Peter Coleman

Bob Hughes who died this week in New York was a companion of my youth. We worked together some 50 years ago on the fortnightly Observer on which he made his name as an art critic. He cheerfully dismissed the established artists of the day from Dobell (‘superficial’) or Tucker (‘cynical’) to Boyd (‘mawkish’) or Dickerson (‘in a rut’). He liked to boast that Dickerson had decked him in a pub and that Tucker was looking for him with a gun. When launching Patricia Anderson’s Robert Hughes: The Australian Years a couple of years ago I described him as ‘one of those volcanic phenomena that erupt from time to time in Sydney and who, whatever they do in life, carry with them the stigmata of their Sydney formation.’ I stand by that.

I was both right and wrong. When Tony Abbott’s Battlelines came out a few months ago I wrote in these pages that it had many excellent things to say but its thinness on economic policy meant that his Parliamentary colleagues would be unwilling to elect him as their leader. That was wrong. But I added: ‘except in the most extraordinary circumstances’ — and that turned out to be right. The Liberal party is lucky to have had him to fall back on. The rage of the Left shows that it knows it now has a fight on its hands. John Howard will be both the guest of honour at the Quadrant Dinner this week and the man in the hot seat. Guest of honour because Quadrant wants to thank the prime minister of Australia’s golden age.

Editing a small magazine is like writing a poem. It is half judgment, but also half inspiration. It can never be done by a committee. So I sensed disaster when I read that the Monthly in Melbourne boasted a committee that met regularly to make editorial decisions (even if it did meet, as reported, in Jimmie Watson’s wine bar in Carlton.) The idea of an editorial committee trying to direct, overrule or censor the editor is repugnant, philistine and almost always counterproductive. At best, such a committee is useful as a list of names to indicate support. One or two of them may have an idea worth ringing the editor about. But it cannot edit a magazine.