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Doing Politics: Writing on public life (Judith Brett, Text) 

The state of the humanities in Australia today fills Judith Brett with despair. If she had a child considering a liberal arts degree now, and she had the money, she would send them to Canada or the United States. How the Australian university sector came to be in such a woeful state is explored in Brett’s 2021 essay ‘The Bin Fire of the Humanities’, the most recent piece included in Doing Politics, a collection of her writing from the past 40 years. Brett was tertiary educated well prior to Dawkins’s transformation of higher education funding—which began the sector’s steady decline into mediocrity—in the 1990s. Educated in the days when university was not just free, but an arts degree was intense, rigorous and potentially life changing, Brett evokes a time when public intellectuals, in those heady days of the 1980s, had both a plethora of newspapers and magazines eager to publish and an audience keen to engage with new ideas. In Doing Politics Brett explores these issues and more, including how we got into our current political moral morass. Brett is one of the most readable of our public intellectuals writing on politics, informed as she is by psychoanalysis, which has its own section. The book is about so much more than just politics though: alongside illuminating background to Brett’s two standout political biographies, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People and The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, readers will also find an essay devoted to the role of the chook in the Australian unconscious. In this timely collection Brett so clearly—and tragically—encapsulates what’s wrong with our politics and our universities today. 

Julia Taylor worked in trade publishing for many years. 

 

Category: Reviews