A brief introduction.(Ryan)

On the evening of September 3, at a Quadrant dinner held at the American Club, Sydney, Professor Geoffrey Blainey delivered the annual lecture in memory of Sir John Latham, sometime Chief Justice of Australia. Professor Blainey was introduced to the gathering by Peter Ryan, an edited version of whose remarks follows.

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IT SEEMED at first sight to be a great privilege to be asked to introduce Geoffrey Blainey to so distinguished an audience, but it may be no more than an exercise in superfluity. What Australian really needs introduction to this pre-eminent scholar, this author of some thirty readable books, this amiable leader and servant of the nation's public life? And, I might add, this fellow citizen who for decades has endured, with truly Roman dignity and fortitude, an unexampled campaign of malignant defamation.

So you will be reassured to learn that I hold in the forefront of memory the best and shortest introduction of a speaker that I ever heard. It was of exactly thirty words, and I remember every one of them, from fifty-three years ago.

In 1950, the philosopher Bertrand Russell made his whirlwind barnstorming tour of Australia. With one other, I was commissioned to conduct him from Melbourne's splendid old Menzies Hotel to a banquet tendered in his honour by the Victorian Rationalist Society.

In his modest suite the great man, almost eighty, offered us a drink, plus what turned out to be the bonus of an hour's hilarious private conversation.

"A Scotch? Splendid!" he said in those high, piping tones of fastidious elegance.