Leonie Kramer: A Woman for All Seasons

People speak of the Tall Poppy syndrome in Australian culture and society, whereby individuals who have reached stellar heights in their lives and careers are deemed to have become—in another metaphor—too big for their boots and need to be cut down to size, in order to perpetuate the egalitarian fiction that nobody is better than anybody else, even if somebody demonstrably is. But when you think about the phenomenon for a moment, you realise that Tall-Poppy-lopping is, in fact, not only a selectively applied pruning process, but even those attaining Tall Poppy status, in the first place, are very selectively boosted amongst the wider, high-achieving class of persons.

The obvious examples that give the lie to the allegedly pervasive custom of demoting poppies are numerous figures from the world of sport, the Australian Clayton’s religion-substitute. Tall Poppies abound in that arena and can rise to the top very quickly indeed. Delightful tennis champ, Ash Barty, is lauded as the “Queen of Oz” (not just Oz tennis, mind) after a career in the spotlight of a mere few years. The exception to prove this rule has been recently provided by another tennis superstar and one-time very Tall Poppy, Margaret Court, who has been jackbooted to oblivion by the New World Order of Woke. She imagined that she lived in a free country where she could express the now counter-cultural view about the nature of marriage (which, until yesterday, was taken for granted by virtually everybody), as a union between a man and a woman. This was in line with her conservative, biblically-based Christian faith. Court mistakenly supposed that such expressions of deeply-considered opinion would not only be acceptable, but welcomed in a society that allegedly values free speech and vigorous debate. Instead, she has been brutally denounced and demonised for “hate speech” and, in the now routine way of the Gulag mentality of the woke, become a non-person.

Much more usually, sporting high achievers enjoy decades-long adulation, such as the recently-deceased and much-lamented cricketer, Shane Warne, and then, on their deaths, are accorded state funerals, as “the whole world”, we were told, was in shock and mourning when Warnie died. And even beyond death, in eternum, he is given accolades, with a posthumous AO in the Queen’s Birthday honours this year.

So some Tall Poppies will never be lopped, and even if aspects of their lives are well known to be less than impeccable, a strange abracadabra is performed by the media (even the ABC, which would never allow this magical transformation for anyone in any other walk of life), as the personal flaws which would make non-sporting prominent men or women ripe for pillorying and cancellation, suddenly become reassuring proof that the Tall Poppy is, after all, just a “lovable larrikin”. His naughtiness can make him all the more worthy of his status. For Australians, too much adoration of sporting Tall Poppies, “icons” and “heroes” is never enough. Such exceptionalism seems to confirm Donald Horne’s idea that, in Australia, “sport is life and the rest a shadow”—and reluctance to bow the knee to this concept is seen as a sign of degeneracy.

In other areas of high attainment, in such as political life, the arts and, even more so, academia, Tall Poppy status can prove more difficult to attain and is far less secure and enduring. Introducing the Australian Biographical Monographs series for Connor Court, editor Scott Prasser explains that these small books will counteract “lack of knowledge or, even worse, distorted views, of some of Australia’s leading historical figures, who deserve to be remembered, [and] better understood for their achievements”. To date, this worthy series has focused on a dozen distinguished people, but entirely from politics, some of whom most Australians (and probably all schoolchildren) today would either have never heard of, or, if they had, have forgotten—such as Sir William McKell (boilermaker, premier and governor-general), Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, Sir Robert Askin (premier of New South Wales), and from more recent political history, Senator Neville Bonner (the first Aboriginal member of the Australian parliament) and—the only other woman in the list, until now—Senator Margaret Guilfoyle (Australia’s first female cabinet minister).

It is instructive to reflect, particularly, of these last two that they should belong to the class of forgotten achievers, to which Prasser refers, given the current obsession with eradicating any hint of sexism and racism in public—and especially political—life. Surely Bonner and Guilfoyle should be widely acknowledged Tall Poppies, taught about in schools, commemorated throughout the land, and so on? Certainly not forgotten, as they are. But of course they belonged to the “wrong” political party, so their extraordinary attainments are underplayed, even actively suppressed. One remembers when Margaret Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister of Great Britain, how muted was the response of feminists who had been—as they continue to be—complaining bitterly about the “glass ceiling” supposedly preventing women rising to the top. Here was a woman who had risen extraordinarily to the very top, and stayed there for two subsequent landslide elections, moreover. But she was the “wrong” kind of woman, belonging, as a Conservative, to the “wrong” party. Probably not a woman at all.

