it was “obligatory” to laugh at the humour in his memoirs. Certainly the author devotes time to laughing at others. I doubt that many readers will find much humour in this very serious account of “the Life of Manne”.  There is a  degree of narcissism in this memoir.

Manne’s recollection of his conservative decade begins with an account of a further instance of his mind floating above his body. This time, he puts it down to the “pain” of “alone-ness”.  And then when he found his soulmate in Anne Manne (nee Robinson) he returned to terra firma, so to speak.

Quadrant

Robert Manne was Quadrant editor between 1989 and 1997.  His account of the power plays within the small magazine take up some 90 pages – around the same size as a number of publications he describes as “works” in his memoir – in particular his three Quarterly Essays, also published by Schwartz Media. Manne’s self-justifying account of how he fell in and out with Quadrant will be of interest to some – but not many.  But he does name lots of names.

The essential problem turned on the fact that Quadrant, which commenced in 1956 under the editorship of the poet and academic Jim McAuley, was a right-of-centre magazine with an anti-communist flavour.  It came to embrace the economic reforms of John Howard during the Fraser Coalition government and those of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments that followed.

In other words, Manne – who has never created an organisation or publication – soon “discovered” that what he “wanted was…to liberate Quadrant (and myself) from the most characteristic disease of intellectual discourse in our era, the blindness of ideological self-certainty”.  In short, Manne wanted to change Quadrant rather than to establish his own magazine.  Towards the end of his years as Quadrant editor, Manne “realised [his] politics has changed” since his appointment. He presents this as some kind of belated discovery.  Nevertheless, Manne blames others for the fact that he lost the support of the Quadrant board and many, but not all, of the magazine’s long-time supporters and readers. Primarily due to his attacks on those advocating economic reform.

Manne ceased as Quadrant editor at the end of 1997.  He soon realised that he now no longer had a “home magazine” to publish his own work and – as previously mentioned –  began writing for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald until he was invited in late 2004 by Morry Schwartz  to become chairman of the leftist The Monthly magazine.

The Culture Wars

Part IV, titled “Culture Wars”, covers various contributions by Manne about his various battles with John Howard (whom he acknowledges that he “did hate”), his support of Labor’s Kevin Rudd and his opposition to Julia Gillard whom he once described as “the  least impressive” prime minister since Billy McMahon along with his views on what he terms “catastrophic climate change”. And the “Stolen Generation” of Indigenous children.

Manne manages to get himself into the centre of politics when he writes:

The greatest moment of the Rudd government was, by general consensus, the prime minister’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations. I hope that my articles in the Fairfax press, drawn from material Heidi [Zogbaum] and I had discovered in the government archives of the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia, played even a small role in revealing this history. I learned at this time that perhaps the greatest ever ruckman in the history of my beloved Geelong Football Club, which I had followed with undiminished passion since the age of four, Graham “Polly” Farmer, had been brought up at “Sister Kate’s”.  That might have helped explain something I had noticed, how his eyes often seemed to be looking into the middle distance, almost blank.

I saw Polly Farmer, as we called him, play for Geelong in the Victorian Football League (now the AFL). He was one of the greatest footballers of all time and the player who revolutionised the game with his emphasis of hand-passing rather than kicking.  I never noticed – when on the field or in TV interviews or photographs – that Farmer’s eyes seemed to be looking into the middle distance, even blank.  This is an example of Manne’s tendency to exaggerate.

Farmer’s history is well told by Steve Hawke in his book Polly Farmer: A Biography (Fremantle Press, 1994). Hawke quoted Farmer as saying that he accepted Sister Kate’s as his home and regarded himself as fortunate to have been there.

Tony Boti commenced his obituary on Polly Farmer in WAtoday on 15 August 2019, as follows:

Born in Fremantle in March 1935 at the height of the Depression to an unknown father and twenty-five-year old Noongar mother from the Wheatbelt town of Katanning, Graham Vivian Farmer, aka “Polly”, arrived at Sister Kate’s Children Home in Queens Park in December 1936. He was voluntarily placed at Sister Kate’s presumably because his mother did not have the means to support young Farmer. Unlike the experience of others placed in various institutions for Aboriginal children, Farmer was grateful for his time at Sister Kate’s and believed it provided him with a good start in life. 

