Back in the post-war years Catholics were continually informed by Movement spokesmen that it was ‘a quarter to midnight’ and, in FIFTEEN metaphorical minutes, the Communists (without police or army moles and only one Qμeensland MHA) would seize the post office, the ABC, and the mint. With pseudo-Hispanic ferocity, nuns would be raped over prie-dieux and priests impaled (no doubt in sedentary gargoyle style) on the finials of their cathedrals. As things turned out for ‘Franco’ Santamaria, it was only high noon not midnight and a cockeyed Bert Evatt shot him out of main street politics into the narking ambush alleyways of the DLP. It has been characteristic of Santamaria that he can take an obscurantist view of what is, in reality, plein air.

This time up Australia is still ‘at the crossroads’ which simply move with time and Santamaria is affecting to be an ‘outsider’, a term used of him by the late ‘Professor Hedley Bull’ (‘Professor’ is important!). This grab-bag of mostly occasional speeches and journalism from The Australian, The Age, and Quadrant makes the point. There are a prologue, five; essays on Australian politics, three on personalities (Lionel Murphy, Wilfred Burchett, Daniel Mannix), three on culture (‘The law as ‘a vehicle, for social engineering’, ‘Test tube babies’, ‘The Christian West; fall and resurrection’) and an epilogue, ‘Faith and belief’, which adds little to the Companion-to the Catechism which used to be studied in Catholic secondary schools. Although Santamaria cogently makes points, for example, on the family as the basis of society, which are for me often unexceptionable, he is at his most original when he distorts history.

While it may seem odd that an outsider’s prologue should be on ‘The Sunset of Australian Rules’, it has always been one of Santamaria’s oratorical ploys, to display his (quite genuine) homeliness with a coy and lulling reference to some hoped-for Carlton victory (giggles from audience) before learnedly citing Thucydides (gasps of admiration) on the decline of complacent states – after which come the omens of Armageddon (sighs and indignation). And, indeed; the second and third essays are ‘1929 Revisited’ and ‘After the Deluge’ where we are told that when the new South Sea Bubble has burst we should look for Japanese and Singaporean solutions.

Santamaria deplores the commercialization of football – for years our Canute opposed the introduction of TV into Australia – and the emergence of one-day cricket. He seems to see them even as part of the subversion of the family, although they may appear to some to be cheaper family entertainment and to an historian to be an inevitable part of the evolution of games which have had only a recent fortuitous origin. While my own preferences are Santamaria’s, it is difficult to resist turning his trope that these events are symbolic of a sick society. As it happens Santamaria’s team has been that of Bob Menzies and Malcolm Fraser, it is the beneficiary of speculator John Elliott’s millions and, no doubt, of the beauteous erotic talents of the Bluebirds, and last year it simply purchased a premiership. I would have thought Santamaria should morally have been with myself at Hawthorn, a real ‘family team’, with moral and physical force.

Supporting Carlton in the end parallels the political career of this unself-critical man who began his journalistic career with a leader in the first issue of the Catholic Worker in 1936: capitalism and communism were the twin enemies of the worker and the Church and of the two, he thought, capitalism was the worse. However, in spite of the Depression, communism was a better bogey and his altar-boy ambition to use the Labor Party to blaze a corporatist path proved catastrophic. His naïveté occasioned the splitting of the alternative government of the country and the subsequent running down of assistance to families under Menzies. His sectarianism – after all, the Movement was only for Catholics meeting in secret – created a vacuum in Victoria filled by ideologues he despised; ‘fellow-travelling’ Jim Cairns and the latter-day Libya-lover, Bill Hartley. Granted the adversarial Labor/non-Labor system of government, and the fact that the DLP, unlike the Democrats (whom Santamaria sneers at as ‘inexpressible’), was unwilling to bring down non-Labor, Santamaria was partly responsible for whatever non-Labor did after 1955.

Very much so, really. Here was an armchair strategist who, though eligible, had done no military service himself but (as in Siegfried Sassoon’s WWI poem) was impatient ‘to speed glum heroes up the line to death’ in Vietnam although his patron, Daniel Mannix, was still to him a by-word for ‘principled’ anti-conscription (1916–l 7). In 1966 Mannix’s propagandist biographer did not want to know that conscription for his mentor was allegedly not a necessary evil but an evil in itself. Nor did he want to remember that in 1939 he and his fellow admirer of Mussolini – not yet at war – condemned all modern weapons, especially aerial bombs. I daresay that if Mannix had lived to be a no doubt dear-headed centenarian he would have supported his protege’s suggestion that nuclear weapons be used against Hanoi. What is this nonsense about Santamaria being an ‘outsider’ except in terms of egregious folly? Is my memory incorrect that, at the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the Movement, Malcolm Fraser gave the congratulatory speech.

