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Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War pp 303–320Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Quadrant: The Evolution of an Australian Conservative Journal

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the ideological development of the Australian journal Quadrant from its foundation in the mid-1950s until the present day. Unusually among periodicals associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), this journal is still published. The chapter begins by considering the circumstances, domestic and international, in which a group of anti-communist intellectuals established Quadrant at the end of 1956, and goes on to examine its response to events in the succeeding Cold War decades. It concludes with an account of the journal’s adjustment to the post-Cold War era, which saw sometimes bitter disagreements about its proper course in the new global context.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I would like to thank Emeritus Professor Robert Manne for answering my questions about his time as editor of Quadrant, and Kurt Ambrose for some useful comments about an earlier draft of this chapter.

  2. 2.

    ‘Counterfeit Freedom’, Encounter (October 1953), pp. 65–68.

  3. 3.

    A useful summary of these events may be found in Robert Murray, ‘The Split’, in Robert Manne (ed.), The Australian Century: Political Struggle in the Building of a Nation (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999). The same author’s The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties (F. W. Cheshire Publishing, 1970) is a standard work.

  4. 4.

    This account of Krygier’s background is based largely on his own article ‘The Making of a Cold Warrior’, Quadrant, 28 (June 1984). See also the essay by his son, Martin Krygier, ‘An Intimate and Foreign Affair’, in Ann Curthoys and Joy Damousi (eds.), What Did You Do in the Cold War, Daddy? (Sydney: New South Publishing, 2014).

  5. 5.

    Cassandra Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999), pp. 151–152.

  6. 6.

    ‘Twenty Years’, Quadrant, 21 (March 1977).

  7. 7.

    Peter Coleman, The Heart of James McAuley (Bacchus March: Common Court Publishing, 2006), p. 69.

  8. 8.

    B.A. Santamaria, Against the Tide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), ch. 30.

  9. 9.

    Pybus, pp. 143–144.

  10. 10.

    ‘Comment: by Way of Prologue’, Quadrant, 1 (Summer 1956–57). For more about McAuley’s worldview and his involvement with Quadrant, see Coleman, esp. ch. 6, and John McLaren, Writing in Hope and Fear: Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 5.

  11. 11.

    James McAuley, ‘On Being Intellectual’, Quadrant, 4 (Summer 1959–60).

  12. 12.

    These appeared in the issues of January–February 1969, January–February 1970, March–April 1970, January–February 1971, and March–April 1972.

  13. 13.

    For Knopfelmacher’s own account of his life before his arrival in Australia, see ‘My Political Education’, Quadrant 11 (July–August 1967).

  14. 14.

    For discussions of his intellectual influence, see B.A. Santamaria, John Carroll and Robert Manne, ‘Homage to Knopfelmacher’, Quadrant, 34 (March 1989).

  15. 15.

    This affair became something of a cause célèbre for Quadrant. See the issues for May–June 1965, July–August 1965, and January–February 1966.

  16. 16.

    ‘Miss Murdoch’s “Realism”’, Quadrant, 3 (May–June 1967).

  17. 17.

    ‘Santamaria and Foreign Policy: a Critique’, Quadrant, 19 (4), July 1975.

  18. 18.

    On how Kristol’s outlook contrasted with post-Cold War neoconservatism, see Jonathan Bronitsky, ‘The Real Irving Kristol’, The National Interest (September–October 2015).

  19. 19.

    In the spring 1960 and summer 1960–61 issues, respectively.

  20. 20.

    ‘Anderson’s Philosophy of Experience’, Quadrant, 7 (Autumn 1963).

  21. 21.

    ‘Velikovsky in Collision’, Quadrant, 8 (October–November 1964). Stove was to return to this theme in the October 1983 and January–February 1984 issues.

  22. 22.

    Horne wrote of McAuley that ‘it was obvious that all he was going to do was choose the verse’. Into the Open (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 114.

  23. 23.

    Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy (New York: Free Press, 1989), p. 222.

  24. 24.

    ‘The Australian Debate on Vietnam’, Quadrant, 10 (3), May/June 1966.

  25. 25.

    ‘Thoughts on Vietnam’, Ibid., 12 (2), March–April 1968.