Manne devotes considerable time in his memoirs to his disagreement with Andrew Bolt over the Stolen Generations.  He describes Bolt as a “fool”. The problem is that Manne fails to acknowledge that some Indigenous children who were brought up in orphanages and the like were not stolen.  Many were handed over to orphanages – run by Christian churches and government institutions – by a family member or a public servant who were devoted to looking after children in need.  The same is true of many white children then – and now.

In The Weekend Australian Magazine on 8 March 2025, David Penberthy profiled the life of Anglican missionaries –  the Rev Percy Smith and Isabel Smith (nee Almond).  He commented that “in the modern era the spectre of the Stolen Generations came to overshadow the Smiths’ work, framed around the flawed assumption that every Indigenous child in their care must have been wrestled away from their parents”.  This was not the case with St Francis House in Alice Springs.  Nor with Sister Kate’s Children’s Home in Perth.  Yet no one would know this from reading Manne’s memoirs.

In time, Manne fell out with the editor of The Monthly, Sally Warhurst, and alleges that “she screamed at Morry [Schwartz] until the battery of his mobile phone ran dead”.  Really.  Your man Schwartz must be very patient. It turned out that Manne had a row with Warhurst about how an article in The Monthly by Kevin Rudd should be introduced. A bit like the “Battle of the Staff Meeting’s Minutes” at La Trobe, it would seem.  Manne comments that he had done as much as he could to advance “Sally’s career” and continues:

In return, she refused the only favour I had ever asked of her, to open the online space of The Monthly to a discussion with Gerard Henderson on the Australian anti-communists’ silence (or worse) during the months in 1965-66 when between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians had been murdered by the forces of  General Suharto.

Later on, Manne mocked Warhaft’s “faux martyrdom”. There is quite a bit of sneering abuse in this book.  Columnists Andrew Bolt and Piers Akerman are described as “fools”. The well regarded historian Patrick Morgan (who opposed Manne’s editorship of Quadrant) is depicted as a “politically explosive cultural critic”. And reference is made to the journalist Paul Kelly’s “solemn-sounding higher bulls**t”. Earlier, Manne refers to the Melbourne University ALP Club (of which Morgan was a prominent member) as consisting of “the most violent spokesmen for Australia’s participation in the war in Vietnam”. This is mere hyperbole.

Manne’s decision to suddenly raise the issue of events in Indonesia in 1965 commenced with an article in the June 2008 edition of The Monthly titled “Agent of Influence: Reassessing Wilfred Burchett”. Manne wrote:

Many of Burchett’s enemies seem incapable of reassessing their support for indefensible causes, like the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian Communists in the mid-1960s or the war in Vietnam, where opposition to American behaviour turned out to be right. The unwillingness of politicians like John Howard or journalists like Greg Sheridan or Gerard Henderson to confront the military failure and the human cost of Australia’s earlier involvement in the military action in Vietnam helped make possible our enthusiastic participation in the even more disastrous invasion of Iraq.

This comment, made without a skerrick of evidence, was wilfully false.  Manne was chairman of The Monthly at the time and it had a policy of not publishing letters in its print edition.  That’s nearly two decades ago when online publications did not have the importance that they do today.  Manne wrote to me, in denial, stating that the reference to me “supporting indefensible causes” applied only to Vietnam and not Indonesia.  Another wilfully false statement.

I declined to have my correspondence published in The Monthly’s  online edition unless it was also published in the print edition. In the end, it was published online by The Monthly – including a 3539-word email from Manne to me. But I never got to refute Manne’s claim in the print edition.

This was an example of Manne picking fights.  Little was known in Australia in 1965, and later, about what occurred when what appears to have been an attempt by the communist PKI to come to power in Jakarta was crushed by General Suharto. When evidence could not be provided about Howard, Sheridan and myself, Manne went on to name B.A. Santamaria, Frank Knopfelmacher and Jim McAuley as supporters of the massacres – all of whom were dead and incapable of defending themselves.  Santamaria died in 1998 and Knopfelmacher in 1995.

I had no contact with Santamaria after 1975 and none with Knopfelmacher after I moved to Sydney in 1984.  Manne knew both men well and he could have raised the issue with them when they were alive.  Indeed, along with Archbishop George Pell, Manne paid tribute to B.A. Santamaria at the function in May 1991 held to celebrate the 50^th Anniversary of Santamaria’s Movement. He did not make the same allegation with respect to former Labor prime minister Paul Keating – even though Keating was a strong supporter of Sukarno.