Agreeably and reassuringly, as this collection needs to speak of achievement beyond the world of politics, Damien Freeman has produced the first monograph—the fourteenth in the series—focused not on a political figure (at least in the narrow sense of that term), but featuring one of Australia’s most prominent academic women, and the first female professor at the University of Sydney, Dame Leonie Kramer. She was, Dr Freeman notes, “the first woman to step foot in venerable domains that had hitherto been exclusively male”. This is too sweeping, as it is important to remember that while Dame Leonie’s rise to the professoriate (she was appointed Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney in 1968) was indeed an outstanding achievement in the small Australian context, elsewhere, at that time, in kindred societies and academia, this was already becoming a common phenomenon. Rosemond Tuve was the first woman appointed Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania in 1962; Muriel Bradbrook was the first woman appointed Professor in the Faculty of English at Cambridge in 1965, and Dame Helen Gardner was the first woman appointed as Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford in 1966. Kramer’s ground-breaking ascent to the professoriate here (and she held the Chair for twenty-one years) needs to be set in this larger international context of her discipline of literature in English, but was, nonetheless, remarkable.

Freeman gives an account of Leonie Gibson’s early life, disposing decisively of a myth that occasionally, sneeringly, surfaced that she came from some sort of “privileged” background in Melbourne. What was truly privileged in her modest upbringing was parenting that focused on literature, poetry, music and art—“socially humble”, Freeman writes, “it was culturally rich”. Many children of parents who had not had the advantage of much formal education, but who developed for themselves, as a consequence, deep knowledge and love of such as good literature and fine music, characteristically derived much more in this way from that home-life than so many children of today. They may have parents who have had every educational advantage, but who do nothing to nurture such as artistic and musical appreciation in their offspring: share poems with a child, introduce them to theatre- and gallery-going, encourage them to learn an instrument. Leonie had all these inestimable gifts in her earliest years, including the influence of her father’s public-speaking talent: Mr Gibson, a bank officer, was also a lay preacher of the Church of Christ.

After graduating, in 1945, with a double First in English and Philosophy from Melbourne University, the young Leonie fulfilled a dream of postgraduate study at Oxford, with the aid of an exchange program between the two universities and a British Council travel grant. So, she was just one of countless examples of people from “ordinary” backgrounds, who, through their own hard work and high ability, were able to pursue academic goals. Yet the myth stubbornly persists that, prior to the advent of St Gough Whitlam in 1972, anyone who attended university—let alone was able to stay on to pursue postgraduate work—must have come from a silvertail background. How “silvertail” was Bob Menzies’s or Bob Hawke’s, for example—the sons, respectively, of a country store-keeper and a rural Congregational minister? And, of course, this was not only an Australian phenomenon. The English playwright Alan Bennett, the son of a Yorkshire butcher, went to a state school and won a scholarship to university—Oxford, no less—in 1952. Anyone familiar with Bennett’s diaries of his early home life in Leeds will know that nothing could have been further removed from the privileged world of the silvertail. But none of these facts disturb the selective and ignorant re-writing of history of today’s politically-correct ideologues, who censor any facts that fail to fit their narrative of the coming of the great social-justice paradise, righting all the wrongs of the past, that they are aspiring to bring to birth in our day. With regard to universities, any familiarity with their meltdown in the contemporary world will see how spectacularly these utopian notions are playing out in that domain, in comparison with the allegedly disreputable past.

Leonie Gibson’s years at Oxford, Freeman writes, “were, without doubt, the defining ones of her life”—including her personal life, for it was there she met her husband, the South African pathologist Harry Kramer. They both graduated with their DPhils in 1953 and two daughters, Jocelyn and Hilary, followed.

Freeman’s main interest is to set forth the range of Kramer’s contribution to Australian life, once the family had returned and eventually settled in Sydney. What is remarkable about this is the depth of her engagement and commitment, beyond the university, in the context of “a radical-conservative approach to tradition and change”, which characterised her life and career. The idea of academics as cloistered individuals cut off from “the real world” could not have been less appealing to her or characteristic of her contribution. She was exemplary in this way: she joined the board of Quadrant (becoming its chairman in 1986) which brought her into contact “with a range of influential barristers, academics, businessmen, trade unionists, and journalists”; she was a member of both the Corrective Services Advisory Council and the National Literature Board and a commissioner of the ABC; she was president of the Australian Council for Educational Standards, made a senior fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs; was appointed by the Whitlam government to the Australian Universities Commission—and much more besides.

