Why social science is a mistake
Why social science is a mistake
And other things I came across and felt the need to pass on
Understanding humanity should be reality-based but it’s not a science
OK. This is really important. It’s so important I just told the AI to draw a picture of something really important. That’s how important it is.
So listen up.
The idea of social science is absurd. Crazy. As Nutzo as all those Puerto Ricans eating cats and dawgs in Springfield Ohio. Social studies — yes. And of course it our study of society should be reality based — evidence based. But should social science built on the model of natural science? Absolutely not.
Here is Exhibit 1 in my argument:
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? Toward an Understanding of Fade-out in Early Childhood Education Programs
John A. List and Haruka Uchida #33027
An unsettling stylized fact is that decorated early childhood education programs improve cognitive skills in the short-term, but lose their efficacy after a few years. We implement a field experiment with two stages of randomization to explore the underpinnings of the fade-out effect. We first randomly assign preschool access to children, and then partner with the local school district to randomly assign the same children to classmates throughout elementary school. We find that the fade-out effect is critically-linked to the share of classroom peers assigned to preschool access—with enough treated peers the classic fade-out effect is muted. Our results highlight a paradoxical insight: while the fade-out effect has been viewed as a devastating critique of early childhood programs, our results highlight that fade-out is a key rationale for providing early education to all children. This is because human capital accumulation is inherently a social activity, leading early educ! ation programs to deliver their largest benefits at scale when everyone receives such programs.
Would it be asking too much for this kind of knowledge to have emerged sooner than 60 years after the initial experiments were done? It might have been if the discipline of economics was less fixated on thinking of itself as a science and understood itself more as part of a system of practical reasoning with its primary goal being to improve the world.
Herbert Simon highlighted the distinction between the natural sciences and what he called the sciences of the artificial — disciplines seeking to change the world to achieve human purposes (like medicine and engineering). The former are ultimately disciplines dedicated to design. Where science investigates the nature of the one universe that exists and that, in that sense is necessary, design explores the multiverse of the possible and tries to identify and then realise better states of the world.
Strangely Simon included economics as among the sciences. I think it should always have been understood as a design discipline. Of course, as with engineering and medicine, understanding itself as a discipline of design rather than science (qua natural science), would not make it any less ‘reality based’. Engineers and medical researchers are constantly investigating the nature of reality, but their ultimate aim is the contribution that can make to us humangoes finding our way to some part of the multiverse that’s better than the part we’re in right now.
This change of self-understanding would clarify that economics’ motive for understanding reality and its intellectual priorities revolved around changing the world for the better, not understanding it for its own sake. There are literally an infinite number of inquiries one might make about the material tungsten (with or without other materials), but an engineer wouldn’t be doing good engineering if there wasn’t some practical point to this — which might enable the improvement of some material in some specific application. Ditto medical research into the qualities of tungsten.
If economics understood itself as a discipline of design, like engineering and medicine would still have had activities of ‘high research’ and disciplinary development, but most of its high status prizes would go to those who help generate the key insights behind successful projects to improve the world.
If we’d thought that way, the ‘freakonomics’ revolution of the last two decades — economists’ turn to looking at data rather than pure economic theory — would have been far less preoccupied with generating innumerable factoids and far more interested in getting down and dirty in concrete projects seeking to help illuminate their quest to improve the world. That’s what a designer would do!
Freshly retired from full time sexual predator role, Bill O’Reilly founds “Not Happy Sigmund”, a support network for fellow psychopaths
Just like my Dad and all my school friends Dads
From a tweet on how tough Australians are (by a non-Australian). Apparently Dads don’t do this sort of thing in other countries. They’re always doing it Australia.
If software’s eating the world, what comes out the other end?
Editors are a bit like Mary Poppins. They help writers’ medicine go down with a spoonful of sugar. If they come to a sentence that is not easily understood, they change it to make it more easily understood. A Good Editor will keep the idea intact. A Bad Editor will change it so it’s easier to understand. And university tests prove, clichés are easier to understand than original ideas. Anyway, Henry Farrell thinks LLMs are like Bad Editors.
I’ve edited out a fair bit from the extract below, but one chunk of text is about how LLMs are doing a lot of peer review these days. This is regarded as a problem. Especially along with the argument that Farrell is running, it is a kind of reductio ad absurdem of peer review. Yet one only has to be exposed to peer review — in the social sciences anyway — to realise that we reached the point of absurdem a good while ago. Humans are quite capable of LLM like behaviour — we just didn’t know that until we had LLMs.
Likewise the way to do your vision, mission and values whether it’s for your workplace, your family or your Anzac biscuits, is to pop it all into an LLM and voila, there it all is.
