For Adelaide University, February, 2006

In 1960 when Robert Hughes, Clive James, Les A. Murray, Germaine Greer, Mungo MacCallum, Laurie Oakes, Richard Walsh, Richard Wherrett, Richard Brennan, Richard Butler, John Bell, John Gaden, Bruce Beresford, Michael Kirby and I all wrote for the Sydney University newspaper honi soit, and Martin Sharp drew cartoons for it, nobody much among us thought each other particularly talented (while quietly each of us assessing ourselves to be an above-average genius) and the paper came out each week without fuss. Nothing then written, apart from perhaps five poems by Clive and Les, has endured. Nothing has been preserved in their collected, or selected, works of any of the participants. Each of us was feeling our way, uncertain, egocentric, blustering, scared of what we were each week handwriting, then typing up on our Olivettis, and laying out in the paper's pages, afraid we were making fools of ourselves. But we began. And some of us -- Greer, Hughes, James, Bruce, Les, Michael Kirby, Richard Butler -- in different fields (with The Female Eunuch, The Fatal Shore, Unreliable Memoirs, Breaker Morant, Fredy Neptune, there is High Court judgements, the charging of Saddam Hussein with WMDs) changed the world. honi gave us our grounding in courage. We filled up our fountain pens with Quink, and got to work.

It was a different world back then, of course. Having won World War 2 our side seemed surely on the way to a good, enduring, liberal, humanist civilisation. It was conceivable we might after, say, ten years of teaching, make our living as novelists, journalists or screenwriters, or editors of some adult weekly, like Nation or The Observer. The riches of Nation Review were still unimaginable. But we saw a future in which, in England perhaps (and many of us went to England), we would make modest names, modest incomes for ourselves as manufacturers of literature or, say, television comedy. Making millions, as some of us did, was unthinkable. Almost indecent.

We learned, too, how good things come in clusters, in groups like the one we were in. And how, admixed with our team spirit, our esprit de corp, was a stirred competitiveness that moved us, rubbing up against each other, to do better than each other. We wrote reviews of each others' stage performances. We wrote and sang new songs. We gave speeches at Union Night defaming one another. We played those student ego games that we still see played in federal parliament.

Our contemporary John Howard, then also at Sydney Uni, never contributed to honi. He never tested his eloquence, his gift of words, against Clive's, or Bob's, or Germaine's. And so he went on into the ghastly banality of speech which has characterised his long career, never having been tested against talented contemporaries. Living, and prattling, in his own world, and slowly dragging his nation into his diminished vision of reality. And it's a pity. We would, I think, have sorted him out. Taught him there were different ways of looking at life, at art, at politics. Embraced him in the grand, expanding humanism of the day. But he never turned up at honi soit. Or at SUDS. Or at Union Night. And those things that so enlarged us he's now abolishing with his anti-student fees laws, from undergraduate life. More and more a university is now a degree factory, less and less a kind of Grand Tour of the Humanities, the Arts, the Literary Life. More and more that instinct, that first, fine careless rapture of student life, is being punished by Howardism, which seeks in the end to erase it.

Are student papers a good thing? Well, in my case they were. They got me writing, and from that sort of writing into the ABC, and screenwriting, and film direction, theatre owning, books on politics, plays. They taught me -- and Clive, and Germaine -- the variety of things we could possibly do with words and punctuation. They gave us a new dimension to work in. They gave us hope, and pleasure, and lifelong friends. But we were the lucky ones, in a golden age, when compulsory unionism gave us a civilisation we revelled in, grew in, prevailed in. What a sorry contrast it is today, as John Howard, the undergraduate illiterate, rewrites humanity in his image. What a pity.