Manne’s decision to raise this matter, albeit briefly, is another example of his ongoing habit of unfairly attacking individuals who were once helpful to him.

During his time as Quadrant editor, Manne engaged in what he terms a “history war” over Helen Demidenko’s 1994 book The Hand that Signed the Paper.  This led to the publication of his relatively short The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust published in 1996.

In his memoirs, Manne claims credit for having “led the pack” in exposing the anti-Semitism and false history by the author – whose real name was Helen Darville (now Helen Dale).  In fact, the criticism of the Demidenko/Darville book was led by The Age’s Pamela Bone in The Age on 9 June 1995 and many entered the debate before Manne.  For example, I debated Demidenko on ABC TV’s 7.30 Report on 27 June 1995 and the American lawyer Alan Dershowitz weighed in later that week when visiting Australia via an article in the Australian Financial Review.  The Demidenko File (1996) which was edited by John Jost, Gianna Totaro and Christine Tyshing, indicates that Manne entered the debate with an essay in the September 1995 issue of Quadrant.  The Culture of Forgetting is a significant book – but it is the work of a contemporary historian rather than a leader of the pack.

What’s Missing From Manne’s Political Memoir

What’s missing from Manne’s political memoir is any discussion about economics.  Early on, he acknowledges that he has “little interest, alas, in the discipline of economics”.

The author writes about his 1987 edited collection The New Conservatism in Australia. In spite of the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan winning the 1980 presidential election in the United States, Manne did not commission an essay on economic reform – what was then called economic rationalism.  For the following reason – as enunciated in his memoirs:

I was tempted to include a section on the tension between Keynesian and libertarian economics but quickly lost heart. I must admit to having no competence in economics whatsoever, and little sympathy for some of the social consequences apparently acceptable to the more doctrinaire enthusiasts of monetarism and the unshackled Free Market [my emphasis].  The italicised words were used against me for the following forty years by enemies on the right – many of whose self-delusions about competence in economics consisted of nothing more than the ability to regurgitate the message of the neo-liberal economists in the most simplified form.

What Manne neglects to state is that – in spite of his lack of interest in economics –  Manne bought into the economic debate. Most notably in 1991 when he gave an address at the Malthouse in Melbourne and compared the industrial relations reform politics advocated by members of the H.R. Nicholls Society with the economic policies of Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union. Really.

The latter theme was repeated in the book Shutdown: the Failure of Economic Rationalism and How to Rescue Australia (Text, 1992) which Manne co-edited with John Carroll.  The editors argued in their chapter that “the Australian economy is at risk”. In his own chapter, Manne maintained that, “in so far as the Australian economy was concerned, it is genuinely difficult to foresee a non-disastrous exit”. Yet, the Australian economy from the early 1990s and throughout the 2000s was in fine shape. Carroll admitted he got it wrong in 1992 and changed his view on the Australian economy. In time, Manne fell out with Carroll over economics as he did with the cartoonist John Spooner over climate change.

On 26 June 2005, Manne was interviewed by Terry Lane on the ABC Radio National’s The National Interest.  Manne acknowledged that he had become involved in the economic debate in the late 1980s and 1990s.  Then he said:  “I’ve never been interested in economics” and added: “When I…began to argue about economic rationalism or neo-liberalism, I found myself out of my depth – and I knew it…as soon as I got into the area”.

Yet, Manne refuses to recognise that a failure to understand economics puts a limit on what a self-acclaimed public intellectual can say, with any credibility – especially when he/she takes a high profile in the public debate. Across international and national politics.

Even though Manne concedes his lack of interest in economics, he believes that governments should pay special attention to public intellectuals like himself:

I…believed that with a Rudd government the best-informed members of the intelligentsia, whose politics was generally but not entirely on the left, would once more be listened to.

In time, Manne became disillusioned in general, with Kevin Rudd’s government for not following the advice of his intellectual friends in his edited collection Dear Mr Rudd.  It included a chapter by Juliana Engberg who argued that the  arts could be advanced by a radical re-design of the Prime Minister’s Office by turning it into an “architectural conundrum”. Over a decade after this proposal was made, Manne still does not understand why the book was dismissed as daydreaming by The Australian’s editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell – whose paper, like Manne, supported Labor in the 2007 election.

