Australian Government and Politics

Abstract

I arrived at Macquarie University in late 1971 to take up the chair of Politics, a subject I had not actually studied as an undergraduate, or even undertaken graduate courses in. I did have a PhD in Political Science, but that could have been written by anyone from across the humanities or social sciences with an interest in political parties. I may have been the last professor appointed in my subject to have been so strangely prepared. But there was not much I could have done about it. I had been an undergraduate at the University of New England, which did not offer political science as a subject. I discovered that the closer history came to my own time the more interested in it I became. My honours thesis explored the local impact of the Depression of the 1930s, while my Masters thesis analysed the electoral support of the Country Party in New South Wales between the wars. One of its examiners, the late Bruce Graham, was a political scientist at the ANU, and his department offered me a PhD scholarship. When I arrived at the ANU to start my PhD I encountered for the first time a scholar and teacher who became one of my intellectual heroes, Perce Partridge. Perce had an MA, but managed to serve, at different times through his exemplary academic life, as a professor in Government, Philosophy, Social Philosophy, Sociology and Education. I did not much notice disciplinary boundaries then, save as ways of structuring universities and their courses, and see them only faintly now.