An Australian book with sales figures of more than 70,000 copies is considered a best seller, especially when it is by an unknown author. This success is compounded when the book is a psycho-historical analysis of the Australian character with the dull sub-title: An interpretation of the Australian way of life.
But it was the title that grabbed readers: The Great Australian Stupor. First published in 1971, the book gained instant fame and was often given to distinguished overseas visitors to Canberra as a kind of guide to the Australian 'soul'.
The author, Ronald Conway, has died in Melbourne. He was 81.
Born on 4 May 1927, Ronald Victor Conway was an only child who grew up in a religiously divided family. His mother was Catholic, his father a Protestant agnostic who converted to Catholicism on his death-bed. His grandfather had been a well known cricketer, footballer, journalist and manager of the first Australian cricket team to tour England in 1878. He was a wealthy and somewhat brutal man.
Conway's parents were not well-off. Not baptised until he was nine, he was educated in state and Catholic schools. He left school at 15, worked in a bookshop, joined the RAAF in late 1944 and, after demobilisation matriculated and went to Melbourne University.
Here he was caught up in the Catholic activism characteristic of those years. This centered on the 'Movement' and Bob Santamaria, the Campion Society (which Conway joined), the Newman Society, the Jesuits at Newman College and the Catholic Worker Movement. Even then Conway leaned more to the right than to the left, but he always maintained a somewhat maverick stance in Catholic ideological struggles.
In his autobiography Conway's Way (1988) he gives a taste in his florid style of those years. He says that at university 'a varied range of social movements flourished ... under the benign laicist policies of Archbishop Mannix. The elite members of the Melbourne social movements were having "dialogue" with their archbishop, clergy and wider society in the days when Sydney had little else on its pontifical mind but raffles and rosaries.'
He studied for a combined psychology-history degree. His psychology supervisor was Professor Oscar Oeser, a rather sour South African. Conway also enjoyed acting in comedies of manners of the Sheridan variety, and he joined the Saint Patrick's Cathedral Choir.
After graduation Conway became a teacher, and from 1955 to 1961 he taught history