• DOI:10.1177/1329878X1515600115
• Corpus ID: 149267110

Reshaping Public Intellectual Life: Frank Moorhouse and His Milieu

@article{Lumby2015ReshapingPI,
  title={Reshaping Public Intellectual Life: Frank Moorhouse and His Milieu},
  author={Catharine Lumby},
  journal={Media International Australia},
  year={2015},
  volume={156},
  pages={133 - 141}
}

• Catharine Lumby
• Published 1 August 2015
• Art
• Media International Australia

This article uses Frank Moorhouse as a study of the formation of a public intellectual in the 1960s and 1970s. Moorhouse was a key figure in the Sydney Push, a loose Libertarian-anarchist network of artists, writers, intellectuals and party people who rejected the dominant moral values of the 1950s and 1960s. A journalist, Moorhouse later became a well-known fiction writer who was part of a similarly bohemian and activist milieu centred in Sydney's Balmain. Taking Frank Moorhouse as a case study, I will argue that there is something particular about the way public intellectuals have historically been formed and given voice in Australian life, which is characterised by a permeability between art and writing practices and between academic and activist milieux.