One looks in vain for any ruefulness in this miscellany. It is sheer window-dressing, an attempt to furbish a reputation which has occluded grotesque failure. Naturally the icon is displayed: Essay 12: ‘Mannix: A man for all seasons.’ A careful student will notice one daub of fresh colour, allegedly a concise statement of Mannix’s views on the relation between religion and politics. Santamaria states that he took it down practically verbatim in 1953 at a meeting of the Episcopal Committee on Catholic Action but, as all the other auditors are dead, it is impossible to check. There will be a few uncharitable watchers who will think that the publication of this brief text, strangely not in the biography; followed hard upon the publication of the first substantive assertion that Mannix was intellectually hollow (see Australian Dictionary of Biography, volume 10). The watchers will remember that for thirty years Santamaria continually attributed to Mannix an article on the Australian Constitution (Twentieth Century, 1954) that he finally had to admit he wrote himself, and that the faithful were allowed to think that Mannix had something more than an honorary Doctorate of Laws. Even more uncharitable will be those who have noted that for his biography Santamaria did not even consult the papers in the Melbourne Diocesan Historical Commission and that the ‘personal interviews’ allegedly recorded with Mannix and referred to authoritatively in his introduction (p xi) scarcely exist. Though highly praised inevitably by reviewers with only impressions of Mannix, Santamaria’s biography is in reality unreliable – as are his essays here on related themes e.g., on the Movement.

One could go on and note various ironies such as Santamaria’s opinion today that China ‘serves to inhibit the exercise of Soviet power’ when his post-1949 line was that China was a Soviet puppet, and C.P. Fitzgerald’s thesis to the contrary was the view of a fellow-traveller. Contention over simply recognizing Red China helped split the ALP in 1955 and Santamaria not only continually warned his Liberal-Country Party allies against selling wheat to China but, with Fraser, believed that by sending troops to Vietnam we were staying its hordes from clattering the dominoes. An absurd eulogy, certainly not for outsiders, in the IPA Review (November–January 1987/88), maintains that Santamaria’s judgement ‘has almost always proved to be right’, that he is ‘the only intellectual near the first rank, outside of the natural sciences, that this country has produced’ and that for ‘accuracy, range and consistency’ ‘one would have to look far’ to find his judgement ‘bettered in the Western world’? On that score, all that needs to be added to the above is that, in a world of wolves, the lad who always cries wolf has to be correct occasionally.

Santamaria has said that he did not himself become a politician because in politics one loses one’s soul. He used to make a point about not belonging to any political party, not even the DLP, although Stan Keon, its most talented parliamentary candidate, accused him of dictating to the party and foiling its development into a non-confessional Christian Democratic force. Seeing himself as having a status above politics involves a curious sleight of mind which removes him from having to consider, for example, how those quasi-Japanese or Singaporean solutions to our economic ills are going to take place. Politicians unfortunately do inherit an actual process and have to operate within it. This makes it facile for a Santamaria to snipe continually at them and his pose, if impractical, nonetheless creates the satisfying self-image of a pained, rejected prophet.

Santamaria admits he has never entertained serious doubts about the dogmas and prescriptions of the Tridentine Catholic Church. That a highly developed intellect can lack even that degree of introspection – and most well-educated Catholics I know do not – Is astonishing, particularly in view of the Second Vatican Council if not the challenges of modern science. Luckily for himself Santamaria operates not within rigorous full-length studies but within mainly journalistic columns, opinion pieces, and TV slots where even desk-calendar quotations can seem like massive learning. Thus he can be spared the problem of reconciling anti-contraception with problems of over-population, or anti-abortion with modern (or any) warfare, or oppression and poverty in South America with the rejection of liberation theology. The IPA Review fatuously compares Santamaria to Edmund Burke of whom Tom Paine said that he pitied the plumage of the Ancien Régime but forgot the dying bird. When a young Paine emerges to write that dissecting political biography of Santamaria he will find surprisingly meagre meat on the ideological bones.