Robert Manne - Professional Work

Professional Work

Manne's allegiances within the Australian political scene have moved from left to right, then back to left again; he titled a compendium of his political essays Left, Right, Left. Between 1989 and 1997 Manne edited the conservative magazine Quadrant, resigning when his editorial policies diverged from the views of the magazine's management committee. Since Manne had been appointed to the position of editor on the strength of his previous anti-Communist publications and his reputation as a conservative, there was widespread anger among some people associated with Quadrant during his editorship that he was trying to push the magazine to the left. Since leaving the magazine he has published various attacks on it and upon his predecessors, Peter Coleman and Roger Sandall, and successors, P. P. McGuinness and Keith Windshuttle as editors. In 1996 he published a widely discussed and cited book, The Culture of Forgetting, which explored the controversy surrounding Helen Demidenko's 1994 Miles Franklin Award winning novel about the Holocaust, The Hand that Signed the Paper.

Robert Manne edited the 2003 anthology, Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, as a rebuttal to Keith Windschuttle's claims disputing there was widespread genocide against Indigenous Australians and the existence of a widespread guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Contributors included well known researcher into the frontier conflict, Professor Henry A. Reynolds, and Professor Lyndall Ryan, whose book The Aboriginal Tasmanians is one of the main targets of Windschuttle’s work. Among Manne's other books are The New Conservatism in Australia (1982), In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right (2001), and Do Not Disturb (2005). Other current professional involvements from Manne include being the Chair of the Australian Book Review, a board member of The Brisbane Institute, and a member of the board of the Stolen Generations Taskforce in Victoria.

Manne was the Chairman of the Editorial Board of The Monthly, a national magazine of politics, society and the arts, from February 2006 until he resigned on August 18, 2011 "in order to focus on his writing, including a new blog to be published on The Monthly's website." His blog, entitled Left, Right, Left, had its first post on September 12. Manne's departure as chairman resulted in the editorial board's dissolution, with Monthly editor Ben Naparstek announcing, "We're not going to have one any more."