Alan Donagan: A Memoir

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Alan always thought he was very fortunate to have grown up in Australia when and how he did. His family was happy and comfortable, the country is beautiful, and his education was excellent. Australians romanticize their classlessness, but it is true that it is an open if philistine society. So people like Alan and me grew up without a sense of constrictions or glass ceilings, and without a sense of being socially placed. There were, of course, rich people and there was the squattocracy-very large landholders-but they did not impinge on most people's sense of themselves or their place in society. The other side of this was an education system, then, that was elitist in the old Scottish and English grammar school tradition. It was legal to leave school at fourteen, and only a relatively small number of students went to the very small number of universities (then only six) in a country of about eight million people. For those who were academic and stayed in high school, the education was good, often first-class, leading to the hurdle of university entrance and scholarship examinations. It was increasingly specialized as one advanced, but it was also cosmopolitan within the European (used very broadly) tradition. Australians now talk about cultural cringe-they mean particularly toward Britain, but it is combined with anti-Americanism-and seem to feel a need to assert Australianness by devaluing education based on European-American culture, with predictably ignorant and narrow results. Alan and his friends, however, always seemed to me perfectly confidently Australian while also confidently at home in a larger intellectual world, on which they also felt free to cast a skeptical eye. I think Alan's openness to the views of philosophers and others he admired, but also his absence of discipleship and his independence, owed a lot to his Australian education and upbringing-despite the fact that his philosophical formation owed so much to Cambridge. Alan was a third-generation Australian. One grandmother was born on the goldfields. One Welsh grandfather, Timothy Evans, after being apprenticed at sea and shipwrecked off South America, ended up a customs official in Melbourne. His family were successful, unpre-