Some friends and family at Coondle on another occasion: Alan Tapper, Marion Tapper, Peter Kovesi, Robyn Owen, Ted Watt, Janet Kovesi Watt, Robin Tapper, Moira Harding
Alan Tapper
This is a recording of a conversation held at Coondle, near Toodyay [in 2009]. Rosemary Hill, that’s right. To commemorate 25 years at this place with Julius and 20 years since Julius died. And the people present are Janet Kovesi Watt, Victoria Castiglione, Moira Harding, Bob Ewin, Robert Castiglione, Ted Watt, Chris Ulyatt, Robin Tapper and myself, Alan Tapper.
Yes, Janet, I think we should get you to say a few things to start off with. But the thing that strikes me is that with the exception of Ted, none of us knew Julius before 1970. Bob and I came in about that time. Chris came in soon after that. Robin would have known him from about that time.
So, I don’t know, maybe you could start by talking about when and how you met Julius and what you remember of that time at Oxford.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Well, I first met him at Oxford. He’d come as a Hackett Scholar, arrived in 1956. No sooner had he arrived, of course, than the Hungarian revolution broke out and he got permission from the Master of Balliol, his college, to go out and give what help he could, because he had now learned English in Western Australia, but since he’d spent a year in Austria after leaving Hungary, he also spoke half passable German, so he thought he could be useful as an interpreter, as indeed he was.
I met him at a little tea party given by one of my friends in college who was herself Hungarian. And I think the first thing I asked him was what exactly was a Molotov cocktail? He’d just come back from people who threw the things. So we went on from there.
Alan Tapper
So did your studies cross over at all or not?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Well, I was doing Greats. Philosophy was part of the course. I don’t think I would have done at all well if I hadn’t got to know Julius. Because the don at my college was frankly a very bad teacher indeed. In fact, we weren’t taught, we were just chucked in to sort of pick up what we could.
So with Julius, I went to Professor Austin’s classes on excuses and they were splendid. And yes, I got a lot of help and scraped by.
Alan Tapper
And vice versa?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Well, I doubt if I helped him much. Not at his philosophy.
Alan Tapper
The thing that astonishes me is that he’d come out of Hungary in 1948 and he’s now in Oxford in 1956. That’s eight years, he’s picked up another language, he’s learned to do philosophy in a different way.
Janet Kovesi Watt
He’s got first class honours, he’s won a Hackett Scholarship.
Alan Tapper
He’s got a philosophy degree. I just don’t understand how anyone could do that. Mastering of the language is one thing, but to get to the top of the world of philosophy in that short period. But he did it.
Janet Kovesi Watt
It was sort of rather Emperor’s New Clothes-ish. Because he was always puzzled why he did so well, that he just sort of wrote simply and straightforwardly. And it was only when he came to be judging student essays himself and found that they all felt they needed to write something very pretentious and lofty and strange and if I can understand it, no, it can’t possibly be philosophy.
And the ones who did write simply and straightforwardly: I see, that’s why I did so well. So did they do well.
Alan Tapper
What do you remember of those Austin classes?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Oh, the discussions on excuses. Did this take place by accident, by mistake? Was it inadvertent? There was the splendid discussion with an American student of Greek origin whose name really was Socrates and he was a pain in the neck, actually. He was of those people who’s always hopping up and saying things and interrupting. And Prof. Austin stuffed his pipe, he was always doing this and it always went out, and saying — well now, no, it wasn’t Socrates. Hang on, it’ll come back to me what his name really was. Never mind. “And well, suppose I took you for a walk, Socrates, along a mountain path where I had reason to suspect that there was going to be a landslide and there was a landslide and you were killed. Would you have met your death by accident?” And of course, the whole class was suppressing giggles and the bloke didn’t get it at all. He just went on huffing and huffing and protesting.
But it was a splendid class because anybody could contribute. It was, how do we use these words in everyday life? What are the circumstances? And one was really working it out. No, it isn’t like that. Somebody would think of another example where you would say, whatever it was, it was great stuff.
And Selwyn Grave visited Oxford at the time and came to one of those classes. Yes. So did Monsignor Jim Bourke, also visiting.
Alan Tapper
I remember Julius’s analogy of what it is to be a philosophy teacher. This was in Social Philosophy. It was like being a guide on a mountain and you could take people up this path and once you got up there, I remember this, and you would tell people that from this vantage point you would get such and such a view, but if you went up the other path you’d get a different view. So the job of the teacher was to be the guide who said, these are the paths that you could take.
The other thing that maybe might have helped him was that he had that knowledge of Plato that, as I understand it, went back a long way into his childhood even. He told me that he started reading Plato at about age 8. He couldn’t remember how early he started reading Plato. I think my memory of that’s right.
