The usual GR intellectual generosity and curiosity (not to mention the jazzily-intoxicating cultural-historical sweep). As Juss suggests, you really do only learn about people fully at their funerals (if they are well curated). We are for the most part forgetting this backstory stuff: the complexity and the contradictions that make for a proper life of an Oz mind, and this makes the present polarised self-imprisonment all the more difficult for our generation to think our way free of. I once got a piece up in Windschuttle's Quadrant - yes, yes, Rundle, but you thieve whatever space y'can, and anyway it was an amusing (no, really!) cheap slag at Australia's Arts & Lit sheltered workshops so no cute animals really got hurt in production - and he was a very soliticious and generous editor. Who also paid - while modestly - on time and with the kind of professionalising dignity that is all flailing wannabes really want and need. That he quickly baulked at my next stab, which was clearly less agreeable to his latterday cultural politics, doesn't diminish my remembered gratitude to him for being taken intellectually seriously by someone intellectually serious, at least once.
I live in Balmain, home to Quadrant under Paddy Mac, and I used to run into Keith's predecessor quite a bit around the manor, usually perched in the window cove of the Unity Hotel getting pissy with it far too early (often with Frank Devine), especially once they'd banned smoking at the Riverview, an earlier branch home to The Push, I think. (If nothing else it riled the libertarian in him.) I'd got to know Paddy a bit while I was working as an Army ADC for Bill Hayden, he too was always gracious - like a lot of these studied (and I think self-protectively ironic) Blimps-in-older age, and if/once they pick you as even halfway interested in how and why they'd got to where they'd got to in older age. (Gerard Henderson, another cheap-clown-figure to far too many Lefties, is in my brief experience the same). I never met Windschuttle, so I'll won't quibble with any consensus that he was, personally, a bit of a prick, but the thing that I remember most about late Paddy was an air of gentle sadness, really. These thinkers lived through and fought some pretty tumultous intellectual battles, and they did for a time genuinely invest their entire selves in the broader idea that...well, abstract ideas made material really do matter. And that if you are going to publicly 'think' something at all, then at least trying to 'make' something manifest of those thoughts too is not some mere optional adjunct to an intellectual life, but really, the definitive part of it.
The world is brilliantly flooded with brilliant ideas expressed brilliantly now, but there's never been a time (in my lifetime at least) where their brilliant authors are so voluntarily weightless and paralysed outside their own brilliantly abstract narcissisms. Contemporary Australian intellectuals have surrendered their material agency to bullying goons like Trump and Murdoch almost completely, and that most would never dream of regarding a life like Keith Windschuttle's as, above all, an instructional one...is a measure of how much salvage work material politics has to do.
Really enjoyed listening to this. Great writing. You understand my era so well, I started at Flinders Uni in 74, a Mandel Trot in a sea of Maoists. I became good friends (and student) with Medlin and Bill Brugger in later years.
A very good piece here from Guy Rundle. I hereby formally welcome him to the growing fraternity of Windschuttle critics. (My own modest contribution is at the url below.)
I used to know Keith and Liz back in the good old antiwar days of the Vietnam Action Committee. (For the younger reader, 1965-75.) That was in the of my wild and mis-spent Trotskyist Youth, when Lyndon Johnson, the murderous Texan Galah, Richard Nixon of Watergate fame, and the recently-deceased and much unlamented old war criminal Henry Kissinger were constantly in the news.
In 1958, as an 18-year-old, I was 'called up' (conscipted) for 'Nasho' (National Service military training for the younger reader) and was told that I would be liable to don khaki and go wherever our old war-hero (NOT) of a PM Bob Menzies sent us until the age of 30. Menzies himself had swanned around Melbourne in the uniform of a Captain in the Melbourne University Rifles until certain events in Europe in August 1914 persuaded him to resign his commission and concentrate on his legal-political career, for which the Establishment was rather slow to forgive him. ("A most promising military career, unfortunately cut short by the advent of war," was how the genuine WW1 veteran and fellow Liberal Sir Wilfrid Kent-Hughes memorably described it.) But I digress.
