Conlon’s Remarkable Circus single work   biography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2012... 2012 Conlon’s Remarkable Circus
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Alf Conlon (1908–61) was a visionary. He would not have known it, but his ideology had similarities with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Conlon had a belief that the ideas that shape society come from a fairly small elite united by shared intellectual premises, and he sought to use the chaos of the war to establish a new kind of elite in Australia. What Gramsci termed ‘organic intellectuals’ Conlon thought of as his intellectual underground. When the war had begun to pose a direct threat to Australia, he could see that the fallout was going to destroy the credibility of the existing elites and undermine the derived power of the conventional establishment. He recognised the possibility of using the chaos to build a new power group with progressive ideas, organic to Australian society and based on intellect. No Marxist, Conlon insisted his ‘New Men’ would be a classless elite, yet those he had in mind were lower-middle-class boys like himself who had come to university through the selective State school system. The poet James McAuley was typical of Conlon’s incipient elite: brainy, ambitious, contemptuous and, most importantly, a product of Conlon’s alma mater, Fort Street Boys High, Sydney, as were Hal Stewart, Ian Hogbin, Jim Plimsoll and a brilliant law graduate named John Kerr.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Scholars at War : Australasian Social Scientists, 1939-1945 Geoffrey Gray (editor), Doug Munro (editor), Christine Winter (editor), Canberra : ANU E View , 2012 12042979 2012 anthology biography

    'Scholars at War is the first scholarly publication to examine the effect World War II had on the careers of Australasian social scientists. It links a group of scholars through geography, transnational, national and personal scholarly networks, and shared intellectual traditions, explores their use, and contextualizes their experiences and contributions within wider examinations of the role of intellectuals in war.

    'Scholars at War is structured around historical portraits of individual Australasian social scientists. They are not a tight group; rather a cohort of scholars serendipitously involved in and affected by war who share a point of origin. Analyzing practitioners of the social sciences during war brings to the fore specific networks, beliefs and institutions that transcend politically defined spaces. Individual lives help us to make sense of the historical process, helping us illuminate particular events and the larger cultural, social and even political processes of a moment in time.'(Publication summary)

    Canberra : ANU E View , 2012
    pg. 55-72
Last amended 19 Oct 2017 09:35:25
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