Patrick McCaughey has endeared himself to Melbourne people with his wit, good humour and generosity of spirit. What is more, given his many successes, he has survived the habitual Australian consequences of the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome. Perhaps this is because he is only too willing to admit a variety of flaws and failings. He does so, unabashedly, in his recent publication The Bright Shapes and the True Names: A Memoir.
An uppish schoolboy who saw his peers at Scotch College as divided into ‘the philistine majority and the civilised minority’, he became a laid-back and somewhat under-committed undergraduate at Melbourne University. ‘I was lazy about my academic work, doing only what interested or came easily to me.’ He admits to a casual decision to combine Honours in English and Fine Arts to avoid ‘bad’ and boring things like Old Norse. He became a brash and, some would say, overconfident art critic and nurtured a snobby attitude to suburbs like Caulfield, Burwood and Box Hill—and even Ivanhoe where, for a time, he enjoyed free lodgings at the university’s McGeorge House.
Stacked up against these characteristics are the obvious positive things. Melburnians of my generation do not need the book to be reminded of McCaughey’s tumultuous impact on the local art scene from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. I believe that in the first decades of his career he was probably the youngest art critic appointed by The Age, the youngest scholar to land a professorship in Visual Arts at a leading university and the youngest arts administrator to become Director of the National Gallery of Victoria. Influential critic, senior academic and leading museum director—all in double-quick succession and, to an extent, without the traditional prerequisites. In those days, as he says, ‘Everybody got his or her own way’.
Part of this run of successes might be put down to the luck of the Irish (and there is a charming Irish lilt throughout the entire book), but even more important was the fact of felicitous timing. McCaughey entered public life in the 1960s—that decade of kaleidoscopic change when young people felt they could do and achieve anything, and usually did.
Against the tide, Vincent Buckley declared the 1950s less grey and eventless than we all thought and it does now appear that this homely, parochial, less-travelled and under-electronically-connected decade bred a generation bursting with self-confidence and open to the unique opportunities of the 1960s. So