As a musician and singer-songwriter, I happened upon the poetry of Suzanne Edgar, and was very impressed indeed; so much so that I set two of her poems to music. That particular quest resulted in my becoming a subscriber to Quadrant Online, (QO) and so into the purview of Keith.
It was not long before I was taking issue with various QO pieces that denied the reality of human-induced climate change, otherwise known as Anthropogenic Global Warming, or AGW. That was also when I realised that 'Quadrant' served as a mouthpiece for the coal industry. For the numerous resident shills there, the best thing to be done with all the coal was burn it up in furnaces ASAP and convert it to $$$$ in the private bank accounts of the coal-owners. I used my commenting rights there to point this out, for which the ‘conservative’ crew who had come into control of that once-liberal journal, chucked me out. Thus I came to understand the complete philosophical bankruptcy of the QO ‘conservative’ position. They were not prepared to even try to defend themselves, preferring to silence their critics instead. As a former student of the renowned philosopher Professor John Anderson of Sydney University, I believed and still maintain that relentless critique has to be a central part of the conversation of humanity.
That, and the antics of one Gina Rinehart, revived my old Trotskyist spirit, and saved me from dumping socialism altogether. I now identify myself as a liberal, (NB: small 'l') and as a resource socialist. I maintain that all mineral resources should be like the roads, the air we breathe, sunlight we enjoy, and the rain that waters everything: public property for use by all. (If we had the same attitude to gold that we have to iron ore, then the legendary and highly disputable Edward Hargraves, who claimed to started the Gold Rush of the 1850s, would have been able to lay claim to the entire Bathurst field. And it would be a very different country today.
But the diggers were free spirits, and genuine free enterprisers; not alienated wage-slaves that later generations became.
I had a lecturer who would always call him Keith 'The Beast' Windschuttle, which I always assumed was just in reference to his stance in Fabrication, but I suspect he was more aware of his whole history. Great obit, thanks 👍
The usual GR intellectual generosity and curiosity (not to mention the jazzily-intoxicating cultural-historical sweep). As Juss suggests, you really do only learn about people fully at their funerals (if they are well curated). We are for the most part forgetting this backstory stuff: the complexity and the contradictions that make for a proper life of an Oz mind, and this makes the present polarised self-imprisonment all the more difficult for our generation to think our way free of. I once got a piece up in Windschuttle's Quadrant - yes, yes, Rundle, but you thieve whatever space y'can, and anyway it was an amusing (no, really!) cheap slag at Australia's Arts & Lit sheltered workshops so no cute animals really got hurt in production - and he was a very soliticious and generous editor. Who also paid - while modestly - on time and with the kind of professionalising dignity that is all flailing wannabes really want and need. That he quickly baulked at my next stab, which was clearly less agreeable to his latterday cultural politics, doesn't diminish my remembered gratitude to him for being taken intellectually seriously by someone intellectually serious, at least once.
I live in Balmain, home to Quadrant under Paddy Mac, and I used to run into Keith's predecessor quite a bit around the manor, usually perched in the window cove of the Unity Hotel getting pissy with it far too early (often with Frank Devine), especially once they'd banned smoking at the Riverview, an earlier branch home to The Push, I think. (If nothing else it riled the libertarian in him.) I'd got to know Paddy a bit while I was working as an Army ADC for Bill Hayden, he too was always gracious - like a lot of these studied (and I think self-protectively ironic) Blimps-in-older age, and if/once they pick you as even halfway interested in how and why they'd got to where they'd got to in older age. (Gerard Henderson, another cheap-clown-figure to far too many Lefties, is in my brief experience the same). I never met Windschuttle, so I'll won't quibble with any consensus that he was, personally, a bit of a prick, but the thing that I remember most about late Paddy was an air of gentle sadness, really. These thinkers lived through and fought some pretty tumultous intellectual battles, and they did for a time genuinely invest their entire selves in the broader idea that...well, abstract ideas made material really do matter. And that if you are going to publicly 'think' something at all, then at least trying to 'make' something manifest of those thoughts too is not some mere optional adjunct to an intellectual life, but really, the definitive part of it.
