The fox and the hedgehog.(the life of Sir John Monash and Daniel Mannix)

TWO OF THE BEST-KNOWN and most influential Australians, General Sir John Monash and Dr Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne, became national and international figures during the First World War, though there could scarcely have been a wider difference in the role each man played in the conflict. Indeed, few famous individuals in Australian history present a greater contrast in background, personality and temperament than do Monash and Mannix, who were born within a year or so of one another in the mid-1860s.

The physical dissimilarity is marked: Monash was a heavily built man with a dark complexion and a thick moustache who at times in his life struggled with obesity. Mannix was tall, pale, rail-thin and clean-shaven. Purely in terms of their appearance they had about as much in common as Laurel and Hardy. They were equally unalike in their sexual lives, with Mannix taking a lifelong vow of celibacy and Monash busying himself with both a wife and a mistress.

One was a self-made man who overcame failure in his careers in business and the military and the other was a prince of the church sent to the other side of the world. As public figures, there are profound differences between them and also a point or two of similarity that is also worth mentioning, such as their shared belief in the paramount importance of education.

Considering Monash and Mannix in parallel--there is no evidence I know of that they ever met--is instructive not only because it serves to illuminate an important period in Australian history but also because I think it may suggest something about the role of personality in history. Two ideas from the ancient world assist us in this exercise: one is the notion of parallel lives and the other is the concept of the fox and the hedgehog.

The parallel-lives idea comes to us from the Roman historian Plutarch. Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans mostly consists of a series of biographies arranged in pairs which Plutarch explains was intended "rather to epitomise the most celebrated parts of their story than to insist at large on every particular circumstance of it".

This approach, or something like it, has been used by well-known historians. Alan Bullock follows Plutarch's precedent in his book on Hitler and Stalin. Simon Schama, in one episode of his television history of Britain, used the parallel-lives framework to examine the lives of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, two figures of immense importance to their era (and ours) but who never met and whose character and achievements are of a certain order of magnitude but otherwise unalike.

Of the two pairs of historical figures I have just mentioned, Churchill and Orwell immediately suggest themselves as nearer to our parallel of Monash and Mannix than does the Hitler-Stalin pairing. I should perhaps emphasise that the idea of parallel lives as I understand it is not the basis for expressing a preference for one person over the other.