Janet Kovesi Watt
That I wouldn’t know. No, I didn’t know it went back so far and I don’t know particularly what he studied in Budapest.
Alan Tapper
Yeah, I mean, all that’s interesting too.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Or in Innsbruck.
Alan Tapper
What about outside of classes and lectures at Oxford? I mean, he did the Why? production.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yeah. And the Szilard [?] Society. I mean, here is he, a postgraduate student from Australia, attracting these great names in Oxford Catholic philosophy circles to come to meetings organised by him and read papers. It seems extraordinary. And somewhere I’ve still got the list, the attendance list, and one of the names on it is the young Benedictine priest who subsequently conducted the marriage ceremony for Ted’s son, Paul and his wife, Henry Wansborough, OSB.
And there he is as a junior student. Anthony [Kenny] and Peter Levy came. Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe, Michael Duff. What’s the word I want? Not Duffy. Dummett. Yeah, all sorts of major names. And they all came.
Alan Tapper
So how did he do that?
Janet Kovesi Watt
I have no idea. Charm. I forget even where the meetings were held. Might have been Catherine Hall, but I can’t remember.
Alan Tapper
Does that suggest everyone knew Julius, knew who he was?
Janet Kovesi Watt
I suppose it does, partly, yes.
Ted Watt
It was certainly the case here several years before, when he was an undergraduate. I can’t remember anything in particular about him from that period, but everyone knew him.
Alan Tapper
What was the story you were starting to tell before, Ted?
Ted Watt
Oh, it’s a joke, and it’s one that I didn’t hear from Julius, though apparently it was Julius’s joke. I heard it from Paul’s wife, Julia. It concerns two Jews in Tel Aviv after the War. One of whom had been there for years and the other had just arrived from Germany. And it’s a personal identity story. There was a unit of the Israel Defence Force marching past and the old resident, the sabra, was saying, “isn’t it marvellous that we have our own armed forces now and look how smartly they march”. And the German said, “that rabble. Now, if you had ever seen the SS in Berlin on the Fuhrer’s birthday”.
Alan Tapper
If you think about Julius, born in 1930. So war breaks out in ‘39. The Jews were deported out of Hungary in ‘44.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Sorry, what did you say?
Alan Tapper
The Jews were deported out of Hungary?
Janet Kovesi Watt
In ‘44, ‘43. Well, when Hungary was forced to enter the war, they’d managed to kick out all the [Jews].
Alan Tapper
That’s right, that’s right. Once they were found.
Janet Kovesi Watt
What I only discovered comparatively recently, and I don’t know whether you all know this, that Julius was half Jewish himself. I simply didn’t know this. And he’d never revealed it. But his father was Jewish. And so this was why they had to leave home and skulk in hiding somewhere in Hungary. But you know, isn’t that extraordinary?
Alan Tapper
It is extraordinary.
Robin Tapper
How did you find out?
Janet Kovesi Watt
We were talking to my sister-in-law, Julia, apropos of the plastic surgery on her daughter’s nose. She used to have a really rather unbecoming hooky nose and she had some rather delightful plastic surgery and it’s a rather jaunty nose now. And we were saying how successful this was and it was really suited her. And Julia was expressing regret that she’d lost her Jewish nose. I said “what?” “Didn’t you know?” No, I didn’t know. Quite extraordinary.
Alan Tapper
You said something just then about they had to — they spent a period of time in hiding, or?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes, I know very little about it. But they certainly had to leave their house in Tata. Yes, but skulk around somewhere. I don’t honestly know much about that. I should ask Julia, in fact, get her memories quick.
Alan Tapper
So Julius lived through that. He lived through the Communists arriving in what, ‘46, ‘45. And he’s not even — he went to university.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes.
Alan Tapper
So in ‘46, ‘47, when he’s only 16.
Janet Kovesi Watt
No, it must have been later than that then. It was ‘49 that they left, I think. Yes, ‘49. And yes, I think he’d done a year by then.
Alan Tapper
Right. That’s a lot to live through, isn’t it?
Janet Kovesi Watt
And yes, the border was — the barbed wire was being unrolled and he and his brother thought we should try and get out. If we don’t get out now, perhaps we never can. And I think quite literally Paul sort of threw gravel up against Julia’s window and said, “Julius and I are going over the border, are you coming?” And she sort of shoved a few odd things into a small bag and yes, she did. And actually, no, the first time Paul and Julius tried it and got caught and were sent back and were told to report to authorities on any of their fellow students who might be having similar disreputable ideas.
And that’s when they thought, well, no, we’ve really got to get out. This won’t do. And they said it was winter. And they kept — yes, so they got out of the train at the station before the border and walked, and I think they kept falling into snowy ditches and getting wet. But finally, I think “we must have crossed the border by now” and then they stumbled across an Austrian policeman.
