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Davis McCaughey: A Life
Davis McCaughey: A Life
Davis McCaughey: A Life
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Davis McCaughey: A Life

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A fascinating and enigmatic man, Davis McCaughey was a theologian equally at home in the secular world. As governor of Victoria, deputy chancellor of Melbourne University, and master of the prestigious Ormond College for 20 years, he played a groundbreaking role in Australian public life. This compelling biography explores the character and achievements of a man who transcended his deeply conservative roots in Belfast to champion radical student politics. A pivotal figure in the creation of the Uniting Church in Australia, McCaughey was also regarded by many as one of the greatest public speakers of his era.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 1, 2012
ISBN9781742241135
Davis McCaughey: A Life

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    Davis McCaughey - Sarah Martin

    DAVIS McCAUGHEY

    DAVIS McCAUGHEY

    A life

    Sarah Martin

    A UNSW Press book

    Published by

    NewSouth Publishing

    University of New South Wales Press Ltd

    University of New South Wales

    Sydney NSW 2052

    AUSTRALIA

    newsouthpublishing.com

    © Sarah Martin 2012

    First published 2012

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

    National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

    Author: Martin, Sarah.

    Title: Davis McCaughey: a life/Sarah Martin.

    ISBN: 978 174223 361 1 (hbk.)

    ISBN: 978 174224 113 5 (ePub)

    ISBN: 978 174224 370 2 (Kindle)

    ISBN: 978 174224 600 0 (ePDF)

    Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

    Subjects: McCaughey, J. Davis ( John Davis), 1914–2005.

    Uniting Church in Australia – Clergy – Biography.

    College administrators – Victoria – Melbourne – Biography.

    Governors – Victoria – Biography.

    Dewey Number: 287.93092

    Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

    Cover This photo was part of a series taken on McCaughey’s retirement, one of which was intended to hang in the Dining Hall at Ormond College. Geoff Parr, photographer, 1979

    Printed in China through Red Planet Management

    This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    Foreword

    Introduction

    Abbreviations

    Prologue

    1      A golden boy

    2      Breaking away

    3      Cambridge and an inclusive Christianity

    4      The exhilaration of ecumenism

    5      The Irish dilemma

    6      Falling in love

    7      Marriage and theology

    8      The war years

    9      The job of a lifetime

    10      Into the unknown

    11      Life in College and university

    12      Taking control of the union debate

    13      A surprising appointment

    14      Master versus Church and Council

    15      Ecumenism underpins everything

    16      Widening horizons

    17      Student revolution and conflict resolutions

    18      Changed politics, and a changing Ormond

    19      Union at last

    20      A moral compass

    21      A churchman for Governor

    22      A modern man

    Epilogue

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    Acknowledgments

    A chance conversation at the Thanksgiving Service for Davis McCaughey held in Ormond College set me on the road to writing his biography. I had known Davis since I first went to Ormond in 1997 to establish the Development Office. As ‘Development’ is code for fundraising, it seemed sensible to talk to Davis, who had been Master of the College for twenty years, from 1959 to 1979, and knew as much about the place as anyone. We became friends, and I even wrote an article about him for the College newsletter to celebrate his ninetieth year in 2004. At the time it crossed my mind that this was a life that deserved more than a two-page spread in a newsletter.

    At the service I mentioned this to an old friend of McCaughey’s, Jack Barnaby, a resident in College during McCaughey’s early years. Some weeks later he rang to ask how I was going. On my replying that I didn’t think I could do it, he said: ‘Sarah, if you want to do it, just do it!’ Jack’s words rang in my ears with a peculiar intensity when I attended his funeral the following Thursday. He had fallen and hit his head, and was dead within a week of his call to me. I told Jane, Jack’s sister, about this conversation and her response was: ‘Well, Sarah, you know what you have to do now, don’t you?’ Another friend suggested I apply to the University of Melbourne to do it as a PhD; that way I would not be alone in my endeavours and I would learn something of the craft of biography.

