British writer wows Melbourne
Now that Christopher Hitchens is gone, he's one of the very few journalists and thinkers who is prepared to strongly question the prevailing pieties and orthodoxies.
They say you should never meet your heroes.
But I came away from being in the presence of Douglas Murray last week even more convinced that his is one of the essential voices of our time.
Now that Christopher Hitchens is gone, he’s one of the very few journalists and thinkers who is prepared to strongly question the prevailing pieties and orthodoxies.
Like the late Clive James, he has the rare gift of not just making you think he’s very intelligent and insightful, (which he certainly is) but that you are all the more intelligent and insightful for having read his work or heard him speak.
The crowd that packed out the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne last Tuesday night had a lot of Jews, but we were by no means the majority.
Murray spoke about Israel but also of the general situation in Western, particularly English-speaking countries.
His main message, as it has always been, is one of hope for the future, that Western civilisation can recover its strength and confidence and go on to provide meaning and purpose.
He told us that while what’s called “wokeism” may have captured a whole generation which is now in its late 20s and early 30s; the kids today who are just leaving high school or university tend to see right through it.
And despite the rhetoric about his presence in Australia from pro-Palestinians and some on the far left, Douglas Murray is not fundamentally a right-wing figure.
I suspect he is probably a small-c conservative, but what he was talking about, and what the audience clearly enjoyed hearing, were fundamental liberal democratic Western values of tolerance, openness, progress and freedom.
These are not, or at least shouldn’t be seen as, right-wing or left-wing values, they are our common cultural heritage.
It was Douglas Murray’s positivity and encouragement that made the evening so memorable.
Like many who were there I came away convinced not just that he could do anything, but that together, WE could do anything.
Bruce Hill is an AJN senior journalist.
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