Graeme Davison - Hugh Stretton: Selected Writings
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Hugh Stretton: Selected Writings: summary, description and annotation
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Australias greatest social-democratic thinker.
A public intellectual known for his deeply humane approach to social, economic and urban issues, Hugh Stretton was an Australian original.
His Political Sciences was described by the Times Literary Supplement as a work of near genius. His groundbreaking Ideas for Australian Cities became the manifesto for a generation awakening to the distinctive features of our cities and suburbs.
In this selection, leading historian Graeme Davison includes highlights from these and other published and unpublished works, showcasing Strettons bravura intellectual style, grounded analysis, literary flair and the remarkable range of his thinking on history, politics, urban planning, and progressive social and economic development. Davison also provides a substantial and valuable introduction, setting the work in context.
Stretton saw the dangers of the neoliberal orthodoxy that took hold in the Anglophone world from the early 1980s. With subtlety, imagination and rigour, his work offers an alternative vision of a good and fair society.
Stretton could see beyond the clichs and into the lives of ordinary Australians. Donald Horne
Stretton may have been Australias most distinguished post-war social scientist. Robert Manne
A public intellectual known for his deeply humane approach to social, economic and urban issues, Hugh Stretton was an Australian original.
His Political Sciences was described by the Times Literary Supplement as a work of near genius. His groundbreaking Ideas for Australian Cities became the manifesto for a generation awakening to the distinctive features of our cities and suburbs.
In this selection, leading historian Graeme Davison includes highlights from these and other published and unpublished works, showcasing Strettons bravura intellectual style, grounded analysis, literary flair and the remarkable range of his thinking on history, politics, urban planning, and progressive social and economic development. Davison also provides a substantial and valuable introduction, setting the work in context.
Stretton saw the dangers of the neoliberal orthodoxy that took hold in the Anglophone world from the early 1980s. With subtlety, imagination and rigour, his work offers an alternative vision of a good and fair society.
Stretton could see beyond the clichs and into the lives of ordinary Australians. Donald Horne
Stretton may have been Australias most distinguished post-war social scientist. Robert Manne
Graeme Davison: author's other books
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Graeme Davison
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Martin Baumeister (editor)
Paul Stretton-Stephens [Stretton-Stephens
Peter Clark
Fran Tonkiss
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Published by La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc.
Level 1, 221 Drummond Street
Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
www.blackincbooks.com
www.latrobeuniversitypress.com.au
La Trobe University plays an integral role in Australias public intellectual life, and is recognised globally for its research excellence and commitment to ideas and debate.
La Trobe University Press publishes books of high intellectual quality, aimed at general readers. Titles range across the humanities and sciences, and are written by distinguished and innovative scholars. La Trobe University Press books are produced in conjunction with Black Inc., an independent Australian publishing house. The members of the LTUP Editorial Board are Vice-Chancellors Fellows Emeritus Professor Robert Manne and Dr Elizabeth Finkel, and Morry Schwartz and Chris Feik of Black Inc.
Copyright The Estate of Hugh Stretton 2018
Introduction Graeme Davison 2018
Collection La Trobe University Press 2018
The Estate of Hugh Stretton asserts its moral right as author of the work.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
9781760640743 (paperback)
9781743820612 (ebook)
Cover design by Marilyn de Castro
Text design by Peter Long and typesetting by Tristan Main
Cover portrait of Hugh Stretton by Rob Hannaford, image courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
INTRODUCTION
Graeme Davison
I N HIS TIME, HUGH STRETTON WAS ADMIRED AS AUSTRALias foremost public intellectual and a social-democratic thinker of international stature. His prolific writings on cities, housing, economics, history and the social sciences attracted appreciative readers on both sides of politics. His most popular book, Ideas for Australian Cities (1970), became the manifesto for a generation awakening to the distinctive features of our cities and suburbs. He gave the ABCs Boyer Lectures on housing policy, speculated on how new technologies and environmental change would reshape Western societies, and challenged the effects of neoliberal economics on their public life.
As powerful as his writing, however, was his personal influence. As a speaker, teacher and mentor, Stretton inspired a generation of academics, politicians, planners and public servants, people who shared his vision of a fairer Australia. His domed forehead, leonine good looks and gravitas made an immediate impression on all those who heard or met him. Colleagues were in awe of his speed and clarity of thought, the simplicity of his speech and his extraordinary breadth of knowledge, practical as well as theoretical. Yet he was modest, self-deprecatory and generous almost to a fault.