    Ernest Scott Professor of History at Melbourne University, Stuart Macintyre, had also been thinking that McCaughey’s life suggested a full-length biography, and supported my application to the university to enter its postgraduate school. In 2006 I began work on a masters thesis that dealt with the period before McCaughey came to Australia, following it almost immediately with a doctoral thesis on the Australian years. Then came the task of converting the two theses into a book for a wider audience. The many people who supported the project, and who, with their information and enthusiasm, helped bring it to fruition are too numerous to mention, but there are some who must be named.

    I am especially indebted to Jean McCaughey for the hours she spent with me reminiscing about her life with Davis. Her generosity in making available her husband’s papers and books and their private correspondence helped enormously as I navigated my way through the highways and byways of a diverse and busy life. McCaughey’s five children were also supportive of the project, and in kindly allowing me to interview them and giving me access to their own correspondence with their father, made it possible for me to view McCaughey in many different contexts. Their willingness to allow me to make my own judgments and form my own conclusions gave me the freedom to approach the task with an open mind.

    The project has been dependent on material drawn from several archives in Victoria, Canberra and New South Wales, and I found, at each location, that people went out of their way to help. Their assistance sustained me at times when it seemed the material was never-ending. Staff at the University of Birmingham, and in the Archives of the University of Melbourne, and the State Library of Victoria guided me through large and sometimes disordered collections. I am also grateful to Stephen Connelly from the Dalton McCaughey Library, and particularly to Ian Breward, from the Uniting Church Archives in Caulfield in Melbourne. They were always available to answer my queries, find documents that I needed, and give me much useful advice on religious matters. Christine Gordon from the UCA archives in Sydney also helped by email, and by sending me copies of material from the archives, saved me a second trip to Sydney. The same was true of a friend in Canberra, Mimi Christie, who searched the records at the National Library of Australia to follow up on significant links to other people. McCaughey’s many theological friends and colleagues were patient in listening to my theorising on theological matters, and commenting appropriately without demoralising me. Those colleagues involved with McCaughey at the university were also generous with their assistance. The welcome given to me at Government House, and the ready access to materials and interviews with staff who worked with the McCaugheys made me understand in a very practical way how well the McCaugheys fitted into life there.

    Rufus Black, Master at Ormond, has assisted not only by giving me access to College records, but with his generous offer of financial support from Ormond College has made it possible for this book to be published. I hope that the final product will repay his confidence in me.

    I was overwhelmed by the support of the many alumni of Ormond College who allowed me access to their private records to enhance my understanding of McCaughey’s interactions with the student body. As well, I am deeply grateful to the many people who gave up hours of their time for interviews, and to those who were happy to talk by phone or by email, and who never seemed to mind me getting back to them with further queries.

    My supervisors for the two theses were Stuart Macintyre and Dr Catherine Kovesi. Their enthusiasm and support for the project have been invaluable, and I was especially thankful for their kindly phrased criticisms and timely advice. They helped me with academic, literary and historical methodology, and in so doing, gave me the confidence to complete the theses and then contemplate turning them into a book. Sarah Brenan, from Allen & Unwin, gave me much practical advice at this juncture, and took me out of the academic mind-set so that I could see the material in a new perspective. Stuart Macintyre has continued on with me in the task of achieving the book, and his thoughtful reading, brilliant suggestions, and quick turnaround on each chapter have been magnificent. I have been fortunate, too, in my editor, Jean Kingett, whose empathy and perceptive reading combined with a watchful eye on my syntax have added greatly to the project. There were many who helped along the way with computer glitches, and formatting, and all the technical things I haven’t yet mastered: Dave Kellam, Jess Hyde, Shelley Roberts and Elise Tiedgen. And I am incredibly grateful to Cas O’Neill, who gave up her time to read the entire manuscript at short notice. Without Noni Turner I might never have begun; she gave me the tools to create a filing system that allowed me to actually retrieve material when I needed it and also unlocked my fear of committing to writing.

    The project has taken up a good part of six years. The companionship of Davis along the way has been an amazing gift, and I would love to be able to tell him how much I have learned. It seems his influence and guidance still continue beyond the grave.

    My family has put up with my ups and downs, the long hours when all I seemed to do was sit in front of my computer, and continued to believe that I would eventually come out at the other end, even when I thought it was impossible. In particular, my mother’s critical reading of many chapters spurred me on at significant moments. And to Peter, who has shared the journey from the beginning, I can only say thank you for every day.

