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In a free public lecture at The University of Western Australia on August 2, 2007, distinguished Australian author and intellectual, Professor Robert Manne, will examine attempts by politicians, intellectuals and anthropologists – from AE Elkin to Noel Pearson – to develop a policy for the survival of Aboriginal society under conditions of modernity.

Professor Manne will explore the reasons why, since the Second World War, policies have lurched erratically between a pessimistic ‘realism’ and an ungrounded ‘idealism’, and why the most recent seminal thinker, Noel Pearson, represents the present best hope.

“The lecture has uncomfortable things to say about the thinking on indigenous questions of both the contemporary Left and Right,” Professor Manne said.

This lecture, titled: ‘The Left, the Right and the Aborigines: New (Uncomfortable) Thoughts on the History of the Dispossession and on the Quest for Reconciliation’ will be presented on Thursday, August 2, 2007, from 7pm, at UWA’s Social Sciences Lecture Theatre.

Robert Manne is Professor of Politics at La Trobe University and regarded as one of Australia's most eminent intellectuals. He was educated at the University of Melbourne and Oxford University during the 1960s and 1970s.

His university teaching focuses on twentieth-century European politics (including the Holocaust), Communism, and Australian politics, and he has made extensive contributions to public debate in Australia on topics such as the ‘Stolen Generation’, the ‘History Wars’ of the 1990s, censorship, anti-Semitism, asylum seekers and mandatory detention, and Australia's involvement in the Iraq war.

Former editor of Quadrant magazine, he is the author of ‘In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right’ and editor of ‘Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History’.

The event is presented by UWA’s Institute of Advanced Studies as part of the ‘New Critic Lecture Series’ co-sponsored with the on-line journal ‘The New Critic’. This is an annual series featuring distinguished scholars, authors, writers, thinkers, entrepreneurs, activists and others who have helped to shape new ideas.

Media references

Milka Bukilic or Audrey Barton (Institute of Advanced Studies) 61 8 6488 1340

Simone Hewett / Francesca Robb 61 8 6488 7977
(UWA Public Affairs) 0420 790 097 / 0420 790 098