Once, and not too long ago, my notions of the cultural consequences of Large Language Models (LLMs) were guided by a common metaphor of monsters of appetite. As Cosma and I and said in an article, “the political anthropologist James Scott has explained how bureaucracies are monsters of information, devouring rich, informal bodies of tacitly held knowledge and excreting a thin slurry of abstract categories that rulers use to “see” the world.” LLMs would do much the same thing to human culture. …
There was even a Nature article that spelled out the consequences of the “curse of recursion,” in which LLMs’ outputs would become increasingly disjointed and meaningless as they devour the content that they and their cousins created. It was an excellent article, but like many articles that take off in the discourse, I suspect that it owed its success more to its cultural resonances than its scientific results. …
But recently, I’ve turned to a different image of recursivity: the disturbing moment in Spike Jonze’s movie, Being John Malkovich … where the eponymous actor crawls through a portal that leads back into his own head. The point of [the] scene is that not just any old rubbish (or gubbish) comes out the other end of the tunnel. Instead, we end up in a world of sameness, a universal society of Malkoviches saying Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich! to each other.
That suggests a subtly different vision of the cultural downside of LLMs. As Alison Gopnik points out, LLMs are quite good at reproducing culture, but not so good at introducing cultural variation. One might go further. There is good reason to believe that these models are centripetal rather than centrifugal. On average, they create representations that tug in the direction of the dense masses at the center of culture, rather than towards the sparse fringe of weirdness and surprise scattered around the periphery. …
This reflects a general problem with large models. They are much better at representing patterns that are common than patterns that are rare. More technically:
Most real-world data naturally have a skewed distribution … with a small number of well-represented features and a “long-tail” of features that are relatively underrepresented. The skew in feature frequency leads to disparate error rates on the underrepresented attribute. This prompts fairness concerns when the underrepresented attribute is a protected attribute but more broadly relates to the brittleness of deep neural network performance in data-limited regimes. …
What is common has cultural gravity. What is rare does not. … This has implications for cultural discovery, and scientific discovery too. …
This pushes back against the claim of Marc Andreessen and others that software is eating the world and It Is Going To Be Awesome as AI unleashes all that wonderful innovation. It focuses our attention on what comes out the other end of that act of devouring: a world in which recursion doesn’t quite turn us all into John Malkovich, talking about Malkovich to Malkoviches, but does bring us closer to that weird and unsettling scene than we are right now, as we converge ever more on what we have in common, smoothing away the particularities that distinguish the one from all the others.
The origin of Australian rules football
I’ve always been an fan since I was struck down by a shaft of black and white light on my way to Harkaway State School in the foothills of the Dandenongs in 1964. I’ve recently had reason to renew and intensify that interest. So I was intrigued by this bit of myth-buthting courtesy of a review of a book by Geoffrey Blainey.
While both Fitzroy and Carlton feature in Geoffrey Blainey's history of Australian Rules Football up to 1900, the Grand Final doesn't, as there was no such thing in the first forty-odd years of the code. In fact there is much about today's game that didn't feature in the early years of what became known as the 'Victorian rules'. For a start the field of play was rectangular rather than oval, there was no handpassing, the game started with a kick-off rather than a bounce, and much of the play was scrummage, rather like Rugby. …
Blainey explains that other ideas of the origin of our game, such as it being derived from Gaelic Football or coming from watching an Aboriginal game, are not supported by any evidence. Gaelic Football was not codified until well after Victoria began playing a distinct style of football, and the similarities that exist between the codes today were not in evidence in the 1800s. Blainey also points out that most of the progenitors of the early game in Melbourne were not Irish, and it seemed to be more popular with the Protestant section of society in the beginning, for lots of social reasons. In fact the first recorded games were between Protestant schools (Blainey explains that the first game was between St. Kilda Grammar and Melbourne Grammar in June 1858, approximately six weeks before the famous "first game of Australian Rules" that was played by Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College in Yarra Park). The links to any Aboriginal form of the game are also tenuous, although Blainey does posit that the distinctive high-marking style of play may have been imported into the game from watching Aboriginals at play in southwestern Victoria.
There are a few things that strike the modern reader and barracker about the history of our game as espoused in this book (the origin of the term barracker is an interesting aside - a Melbourne term, it referred to the military regiments who often played early club football, and the men from the barracks were known for not only their vocal support of their own men, but also disparagement of the opposition). The first is the age of Australian Rules compared to other codes of football. Australians do not often think of things in this country as being old apart from the land itself and Aboriginal culture, yet only Rugby is older as a codified game than Aussie Rules. Of the five oldest major football clubs in the world, three of them are Victorian (Melbourne 1858, Geelong 1859, Notts County 1862, Stoke City 1863, Carlton 1864). The rapidity of the growth in crowds is also notable: Blainey writes "[i]n 1880 in England the final of the FA Cup drew 6,000 people but as many as 15,000 then attended the important matches of the season in Melbourne." In Geelong as much as 10% of the population was turning out to watch games in the 1870s.
