My personal experience of politics began as a boy in South London, heavily bombarded by Hitler's Luftwaffe and rockets. I came to Australia in 1956 as a newly qualified master in sociology from the London School of Economics. My first host was the Salvation Army in Fremantle as I had no money and was alone. I am grateful to them. Australia was wide open to British migrants then. It was also notably more affluent than post-war England. However, it was rather old-fashioned and conservative and very white. It was protected from others by immigration policies preferring the British and excluding non-Europeans; it was protected from new ideas and controversies by a censorship system based on the Vatican Index of prohibited items administered at the landing place by customs officers; its Sundays were devoted to closing down innocent pleasures such as newspapers, cinemas and above all the consumption of alcohol; it banned birth control and abortion, kept women in a secondary role and made divorce as hard as possible. On the international scale it was protected from potential enemies by the alliance between Britain and the United States, left over from the Japanese defeat. This ‘saved’ Australia from a tiny band of communists, which got steadily smaller and has now vanished. Potential enemies never attacked.

Melbourne University reflected much of this safeguarded provincialism. Although renowned, it was inbred, with most academics born and raised locally. My later teaching posts have included Canada, Yorkshire and Canberra, with research sessions in Sri Lanka and Vanuatu. But Melbourne started me off as an academic, teaching compulsory Australian Politics One as the equivalent of a base-grade tutor.

My impressions of the world since then have largely come from international travel, which I recommend to scholars who need to get out of their studies for a look at reality.