I heard, conversely, that Manne said he would resign unless Murray was
sacked as poetry editor, at which point the Board said, ok, you resign.
If that is true, then Manne was stuck in a cleft stick of his own making.
And if some other stories I've heard are correct, Murray is no great
friend of Leonie Kramer.
Manne and Murray were fighting about the Stolen Generation. I am
completely unsure about the details, but Manne was at the time comparing
the tragedy of the Aboriginal people to the Holocaust, and it seems that
Murray didn't agree. My sympathy on that score is rather with Manne's
point of view, though I feel enormous scepticism about his claim that he
knew nothing about it until the Stolen Children report was released. How
could he not, as an active intellectual in Australia? It was, as they
say, common knowledge: and it seemed to me at the time a little
dishonest, a glossing of his failure to speak about it beforehand.
He was replaced with the rebarbative P.P. McGuinness, who used to be
(perhaps still is) a right wing newspaper columnist. I had to sub his
columns sometimes, the only time I ever read them all the way through,
and they were (a) untouchable (you weren't allowed to make corrections)
and (b) illiterately unreadable. He was paid an enormous amount of money
to write them, for reasons which used to mystify me completely.
Roll on Australian intellectual life.
Alison
>I used to read it in the early to mid-90s when it was under Robert Manne's
>editorship. It never seemed to be quite as right-wing or ant-left as it was
>supposed to be - I was probably missing the specifically Australian politics
>going on?
>
>I heard that Manne had been pushed out for not being right-wing enough and
>that the campaign was was orchestrated by Les Murray - is that true?
>
>____________________________________
>
>That's what the newspapers at the time said - Les Murray, deftly assisted
>by Quadrant Board member Dame Professor Leonie Kramer, an erstwhile member
>of the Board of one of "entrepreneur" Alan Bond's many companies.
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