The greatest difficulty in trying to understand the early history of Australian Rules is to gather how the game was actually played. There were only ten "laws" of the game when they were first written down, and the newspapers of the day did not expend much print or paper on reporting matches in any great detail. What we do know (and what Blainey describes well), is that the field of play could be up to 500 yards long, often contained trees within the boundaries (trees must have often stood for goalposts), and games could run over several days. It was very much a defensive game of scrummage, with goals hard to come by. It took several decades for the game to open up and become a spectacle of kicking and marking that would look more familiar to modern viewers of the game.
The first games, held in parks, were a free spectacle, but after a time grounds were fenced and admission charged. Money changed the game - players were paid under the table, professional umpires were hired (previously the opposing captains ensured the rules were followed), and some clubs grew strong while others began to wither on the vine.
A little long winded, but a good story
John Atkinson Grimshaw: painter of the night
Speaking of Schumpeter
My piece mentioning Schumpeter in last week’s newsletter brought forth this passage from Sylvia Nassar’s history of economics Grand Pursuit. HT: Gene Tunny.
As expected, Schumpeter left the banking to Biedermann's capable longtime chief and became, in effect, a money manager and venture capitalist. He promptly took large stakes in several enterprises, in some cases with a partner who was an acquaintance from the Theresianum. Within months, he was a director of the Kauffman Bank, a porcelain works, and a chemical subsidiary of a German multinational."
The frenzy of deal making, buying, and selling was intoxicating. Schumpeter may have dressed like a bank president, but, as the Viennese press observed snidely, his lifestyle was as extravagant as a lord's. He still owed large personal debts and even larger tax arrears. He had given up his hotel suite and his half of the Palais, but he threw lavish dinners at his apartment and spent prodigiously, whether on his mistresses, horses, or clothes. He was as careless of his reputation as he was of his money. In response to a business associate's warning about appearing in public with prostitutes, "he rode up and down … a main boulevard in the inner city … with an attractive blonde prostitute on one knee and a brunette on the other." At the beginning of 1924, Schumpeter considered his financial affairs to be "perfectly in order", his Biedermann line of credit being cover by gilt-edged securities. Then came the spectacular collapse of the stock exchange on May 9, 1924. Between breakfast and dinner, three-fourths of the value of the "highly marketable securities" that constituted Schumpeter's personal collateral had disappeared in a puff of smoke'.
Not tap-dancing to work any more? Try divorce
A fun 2015 column from the FT’s Lucy Kellaway. She was of the FT then but is now a school teacher of similar energy. Anyway, it’s an excellent column. Alarmed that she was one of the oldest ones there at a corporate law dinner the person next to her told her that lawyers tended to tire of the pressure in the 1950s.
There was only one exception to this rule, he went on, and that was lawyers in their fifties who had recently been divorced and were starting again with mortgages and young children. … The combination of extreme wisdom and extreme hunger made them unbeatable.
I don’t think the man realised quite how well this divorce-is-great-for-your-career argument was going down with me. In the past six months I have a) separated from my husband, b) bought a wildly expensive house, and c) been feeling more than usually keen at work. Until that minute it hadn’t occurred to me that the three things were connected, but then I saw what was perfectly obvious: a) and b) have caused c). …
I can no longer allow myself the luxury of mild disillusionment. Instead, I am applying myself to the job, and, to my amazement and delight, find that instead of feeling trapped or sorry for myself, I’m rather enjoying it. The work itself has not changed a bit, but I am doing it with more conviction. …
People in professional jobs work for three reasons: money, status and the interest of the work itself. The main reason those in their fifties become sluggish is not that their minds are going, nor that the work itself has become too monotonous. It is that neither money nor status move them as they used to and the interest of the job is not enough to keep them going on its own.
You would have to be a most peculiar person to be prepared to stay up all night doing the legal slog on an M&A deal for the sheer fun of it. And even though journalism is arguably more enjoyable than corporate law, it is not so fabulously entertaining that I would consider doing it if I didn’t have to.
Almost all the scientific studies will tell you that money doesn’t motivate. Yet when you have just parted company with your nest egg and lost some of the financial security you thought you had, every pay cheque becomes a minor cause of celebration — and the same old, same old work suddenly seems as fresh and full of possibility as it ever did.
Arthur Boyd images
Borrowing e-books
Copyright is notoriously widely drawn. In fact nonsensically widely drawn. Because the mere copying of someone else’s work violates their copyright — rather than also requiring it to damage the copyright holder’s interests — copyright is violated gazillions of times just to hoist anything on the internet. It is copied by the PC it begins on and then every time it moves from router to router and so on. Then it is copied a quazillion more times when people start accessing it from their tiny perch on the net. These words you’re reading have been copied by your screen so you can read them.