    Foreword

    John Davis McCaughey, my father, led an interesting and varied life both in the United Kingdom and Australia. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he held important secular appointments and moved easily between church and university and the wider world. His Christian beliefs and his secular interests shaped his mind and view of the world in equal measure. Sarah Martin has captured that so well in this biography, recording telling details and events, many of which were unknown even to members of the family. We salute her assiduous research and intellectual stamina in completing such a comprehensive biography.

    My father was an affectionate, loving but not effusive father. Always generous and encouraging, he could be remarkably supportive and sympathetic when things went wrong. His marriage to Jean was the deepest and most profound relationship of his entire life. It gave them a lasting sense of security in their own lives, which extended to all their children.

    Davis McCaughey was a man of unfailing courtesy and not a little charm. Behind that, lay determination, firmness of purpose and considerable courage when required. His deep and abiding faith was the wellspring of his humility and purged him of personal vanity and egotism. It gave him insights into the lives of others and the way of the world.

    All manner of persons – his contemporaries, his colleagues and students, people in public life and those he knew casually – were drawn to him. An old friend once remarked that people felt distinguished simply by being in his company. Sarah Martin has tapped into the sources that made John Davis McCaughey such an enduring and unforgettable man.

    Patrick McCaughey

    Introduction

    I first met Davis McCaughey on a warm afternoon in late summer 1997, soon after I was appointed as Development Manager at Ormond College. My job was to help the College reconnect with its former residents in order to generate interest in the College and facilitate a fundraising program, and it had been suggested that McCaughey was the person who could help me with information about alumni as a starting point. He had agreed to talk to me about the residents he remembered from his twenty years as Master of the College, so I arrived at his house armed with the record of over 3000 names of alumni from that period. We sat down together in his comfortable, book-lined study, the roll-call on the table between us, and fortified by a cup of tea that Jean his wife brought us, along with a plate of her delicious fruit slice fresh out of the oven. It soon became clear that this was going to be the first of several such meetings, since Davis was able to give a thumbnail sketch of every person on the list, and progress was necessarily slow. I was amazed at his almost total recall of the students from 1959 to 1979, his memory of the schools they had gone to, something of their socio-economic backgrounds, the courses studied at university, and subsequent careers. And that was not all: there was affection and recognition, even after so many years, for the adults they had become or might have become. But I sensed in the cautious handling of the pencil that he was using to make the mark beside the name according to the formula we had agreed upon, a reluctance to commit that person to an assigned category (a tick for those who would be keen to support College social and fundraising activities, a dash for those who might be interested, and a circle for those less likely to be supportive), since things might have changed, and could he really be justified in making a judgment? Later, when I perused the list, I found the markings so faint that they were almost indecipherable, and I was left with the warm sound of his positive endorsements and none of the negatives. I was not to know at the time how characteristic this was of the man.

    These long, stimulating afternoons in McCaughey’s study, when our conversation at times ranged far beyond the project in hand, were a high point for me, and we continued our discussions long after we had exhausted the list. The sequel came after his death in April 2005. Jean received hundreds of letters from those same alumni who obviously remembered him with similar affection and respect. Their letters stood out among the many from friends, former colleagues, and members of the general public. But there was a single thread that united all the writers. They described their love and regard for Davis, and recalled how he had changed their lives – an outpouring of affection and admiration that was mirrored in letters spanning a period of at least fifty years that I later found among his papers. What was striking about the letters was how intensely personal they were. McCaughey, a Northern Irish Presbyterian theologian, came to Australia in 1953 to take up the position of Professor of New Testament Studies at the Theological Hall at Ormond College, Melbourne University. He went on to play a leading role in several institutions, initially as Master of Ormond College (1959–79) and as chief architect, and then first President, of the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) in 1977. He was a member of the Council of the University of Melbourne, and its Deputy Chancellor (1978–79 and 1982–85). Then came his appointment as Governor of Victoria (1986–92). But rather than talking about his occupancy of these offices, the letters spoke of relationships with McCaughey that seemed to exist outside and beyond his working life in any of these institutions.