The world is brilliantly flooded with brilliant ideas expressed brilliantly now, but there's never been a time (in my lifetime at least) where their brilliant authors are so voluntarily weightless and paralysed outside their own brilliantly abstract narcissisms. Contemporary Australian intellectuals have surrendered their material agency to bullying goons like Trump and Murdoch almost completely, and that most would never dream of regarding a life like Keith Windschuttle's as, above all, an instructional one...is a measure of how much salvage work material politics has to do.
A really grand obit, Guy - thanks a bundle.
Really enjoyed listening to this. Great writing. You understand my era so well, I started at Flinders Uni in 74, a Mandel Trot in a sea of Maoists. I became good friends (and student) with Medlin and Bill Brugger in later years.
A very good piece here from Guy Rundle. I hereby formally welcome him to the growing fraternity of Windschuttle critics. (My own modest contribution is at the url below.)
I used to know Keith and Liz back in the good old antiwar days of the Vietnam Action Committee. (For the younger reader, 1965-75.) That was in the of my wild and mis-spent Trotskyist Youth, when Lyndon Johnson, the murderous Texan Galah, Richard Nixon of Watergate fame, and the recently-deceased and much unlamented old war criminal Henry Kissinger were constantly in the news.
In 1958, as an 18-year-old, I was 'called up' (conscipted) for 'Nasho' (National Service military training for the younger reader) and was told that I would be liable to don khaki and go wherever our old war-hero (NOT) of a PM Bob Menzies sent us until the age of 30. Menzies himself had swanned around Melbourne in the uniform of a Captain in the Melbourne University Rifles until certain events in Europe in August 1914 persuaded him to resign his commission and concentrate on his legal-political career, for which the Establishment was rather slow to forgive him. ("A most promising military career, unfortunately cut short by the advent of war," was how the genuine WW1 veteran and fellow Liberal Sir Wilfrid Kent-Hughes memorably described it.) But I digress.
As a musician and singer-songwriter, I happened upon the poetry of Suzanne Edgar, and was very impressed indeed; so much so that I set two of her poems to music. That particular quest resulted in my becoming a subscriber to Quadrant Online, (QO) and so into the purview of Keith.
It was not long before I was taking issue with various QO pieces that denied the reality of human-induced climate change, otherwise known as Anthropogenic Global Warming, or AGW. That was also when I realised that 'Quadrant' served as a mouthpiece for the coal industry. For the numerous resident shills there, the best thing to be done with all the coal was burn it up in furnaces ASAP and convert it to $$$$ in the private bank accounts of the coal-owners. I used my commenting rights there to point this out, for which the ‘conservative’ crew who had come into control of that once-liberal journal, chucked me out. Thus I came to understand the complete philosophical bankruptcy of the QO ‘conservative’ position. They were not prepared to even try to defend themselves, preferring to silence their critics instead. As a former student of the renowned philosopher Professor John Anderson of Sydney University, I believed and still maintain that relentless critique has to be a central part of the conversation of humanity.
That, and the antics of one Gina Rinehart, revived my old Trotskyist spirit, and saved me from dumping socialism altogether. I now identify myself as a liberal, (NB: small 'l') and as a resource socialist. I maintain that all mineral resources should be like the roads, the air we breathe, sunlight we enjoy, and the rain that waters everything: public property for use by all. (If we had the same attitude to gold that we have to iron ore, then the legendary and highly disputable Edward Hargraves, who claimed to started the Gold Rush of the 1850s, would have been able to lay claim to the entire Bathurst field. And it would be a very different country today.
But the diggers were free spirits, and genuine free enterprisers; not alienated wage-slaves that later generations became.
https://noahsarc.wordpress.com/2020/05/28/windschuttles-endarkenment/
I had a lecturer who would always call him Keith 'The Beast' Windschuttle, which I always assumed was just in reference to his stance in Fabrication, but I suspect he was more aware of his whole history. Great obit, thanks 👍
Great review and obituary. I had absolutely no idea there was more to him than Fabrication.