Christopher Pearson’s wit and wisdom preserved for posterity in book form

ORIGINAL opinion is a rare commodity in this age. Which is why Australia could ill-afford to lose Christopher Pearson.

Illustration: Bill Leak

IN the digital age of ubiquitous commentary, original opinion is a rare and precious commodity.

Which is why Australia could ill-afford to lose a writer like Christopher Pearson, who died in June last year at the age of 61, shortly after filing his column for The Weekend Australian. Like his intellectual sparring partners Paddy McGuinness and Frank Devine, Pearson was a columnist who refused to outsource his thinking and was deeply suspicious of conventional wisdom.

Next week the Prime Minister will launch an anthology of Pearson’s columns and essays drawn from the million or so dissenting words he had published from the early 1990s. They are the work of a writer who possessed exceptional literary qualities and a sharp wit.

Pearson’s thoughts would range from the byzantine politics of the Catholic Church to the pleasures of Jerusalem artichoke soup without missing a beat. He maintained a constant voice and values that set him apart from his less-grounded contemp­oraries. That consistency made the task of editing this collection, drawn from more than 800 columns, somewhat easier.

Re-reading his work was in a sense the extension of the conversation that began when we first met in 1989 over lunch at Rigoni’s in Adelaide where Pearson, then editor of The Adelaide Review, held court at a table that would shrink or expand depending on which of his many companions happened to be passing by.

Tony Abbott, in an introduction to the book, recalls his first lunch with Pearson in 1993, soon after his unceremonious ­departure from the office of John Hewson, who had just lost the unlosable election.

“For Christopher, lunch was both and art and a science,” ­Abbott writes. “Arguments could break out over the correct method of cooking a bechamel sauce or the proper way to roast a duck. In life, he once wrote, ‘only fools fail to take their pleasures seriously’.”

Abbott’s luncheon audition as a would-be writer for the Review was the start of an exceptional friendship that lasted for the next two decades. It was, Abbott reflects, an unusual coupling: “Christopher was the aesthete, I was the athlete; he was a ­reformed Maoist and I was a lifelong conservative.”

Yet the friendship was an ­important one. Until becoming opposition leader, Abbott reveals, he gave few scripted speeches that were not enhanced by Pearson’s broad knowledge and attention to detail. Pearson edited three of ­Abbott’s books, The Minimal ­Monarchy, How to Win the ­Constitutional War and Battlelines.

Abbott throws light on a crucial disagreement with Pearson about the proposal in Battlelines to ­reform the federation by allowing the commonwealth to assume general authority over the states when it chose.

As a way of ending blame-shifting, jurisdictional confusion and inefficient service delivery, the constitutional amendment seemed to make sense in 2008, says Abbott. He now accepts, however, that Pearson was right to be suspicious.

“Six years later, the failed ­experiments of the Rudd and Gillard governments, with their predilections for central planning, have proved the soundness of Christopher’s instincts,” he writes.

Running through Pearson’s work from beginning to end is an abiding suspicion of any statement that started with the words “of course”. Not for him the off-the-peg opinions and common prejudices too readily embraced by the crowd he delighted in calling the bien pensant. He refused to recognise the rules of political correctness and was a steadfast opponent of “the politics of the warm, inner glow”.

Pearson’s dissident tendencies led him into zones where lesser intellects fear to tread. He was a climate change sceptic long before most people had given much thought to the matter, taking issue as early as 1997 with the dogmatists who appeared to delight in “the prospect of global warming and self-flagellation over Aus­tralia’s allegedly shameful part in that disaster”.

The extreme forecasts of global warming were born not of empiricism but of ideology, self-interest and moral vanity, he insisted. “Perhaps having safely negotiated the millennium, which is a major cause of all this anxiety, we may collectively surrender to a bout of unqualified optimism,” he wrote. “I doubt it, because the appetite for catastrophe is now highly ­developed and mass media delight in pandering to it.”

Pearson was a dissenting voice on indigenous matters, rejecting the utopian dreaming that ­became common currency in discussion of indigenous affairs from the early 70s. He was instrumental in the South Australian royal commission that exposed the ­fiction of the so-called “secret women’s business” that was used to block the construction of a bridge to Hindmarsh Island.

Pearson recognised earlier than most that the policies of ­welfare and separation were the cause of misery, not its solution. He ­resisted the “moral narcis­sism” of the reconciliation movement, regarding it principally “as a way for parts of suburban white Australia to feel good about itself at minimal personal cost”.

