also have a capacity to barge in directly – but only if they have a desire to appeal to people’s imaginations, and the talent to do so. These are the ‘public intellectuals’. Some of them may be one-offs. Some become regulars. They become influential if they articulate ideas that are already in the minds of some of ‘the public’ anyway, if in a more diffuse state. They get nowhere if they don’t. Two of my books, The Lucky Country and Death of the Lucky Country, were prime examples of appealing to interests of which readers were already becoming aware.

Geoffrey Blainey: a bag of breadcrumbs

The species known as Public Intellectual has probably existed a long time. In the late nineteenth century in Australia the churches probably harboured more of the species than did the universities which were few and small. Journalism and radio are now home to quite a few people who think seriously about a wide range of issues and disseminate their views. Universities are a haven for most public intellectuals but there it’s not always easy to play the role. In many departments it is believed that only an expert with a list of publications and a known monopoly of a strip of knowledge has a right to comment on related issues. Even if those experts themselves refuse to make comments for a wider audience, they are suspicious of a colleague or someone in another discipline who tries to fill the gap. Knowledge is more and more broken into breadcrumbs. The university – with its explicit faith in total knowledge – is in danger of slowly becoming a bag of breadcrumbs. The present research cult encourages this trend. In medicine, engineering, physics and allied fields there are probably social gains from this acute specialisation but in the humanities and most of the social sciences the finely weighed and closely analysed bread crumb, while vital, is not a substitute for the loaf of bread. The task of a public intellectual is, by its nature, hazardous. The knowledge, experience and perspective needed by one person who is willing to comment on numerous issues is often more than one person can reasonably command. And yet in a university, let alone in a democracy, the role is essential.

Robert Dessaix: dead and stuffed parrots

For the public intellectual in Australia there are surely two sine qua nons: an intellect (the easy part, we almost all at least have access to one) and a public (the hard part – even when sighted, it can rarely be run to ground). Apart from anything else, these two basic requirements sadly rule out most academics because (a) most academic institutions reward publication in The (refereed) Saskatchewan Journal of Studies in Neurolinguistics, read by two Ukrainian eccentrics and the janitor, far more highly than an uncompetitive, easy-to-read, jargon-free article read by millions in The Good Weekend; (b) academics generally all too often confuse specialised knowledge with intellect; and (c) academics mostly labour under the misapprehension that the public wishes to be taught something – it doesn’t, it wishes to learn. But there are other factors, I think, constraining the appearance of public intellectuals in the European or North American sense in Australia. Firstly, there are so few forums for them, apart from Radio National, The Australian and one or two smaller magazines – and no forums, no real public. Secondly, in sharp contrast with Europe or America, intellect has become so identified with specialised know ledge and theory in Australia that artists have become virtually excluded from the field – if an Australian Camus, let alone a Dostoyevsky, dared raise his head here he would soon be shouted down for failing to distin­guish between the dead parrot of structuralism and the merely stuffed parrot of post-structuralism, or for laughably confusing Hassan with Habermas. Consequently, there are almost no novelists, poets, playwrights or painters who could unarguably be dubbed public intellectuals in this country. This is a huge loss. Thirdly, to be a public intellectual in the grand tradition it seems to me you neesd to be able to expand outwards from a solid matrix of ideas – scientific, political, religious, artistic – as the Sontags, Steiners, Ecos and others do. Few among us have the economic or intellectual freedom to allow this to happen. And finally, I think a true public intellectual has to be able to identify with his or her (and we’ve produced very few hers, note) country’s history, to be able to say ‘Australia’s history is my history’, the shameful things as well as the triumphs. This sort of sensibility is no doubt slow to develop in any post-colonial society, but the kind of scepticism foisted on Australians about the need to identify with any Grand Narratives at all, apart from approved ethnic ones, let alone with British colonial history, is effectively stunting what little growth there has been.

Beatrice Faust: is and ought to be

Intellectuals sift what is from what ought to be. They have some education, some concerns with the big issues and some aptitude for expressing these concerns. The public forum is the mass media. Sometimes little magazines can advise journalists that an issue is important or curious but it is nearly impossible to be an intellectual in the public forum because of all the noise impeding communication in newspapers and television. Intellectuals are probably more effective via radio, where the audiences are smaller but more representative and more thoughtful. Success on television demands many skills – mostly inimical to intelligence: capacity to act, to say what you have to in less than no time and not to mind if you are forced to share the show with someone who dresses up as fruits and vegetables to talk about diet. If intellectuals are really going to write for more than their own coterie, they will need a style simple enough for the person who left school at or before the legal minimum age and interesting enough to engage double PhDs. The sort of accessibility required in the public forum is not as valued among intellectuals as it was, say, in Orwell’s time – partly because the influx of first-generation tertiary graduates after WWII confused unintelligibility with erudition and partly because postmodernists are obliged to be unintelligible in case they are found out. In fact, most Australian intellectuals are content to write only for their friends, their opponents and festival audiences.