Anyway copyright holders guard these rights even beyond the point at which it’s doing them any good. Archive.org had hundreds of thousands of books available to borrow. And because the copyright lobby objected to each book being made available to an unlimited number of users, they restricted that availability so no one book is ever made available to more than one person — but it is made available by the hour. So one book goes a long way. Or did.
Generally these books were out of print. So everyone was a winner, not least because it provided a good mechanism for fostering and detecting when it might make sense to bring them back into print. Anyway, the copyright lobby didn’t like any of this. So they forced the end of the service for most books. And a report has just come out on it which shows how bad this is. Really is there anything the copyright lobby does that is any good for anyone? I haven’t noticed. At least banning single use plastic bags is an utter waste of time that doesn’t do any great harm. Not so banning internet access to out of print books. Then again, I always did care about books more than single use plastic bags.
The graphic accompanying it is above and you can check out the report here.
Madeline Purdie
Race Matthews: a scholar and gentleman if ever there was one
I’ve known Race Matthews for a long time, though not well. In any event, I was talking to American writer Nathan Schneider in Denver, Colorado. (He was there. I was walking along Port Melbourne foreshore.) Anyway, Schneider is a social entrepreneur of sorts and a scholar and writer on new social forms. Schneider had just published a book on cooperatives and I asked him about Mondragon. Turned out he knew Race well and regarded him as an eminence.
In the upshot of this conversation I e-mailed Race to tell him of this happy coincidence and see if he’d fancy catching up for lunch. But it seemed the time for that had passed:
Thanks for the thought, but I’d be a poor lunch companion at present - still coming to terms with failing eyesight, hearing and memory.
In any event a biography of Race has just been published consisting of four introductory chapters written by Race with the rest of his life written by his wife Iola.
First a few extracts and then Chapter 3 which Monash University Publishing have allowed me to republish here.
Peter Gebhardt, a Melbourne barrister who had been the Principal of Geelong College, wrote this to Race on his missing out on being re-appointed in the third Cain Government:
There is something delightfully 18th century about you which, when combined with the needs of the 20th, even the 21st century, makes your position so much more enduring than those who have no memory, no history and no imagination. My anger is not made any better by your ultimate decency and style.
Race's staffers were also shocked, and very caring towards him. Sue Gavaghan, his media adviser, gave him a book in which she'd written: 'Thanks for a memorable and rewarding nine months with a great mind and a kind soul.'
Then there’s this passage documenting a phenomenon people of my age witnessed. The gradual morphing of Labor politicians into clones of Gough. Here’s Race on being Gough’s speechwriter (after the feted Graham Freudenberg).
Once an invitation for a major speech had been accepted, a fairly standard procedure followed. The starting point was usually a note or oral briefing from Whitlam, complete with references, In the first instance, a Whitlam line on a key topic was likely to have been laid down in earlier speeches that had the status of revealed truth, and could only with extreme difficulty be changed.
I'd go off and do a first draft and give it to him. He'd send it back heavily annotated, or say something like, 'You haven't referred to my question of 23rd April 1964,' or 'Have a look at such and such government report,' or 'Have you talked to so and so about this?' It would go back and forth until he was happy with it.
I learned about 'scansion' or the rhythm of a speech. He was fond of alliteration and liked short phrases that could be used over and over again. As a speechwriter, you need to look at the world through the eyes of the person for whom you're writing, and you've got to catch the cadence, or inflection, of their voice. I used to read his speeches in Hansard to see the way he spoke, and when I got better at it, I felt empowered.
And the funny thing is that unconsciously, I started to speak a bit like Gough. … It happened by osmosis, I guess, and I was not the only one. As Whitlam's biographer Jenny Hocking noted, Graham Freudenberg 'drew uncannily close in manner, speech and ideas to Whitlam' [A Moment in History, p. 282].
And here is chapter three of the bio:
Chapter 3
A Socialist AwakeningIn 1949, aged fourteen, Race transferred to Melbourne Grammar’s senior school in Domain Road, South Yarra, next to the Shrine of Remembrance and the Royal Botanic Gardens. It was there that his political awakening commenced.
I entered the senior school in Year Nine, then called Sub-Intermediate. The teachers were mostly older men who’d been called back from retirement during the war, to replace those who’d gone into the armed forces. Their gowns and minds were threadbare and they taught mechanically, with a heavy reliance on sarcasm, the cane and Saturday morning detentions. One of them accused me of being ‘indolent’ – a word I needed to look up in the dictionary – and I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to prove him wrong.