The early 1980s were “the highpoint of her professional career”. She published the Oxford History of Australian Literature in 1981, was Visiting Professor in Australian Studies at Harvard for 1981-82; she was Chairman of the ABC in 1982-83 and was made a Dame of the British Empire then, for services to literature and the public. It is valuable that these details are recorded here, so future researchers and biographers can follow them up in more detail than the limited space this monograph affords. Freeman rightly notes that “this is neither a biography of Dame Leonie Kramer AC DBE nor a comprehensive assessment of her scholarship”. He alerts readers to important aspects of her public and scholarly lives “in the hope that others might be inspired to take on the more onerous tasks of biography and cultural history”.

It is good that Freeman pays attention to Kramer’s great gifts as a teacher (a vocation to which one is born). Today, in the corruption of the universities that we are witnessing everywhere, inspired teaching, delivering the brilliant lecture series, conducting the challenging seminar, are regarded (at best) as secondary accomplishments to research production, even if what is being churned out in that scholarship, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences, is worthless and incomprehensible. As a survey has shown of academic articles in so-called learned journals, they are read, on average, by three people. The lecturer who can inspire an audience of three hundred to love poetry, for example, as Kramer could, is now seen as some kind of second-class citizen, in the academic community, to the scholar turning out gobbledygook.

Kramer was also prescient, as Freeman demonstrates, in her understanding of the dangers that lay ahead for so-called “progressive education”, the seeds of which were being sown during the time of her career and of which we are now reaping the catastrophic whirlwind. Australia has so “progressed” in its school education, for example, that it now rates—according to the latest UN survey, this year—thirty-ninth out of forty-one countries. Only Romania and Turkey are worse.

Kramer also foresaw one of the most damaging developments in the university pre-service training of schoolteachers, in the incursion of Education faculties and their courses as components of undergraduate would-be teachers’ course requirements. The former approach had been that “an aspiring teacher would take a university degree that concentrated on the subject matter that the teacher hoped to teach before proceeding to a teachers’ training college”. Now, instead of “majoring” in a discipline, such as English or History, students in the BEd degree do a smattering of the subject rather than a sustained major in it, combined with education courses. The inevitable consequence of this watered-down regime is that such students are less well prepared and grounded in the discipline they will be teaching than those of the past, who would do three or four years’ study of English, then the year’s Dip Ed at a Teachers’ College.

Freeman gives detailed accounts of Kramer’s involvement with Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, the Miles Franklin Prize and the Demidenko affair, her attitudes to feminism and her removal from the Chancellorship of the University of Sydney by “her enemies”, which he assesses as a “petty victory … in Australia’s culture wars [that] can be a source of little consolation for anyone”.

There are a few mistakes that one hopes can be corrected in a future reprinting. The Oxford Bachelor of Letters degree (BLitt) is not “a second undergraduate degree” and there are no “tutorials” for it. It is (or was—it no longer exists), in spite of its “bachelor” designation, a postgraduate research degree for which the student reading for it (and I was one) is assigned to a supervisor for occasional meetings. There is no “Hughes Hall, Oxford”, though there is a Hughes Hall at Cambridge. Kramer was at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and this is no doubt the institution mistakenly referred to here.

What disturbed and puzzled me about this monograph was its title: Killer Kramer. This was the catty phrase coined by Patrick White, who loathed Dame Leonie and was, notoriously—for all his genius as a writer—a great hater (as Cardinal Manning said of Cardinal Newman—and as Freeman notes himself: “White was a notorious hater”). While no one would expect or want a monograph such as this to be simply an exercise in hagiography, I am at a loss to understand what possessed Dr Freeman and Connor Court to dignify this crass nastiness in this way. The monograph, while not shying away from controversial aspects of Dame Leonie’s life and career, is an overdue tribute to Kramer, seeking to encourage readers to appreciate her notable contribution. This title hardly invites or anticipates that experience.

We await a full scholarly biography of Leonie Kramer. This work will provide useful information and an introduction to some important perspectives on her life and work for such a project.

Barry Spurr’s Studying Poetry (second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) is dedicated “To Leonie Kramer”, his teacher, colleague and friend.