Gerard Henderson: the PIs are coming

Public Intellectual. It sounds somewhat pretentious. That’s why, no doubt, some prefer the abbreviation ‘PI’. But PI has its own problems – including almost no name recognition. For example, it’s unlikely that a cry of ‘The PIs are coming’ would inspire a push to the nearest conference room. A greater diversity within the media has been one consequence of the information explosion. It’s not so long ago that journalists and presenters (along with editors and producers) dominated both the print and the electronic media. Not anymore. These days it is not uncom­mon to find non-journalists with their own columns or programs or making individual statements in print or on air. Moreover the concept of journalism is no longer confined to reportage and many journalists are specialists or opinion leaders in their own right. In the past much of the public debate was narrowed by exclusion. In universities there was a view that academics should not demean their status by writing or speaking for the general public. And in the media there was an assumption that intellectuals could not be readily understood. Moreover some intellectuals who did enter public debate gave the (false) impression that there was something special about their political views and/or personal morality. Examples aplenty can be found, inter alia, in Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937) and Authors Take Sides on Vietnam (1967). But now instances abound of intellectuals mixing it in the public debate – with relish and without pretention. Many Australian examples come to mind – Peter Craven, Louise Adler, Andrew Field, Stuart McIntyre, Marilyn Lake, Robert Manne and Judith Brett. This lot, and more besides, do not need a guernsey – whether of the ‘Public Intellectual’ or ‘PI’ genre. There isn’t a problem. So let’s not invent one.

Robert Manne: between two worlds

Intellectuals are caught, uneasily between two worlds. Like scholars they are concerned with ideas and the pursuit of truth. Like politicians they wish to change the world, to leave it, as a result of their activities, a better place. The tension between these two impulses is fundamental and irreducible. Scholars often suspect that the intellectuals’ worldliness and combative tendency are inconsistent with the disinterested quest for truth. Politicians often regard with a kind of benign contempt the complexity and uncertainty in which the thinking of the intellectual is inescapably grounded. There exists a small sardonic literature on the intellectual in politics. Nonetheless it is the co­existence of the passion for truth and of engagement in affairs of the world that defines the intellectual. The intellectuals’ only weapons are words; their characteristic activities writing books and articles whose aim is to influence the world, editing magazines, giving lectures. Only in part is the purpose of such activity to shape immediate political outcomes. In reality politicians and journalists influence the world more directly and immediately. Intellectual activity is based, rather, on the conviction that the life of society is ultimately determined by battles over ideas, and enriched by the existence of a level of public discussion characterised by conceptual clarity rather than confusion, by moral lucidity rather than muddle. Yet intellectuals are, as Russell Jacoby has noted, a dying breed. The reasons are complex. The expansion of universities has paralleled the decline of intellectuals. Universities encourage extreme specialisation and do not reward generalists. At the universities the study of humanities is now conducted in a language designed to repel outsiders and is unsuited to the public sphere. Post-modernism teaches scepticism with regard to truth. It shatters the public sphere into fragments. Under its influence belief in the capacity of ideas to change the world – for good or ill – has gradually faded. The public sphere comes to be filled not by intellectuals but by two rather different types: ‘experts’ and ‘pundits’.

Phillip Adams: declaring yourself priapic

Intellectual is such a silly, pretentious, boastful, anachronistic word. I can live with terms like academic, scholar, scientist or philosopher but to anoint yourself an intellectual is, well ... comic. An above-the-waist counterpart to declaring yourself priapic. Big brain versus big dick. I work as a gatekeeper for intellectuals on the wireless and it is my sad duty to report that many of them are, in fact, dickheads. I think intellectuals should be banned under the new gun laws. At very least your semi-automatic or automatic intellectuals.

Christopher Pearson: windbags of our time

Academe and the bench provide a niche for some public intel­lectuals in this country but the only way I know of making a living out of it is as a newspaper columnist or radio broadcaster. I once thought of writing a book about Australian columnists and calling it ‘Great windbags of our time’. Part of the feebleness of our cultural and intellectual life arises from the laziness of editors. Rather than pursuing people who are experts in particular fields, they tend to rely on people who are expert in having an opinion and getting their copy in on time. A great trap for columnists is that we are expected to be preternaturally well­informed on far too many issues. Some, like P.P. McGuinness, are genuinely omnicompetent. The rest should more often decline the opportunity to display their frailties. I mentioned the laziness of editors before but I should say that there are worse editorial crimes. For example, a lot of columnists are employed in a very one-dimensional way-as representatives of the Left or the Right, women, gays or whatever – as though the range of opinions worth publishing had been served if all categories were given a tum. But the best public intellectuals are forever revising their opinions and thinking in several dimensions at once. It wasn’t intended as a compliment when a friend said you never knew what Beatrice Faust was going to say next, but it ought to have been. Too few of our columnists have that capacity to surprise us. More often it is a matter of ‘we’re here to do your thinking for you, at a lumbering pace, in undemanding prose’. One of the best tests of a public intellectual is whether or not they’re prepared to pander to the craving for vicarious thought or provoke the real thing.