But if the teachers were generally mediocre, there were some notable exceptions. Mr Covill, my English teacher the following year, had a contagious enthusiasm for poetry, which he recited with gusto. His gift to me was a love of Milton’s Paradise Lost and an introduction to the works of Dante, Donne and Spencer. He was also in charge of the school’s Cadet Corps, which I was obliged to join, though with little enthusiasm.
My two history teachers, Mr Jukes and Mr Fell, deepened my interest in history. British History as taught by Mr Jukes was a far cry from the former drudgery of writing down masses of insufficiently explained information. What mattered to him were the force and motives behind how individuals and nations acted, and why history unfolded as it did. Mr Fell adopted a similar approach to Modern History, but from a more liberal viewpoint and with the whole of Europe as his canvas. The effect was magical. History took on an engrossing quality, and I began at last to find my place in the school.
Another revelation occurred when I was sitting in a chemistry class and, unable to see what the teacher was writing on the blackboard, I picked up the glasses of a boy sitting near me. Suddenly, all was clear. From then on, I wore glasses all the time.
Fascinated by Mr Fell’s account of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European dynasties, a group of students older than myself developed a role-playing game they called the Drei Kaiserbund, or ‘the League of Three Emperors’. They met in the library and, as I was often there, invited me to join. The leading light was Don Grant, who would later become an archivist and genealogist. The focus of Drei Kaiserbund was romantically European. Its manual was the Almanach de Gotha, the directory of European royalty and nobility. A surviving note records the title they gave me:
His Excellent and Splendid Highness Rodrigo X, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst and Duke of Saxe-Altenburg, Count of the Empire of Luxembourg, Grand Lion of Hanover, Knight Commander of the Silver Sword of Saxony, Squire of the Golden Gong of Austrasia.
Meetings were held in one another’s homes, where we charted elaborate genealogies, drafted complex treaties and alliances, engaged in trade, and conducted wars and revolutions. We gained or lost titles or territories by playing sessions of poker, pontoon, Monopoly or the boardgame Powers until the early hours of the morning.
Most boys at Melbourne Grammar came from families that were better off than mine, but I did not see that as a disadvantage. I was a bit of an outsider, but that was not on social grounds. It was based on my intense distaste for compulsory sport, and because I had a more intellectual and inquiring cast of mind than many of my classmates. The members of The League were my first real Melbourne Grammar friends.
At the same time, I was also discovering left-wing politics. In the school library I discovered The New Statesman, and encountered what was possibly the single most influential book I’ve ever read: The Socialist Sixth of the World by Hewlett Johnson, the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury. It opened my eyes to the possibility of people living together, relating to one anther and working cooperatively in a totally new way, which had immense appeal. The foundations for my belief in democratic socialism began to be laid. Further down the same shelf I found the short version of Karl Marx’s Das Capital, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation.
These ideas gave me a sense of purpose and deep personal commitment that I had not previously experienced. While in the grip of my schoolboy enthusiasm for communism, I discovered that Russian and Chinese films could be seen at the New Theatre in Flinders Street, which was linked to the Communist Party of Australia. There, I was dazzled by the Sergei Eisenstein films Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, along with his Battleship Potemkin.
I thought seriously about joining the Communist Party, and took the tram to their office in Collins Street (wearing my Melbourne Grammar blazer) only to find it was unattended. This vastly relieved my parents, who warned me that if I persisted, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) would open a file on me, and that would be the end of my prospects for a secure career in the public service.
My interest in communism would last for several years, until the fallout from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, and the influence of a new friend, finally changed my mind. Years later, following my election to federal parliament in 1972, the then director of ASIO, Peter Barbour, advised me that a file had indeed been opened and I was identified as an ‘agent of influence’. That was because in 1970, I had visited the Russian Embassy in Canberra to arrange Whitlam’s visit to Moscow.
When I was fifteen, the founders of the Drei Kaiserbund obtained permission to establish a mock parliament with a House of Representatives and a Senate, and I became a member. The Parliamentary Society turned out to be an invaluable training ground for my future career in politics. Most of its members were politically conservative, like their parents, and they formed the governing Liberal Country Party (LCP). I was the MP for Hampton and Leader of the Communist Party; I was also Leader of the Opposition, as there was no Labor Party. However, the ‘government’ sabotaged my position by introducing a Communist Party Dissolution Bill. In the real world, the Menzies government’s Dissolution Act was rejected by the High Court and defeated at the subsequent referendum in 1951. But in our 1950 school parliament, the Bill became law and the Communist Party was banned. I denounced this move, then rebadged myself Leader of the Labor Party and Leader of the Opposition.
