Hugh Stretton: one of Australia's best public intellectuals

My father was a lawyer, my mother was a graduate when women graduates weren't all that common but although she was prepared to go and earn her living as a school teacher, she never did. She stayed home and got married and brought up children and did a lot of other things, charitable things and so on and they were splendid parents and it was a very happy childhood.

Hugh spent his early education at Mentone Grammar and Scotch College, being the beneficiary of an early education program that catered for those with special talents. But in Hugh's case his upbringing helped to create the man. He was a gentleman with socially cohesive behaviours; Hugh never acted like he was born with a silver spoon rather he has been overwhelmingly respected for his heart of gold.

In reference to Scotch College (this is also from the same interview, slightly edited):

Just before I got there (referring to Scotch College), a remarkable headmaster got there. It had had one of these famous old bearded headmasters for about forty years, very conservative and I don't think the notion of the Arts had ever crossed his mind in any form and then there came this new man in 1935. I suppose, he was a New Zealander. He had been to England as a Rhodes Scholar, he was a classical Latin and Greek Scholar. He was also a Scottish International rugby player and he had also got a Military Cross and bar as a soldier in World War 1. He also looked like the Metro Goldwyn Mayer Lion, if you know what I mean. He was the most formidable conservative figure nobody would ever impute anything radical or naughty to him and he moved into the place and he threw all the portraits of headmasters out of the Memorial Hall where we met every morning for assembly and brought the Carnegie collection of Contemporary Art and spread that around. He hired three or four good artists to teach us to paint and sculpt (Hugh also reminded me on many occasions of his early ability to recite two Shakespeare plays). All those rather splendid kinds of things. The school had a fortnightly newspaper entirely edited by boys and once every term, three times a year, a magazine of a more solid kind, entirely edited by boys, and it was never censored.

During my time at Scotch College, there was something of a sex scandal, about which we published reports and opinions without any interference from the school's hierarchy. Now that editor, it makes me proud to say, was Creighton Burns who got much more famous with publishing the Age Tapes and things like that. So the school was an extraordinarily lucky place to be if you wanted to grow up and be something of an intellectual. I had good teachers in a number of things and had a spectacularly good history teacher.

This is how one of Australia's pre-eminent public intellectuals of the 2^nd half of the 20^th century explains what for the rest of us seems to have been a fantastic academic career.

Stretton completed the first year of an Arts/Law degree at Melbourne University, served three years in the wartime navy, then won a Rhodes scholarship. At Oxford he took a B.A. in history and became a fellow at Balliol College in 1948. Before he began teaching, the college arranged for him to spend a year at Princeton graduate school where he took courses in a number of social science subjects.

On his return to Oxford, Stretton developed a strong friendship with two colleagues in economics. One was Paul Streeton, a philosopher as well as an economist, an Austrian Jew who enlisted in the British commandos after the Nazi occupation of Austria, and was then severely wounded in the Second World War. The other was Thomas Balogh, Hungarian born, who had experienced both Germany and the US before he settled in England. He was an associate of Keynes, and adviser to the post-war Labour government, which nationalised major industries and created the National Health Service. Streeton and Balogh shared and encouraged Stretton's pragmatic, historical and institutional approach to economics.

From 1954 to 1989, Stretton taught history at Adelaide University. Among his colleagues were some who had experienced some of the worst of the history that they then taught about in their classes; the Nazi Holocaust, the Stalinist tyranny in Russia, racist apartheid in South Africa. They were unusual in insisting on their common humanity with their oppressors. Their purpose was not to excuse the crimes but to understand them. Stretton admired the vivid effects of their experience on their teaching, and learned much from them.

Some principles and values underlining Hugh's thoughts

Let me give another example of how Hugh challenged what I call "stereotypes". In an interview at LaTrobe University in 1998, I asked him about his many honorary doctorates. This is what he said:

I honestly am deeply unimpressed by those. I think their only effect is to give you the impression that you are being embalmed. Yes, I have quite a number of them. They are all from around Australia. One from here too. [i.e La Trobe]. I am a Doctor of Letters with this university.

His answer to my question indicates his unwillingness to allow himself to be classified in some "elite" category. That for me was and is an important reminder that our life is not about polishing ourselves. In this he surely recognised the shallowness of "celebrity", particularly in an academic context.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, Hugh Stretton had a phenomenal public career. He published his first book in 1969 titled The Political Sciences which is explained as follows:

The worst kind of bad social science, Stretton argues, purports to select the things to be explained, and the ways of explaining them, without resort to values and valuation. – R Dare

Following this Hugh released another six books. They were all highly acclaimed, winning many prestigious awards. Hugh also received many Honorary Doctorates that acclaimed such work.