On hearing of the passing of malcolm fraser: Part 1

[RonPrice]

On hearing of the passing of Malcolm Fraser in the morning of 20/3/'15, I revised a prose-poetic piece I had originally written on hearing of the passing of Gough Whitlam on 21/10/'14. The following revised piece of writing is somewhat long, too long for those of the Facebook-Twitter generation who prefer short and pith posts. I recommend that many readers just skim or scan or, indeed, stop reading now unless, of course, your interest in this subject has been piqued.
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HEADY DAYS
All my sins are remembered

Part 1:

When one writes about politics, the people and the events, the ideas and the issues, one does not have to engage in the partisan variety which divides the nation and individuals from each other and engages millions in hair-splitting discussions on topics about which they usually or, at least, often know very little. Often the opinions are endless, opinions which get dropped-about now in cyberspace's social media and elsewhere, and in real space.

I have studied politics and taught it from grade 10 when I was 15 to these years of my retirement more than half a century later. I am now 70. My parents had political meetings in our home back in the early to mid-1950s. It was in those early, those embryonic, years when I was inoculated against partisan-party politics. That in-house political discussion was characterized by endless hair-splitting and personality clashes in what were my pre-puberal years and we are still, as Matthew Arnold once wrote, ".....here as on a darkling plain. Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, /Where ignorant armies clash by night."1 The political scene has changed little, in many ways in the last several decades, some 60 years of my life-narrative.

But such experience of political wrangling in my childhood and adolescent years has not prevented me from being interested in the political world. Nor does it prevent me now as I go through these years of my retirement from a 50 year student and paid employment life, 1949 to 1999. Today I learned of the passing of Malcolm Fraser. Fraser was appointed as caretaker prime minister on 11 November 1975 by the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, following the controversial dismissal of the Whitlam Government in which he played a key role. At the time I was settling-in to several years of teaching as a lecturer in a technical and further education and a college of advanced education in Victoria Australia.

Fraser went on to win the largest majority in Australian political history at the subsequent election. After two further election victories in 1977 and 1980, he was defeated by Bob Hawke in 1983 and left politics a short time later. In retirement, Fraser became involved in international relief and humanitarian aid issues and, domestically, as a forthright liberal voice for human rights. On 20 March 2015, Fraser died at the age of 84 after a brief illness.

Part 2:

I'm looking forward to doco's on Fraser in the days ahead. I watched a two-part doco on Gough Whitlam after he passed away just five months ago.2 He was Australia’s 21st Prime Minister from 1972 to 1974 just after I arrived in Australia from Canada when I was in my late 20s as an international pioneer from the Canadian Baha'i community. I wrote the first draft of this statement on Whitlam after watching this political-doco in the evening of my life, early or late it is hard to say. I updated this statement on hearing of the passing of Gough Whitlam on 21/10/14 and, again, on 21/3/'15 on hearing of the passing of Malcolm Fraser.

More books have been written about Whitlam, including his own writings, than about any other Australian Prime Minister. According to Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking, for a period of at least a decade, the Whitlam era was viewed almost entirely in negative terms, but that has changed. Paul Kelly(1947- ), an Australian political journalist and author who has written seven books on political events in Australia, wrote the following 3 paragraphs on hearing of Whitlam's passing at the age of 98 in October 2014:

"Gough Whitlam’s passing is a sad moment for the nation, but it is the time to recognise one of the most extraordinary and inspiring figures produced by the Australian nation and our democracy. Gough’s glories and follies were writ large. Nothing he did was small, mediocre or apologetic. He was a giant in stature, learning, presence and achievement. Nobody who ever met Whitlam will forget him and those who dealt with him regularly in political life will retell Whitlam stories to the end of their days."

For more go to this link if your interest is aroused. : ON HEARING OF THE PASSING OF MALCOLM FRASER: Part 1 - Blogs - Political Forum

 

[RonPrice]

I was reminded as I thought about the legacy of Whitlam and Fraser of the words of sociologist C. Wright Mills at the beginning of the 1960s.(1) By linking biography and history, individual and society, self and world, Mills sought to show that underlying people’s experience of difficulty and anxiety, apathy and discouragement, as well as a host of troubles and issues that they confront, are the fundamental problems of reason and liberty. They are not only the imaginative sociologist’s problems but Everyman’s.

What is desired, continued Mill, is the strength of mind and heart to be inwardly alive and to persevere in one’s devotion. Such a person is not only the teller of what is, is not only an autobiographical voice, but he is also the seeker after the highest human possibilities. This person must insist that “nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passion.”

This passion alone is, of course, not sufficient for the achievement of one’s purpose. Much else is needed, and we are not talking here about that sterile excitement which abounds in our popular culture today, the kind that finds its way into our culture ad nauseam, with a kind of shrill voice at fever-pitch, the musical and artistic cultural inheritance of rock-and-roll and do your own-thing, where the worst are full of passionate intensity, and the ceremony of innocence is drowned.(2) Mills saw both liberalism and socialism as having collapsed as adequate explanations of the world and of ourselves, and he saw this in the first decade that Whitlam and Fraser had gone into politics: 1953-1963. –Ron Price with thanks to (1)C.W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford UP, 1959, p.196; (2)W.B. Yeats, quoted in Kenneth Clark, Civilization, Penguin, NY, 1969, p.246.