  26. 26.

    ‘The Terror in South Vietnam’, Ibid., 13 ((4), July–August 1969.

  27. 27.

    ‘C.I.A.’, Quadrant, 11 (May–June 1967).

  28. 28.

    Ibid.

  29. 29.

    Frank Devine, ‘An Interview with Peter Coleman’, Quadrant, 50 (May 2006).

  30. 30.

    For Henry Kissinger’s views on congressional obstruction, see his Years of Renewal (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), pp. 472–475, 831–832. For Carter’s speech, see ‘Text of President’s Commencement Address at Notre Dame on Foreign Policy’, New York Times, 23 May 1977.

  31. 31.

    Left, Right, Left: Political Essays 1997–2005 (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2005), p. 16.

  32. 32.

    ‘Why the Soviet Union Thinks it can Fight and Win a Nuclear War’, Quadrant, 21 (September 1977).

  33. 33.

    ‘Does NATO Exist?’ Quadrant, 24 (August 1980).

  34. 34.

    ‘Mugged by Reality: An Introduction to Neoconservatism’, Quadrant, 26 (January–February 1982).

  35. 35.

    A. Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Harvard Address’, Quadrant, 22 (September 1978).

  36. 36.

    ‘The New U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment: Its Rise and Fall’, Quadrant, 24 (November 1980).

  37. 37.

    ‘Foreign Policy After Vietnam’, Quadrant, 26 (March 1982). Fraser had become Prime Minister originally as a result of Gough Whitlam’s dismissal by the Governor-General in 1975.

  38. 38.

    See John Whitehall, ‘Who’s Who in the Australian Peace Movement’, Quadrant, 26 (September 1982), and Vladimir Bukovsky, ‘The Peace Movement and the Soviet Union’, Quadrant, 26 (December 1982).

  39. 39.

    ‘The Menace of Multi-Culturalism’, Quadrant, 24 (October 1980).

  40. 40.

    ‘Chomsky and the Neo-Nazis’, Quadrant, 25 (October 1981).

  41. 41.

    R. Manne, ‘Left of the Urals’, Quadrant, 33 (April 1989). Rubinstein’s attack and Manne’s response appeared in the June 1989 issue.

  42. 42.

    ‘A Short Way With Dissenters’, Quadrant, 33 (March 1989). Manne has since indicated that he felt some uneasiness about this editorial even when he wrote it (private communication with the author).

  43. 43.

    ‘The End of the Cold War and Us’, Quadrant, 34 (March 1990).

  44. 44.

    For Manne’s own account of his political evolution, see the title essay in his collection Left, Right, Left, and for the circumstances of his departure ‘Why I Have Resigned’, Quadrant, 41 (December 1997).

  45. 45.

    ‘Why I Am Not a Republican’, Quadrant, 37 (May 1993), and ‘Why I Am No Longer Not a Republican’, Quadrant, 39 (April 1995).

  46. 46.

    See Hal Colebatch, ‘Robert Manne and the Quadrant Affair’, News Weekly, 15 October 2001.

  47. 47.

    For a critical discussion of Windschuttle’s views, see Tony Taylor, Denial: History Betrayed (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), ch. 6. For a different view, see W.D. Rubinstein, ‘The Biases of Genocide Studies, Part III: Alleged Colonial Genocides’, Quadrant, 53 (May 2009).

  48. 48.

    See his article ‘Why I Left the Left’, Quadrant, 50 (June 2006).

  49. 49.

    Frank Devine, ‘An Interview with Peter Coleman’, Quadrant, 50 (May 2006).

  50. 50.

    John Zerilli, ‘Why Conservatives Should Support Same-Sex Marriage’, Quadrant, 56 (March 2012).

  51. 51.

    See his article ‘In Defence of (Occasional) Appeasement’, Quadrant, 59 (October 2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia

    John Chiddick

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of History, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Giles Scott-Smith

  2. Amerika-Institut, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany

    Charlotte A. Lerg

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Chiddick, J. (2017). Quadrant: The Evolution of an Australian Conservative Journal. In: Scott-Smith, G., Lerg, C. (eds) Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59867-7_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59867-7_16

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