Cirrus@Austlit

'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)