    This pattern made me think about different types of leaders, and the nature of leadership whereby McCaughey exercised such influence. Influence is a difficult quality to pin down, and invites questions as to how it is exercised and how it is received. Is it a deliberate process, or something much finer, more instinctive that cannot be quantified, even less explained? What is it that makes some people leaders while others, equally talented, can never play the same role? The relationship between McCaughey’s official positions and the strong personal connections he formed also seemed to require closer attention. And I wondered how his career would be evaluated. Would he be judged only in relation to his service of these institutions, which could be grasped through documentary record, or was there a more ambiguous, intangible quality that was expressed through his interactions with individuals? Had he, as his son Patrick suggested, found his true métier in bringing change and modernising institutions? Or was this background for something more profound that had taken place?

    In considering these questions I came across newspaper articles in which McCaughey’s appointment as Governor was announced. The transition from theologian to ceremonial head of state in the Australian context was interesting, and at the time unique. Among the articles was one that caught my attention. In January 1986 at the age of seventy-one, a month before taking up the role of Governor, McCaughey, who had by then lived in Melbourne for thirtythree years, took out Australian citizenship. It could have seemed that this was a prerequisite for the role, and that it was done hastily to legitimise his position. But this was not so. Only the previous two governors of Victoria were Australians; before them, Victorian governors had always been British and there was no pressure on McCaughey to become an Australian at this point.

    As I researched McCaughey’s life I came to see this action as somehow emblematic of the man, providing a clue to the type of leadership he expressed. His commitment to Australian life was manifest in all his endeavours after his arrival here; there was no excuse, he said, but ‘sheer indolence’ on his part for not having taken out citizenship sooner.¹ But the fact that he and Jean chose this moment above all others was a little more complicated. Embracing Australia necessarily recalled his Irish background. In choosing to be an Australian governor rather than a Northern Irish one, he was expressing something of his political discomfort with Britain’s management of the Irish question, and his desire not to be linked to that political disaster. Always observant of form and carefully diplomatic, he wanted to be recognised as an Australian representing Australians, despite the lilting Irish brogue that revealed his origins. But taking out Australian citizenship so publicly also indicated another facet of his character that was at odds with his rather more private nature. The underlying contradictions raised by this event intrigued me.

    This biography explores the complexity of personality, and takes up the questions of leadership, although they can never be answered with complete satisfaction. Among McCaughey’s papers there is little to indicate that he reflected on such questions; he seldom commented how he felt about particular events, or even about the part that he played in them. This reticence can be contrasted with the personal papers of other well-known Australians – Manning Clark springs most immediately to mind. Clark’s papers were annotated with a running commentary on his role, directing a potential biographer as to how it should be viewed.² There are no such leads in McCaughey’s papers; indeed, I later found in his files several polite letters thanking people for their interest in writing his biography, but telling them he did not think there was enough to write about. His own account of his leadership of Ormond College, written for Stuart Macintyre’s collection of essays on the College, is indicative of his approach: the changes during his time were momentous, and can almost entirely be attributed to him. Yet he managed to write the chapter without any reference to himself, and, even more pointedly, entitled it ‘Thirty Years A-Growing’, to include the post-war Masters, Stanley Prescott and Brinley Newton-John, thereby acknowledging, with careful historical accuracy, their contribution to the modernisation of the College.³

    McCaughey’s absence of ego does not imply any lack of self-confidence, or coyness about making his views known. This apparent conflict in his nature forms the backbone of his story, and provides much of its fascination. Once I had begun my research I was drawn further into that tension, and into a search for keys to his character that would explain the contradictions. That brought me back full circle to the questions of leadership and influence, and what they really mean. McCaughey’s written works contained plenty of clues, while the testimony of those who knew him produced a range of views.

    Most of those views were enormously positive. Statements of the ways he had helped individuals were astonishing because of their variety, but most frequently expressed was the idea that he had instilled in individuals the confidence to explore their own personal qualities, entertain new ideas, find new horizons. On the negative side, there were those who seemed impervious to his influence, and others who felt he was a meddlesome idealist, intent on carving out a position of power for himself. Where did the truth lie?

