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'This article investigates the reception of Judith Brett’s landmark study, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, on its publication in 1992, a moment when many Australians living under neoliberal economic reform and recession were rethinking what it meant to be middle class. Brett argued that Menzies thought it meant individuals living the best lives they could, lives defined by independence and the possession of superior moral qualities. Her account resonated with contemporary Australian experience and remains highly influential. Yet within political history, reviews were mixed as traditionalists resisted the psychoanalytic theory Brett employed to understand Menzies’ public language. Her strategic defence of her interdisciplinary approach has ultimately helped to keep the idea of moral liberalism alive in political discourse.' (Publication abstract)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Landmark Histories : Response by Judith Brett
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: History Australia , vol. 20 no. 3 2023; (p. 435-437)'It is very gratifying to have Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People included in History Australia’s Landmarks series, and I thank the editors for the honour and Sybil Nolan for her thoughtful discussion of the book and its reception. I thank her too for publishing a second edition in 2007 with Melbourne University Press which has kept the book in print. I wrote a long introduction to this second edition, in which I reflected on the book’s origins in a course I was teaching on political parties at the University of Melbourne in 1980. Back then, I was looking for readings on the Liberal Party – its history, what it stood for and the reasons for its electoral success. Everything I found was from the left, describing the party as a vehicle for capital and the ruling class. I wanted something from inside, which captured the party’s self-understandings, when I found a copy of Menzies’ 1942 radio broadcast, ‘The Forgotten People’, in the basement of the Baillieu Library. I had just finished my PhD on the fin-de-siècle Austrian writer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which used a close reading of Hofmannsthal’s writing to develop a psycho-biographical argument about his transition from a gifted young lyric poet to Richard Strauss’s librettist. I was good at close reading, and I started to apply my skill to Menzies’ broadcast, mostly to the ‘Forgotten People’ broadcast itself but also to other of his writing, including his occasional verse.' (Publication abstract)
-
Landmark Histories : Response by Judith Brett
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: History Australia , vol. 20 no. 3 2023; (p. 435-437)'It is very gratifying to have Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People included in History Australia’s Landmarks series, and I thank the editors for the honour and Sybil Nolan for her thoughtful discussion of the book and its reception. I thank her too for publishing a second edition in 2007 with Melbourne University Press which has kept the book in print. I wrote a long introduction to this second edition, in which I reflected on the book’s origins in a course I was teaching on political parties at the University of Melbourne in 1980. Back then, I was looking for readings on the Liberal Party – its history, what it stood for and the reasons for its electoral success. Everything I found was from the left, describing the party as a vehicle for capital and the ruling class. I wanted something from inside, which captured the party’s self-understandings, when I found a copy of Menzies’ 1942 radio broadcast, ‘The Forgotten People’, in the basement of the Baillieu Library. I had just finished my PhD on the fin-de-siècle Austrian writer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which used a close reading of Hofmannsthal’s writing to develop a psycho-biographical argument about his transition from a gifted young lyric poet to Richard Strauss’s librettist. I was good at close reading, and I started to apply my skill to Menzies’ broadcast, mostly to the ‘Forgotten People’ broadcast itself but also to other of his writing, including his occasional verse.' (Publication abstract)