The master in charge of the society, Mr Gaynor, had the role of governor-general. In this capacity, he read out the LCP government’s program for 1950:
· To introduce compulsory military training for those deemed fit
· To preserve the White Australia Policy with greater discretion
· To amend the Constitution so as to prevent nationalisation without a referendum
· To introduce the decentralisation of industry and to encourage free enterprise by government subsidy
· To increase the numbers of the Security Police and to check places of ill repute; i.e., vice dens and fan-tan houses
I drew up alternative policies for the Labor Party, which included the following:
· Lower prices and break up large private monopolies
· Rehouse all slum dwellers
· Place the railways under Commonwealth control
· Introduce free university education
In practice, there were fallings-out within the LCP camp that enabled smaller parties such as my own to form coalition governments. In one such merger, I was briefly the Prime Minister and Leader of the Labor Party, as well as Minister for Trade and Customs, and Minister for School Affairs. In my Cabinet were two from the Liberal Party: Rob Maclellan, who would later be a minister in the Hamer Liberal government in Victoria, and John Levi, who would become a senior Melbourne rabbi.
As Minister for School Affairs, I introduced An Act to Amend the Existing Rules of the Melbourne Church of England Grammar School at a special sitting of the school parliament in August 1950. The Bill included the following:
· Abolition of caning by prefects
· Election by secret ballot of probationers and house captains
· Abolition of compulsory sport
· Replacement of homework by guided home study
My argument for the abolition of compulsory sport was heartfelt. After beginning with, ‘Mr Speaker and Honourable Members …’, I argued against forcing boys to turn out twice a week to watch school and house matches, which prevented them from participating in other activities.
The guests at this special sitting of parliament included several LCP federal and state MPs, but no Labor MPs. Following their visit, the society arrived at an agreement that the LCP members would invite an MP of their choice to speak to us, followed later by my choice of a representative of another party or ideology.
The LCP members invited the MP for Chisholm, Wilfrid Kent Hughes, an old boy of the school who in 1933 had published a series of articles in the Melbourne Herald on ‘Why I have become a fascist’. When it was my turn, I nominated Ralph Gibson, Secretary of the Communist Party of Australia, and also an old boy. Mr Gaynor vetoed my choice, an act I felt was not in keeping with the impartiality required of him as Governor-General. To add insult to injury, he instead invited the right-wing Labor MP for Fawkner, Bill Bourke, who later helped establish the anti-communist Democratic Labor Party (DLP). Incensed by the injustice of this, I boycotted seven consecutive meetings of the Executive Council, where the Governor-General met with the leaders of the parties.
That episode inculcated in me a distrust of governors-general that I should have been mindful of years later, in the run-up to the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government by Sir John Kerr.
My government ended when my coalition Liberal Party colleagues Maclellan and Levi orchestrated a coup, in which I was stripped of my portfolios and forced to resign as Prime Minister. To do this they roped in others, including Barry Humphries. He was a year older than me and well known as an eccentric student. I admired his ability to shirk organised sport and cadets. He was active in the Dramatic Society, the Art Club and debating. At university later on, he was involved in a dada and surrealist exhibition, famous for a pair of filthy old boots filled with custard and labelled ‘Pus in Boots’.
The Parliamentary Society taught me a lot about procedures, debate and tactics. It was also a foretaste of the ruthlessness of politics and the duplicity of governors-general.
My school reports at the time were erratic. At the age of fourteen, I came second in English, but thirty-fifth in Arithmetic. At fifteen, I was first in English, but twenty-second in Latin. By sixteen, in my final term, I came fifteenth in Economics, but second in Modern History, with the comment, ‘He shows imagination and intelligence.’ I got prizes for English and Divinity, but that was a surprise, as I had no religion and nor had my parents, and I thought compulsory chapel was a waste of time.
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My part in the Parliamentary Society ended when I left Melbourne Grammar prematurely at the end of 1951, when I was sixteen. In the final weeks of the school year, teaching was set aside so the forms could play one another at cricket. I was no good at sport and saw this as a waste of time. I was restless, bored, and longing to be independent. My frustration was such that one December day, I took a tram along St Kilda Road to the city and found myself a job. Walking up Bourke Street, my eye was caught by the classic façade of the Shell Oil Company offices on the corner of William Street. Introducing myself to the personnel manager, I inquired whether a position with the company might be available in the new year. He invited me on the spot to join what was described as its ‘executive cadre’, to commence work the following February.
It was a rash decision, and I look back on it with shame. It was insensitive to my parents’ financial sacrifices and hopes for me, and potentially destructive of the university course and professional career in which they and the school had encouraged me. Stoic as always, they pointed out the pitfalls of what I was doing, while giving no indication of their disappointment and perhaps anger at my decision.
Looking back on my time at Melbourne Grammar, my main feeling about the school and my parents’ decision to send me there remains one of gratitude. I was exposed to a handful of inspiring teachers, a well-resourced library and stimulating extracurricular activities. I made some lifelong friends, including Dick Jenssen, who shared my love of science fiction, and Ken Heyward, who shared my love of movies. Dick would become a senior lecturer in the Meteorology Department at Melbourne University, and Ken would become a clinical psychologist.
