To start with a story: long years ago in 1978 Mary Lady Fairfax hosted a dinner in her Point Piper home Fairwater at which the guest of honour was Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone, Tory grandee, former (and later) Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, also known as Quintin Hogg. To my surprise Lady Fairfax invited me. Since at the time I was leader of the opposition in New South Wales, the invitation was, I assumed, ex officio. It was a splendid occasion. But I had to sing for my supper. Lady Fairfax suddenly asked me if I would care to say a few words about the state of conservative philosophy at this time of emerging Thatcherism and Reaganism. She meant basic ideas, not mere electoral policies. Collecting my thoughts with extraordinary speed I thought it best to talk about the approach to politics of my old teacher at the London School of Economics, Michael Oakeshott, whose work I knew well. He believed that the chief characteristic of a conservative is not dogmatic political rectitude but enjoyment of life and love of the country that made it possible. He was more ‘Laughing Cavalier’ than puritan. Politics is about your diplomatic feel for things (‘pursuing intimations’), not about applying dogmas. You could be conservative in politics, he would say, and radical in every other department of life including morality and religion. Right or wrong, I thought all this a refreshing break with the Blimpish conservatism of the past. Perhaps its moment had come?

And what did Lord Hailsham think, Lady Fairfax inquired? He was having none of it. He was icily polite to me but contemptuous of Oakeshott. He was all for the old verities, the tried-and-true dogmas, including appeal to God and Natural Law. (It had slipped my memory that, when he had published his famous The Case for Conservatism in the late 1940s, Oakeshott had ridiculed its ideological dogmatism.) I also detected a scorn for Oakeshott’s libertarian (Dionysian?) bohemianism about which at that time I knew little. (See Robert Grant’s brilliant essay on Oakeshott’s love life in A Companion to Michael Oakeshott, 2012, edited by Paul Franco and Leslie Marsh.) This little encounter at Fairwater ended in amicable disagreement. I excavated it from the depths of memory when reading Cory Bernardi’s new The Conservative Revolution (Connor Court). At first glance Bernardi may strike you as a new Lord Hailsham with a comprehensive ideology and catechism for our day. He acknowledges four great pillars of the good society: Faith, Family, Flag and Free Enterprise. He begins each section with a statement of a current crisis (in the culture wars, family, schools, patriotism, taxation or whatever) and ends it with the chorus: ‘This is why we need a conservative revolution.’ In one chapter he lists ten principles to guide us, ranging from prudence and honour to voluntarism and private ownership. If this sounds like some sort of ideology (to combat ideology!), it really is not. Bernardi has taken ideas that do not mandate rigid conformity but which may echo in the mind when practising politics (‘pursuing intimations’.) His handbook deserves to be widely read. He has reopened debates that should not have been closed. But he would widen his appeal if his style were less fundamentalist. He could do with a touch more Oakeshott and a little less Lord Hailsham.

There are three politicians in Bill Leak’s retrospective of his portraits, mainly oils on canvas (not black-and-white caricatures), at the Manly Gallery. They are a blustering Gough Whitlam, a machiavellian Graham Richardson and Malcolm Turnbull. Whitlam thought his should have won the Archibald. Richo said of his: ‘No one can be that ugly.’ But the standout painting is the Turnbull — uneasy, intense, guarded and ambitious. Painted 20 years ago, it was the People’s Choice in the Archibald. ‘I confidently predicted,’ Leak said at the time, ‘that Malcolm would, one day, become a great Labor Prime Minister.’

I read an absorbing memoir over the holidays. It is No Fixed Address by Jessie Bartos. It is in effect two memoirs. The first is about the author herself, the second about her husband. The first covers her Anglo-Australian childhood, her parents’ separation (and much later reunion), her evacuation from England during the war and having to abandon ship when it collided with a freighter in the U-boat-infested Atlantic. The author takes it all in her stride and remains not always cheerful but never crushed. She also fits in her years in a children’s home outside Sydney and a spell as a Qantas air hostess. The second story is darker. It is more history or biography than memoir. It is about her husband Alex Bartos, Hungarian and Jewish, who spent the war years being moved from one Nazi concentration camp to another. He remains a little mysterious but always indomitable. On the last page there is a wonderful picture of him playing cards in Sydney with four old men, all Central Europeans who you imagine harbour terrible secrets from the war years. But the point of this note is that No Fixed Address is a self-published book. We are used to famous best-sellers like Tom Clancy or Beatrix Potter beginning as self-publishers but there seems to be a special niche for memoirists who do not always appeal to commercial publishers but still have stories with fascinating details to tell.

Christopher Pyne’s committee examining the national (that is, jargonised and centralist) school curriculum need not sit for long. It should simply scrap the curriculum forthwith.