Hughes's demise exposes the void

IN the final year of my bachelor's degree, when I should have been dedicating every waking hour to completing an honours thesis on Australian politics, I was instead captivated for several weeks by Robert Hughes's book American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America and his documentary series of the same name.

The sight of Hughes, clad in baggy beige chinos, pale-blue business shirt and occasional sports jacket, in a hundred different places analysing the broad sweep of American history through the prism of art, was utterly engrossing.

His "love letter to America" was just one of his many books and documentaries that made art, history and culture accessible to millions of people over five decades.

His death, soon after the loss of the great novelist and essayist Gore Vidal, and the passing of the contrarian thinker and polemicist Christopher Hitchens, begs the question: who will replace these standout public intellectuals at home and abroad?

Perhaps we have exhausted this once noble vocation and are instead destined to an insufferable misery of a public discourse defined by its banality, the dearth of new ideas, the lack of courage and creativity, and the inability of our universities, think tanks and political parties to produce a new generation of raconteurs who can entertain, educate and energise the public realm of our civic life.

Hughes had a turn of phrase that, like the sharp crack of a bullwhip, could define a topic, person or artwork and reduce it to its significance in an instant. He had a masterful command of the English language. His prose was leavened with metaphor, insight and wit, delivered in a characteristically authoritative patrician manner with elegance and erudition.

If he could revive just one dead American it would be Thomas Jefferson, he said, simply because of "the overwhelming attractive cast of his mind". In a description that could easily be applied to himself, Hughes said: "Reading him, you feel his enthusiasm and curiosity on your face like sunburn."

Hughes's books, The Art of Australia, The Shock of the New and Nothing if Not Critical, and his 30 years at Time, secured his place as the doyen of art critics. The Culture of Complaint, about the "fraying" of American society, was prescient at the end of the Reagan era. But it was The Fatal Shore, published on the eve of Australia's bicentennial, with its sparkling language and scorching portrayal of our penal origins, which revealed Hughes to be as good a historian as he was a critic and commentator.

So who will replace him? Sure, we have many talented writers, scholars and commentators. They produce great books, probing essays and perceptive commentary. Those who come to mind include Clive James, Geoffrey Blainey, Thomas Keneally, Les Carlyon, Don Watson, David Day and this newspaper's Paul Kelly. There are few others.

The genius of the public intellectual is combining a soaring intellect with an inquiring mind that engages with the community to inform public opinion and nudge it in new directions by offering a rarity of wisdom on policy, politics and culture.

All too often, our public discourse is reduced to ideological skirmishes rather than addressing the substance of a subject. Facts and figures are distorted and marshalled to support a pre-determined and predictable point of view. The withering attack and the personal insult are habitually employed as a substitute for reasoned, informed and serious debate.

It would be easy to blame our short attention spans, the media's apparent focus on the triviality of politics or the relentless news cycle that undermines any capacity for considered discussion.

Rather, our universities have become dumbed-down as too often academics narrow their focus to the peripheral and confine their engagement to within campus walls.

Apart from a few exceptions, our think tanks tend to act remotely from the everyday experiences of Australians and serve a political purpose rather than a public good.

Politics, once a vocation for the highly intelligent with a passion for policy and the skills of public advocacy, rarely produces public intellectuals. Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard were prime ministers who at the summit of their careers had an acute understanding of the policy challenges they faced and knew how to educate the public and win their support.

While parliament enjoys the cerebral talents of Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd, Bob Carr and Andrew Leigh, who regularly make an insightful contribution with the written or spoken word, most politicians prefer to repeat key lines and fire barbs rather than offer an original thought, a bold idea or a knowledgeable contribution.

Tony Abbott, a Rhodes scholar with an Oxford degree, is no intellectual slouch, but it doesn't show in his policies or rhetoric. Labor has not produced the next Barry Jones, Kim Beazley, Lindsay Tanner or Mark Latham, who all made intellectual contributions to their parties.

No wonder the public are turning off in droves. It confirms what Hughes feared in America two decades ago when he lamented "a public recoil from formal politics", which runs counter to the duty of "the active reasoned exercise of citizenship".

I met Hughes in 2006 when he was promoting his memoir, Things I Didn't Know. He had barely survived depression and a car crash. I told him The Fatal Shore was the first serious non-fiction book I had read and it sparked my interest in history. Ever the gentleman, he offered his thanks and signed both books.

Although in his final years Hughes seemed unable to appreciate the vast changes that had taken place while he had been abroad, at his peak he was unrivalled. He was a genuine intellectual who engaged with the public, wrote for them, spoke to them and informed them.

At a time when we need a dose of intellectual nourishment in our public life, the ranks of our public intellectuals are thinning.

A survey of our universities, think tanks and political parties reveals there are very few who come within cooee of Hughes.