Years later, I wrote an essay about my time at Melbourne Grammar called ‘A Stench of Liniment’, which was published in Overland in 1987. It read in part:
The school was dominated at the time by cricketers, footballers, oarsmen and athletes, who were also its prefects, house captains and probationers. Liniment hung about their clothes as it did about the studies and passages underneath the clock tower from which their authority was exercised … Its presence has been linked in my mind ever since with hostility to ideas, pressure for conformity and the ‘born-to-rule’ syndrome of Australian conservatism.
I concluded the essay by expressing my thankfulness to the school. However, I objected to the fact that schools like Melbourne Grammar skimmed off the wider education system’s most able students, while opting out of the system’s mounting problems:
What is asked of them is simply that they should now shoulder their fair share of responsibility for the impaired, disturbed, poor and otherwise disadvantaged young people whose needs and difficulties currently threaten to overwhelm our government schools … It may be that Melbourne Grammar has mostly freed itself from what the liniment stench once represented. There is a stench instead of abdicated social responsibility.
z
My teenage years were also busy outside school. To supplement my pocket money, I got a Saturday morning job at Hattam’s menswear shop in Hampton Street, which I enjoyed. My half-day’s wage was ten shillings, plus a two shillings and sixpence bonus for every sale of a suit or overcoat.
I was also involved in the Second Hampton Boy Scout Troop, which I’d joined at the age of twelve. Some of the leaders were drawn from the older scouts, the Rovers, and I enjoyed the camaraderie of our meetings, hikes, overnight camps and excursions. At fourteen, I went to the 1949 Pan Pacific Jamboree at Wonga Park, north-east of Melbourne, which was attended by nearly 11,000 scouts from around the world. I took with me an emergency kit for downed airmen, which I’d purchased at a war surplus sale. It included dehydrated and tinned food, painkillers and a packet of condoms. I was not sure what the condoms were for, and my friends were equally ignorant.
We were asked to decorate our tents in preparation for an inspection by the World Chief Scout, Lord Rowallan. To do this, we inflated the condoms and hung them on the outside of the tent pole. The official party progressed through the camp in a stately manner, Lord Rowallan wearing a kilt, and when they came to our tent they paused and closely examined our ornaments, before moving on. We were then instructed by a flustered scoutmaster to remove the offending items, for reasons that were not disclosed.
My enthusiasm for boys’ weekly periodicals like the Nelson Lee Library continued, and I started collecting them as a hobby. At sixteen, I got in touch with some collectors in Melbourne, most of whom were adults. I then established the Old Boys’ Book Club (Australasian branch) at a meeting in my family’s living room. Don Wicks, an accountant, was Chairman, and I was elected Secretary. We acquired a regular meeting room at the Victorian Railways Institute at Flinders Street station, presented papers, published four issues of a newsletter, and recruited members from as far afield as New Zealand and South Africa. The newsletter lapsed when I stepped down as Secretary later that year, but the meetings continued.
Another interest was science fiction, which I had discovered at the age of nine. At the time, travelling to Grimwade involved a change of trams at the intersection of Brighton Road and Carlisle Street in St Kilda. Close by, a down-at-heel shop sold second-hand comics and magazines, which I gazed at through the window as I waited for my tram. American comics were given pride of place, but one day there was an intriguing magazine on display. The cover featured a couple of bulbous red creatures, directing something like an old-fashioned movie camera at two men dressed for tropical exploration, and confined in a cage. It was the tenth anniversary issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, published in 1939 in New York.
The effect on me was instantaneous. Few glittering prizes in later life have ever beckoned so alluringly. I lived on tenterhooks for the next two days, until my pocket money came due on Saturday morning and the magazine was mine. As the weeks went by, further prewar issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories made their appearance in that shop window, along with occasional copies of Amazing, Startling Stories, Astounding and Famous Fantastic Mysteries. I bought all that I could afford.
Fantasy had been a large part of my childhood reading, and science fiction gave me a further wealth of imaginative possibilities. In the following years, I encountered the short stories of a generation of science fiction writers of the calibre of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. By the age of fifteen, I was buying my science fiction by mail from Britain.
At sixteen, I made some new science fiction friends in Melbourne, including Bob McCubbin, a middle-aged schoolteacher, and Mervyn Binns, a shop assistant who went on to run a science fiction bookshop. Another science fiction fan was a young photographer named Lee Harding, and of course there was Dick Jenssen. I arranged a meeting in my family’s living room, and on 9 May 1952 we founded the Melbourne Science Fiction Group (MSFG). Our get-togethers revolved around discussion, letters, the bartering of books, and chess.
