One day to our collective conservative shock he said blandly that no one of intelligence could fail to belong to the progressive leftwing of Australian politics. Years later, during the Vietnam War, he was to emerge as die-hard anti-communist, totally intolerant of anyone trying to point out the insanity of that conflict. Years later I was to call it the flip-flop effect – the inability of Australian intellectuals to maintain intellectual consistency, or at least to explain belief changes
