Vale Paddy McGuinness (1938-2008).(In memoriam)

We regret to record the death on Australia Day, January 26, 2008, of the editor of Quadrant, Padraic Pearse McGuinness. A former editor of the Australian Financial Review and a columnist on the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, he was one of Australia's greatest journalists. He will be sadly missed by his numerous colleagues and friends. The following three addresses were given at a dinner in Balmain on December 12, 2007, to mark Paddy's retirement after ten years and editing 100 editions of Quadrant. The fourth address is a eulogy given by Frank Devine at Paddy's funeral in Sydney on February 1, 2008.

A DIFFICULT CASE

Peter Coleman

IT'S NOT EASY to get a handle on the life and adventures of P.P. McGuinness. He has so many aliases. Three of them converged to create the brilliant editor of Quadrant who produces his 100th and final issue next month.

The first is Paddy the Outsider--the freethinking critic of established opinion. We first see this Outsider in the student and young man. There are not many records to document this period. But there is one useful source--Paddy's ASIO file. It's on the net. You can look it up on the National Archives website. There should never have been a file at all. But let's leave that aside for the moment and see what it has to say.

A lot of it is raw data such as date and place of birth (Melbourne, 1938); schools attended (St Ignatius, Sydney High); the employment he qualified for after graduating among the top of his year from Sydney University (labourer with the Water Board, stage-hand at the Elizabethan Theatre, trainee at Callan Park); or his early court appearances for sundry offences at student demonstrations ("using language", resisting arrest, and so on).

There was one noteworthy characteristic which confused some of the ASIO hands. He was not only a relentless critic of intellectual conformity. He was also an uncompromising anticommunist, a "strident" anti-communist you might say. One note in the file records his role at a conference of the Australian Student Labor Federation fifty years ago, at the time of the blood-soaked Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. The dissident nineteen-year-old was, it says, "the most active anti-communist at the congress. He never missed an opportunity to attack in caustic terms communists and communism."