Forming new organisations was second nature to me and would become a regular occurrence throughout my life. I saw early on that you could achieve more in an organisation than you could achieve alone. Things had to be organised and formalised in order to have some reliability and continuity. I liked being a catalyst.
Lee and Dick decided we should put out a fanzine (an amateur publication written by fans). We produced five of them, titled Perhaps, Bacchanalia, Etherline, Question Mark and Antipodes. We purchased a second-hand Roneo 500 duplicating machine, taught ourselves to type stencils, and regularly got smeared with ink.
Once our membership grew, we transferred to Val’s Coffee Lounge in Swanston Street, opposite the Town Hall. When it was discovered that this was a meeting place for lesbians, some of our members were shocked. ‘Extroverts and introverts we may be, but perverts never,’ said Bob McCubbin. Meetings were then held in the asexual surroundings of a basement room of the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows.
About this time, I also joined the Australian Science Fiction Society, run out of Sydney University, and in March 1952 I attended the first postwar Australian science fiction convention, held in Sydney. In those days, science fiction was a pariah genre, with books and magazines few and far between. It has long since carved out a respectable niche of its own in the literary canon. These days, it’s read by millions, taught in universities, and turned into award-winning movies.
We few science fiction readers at the time repeated a catchphrase based on a 1949 story in Astounding: ‘It is a proud and lonely thing to be a fan’. We also identified with the sentiments expressed by Arthur C. Clarke in his short story The Sentinel:
Nearly a hundred million stars are turning in the circle of the Milky Way, and long ago races in the worlds of other suns must have scaled and passed the heights we have reached … Theirs must have been a loneliness we cannot imagine, the loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts.
Those of us who were growing up at that time still cannot read that passage without feeling emotional.
After leaving school, I sold off the greater part of my SF collection to my MSFG colleagues, and my active involvement petered out. The MSFG has survived, however, reinvented by successive generations of fans, and Melbourne has gone on to host several World Science Fiction Conventions (Worldcons) – I had the privilege of opening two of them, in 1975 and 1985.
I have continued to read science fiction, to which I am indebted for several enduring friendships and for the extra edge it has given to my curiosity, imagination and pursuit of ideas.
z
As a teenager, I became close to my maternal grandmother, Muriel Morse, whom we called Bill-Bill. She was a frequent visitor to our house and liked reciting poetry with my father – her name originated from my infant tongue trying to say ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’, from a poem she used to act out. She was the complete opposite to my Brighton Road grandparents. Well spoken and elegantly dressed, she was equally at home in theatre foyers, fashionable restaurants or the members’ enclosures of the Flemington and Caulfield racecourses and the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Born Muriel Hutchinson, she was one of eight children who grew up in an earth-floored shack in Inglewood, about 200 kilometres north-west of Melbourne. She married a policeman named William Morse, with whom she had three children, and then divorced him; he was said to have later drowned after falling into a flooded creek. Bill-Bill then sent the children – my mother and her brothers, Gordon and Douglas – to live with her older sister Matilda, ‘Auntie Till’, who was a nurse. Despite this unhappy beginning, my mother remained on good terms with Bill-Bill, and after my mother married, Bill-Bill regularly took her to the theatre.
After her divorce, Bill-Bill worked as a saleswoman in the Mutual Store in Flinders Street, then at Georges in Collins Street, and later managed an antique shop. She had transcended her origins and was determined to live life to the full. Her day jobs may have been mundane, but to me she was a larger-than-life figure, reminiscent of the character in the movie musical Auntie Mame. Bill-Bill shared a South Yarra flat with a woman about the same age, and from when I was about nine, I was introduced there to men friends who (unimaginable to me at the time) may have been her lovers and perhaps provided some financial support. If so, I was the beneficiary, because her generosity was the means of my introduction to many of the enriching experiences my family could not have afforded for me.
She took me to successive seasons of league football, using ‘Ladies’ Tickets’ on loan from her admirers who were Melbourne Cricket Club members. She took me to my first restaurant meal, and set off a lifelong habit of theatre-going by taking me to matinee attendances at the old St Martin’s Theatre in South Yarra and Frank Thring’s Arrow Theatre in Middle Park. She gave me records of Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto, and paid for my first dinner suit. She sparked an appreciation of art and culture that served me well when I became Minister for the Arts in the Victorian Government.
I was fortunate in growing up with three adults who had absolute belief in me – my parents and Bill-Bill.
This is an extract from Race Mathews: A Life in Politics by Iola Mathews (Published by Monash University Publishing).
Play this: a sheer delight!
"Strangely Simon included economics as among the sciences. I think it should always have been understood as a design discipline"
which is why I regard both librarians and police as primarily caring professions, and should be organised as such