Thank goodness, McGuinness

From The Australian - By Peter Coleman

It's not easy to get a handle on the life and adventures of P.P. (Padraic Pearse) McGuinness. He has so many aliases. Three converged to create the brilliant editor of Quadrant who produces his 100th and final issue next month.

The first is McGuinness, the outsider, the free-thinking critic of established opinion. We first see him in the student and young man. There are not many records to document this period. But there is one useful source: his ASIO file. It's on the net. You can look it up on the National Archives website. There should never have been a file at all. But let's leave that for the moment and see what it has to say.

A lot of it is raw data, such as date and place of birth (Melbourne, 1938); schools attended (St Ignatius, Sydney High); the employment he qualified for after graduating top of his year from the University of Sydney (labourer with the Water Board, stagehand at the Elizabethan Theatre, trainee at Callan Park); or his early court appearances for sundry offences at student demos (using language, resisting arrest).

There was one characteristic that confused some ASIO hands. He was not only a relentless critic of intellectual conformity; he was also an uncompromising anti-communist, a strident anti-communist, you might say. One note in the file records his role at an Australian Student Labor Federation conference 50 years ago, at the time of the blood-soaked Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. The dissident 19-year-old was, it says, the most active anti-communist at the congress. He never missed an opportunity to attack in caustic terms communists and communism.

McGuinness clearly was not your run-of-the-mill 1950s Stalinist, Trotskyist or Titoist. What was he? The files describe him as scruffy, careless with money (his own as well as other people's) and a serious drinker. A bit of an anarchist with a dash of the dandy. (Later on he sported a cloak and cane.)

You couldn't call him a libertarian because, although he liked libertarians, he despised their theories.

One baffled assistant director-general who examined the file concluded: "This is a difficult case." Another assessment declared: "He is an individualist, a non-conformist and an anti-authoritarian."

That's pretty accurate. All his life he has remained an anti-authoritarian, non-conformist individualist. When he moved to London in 1963, you would find him at the anarchist meetings in Whitechapel, probably heckling the speakers, or in Hampstead giving blood for the Vietcong while getting stuck into the communists, or in the pages of London's Oz magazine ridiculing prohibitionist drug laws and moronic druggies. Naturally he was over in Paris for the uprising of May 1968. (He got there on his bike; the French trains were on strike.)

Back in Sydney in the early 1970s you could hear him out at Minto at a libertarian conference lecturing on his trip to Cuba and the nastiness of the Castro dictatorship. Yet this is not the whole story. McGuinness was never satisfied to be the permanent outsider. He also needed to be an insider. Driven by curiosity, he wanted to know what was going on inside the City of London, or the cabinet room, or Leichhardt Council.

This second McGuinness came out, as it were, in London. At 24 he was working as what he grandly called a plongeur, a dishwasher, in a Bayswater pub when he came across a newspaper advertisement for the Moscow Narodny Bank in London. It was looking for an economist. He applied. He got the job. He rose to a senior position in the bank, manager of the economics department.

This experience did more than give him an insider's view of banking and the City in the years before the big bang of deregulation in the Thatcher era. He learned to enjoy the company of the warm, heavy-drinking, bear-hugging Russians and to despise even more deeply the grey-faced bureaucrats, jailers and executioners of the Soviet Union. He also got to know the city's historic laneways and pubs.

He left the bank after four years. But McGuinness the insider still turned up from time to time: as an economist with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, as alderman McGuinness of Leichhardt Council or as adviser on the staff of the Labor minister for social security, Bill Hayden. He says his job with the minister was to keep an eye on Treasury. He claims he used the time to convert Hayden to free-market economics.

The two McGuinnesses - the critical outsider and the constructive insider - are not the whole story. They came together in his third persona, the journalist. He was always a writer. (His father was a journalist) But he found his vocation and flourished as a newspaper columnist and polemicist (and for a few years, film critic) during his 20 to 30 years on The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and for a time on The Australian. A collection of his stylish, often acerbic and always compelling commentaries on the robotic Left and the mindless Right would make a fascinating record of our times.

These various aliases culminated in the editor of Quadrant. But McGuinness also brought something else to Quadrant, that X factor of courage and imagination. Editing a magazine such as Quadrant is a bit like writing a poem and a bit like conducting a band. McGuinness has been a poet-conductor in the great tradition.

He saved the magazine, restored it and took it to new heights. He brought in new writers. He developed new themes (including religion, science and indigenous affairs.) He maintained Quadrant's literary achievement. (It publishes more poetry and short fiction than any other weekly or monthly in Australia.) He made Quadrant the indispensable magazine.

Peter Coleman was editor of Quadrant for 20 years. This is an extract from his address in Sydney last week to celebrate the retirement of Paddy McGuinness after 10 years editing Quadrant.