Among twentieth-century Australian intellectuals, perhaps only one other figure the philosopher John Anderson was similarly revered. In a country sometimes considered resistant to intellectual pursuits, each commanded attention for his intellectual charisma. Anderson developed a distinctive philosophical approach, Australian realism, and drew a band of devoted disciples, the Andersonians, although their influence hardly spread beyond Sydney. While drawing strength from the progressive traditions of Melbourne and Adelaide, Stretton reached a wider national and international readership. For a time, his ideas influenced social policy in Adelaide and Canberra, and even after his brand of social democracy faded he remained an incisive critic of its opponents. Yet while his writing was widely read, he won admirers rather than disciples. There are no Strettonians.
Like Anderson, Stretton was an Australian original, a big-picture thinker conversant with the wider currents of British and American thought, but with distinctively Australian attributes: a resistance to abstraction, a respect for the lessons of practical experience, and a preference for plain speech. Immune from the herd instinct of parties and schools, he defied conventional labels. He was sometimes called enigmatic or idiosyncratic, although there was really nothing mysterious or contrarian about him. While resistant to Marxism he believed that the idea of having a theory of everything is death he defied Cold War suspicions and both encouraged and appointed individual Marxists.
The label most frequently applied to Stretton is social democrat, sometimes with the qualification pragmatic. It is accurate as far as it goes, in capturing his belief in democratic state action to redress social disadvantage, but it misses a strain of paternalism that irked some critics. Moderate socialist or radical conservative was how he described himself in Ideas for Australian Cities. Then and later he usually placed himself on the Left, but gave the term his own definition: I use the terms Left and Right not for forms of government but for attitudes to equality. In that regard he was old-fashioned, for he had little interest in emerging leftist preoccupations with questions of identity and diversity. Asked about his beliefs, he offered Christian atheist. His heroes included the Christian socialist R.H. Tawney, the sociologist and activist Michael Young, the old-school South Australian public servants J.W. Wainwright and Alf Ramsay, and the long-serving Australian Reserve Bank governor and advocate for Aboriginal Australians Herbert Nugget Coombs.
The apparent contradictions in Strettons outlook are best understood when set against the pattern of his life. The opening section of this book, Stretton on Himself, collects a number of short pieces drawn from various published and unpublished works in which he reflects on phases or aspects of his life. Written at different times and for different purposes, they nevertheless provide insights, variously earnest, wry and self-critical, on how he saw himself. In the following pages, I offer a brief overview of his life and an assessment of his work from the vantage point of an admirer, a fellow historian who knew Stretton (although not closely) and followed a similar path some years later from Melbourne via Oxford to Canberra, where I caught his interests in the social sciences and the history of Australian cities.
Hugh Stretton was a person of his time World War II and the long post-war boom and of the places where he lived Melbourne, Oxford and Adelaide. He was born in 1924 into Melbournes upper middle professional class. His father, Leonard, was a respected barrister and judge who chaired a series of landmark inquiries. His mother, Nora, a daughter of the vicarage and herself a brilliant student, devoted her life to her family and a range of public causes. At Melbourne University the Strettons had been friends of the young Robert Menzies, but as adults, their son recalled, they were almost perfectly non-political in the party sense. Hugh was a child of the suburbs (beachside Beaumaris and upper-middle-class Kew), of the private schools (Mentone Grammar and Scotch College) and of a loving, encouraging family. Several of his abiding interests as a social theorist such as the effects of housing on human welfare, the value of unpaid domestic work and the benefits of the suburban house and garden were grounded in his own experience of home and family.
While the Strettons were well-off, there was nothing insular or complacent about them. Life didnt consist of having, or looking at or enjoying things, Nora told her children. Life consisted of doing things. At Scotch, Hugh came under the influence of a remarkable school chaplain, the Christian Socialist Stephen Yarnold. With Yarnolds support, he established a boys club on a new Housing Commission estate in Port Melbourne, a working-class suburb on the other side of town. Reaching across the class divide would become a motif in his social thought. I like trotting about the class structure, he later confessed. To some, it smacked of noblesse oblige. But, as Stretton persuasively argued, the barriers between rich and poor damaged both. He was convinced that a more equal society would also be a happier one for everyone.
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