Judith Brett: imagining the audience

To be a successful public intellectual one obviously has to have something to say, but, as importantly, one has to know how to say it. One has to be able to write persuasively for a range of readerships, and at varying lengths; one has to be able to go on radio, learning the art of putting your point across, even though the interviewer asks you questions that are beside the point; one might even have to go on television, at short notice, with unwashed hair. That is, being a public intellectual requires the development of considerable skills of writing and communication. Where does one learn these? For what they’re worth, I learned most of mine whilst I was editor of Meanjin. My academic training had given me some rigour of thought and facility with argument, as well as a considerable basis of knowledge of political and social history and theory to inform my opinions; and although it had taught me to write clearly, it had not taught me how to write for a general readership – nor taught me the usefulness of anecdote. I learned these editing other people’s work, and writing myself for a general readership. The key thing I learned was the importance of imagining the audience. I also learned the importance of writing to length. If the editor has given you a word length there is a good reason for it, even if it is only 250 words on the role of the public intellectual.

Dennis Altman: a modern Agora

In discussing ‘public intellectuals’ we tend to concentrate on the second word, rather than the first, yet in some ways the concept of ‘the public’ is more important. The very term’ public intellectual’ assumes a common space and culture in which we can meet, a modem Agora in which ideas can be broached and developed without political persecution and with at least some sense of a common citizenship which means they are generally relevant. In recent decades those disenfranchised from the public sphere – Aborigines, women, homosexuals, those of non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds – have pointed to the extent which, far from being a neutral meeting ground, the ‘public arena’ has been constructed to serve certain privileged groups and interests. This is partly true, but the answer is not to close down the Agora but to make it accessible to a more diverse range of people. Despite postmodern claims for relativism there are, I believe, certain universal values which should be upheld, and in this sense the role of the public intellectual is a moral one, holding the wielders of power to account as the clergy might have done in less secular times. There can and should be debate over moral principles, but it is precisely these debates where we need intellectuals. Many of today’s most significant public intellectuals come out of particular communities and are associated with particular forms of identity politics. Their impact upon the larger society is measured by the extent to which they are able to link those specific communities and identities to larger debates, and challenge the boundaries of what is considered appropriate political and intellectual discourse.

Humphrey McQueen: revolt and the masses

Because intellectual is a category of work and not a quality of mind, intellectuals are by definition public. Educators receive taxes in return for training operatives to maintain corporations or state machines, making them and their students into public intellectuals. Just as credentialism is the educators’ source of power so the expertise they impart becomes the tool for social control. In a slip of redistributive justice the procedures devised by social scientists for the management of workers and welfare recipients were imposed on their academic creators under the Dawkins regime. Lawyers, economists and scientists are the bulk of public intellectuals and their methods are antithetical to popular sovereignty. This anti-democratic bias of intellectuals is apparent in the criticism of jury trials. The managerial counter­revolution appears also in the appointment of trade union organisers with university degrees but no industry experience. Displacement of consciousness-raising in the women’s movement by the femiotics is another subversion. Throughout these professions of power runs a revolt against the masses. Under threat is the equalitarian ‘s trust in a capacity to convince people that reform is desirable while learning from them how to ensure fulfilment of those goals. Mabo is a prime example of lawyers’ business dropped on a public not prepared by discussion. Popular sovereignty with its promise of social equity is threatened by the labours of public ‘intellectuals on behalf of the state and business.

Greg Dening: an erotic moment

There is a moment in reading – I would call it an erotic moment – when one says to oneself ‘that is just what I was going to say’. It is a moment in a novel, a history narrative, a philosophical reflection, a linguistic analysis, a literary criticism, an archaeological report, when one catches the metaphoric dimension of general cultural discourse. It is a moment of recognition that crosses all the languages of art and science. The world and I are speaking to the same point. I think it is the role of the public intellectual to take off the blinkers of specialised discipline and to give voice to what that common point is, to discover the metaphors of thinking. Maybe that cathartic moment occurs only once in a public intellectual’s lifetime. That’s all right. Better once than never. Better once, for that matter, than weekly in a newspaper column. A biochemistry professor once told me that he would sack a postgraduate student he caught reading a scientific journal older than three years. I doubt if he ever supervised a budding public intellectual. I doubt if anyone unconscious of the plagiarisms of their own learning and living can be deemed a public intellectual. The problems of humanity do not seem to change, only the talk about them. In an age of headlined’ discovery’ and frenetic novelty, maybe the role of the public intellectual is to say that there is no knowledge in a headline. All talk is complicated and, in a sense, borrowed.