    With these contrasting judgments in mind, I began my journey from a funeral service to several intense years in the company of a fascinating but elusive man. Most biographers refer to their involvement with their subject as one in which they learn much about themselves. They also admit that the more they discover about their subject, the less they really know. It is, after all, impossible to know oneself, so it is a kind of arrogance to assume that one can know another. While writing the biography of her friend Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf described her difficulties in fusing ‘into one seamless whole’ the ‘granite-like solidity’ of truth and the ‘rainbowlike intangibility’ of personality.⁴ As I followed McCaughey’s path I found this all too true.

    The starting point for my research was Jean McCaughey, and other members of the family. They suggested people who might be useful to talk with, and gradually the testimony of family, friends, colleagues and former students built up a vivid picture of McCaughey, along with the changing times and the character of the institutions that occupied his working life. McCaughey’s correspondence and writings were deposited in several archives across Melbourne and Sydney. They revealed the zeal and energy with which he pursued reform and engaged with contemporary thinking. Collating this material, corroborating evidence drawn from different sources and checking it against people’s memories, showed me the breadth of his activities and the sheer scale of his interests and personal interactions over a busy fifty years. Each day that I worked on McCaughey’s life made it more imperative to find a shape for the biography and to discover the links that would bring together the themes that began to emerge.

    Biography offers the opportunity to view trends and patterns of change in society against the actions and thoughts of one person. In McCaughey’s case the background was particularly broad because it covered religious, educational, and political life in both Great Britain and Australia for most of last century. The religious piety of his childhood is contrasted with his discovery of a different kind of faith at university, and his career in Australia serves to highlight the weakening of religious thinking as the baseline moral code of the Western world, a process often summarised as ‘secularisation’. The letting go of theocentric belief raised issues that McCaughey would address in his desire to offer certainty and moral guidance for young people growing up without the support that Christianity had previously provided. In Australia, too, he was able to give full rein to the ecumenical spirit that inspired and guided him throughout his life.

    McCaughey’s views on education were formed by his experience as a student at Cambridge in the 1930s, and the writers he discovered at that time. He would continue to hold to the style of education from this ‘golden’ period of his life, even when change threatened to destroy that ideal. His goal was always an education that was accessible to all and had at its centre a serious commitment to learning for its own sake. In Australia McCaughey supported youthful aspirations, and the active role he played is borne out in letters in his files and in the alumni records at Ormond College.

    His arrival in Australia coincided with the conventional conservatism that gripped the country under the Coalition government of Robert Menzies. McCaughey was a willing participant in the stirring of a greater freedom and openness to ideas that heralded a new inclusiveness and tolerance of difference during the 1960s and early 1970s. He was not alone in encouraging this change but his was certainly an incisive voice, matched by his actions and personal example. His message became less appealing from the beginning of the 1980s, with the advent of neoliberalism, which brought a retreat from public provision, along with a scepticism towards the public benefits of education, and an emphasis on self-interest.

    McCaughey’s political views were more elusive. Without doubt his desire for social justice and equality of opportunity were inculcated from an early age through his observation of disadvantage in Belfast. Although not overtly political, he was not afraid to speak out on matters of principle, and in later years he actively supported his wife’s more radical campaign for social justice. Barry Jones has remarked that he was one of the few intellectuals in Australia who believed that the positions of authority and privilege that he held gave him obligations towards the community which meant he was empowered to speak on matters of principle.⁵ As well, it is hard not to see a political mind at work in his dealings with hierarchies, different administrations, staff and colleagues. A strategic thinker and innately cautious, few of his actions were completely spontaneous.

    As my research and interviews continued, it became apparent that his time in Australia was the most interesting and productive part of his life. I found I could visualise it against the backdrop of the Theological Hall, Ormond College, Government House and North Melbourne, where he had retired. My own involvement as a non-resident at Janet Clarke Hall, another residential college for Melbourne University, in the latter half of the 1960s, and my husband Peter’s residency for two years in Ormond College during McCaughey’s time as Master, gave me a strong sense of the era and the environment that were important for McCaughey’s life in Australia. But the early years, which seemed to hold important clues, were shadowy and insubstantial. I had to go back to the beginning and ‘find’ McCaughey in the places of his childhood and early adulthood, to wander the neighbourhoods that had been familiar for him and try to catch the echo of his footsteps.

