Memoirs of a Slow Learner

by Peter Coleman

BOOK DESCRIPTION: This memoir is a new departure in Australian autobiography. It is the intellectual adventures of an Australian child and youth who was reared in a radical ambiance and slowly learned its limitations. Some will read it as the comic anatomy of the corpse of small-l liberalism. Others will see it as a journalistic record of our times. Yet others will find a moving personal statement.

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 21, 2013

About the author

William Peter Coleman (born 15 December 1928) is an Australian writer, and former politician. A widely published journalist for over 60 years, he was editor of The Bulletin (1964–1967) and of Quadrant for 20 years, and has published 16 books on political, biographical and cultural subjects.[1] While still working as an editor and journalist he had a short but distinguished political career as a Member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly from 1968–1978 for the Liberal Party of Australia, serving both as a Minister in the State Cabinet and in the final year as Leader of the New South Wales Opposition.[2] From 1981–1986 was Member for Wentworth in the Australian House of Representatives.[3] In 2008 he was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) at the University of Sydney for services to Australian intellectual life.

Reviews

[Kevin Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

My introduction to Coleman's work was his landmark study of censorship in Australia, "Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition", and from occasionally browsing through back issues of "Observer", the lively and informative fortnightly Australian current affairs journal he edited until it was eventually merged with "The Bulletin" in 1961. This brief memoir is a kind of intellectual history of post-war Australia, and the emerging "culture war" between different philosophical/ideological camps that dominated Sydney's intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s. But it's also a glimpse of a long-vanished Australia, a country that was rapidly changing alongside Coleman's own intellectual journey/evolution. I was particularly struck by the prevalence of anti-war feeling in Australia which Coleman encountered firsthand, and the resistance to Australia joining yet another "imperial war" between Britain and Germany, the collective memory of the slaughter of the Great War (1914-18) still resonating among many Australians (That perspective changed once Japan entered the war and directly threatened Australia following the Japanese bombing of Darwin in 1942). This was a poignant and engaging memoir.

[William Laing · Rating 5 out of 5]

You cannot understand Australian politics or literature without this book.

An able and really independent critic and student of Australian thought should be much more widely known. Read this book.