Dogma was anathema to ­Pearson. He deplored the politically correct tendency to silence contrarian voices. “Reconciliation no longer is something about which you can say, ‘On the whole, I think it’s a good thing’,” he ­observed in 1996. “It has become a secular article of faith.”

Few within the commentariat were prepared to argue in the late 90s against an Australian republic, a transition Paul Keating had told the Queen was inevitable. In his support for the monarchy, Pearson was, in a sense, ahead of his time; the tide of public opinion has since been moving in his direction. He possessed a keen ear for groupthink and took pleasure in describing its characteristics. “The Canberra press gallery often reminds me of a tankful of tropical fish,” he wrote four years after the election of John Howard.

“They have a marked tendency to change direction, suddenly and simultaneously, as if by magic or in response to some signal, almost undetectable outside the aquarium, from one of their ­number.”

The origin of Pearson’s instinct for intellectual scepticism is best explained in an illuminating essay written in 1996 at the invitation of Peter Coleman, who published it in the book Double Take.

It is in part a memoir, beginning with Pearson’s experience at Adelaide’s Scotch College as what he calls “the school’s foremost poofter”. It continues with his ­flirtation with the gay liberation movement at Flinders University where he became uncertain about the act of “coming out”.

It reminded him “of Billy ­Graham’s evangelising techniques and the invitation to ‘make a decision for Christ’ ” that “smacked of the Republic of ­Virtue and its excesses”.

No one who knew Christopher could accuse him of being coy about his sexuality, but he refused to allow that it was a polit­ical statement or permit it to ­define him.

His conversion to Catholicism at the turn of the century was a considered step of faith by a man prepared to confront his own mortality. He developed a taste for the Latin mass that reflected his interest in all things sublime. Yet at the same time his conversion was another decisive rejection of the zeitgeist and an affirmation of the eternal that set him apart from “intellectual fashion and those eager to do our thinking for us”.

The title for the collection, A Better Class of Sunset, comes from a column Pearson wrote in 2003 bemoaning the tyranny of summer beach culture, deploring the indignity of “compulsory fun”. “I’m not entirely averse to ­beaches,” he wrote, “but it’s best done on an isolated strand, in winter and wild weather. You get a better class of sunset that way, too.”

In later life, Pearson adopted the name Club Sensible for those whose opinions he respected. It was a wide and politically agnostic circle that included Jack Snelling, the Labor Health Minister in South Australia, poets Les Murray and Peter Goldsworthy, anthropologist Peter Sutton, the ­composer and conductor Richard Mills, editors, journalists, priests, defrocked priests and, of course, Abbott.

A Better Class of Sunset is Club Sensible’s attempt to compile the book it wishes Pearson had written and to contribute to the posthumous reputation he ­deserves as a brilliant and original Australian intellectual.

“He was a complex man,” writes Abbott, “in some ways a torn character, but to be at all close to him was to receive a practical education on the human ­condition. For many, certainly for me, the world is now painted in richer, truer colours.”

Pearson in full flight

“For many years I toyed with the idea of writing a book about Australia’s public intellectuals called Great Windbags of Our Time.”

September 1997

“The gallery is so often like a bunch of old-fashioned Kremlinologists, insistent on trying to decipher a code even when the message is code-free and straightforward.”

July 2001

“The gay movement’s ‘official culture’ demanded that the past not merely serve but suck up to the present, providing heroic precursors with a flattering resemblance to ourselves.”

1996

On Paddy McGuinness:

“Our first disagreement, a friendly and longstanding argument, was not over economics or ideology but methods of roasting duck. It was firmly predicated on the assumption that only fools fail to take their pleasures seriously.”

February 2008

On climate change:

“The appetite for catastrophe is now highly developed and the mass media delight in pandering to it.”

November 1997

On Manning Clark:

“Almost unreadable but reassuring to have on the shelves.”

September 1996

On politics:

“People who join political organisations, particularly in a country as prosperous and equitable as Australia, tend to have something missing in their lives.”

October 1996

On setting up a home:

“In the limited space I have available, I want to cut to the chase on two vexed questions: getting value for money when buying tinned fish and establishing a liquor cabinet.”

August 2008

Thanks to Connor Court and The Australian, readers can get a copy of A Better Class of Sunset for the special price of $49.95. Simply visit www.connorcourt.com and use the word “cater” when asked for a coupon code during checkout. If you prefer to order by phone, call [phone] and mention the special price for readers of The Australian.