    Belfast, where he was born, was the obvious starting point. It was the place of his comfortable childhood within a commercially prosperous family prominent in civic life, and a divided city where he experienced first-hand the consequences of bitter sectarianism and oppressive power. Here, too, he met Jean Henderson, who would become his wife. I followed the trail of the young Davis from Belfast to Cambridge where he attended university, to Dublin, the scene of much of his early experiences working for the Student Christian Movement (SCM), and to Edinburgh, the city where, as a theological student, he found the intellectuality in theological studies that he craved, and then to London. He came to life for me in all these places – energetic, sports-mad and drily funny, with a deeply embedded Christian faith. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, the beginnings of his passionate involvement with literature and in a Christian life outside the conservative traditions of his parents’ Irish Presbyterianism began to emerge. In London, the exhilaration and inspiration of his job with the SCM became clear, as did his early married life and fatherhood. The love that he and Jean experienced would nourish and absorb them for the rest of their lives and fire them with the courage and excitement to take up adventure in an unknown land.

    The clues to his personality and the driving forces that dominated his working and personal lives were in Great Britain. Unlocking them helped order the material I was collecting. First and foremost was his faith, which is central to any understanding of McCaughey. A theologian and devout Christian, he practised his faith in all that he did. Its influence is apparent in his major contribution to the creation of the UCA, his role in transforming Ormond College from a relatively pedestrian residential college of Melbourne University to a vibrant intellectual centre with a voice in the wider community, and in his work as Governor, where he was responsible for modernising that office. In seeking answers to the divisions in Ireland and to the threats that Nazism and fascism posed in the 1930s, he found his inspiration through the SCM and the discovery of ecumenism.

    When he came to Australia, McCaughey found himself in a position to effect organisational change. Although the changes he sought were couched in the context of his faith, he never sought to impose that faith on others, nor convert them to his own form of religion, and he never implied that the non-believer was in need of salvation. At the same time, those who had dealings with him were almost always conscious of his Christianity. It reinforced the understanding of people who knew him well that McCaughey’s religion and avowal of faith were essentially private. Even those who had shared long and interesting religious discussions with McCaughey never felt that they had had a personal conversation with him about his own faith.

    The biography was beginning to take on a shape. His faith, which developed and changed, was at the core of the story. But there must have been other driving forces. Each interview gave a little more of the picture but I felt I was missing something. Other pressing questions were also surfacing. I had to consider the position to take as a biographer. Where would I stand in relation to the material, and in relation to McCaughey himself? Since I knew him, would I be part of the story, or could I absent myself? Reading biography with an eye for the relationship between subject and author showed that there were different stances that could be adopted.

    My interviews with people who knew McCaughey showed me that you can never be entirely absent from the story that you tell. Their testimony mixed personal memory with historical reminiscence and opinion. Even now, only six years after McCaughey’s death, memories come with an overlay of subsequent experience. Each informant told their own truth as they saw it, and when several people told about the same incident, there were many truths. Objectivity is an elusive goal since the person is always there in the memory recounted. The words they choose to tell the story and their particular view of the event change the fabric and the structure of a life in subtle ways.⁷ I began to understand that to produce a coherent picture from the myriad moments of action, thought, emotion, stillness and absence, while imbuing the whole with some dramatic impact, involves the same process of selection of information as for a novel. But since this was not a novel, it was necessary to observe strict historical procedures, in relation to the corroboration and correlation of events and opinions.

    There were other aspects that governed my thoughts on the stance I would take as biographer. I became aware of McCaughey’s sense of privacy, evident in the way he dealt with the confidences of students, colleagues and friends. I felt it had to be respected. As well, the difficulty of writing a biography of one so recently dead meant that the sensitivities of those still living had to be considered. It was imperative to steer a course that took these concerns into account and still gave a full picture of the man and with a critical assessment of his successes and failures.

