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ears of the Melbourne Establishment, which responded in the person of F.L. Edmunds, MLA for Hawthorn. As recalled by Max Marginson, he described university academics as ‘socialists, parlour pinks’—and in a pryotechnical final flourish, ‘dingoes crowing from their dunghills’.

Are you engagé?
    At the same time, there was a quieter revolution afoot across Tin Pan Alley at Newman College. Inside this Mayan/Byzantine fantasy designed by Walter Burley Griffin, Catholic students were engaging in the unprecedented activity of thinking for themselves. They were trying to join together what the Australian Church had put asunder: ‘Catholic’ and ‘intellectual’.
    The Newman Society’s Ian Turner and Ken Gott were Vincent Buckley and Bill Ginnane. They were the leaders of what was called the intellectual apostolate, quoting French theologians we’d never heard of, to the effect that we had to complete the work of the secular university by opening it up to the sacred. The clergy had always been the leaders, with the laity sheepishly following. Now there was a double reversal: the world was to be affirmed, not denied, and we were the ones who were going to do it.
    There were meetings, Masses and summer camps at Point Lonsdale, where an assortment of sandals, shorts and floral dresses, under a tin roof that pinged with the heat, would listen to talks about the power of the incarnation to transform the world. But there were also earthy dissenters who thought the jargon of being engagé with the milieu pretentious. ‘What’s all this weltanschauung nonsense?’ objected one of them. ‘Why can’t you just say a way of looking at the world?’
    And there were parties in Parkville, opposite the university. One night, when I was being hammered by John Dormer, the eccentric heir to an English beer fortune, I beat a backwards retreat—and there in a corner, scarcely able to sit, let alone talk, was Vin Buckley, the guru himself, comatose with liquor. I was shocked. That night, my university education really began.

    Plotting a Catholic takeover of Melbourne University in 1953 (from left: the author, Greg O’Loughlin, Des O’Grady, Brian Buckley).
    Archbishop Mannix was uneasily tolerant of the Newman Society, very much preferring a different apostolate, run by B.A. Santamaria, under the superbly meaningless title of The Movement. The Cold War was warming up, and The Movement was on the move. It organised Industrial Groups (Santamaria had a genius for anodyne titles) to infiltrate the Labor Party, and Dr Evatt, Labor’s leader, a man of massive intellect and minuscule political acumen, was being sawn off at the knees. The Groups (to their credit) battled the Communists in the unions, and from Catholic pulpits wildlife imagery flourished. While the Reds were white-anting us from within, the priests would inveigh, the Communist octopus was slithering southwards from China, with tentacles poised to embrace us. We were trapped between the termites and the calamari.
    For Catholics, the fifties were not a time of suburban torpor. It was always five minutes to midnight. From anonymous offices in Swanston Street, men with briefcases went out to the parishes. At the West St Kilda branch of the Catholic Young Men’s Society, which I’d joined to play cricket and football, we were told that unless we got off our backsides, the yellow hordes would soon be swarming through the streets.
    Tired of the aerated theologies of the Newman Society and awkward with girls, a few of us retreated to the Campion Society, whose members were earthier, but just as fond of talk. We would gather on a Saturday night round a table forested with bottles, and smoke, drink and talk, often till dawn. Was The Movement sanctioned by the bishops, and therefore Catholic Action? Or was our affiliation with it a matter of choice, and therefore no more than the action of Catholics? Was