A Reflection on Memory

Despite the claim in the Introduction that his book “has relied on publications… rather than on memory” there is much recall in Manne’s account. There are two aspects of someone with a good recollection.  Remembering – and not forgetting.

Manne writes that, until reading Patrick Morgan’s edited collection B.A. Santamaria Running The Show: Selected Documents 1939-1996 (MUP, 2008), he had “almost no memory” of discussions held with B.A. Santamaria, former prime minister Malcolm Fraser and John Carroll in late 1992/early 1993.

They involved the possible creation of a new political party. What was termed the Malcolm Fraser Group did not last long.  Even so, it is remarkable that Manne in 2008 had scant recall of having been involved in discussions about a new political party with Fraser and Santamaria, two of the most important figures in Australian history, a mere 15 years earlier.

Robert Manne and myself were among some one thousand Australians invited to attend the 2008 Summit established by Kevin Rudd soon after he became prime minister after the November 2007 election. This Ideas Summit was held in Parliament House in April of the following year. There were ten groups of one hundred each which were initially divided into five groups of twenty each where detailed discussions took place – before a final meeting of one thousand too place.

This is Manne’s recollection of the event:

Australians were invited to a weekend “Ideas Summit” in Canberra in April 2008. The thousand met first in general assembly…. We then divided into hundreds. I chose Governance.  Everyone was able to nominate an idea: I suggested the mandatory approval of parliament before going to war (except in a 9/11-style emergency). Because of the opposition of about twenty  invitees, including Paul Kelly and Gerard Henderson, this failed to make it as what was called a “Top Idea”. 

This is another “recollection” of an event which did not take place in the way Manne states.  After the initial get together of a thousand, the attendees were divided into ten groups of one hundred and then into five sub-groups of twenty each – which held lengthy meetings.

I was not in the sub-group with Manne where he first advanced his idea about Parliament and the war power. As to Paul Kelly, I do not know.

The five sub-groups reassembled as a group of one hundred at which Manne pitched his proposal. Here it was voted down on “the voices” – it was a bit of a shambles. As I recall, the top idea from the group of one hundred was for Australia to become a republic.

Again, 2008 is only 17 years ago and Kevin Rudd’s Ideas Summit was a memorable – if somewhat naïve – occasion. But, again, Manne’s recall is flawed.

Afterword

The Afterword ends with a The-End-of-the-World-is-Nigh warning:

Will humankind act in time and with the necessary urgency to abandon the use of fossil fuels for the energy needs of our industrial civilisation? Or will we allow the benign condition of the Earth – for humans, other species and the natural world – that has existed over the past 10,000 years, to be destroyed? I hope to live long enough to see what the answer to this question will be.

In spite of this, Robert Manne: A Political Memoir was a printed book – rather than an online only publication.  With a little help of fossil fuels, dead trees and so on.

Manne writes about Australians he has known or commented on for over half a century – but few are acknowledged as having done much good.  The only individuals to receive substantial praise in the Manne memoir are Manne himself, his wife Anne and his best friend Rai Gaita.  To many, Gaita’s writings are all but incomprehensible. But, to the author, Gaita exhibits “a purity of spirit” that shines through.

And then there is the fact that the individuals most ridiculed in the book are Frank Knopfelmacher and Hugo Wolfsohn – the two men who gave Manne his start in university academic life and made possible his “brilliant career” in the taxpayer subsidised academy.

The author’s principal mentor was Knopfelmacher.  When Manne addressed Knopfelmacher’s retirement dinner in late 1988, he described him as “a social thinker who has been for thirty years or more an original…prescient diagnostician of coming political troubles capable of discerning well in advance of most  of us the darker consequences of social engineering or social utopianism”.  Manne particularly praised Knopfelmacher’s comments on immigration “in the early 1980s”.  Yet at page 238 of his memoirs, Manne states that he knew in the early 1980s that Knopfelmacher “was gradually losing his mind”.

In short,  there is plenty of material in Robert Manne’s political memoirs for Peter Costello to raise a few laughs if he happens to be asked to launch a new edition of Frank Knopfelmacher’s Selected Writings.

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