    McCaughey’s writings held the key. While he cannot be regarded as a literary figure in the strict sense, it is possible to understand a great deal about him from analysis of his words. I made the decision that wherever possible his voice should be heard, and that my role should be restricted, as much as it could be, to narration. His writings are mostly short in length – that of a lecture or a sermon – but they are eloquent and elegant in style. He used his literary gift to articulate complex issues in a subtle and persuasive way. Because of this, his writings seem to justify the kind of treatment accorded to authors whose fictional works are scrutinised for clues to their personal experience. And while McCaughey was always alive to the present, he continued to draw on his basic value system and ethical standpoint for solutions or explanations. It could be said that the ideas and philosophical views he imbibed in the early years stayed with him, and that all his later views were fitted within this framework with a remarkable consistency.

    The failure of Keynesian economics following stagflation in the early 1970s created a society where self-interest and the growing cult of the individual began to override concern for community, and ignored the more liberal humanist ideals that had encouraged research and learning for their own sake. McCaughey’s viewpoint had less currency in this climate, and he saw an increasing gap between the principles he espoused and the emergent ethos that was developing. Yet he deviated very little from his original line of thought. In the introduction to his penultimate publication, Tradition and Dissent, McCaughey mused on this, asking – in a rare moment of self-reflection – ‘Have I just been repeating myself again and again, the mark of a bore?’ It was possible, he suggested, that he might have been writing the same book over and over again. But it was his hope, and one that is important to understanding him, that there was ‘some theme that has been worth exploring, some way of thinking, talking and living that has guided me (perhaps without my knowing it) as I responded to a number of demands to put into words what I and others want talked or written about’.

    McCaughey’s life was frenetically busy: for a good part of his working life in Australia he was working at two jobs that were more than full-time, with additional side activities. Throughout, he seemed to maintain control and exude calm. Many people involved with him in one activity were not really aware of the many other claims on his time and thoughts. His attention, they believed, was only for them. That impression testifies to his management skills and ability to be totally present in the moment with an enthusiasm that never seemed to dull. I wanted to convey this enthusiasm and busyness, and it seemed possible to do so only by telling his story in ‘real time’. This method would enable me to suggest the overlapping demands of several simultaneous projects, and the personal time he always gave to the individual throughout his life.

    The landscape that McCaughey occupied kept expanding as I collected more evidence and detail, but it was necessary to limit the scope of the biography. I therefore decided that I would not deal with McCaughey as a father unless it was pertinent to his public life. Nor would I attempt to give examples of his humour, a significant aspect of his charm and warmth. People spoke about how funny he was, of his wry, lightly satirical turn of phrase, and the deliberately pedantic word pictures he drew that used timing and intonation for effect. It was a delicate humour that does not translate well to paper, so must be left to the reader’s memory or imagination. Similarly, I decided to consider his religious teaching and his treatment of sacred texts only as they affected his institutional and public activity or contributed to his faith.

    I also chose not to retell the story of the union of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational churches and the intense theological discussion that ensued. That story has already been told, from several theological viewpoints. McCaughey’s unique contribution is put under the spotlight here, because it has not previously been set before a general public, and perhaps is little known within the Uniting Church itself. My reading of the theological accounts of Church union does not indicate much interest in the first small Presbyterian committee on union that McCaughey chaired and that had a profound effect on the process. Those who were there assured me that without McCaughey’s intervention, it was doubtful that union would have been achieved.

    I looked in vain for diaries and the kind of material that would reveal the ‘inner’ man, and perhaps make the biography flow with psychological understandings of the reasons for his actions. But as a pragmatist with eyes set firmly on practical outcomes, McCaughey did not waste time writing or talking to himself about what he was thinking. He had Jean to talk with about his doubts and insecurities, and to make plans. Fortunately he wrote extensively to her when he was away, and this correspondence provides an intermittent window into his more personal side, as well as revealing the depth and quality of their relationship, another important ingredient of his story. But as my reading of his sermons, addresses and other papers widened, my anxiety about the lack of self-reflection was allayed. Judith Brett has argued in her study of Robert Menzies that ‘the task is … not one of searching for the real person behind the public person, but of realising that the public person is the real person, and so learning to read the public … life for what it reveals about the distinctiveness of the person whose life it is’.⁹ That insight brought together the threads that had interested me in the first place: McCaughey’s involvement with institutions and his commitment to supporting individuals. Both suggested a public life that was based on his desire to impart something of the joy and inner confidence that his faith had given him, and a life so busy that he found

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