This ‘joke’ resonates in the collection assembled by Stephen Murray-Smith and Leonie Sandercock. Had the Lecture opened the book it would have posed the question that runs through it: after the collapse of his confidence in the CPA as vanguard party, how did Turner, a socialist to the end, reason the relationship between radical intellectuals and socialism’s intended popular base? From the earliest of these pieces (1959) to the latest (1978) Turner kept coming back to that question.

One answer was given in a series of responses to revisionist (or New Left) accounts of Australian working-class history. Allowing that there were some differences of emphasis among them these writers could be summed up as arguing that the history of the working class cannot be written apart from a history of class structure. This would mean seeing more of the ideological and political limitations of the working class, their incorporation into dominant perspectives and practices. It would not lay so much stress on the relationship of the working class to socialist intellectuals partly because it would do more to examine other determinants of working class action, and partly because of its critical analysis of the formation of those same intellectuals within a nationalist and populist tradition.

Turner had some good comments to make on this. He conceded that the radical nationalist tradition in Australia included some reactionary elements previously downplayed by partisan scholars. He had already agreed with Manning Clark that historians had not registered the tragic limitations of the doctrine of immanent Progress and the naivety of seeing an implicitly socialist trajectory in Australian history. Turner questioned whether the critique of populism and Laborism enabled an alternative political practice. Did not the Marxist rejection of populism smack of academic posturing, outside of politics? Where else to turn but the ALP in a serious political practice?

Turner also pointed out in Australian Nationalism and Australian History (1978) that his difference with the New Left was generational. ‘They have lived in a different world and see that world with different eyes.’ Turner’s generation saw the practical potential of radical nationalism in the period of their maturation, from the thirties to the fifties. He describes his generation as ‘that which gave rise to radical nationalism’.

So radical nationalism was both a construct of an intellectual milieu and an intuitive description of the reality of popular feeling. Turner’s final response to the New Left is, accordingly, both affirmative and descriptive of ‘common people’: ‘As I read Australian history radical nationalism fits more closely (warts and all) the traditional aspirations of that segment of society with which I am most concerned – the working class, the labour movement, the ‘common people.’

He went on to say that this meant the incremental realisation of an egalitarian democracy rather than a revolutionary rupture. Although that might be a more desirable and realistic historical course, it does not by itself establish the necessity of radical nationalism. What values and demands does it nowadays include? In this collection, Turner’s writing is not programmatic for either scholarship or politics. His debate with the New Left was not about programmes but about the possibility of intellectual identification with a popular constituency. The New Left writers were much more certain of discontinuity, of what they could not identify with in popular traditions.

Room to Manoeuvre reveals more of the difficulties than the possibilities of Turner’s wish to represent popular interests in his intellectual activity. It was with some embarrassment that he began his 1964 essay ‘Culture of the intelligentsia’, ‘a pretentious title’, he said, ‘why take time off to write it?’ The ‘time off’ was well spent. Turner argues that a central strand of this culture was the ‘desire for independence and individuality’. Intellectuals are the intelligentsia’s freer spirits, not narrowed by intellectual specialisation, resistant of orthodoxy. He mentions the intelligentsia’s ambivalence about being thus apart; they offset it by ‘a chameleon-like adaptation to the general society, an attempt to escape recognition and isolation’. Nonetheless they are a distinct and growing stratum on whose future Turner speculated. It was the tension between their independence and their institutionalization that mattered. Both conservatives and radicals, he wrote in 1965:

are now willing to hire the services of intellectuals provided that they can establish the limits; neither is prepared to concede anything in the way of power. Society no longer isolates its intellectuals; but it still fears and disapproves their intellectuality. How much room for manoeuvre still remains?

Expressing this anxiety seems to me to imply that an intellectual’s duty to self comes before an allegiance to a class.

Turner had a sense of the atrophy of working-class radicalism. In the democracies labour movements had become ‘reformist and empirical’; their political development stunted rather than stimulated by their economic and political victories. In a 1960 essay he refers to ‘the suffocating feather beds of the welfare state’ and in 1959 argued that in a time of affluent complacency it was necessary for someone to keep democratic values alive. Manning Clark seems to have given this disillusion a new dimension: by 1966 Turner saw behind the comfort of post-war Australia a strain of a spiritual kind. The ‘Retreat from Reason’ to absurdism and sensation was a response to:

a situation in which men confront the possibility of their involuntary participation in the mega-death race, in which they seem no longer able to control the productive and political machines they have made. Those who think of their condition rationalise it in the form of determinism and absurdism; those who do not, relax and enjoy their fate.

Turner took from Clark a language with which to express his political disappointment, a language which universalised his frustration. He agreed with Clark that the promise of politics and material progress had been spiritually empty. Critical intellectuals were now confronting problems that could not be solved by existing political instruments. The eve of the anti-War movement saw Turner· at his most pessimistic, ready to follow Clark in a retreat from politics.

His students helped save him with their more articulate rejection of mainstream society, the subject of ‘The politics of action’ (1968). Their refusals, he hoped, would clear the way to an alternative form of political expression. By 1970 he had seen it in action in ‘The Vietnam Moratorium’, the shortest but happiest piece in the collection. It was in that year that he felt able to answer the challenge of Clark’s pessimism. There was a point to politics and reform. It was to bring about a state of material security in which it was possible to acknowledge and explore the limitations of the human condition. The essay on Manning Clark is the most confident and judicious· working out of the relationship. between his populism and his intellectualism, that is, between his Marxist ambivalence about popular materialism and his sense of despair at the Stalinist debacle. Perhaps this point about belief should be balanced by one about milieu and audience. I’m thinking of Turner’s valedictory compliment to Outlook in the same year, that it had ‘provided a refuge, a place for many of us to examine, and to lick our wounds of 1956’.

But the Clark essay also led Turner further from an avowal of radical nationalism, except by recourse to a rereading of the canon of painting and writing which proclaimed the ‘identification of the Australian tradition. with pre-Christian and Christian traditions, sanctified by age, the transformation of legend into myth’. But this re-reading conceded much – a once demotic and politically celebrated canon became acceptable as intellectual culture. This is a long way from the radical and popular nationalism of the Australian Book Society, the party assignment that Turner seems to have relished most.

If radical nationalism became a more abstract and all-inclusive notion in order to survive in a more plural society, if avowing it became more a matter of loyalty to his generation than a programmatic commitment, then the readers of this collection are not the losers. The essays on female history, cultural policy, Aborigines, graffiti and children’s rhymes show a diversity, responsiveness and generosity that is unmatched by any social critic of the left or the right. Some pieces’ teaching value will survive a long time; they were written for a general audience, by a warm and intelligent man.