'Independent peasants': a memoir of the Tasmanian Wright brothers

Abstract

My father and uncle were involved, on opposite sides, in many of the political debates of the late 1940s and the 1950s. These included the proposed nationalisation of the banks by the Chifley government in 1947; the attempt by the Menzies government to ban the Communist Party in 1950; and, most notably, the dismissal of Professor Sydney Orr by the University of Tasmania in 1956. The implications of the controversies surrounding these issues are still relevant today. The Wright brothers saw their private and public disagreements in traditional terms as the rivalry of the older conservative and the younger radical. Each, of course, believed that he was right and his brother hopelessly mistaken. This rivalry forms an important narrative strand in Peter McPhee's biography of my uncle, which bears his nickname, 'Pansy', as its title.