Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to pay tribute to a great Australian, Ronald Conway, who died this week in Melbourne and who wrote Australia’s best-selling work of serious social criticism after Donald Horne’s Lucky Country. While Donald Horne’s title has become part of Australia’s self-description, that book is now a period piece. By contrast, there is a timeless quality to Ronald Conway’s Psycho-studies of Australian Society, especially his accounts of the dysfunctional Australian male.

Conway described himself as a conservative and was a frequent strident critic of much that was associated with the modern world—consumerism, materialism, feminism and especially the post-Vatican Council disarray of institutional Catholicism. Yet he was far too aware of the complexity of the human condition, and especially of the power and ambiguity of human sexuality, ever to be a straightforward barracker for conventional thinking.

In turn, Conway was a school teacher, a practising clinical psychologist, a university lecturer and, for 40 years, an advisor on priestly vocations for the Archdiocese of Melbourne. He appeared regularly on 1970s ABC TV programs such as Any Questions and hosted commercial radio programs in the 1980s. He wrote and produced plays and musicals, mostly for 1950s and 1960s Catholic festivals in Victoria. From the 1970s, until about five years ago, he was a regular contributor to newspapers such as the Australian and magazines such as Quadrant.

His six books, though, are his most enduring contribution to Australians’ self-understanding. The Great Australian Stupor, published in 1971, was followed by two companion volumes: The Land of the Long Weekend, in 1978, and The End of Stupor, in 1985. Being Male was published in 1986 and The Rage for Utopia in 1992. In 1988, he published a slim but elegant autobiography.

His work has not always been as well promoted as it deserved, because he was rarely entirely on any side. Much of his work has the capacity to surprise, dismay or exhilarate a wide range of readers. Instead of cementing his position in the first rank of Australian public intellectuals, however, many thought that this made him not quite trustworthy. The danger is that his insights will be forgotten because they are not sufficiently partisan, even though he stands to the analysis of social behaviour in Australia as much as Edmund Burke does to conservative political thinking.

Long before it was fashionable to feel people’s pain, Conway was quick to discern inner need, and for thousands of students, clients and friends he opened the doors of the emotional prisons that they had conducted for themselves. He had a strong sense of vocation to help people to look unflinchingly at what they really are and to make the best of it. Conway was almost addicted to making judgments but he was never judgmental. Long before the men’s movement, Conway was drawing Australian males out of the sterile macho ghetto of too little deep thought, too much manic activity, and emotional intimacy only with fellow drinkers. His particular gift was to help young men to understand that masculine love did not mean they would become sooks. As a university student, I had been much struck by a passage in The Land of the Long Weekend quoting a soldier of the First AIF’s letter home:

When Jim died last week I took him in my arms, kissed him and cried like a baby. I loved that stupid big cow with my guts. I suppose June will think I’ve turned queer or something but she knows me better than that. They say the old Spartan fighters used to take men lovers into battle. I know we used to laugh ourselves silly when we read about it at school … men cuddling up to one another and all that sort of stuff. But I used to sleep very close to Jim more than once in the trenches … It felt good, decent, even grand to be close … Why didn’t Dad or someone tell me that when I was home? Why did I have to come over here to this dirty butcher’s shop of guns and broken bodies to find out?

Where is Conway when so many feckless young gods are in such obvious need of a mentor? This philosopher of human frailty was a great Australian. He was indeed a prophet and he should be honoured in his own country.