They thought, “oh, he’s Austrian, this is marvellous”. But he said, “I’m terribly sorry, but” — Austria was then occupied by the four powers —, and “this is the Russian zone. And I’m afraid I’ve got instructions to turn anybody in who tries to cross the border, follow me, please”. So they trudged after him and then he stopped and said, “well, now the Russian command post is in that village over there, but the bus to Vienna leaves in this corner here”. He waved goodbye to them.
So then they got to Vienna. But then Vienna was peculiar too, because again, the four powers took it in turns to patrol. And Julia remembered some time when she and Paul were sitting having a cup of coffee somewhere and oh, hell, Russian soldiers coming in at the front and they scooted out to the back as fast as they could.
But then how they got themselves to the — was it the British zone or the French zone? Anyway, the West. I don’t know how they did that, but Julius anyway landed up at Zell am Zee on Easter Sunday and fronted up to the parish priest who said, oh, good, you can serve my Mass. So he did.
And then they all got to Innsbruck and Paul went back to fetch his parents out. And that, apparently is a standard refugee nightmare, very widespread. You dream that you’ve gone back for some trivial purpose and then, oh, my goodness, I’m stuck here, I can’t get out again. So he did that in real earnest and got his parents out.
But I don’t know the full story of that, though I do have the — I confess I haven’t read his mother’s account of it, so I really must read that. Anyway, they all fetched up in Innsbruck, where the inhabitants were so kind. They got scholarships at the University, they got luncheon vouchers. Women from the village would offer to mend their socks or would leave a bag of potatoes. And I mean, this was the end of the war, they were terribly poor themselves.
And then, of course, the bit that he describes all about fronting up to the immigration people in Innsbruck and being asked, “what flag is that?”
Alan Tapper
Well, tell us about that.
Janet Kovesi Watt
But he’s written about that, or haven’t you read? There’s an article which was published in — Oh, there was the Sunday Times article, but there was the other one. Hang on. It amalgamated with The Bulletin, but before that it was something else.
Yes, well, anyway, fronting up at this office and being asked to identify this flag and advised, don’t say that you’re students, say that you’ve got some useful trade and acquire a useful trade. So he took a few lessons in driving and said, “I am a truck driver”. And his brother Paul took lessons in, of all things, shoemaking. Any more incongruous cobbler, it would be hard to imagine. And of course they never drove trucks and never mended shoes.
But the first job they had after getting out from the Northam camp was in Wooroloo, which was then a TB sanatorium. Giving injections of all things. Julius, giving an injection and making beds and serving up lunches and so forth. And then the next move was down to the city. Okay, hospital experience is what you had. So St. John of God Hospital, where it was mostly, I think, polishing floors, especially at intersections where somebody else’s floor met yours and whose is the shiniest? And all these nuns making sure that you were doing your work properly and that you had been to church this Sunday, had you, — this sort of thing.
And of course that’s where he met Professor Grave, who was then a patient, and he saw the philosophy books by his bed. And Selwyn explained how it was a free university and that there were evening classes and so it went on.
Alan Tapper
Backtracking a bit. It’s quite possible your [Robin’s] family were at Wooroloo at the same time.
Robin Tapper
I was probably living there. My father was the doctor there and the patient there. So when was that?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Well, it would have been ‘50 or ‘51.
Robin Tapper
So we were there, ‘50, ‘51, no. Yeah, ‘50.
Alan Tapper
The other story I remember is about their arrival at Fremantle, if I’ve got it right, in the middle of the night. And so they get — they disembark off the ship and they’re put straight onto a train and the train just heads off into the distance. And the next morning they wake up at what they think is Perth, but is actually Northam.
Janet Kovesi Watt
I wasn’t aware that it was at night, but they certainly weren’t aware of a city. It seemed like a little seaside holiday place. And of course, the journey took an absurdly long time for what’s quite a short distance. Alien vegetation. Then, of course, ironically, both of them buy land in this alien place.
Robert Castiglione
When did they [arrive]? Was it summer?
Janet Kovesi Watt
No, it was July.
Robert Castiglione
That’s merciful.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes. And there’s this army camp, just kind of grey blankets hung up to make makeshift cubicles.
Robert Castiglione
In Northam?
Ted Watt
In Northam or outside, you know, the army camp. Just on this side, up on the hill.
Robert Castiglione
Wow.
Alan Tapper
There’s a bit about it in the Northam museum. Quite a nice display about its history as a migrant camp.
Robert Castiglione
Welcome to Australia.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes, there’s this book called Milk and Honey but no Gold which I was put onto. But Julia, my sister-in-law, was invited to contribute memories to this, but she was afraid it would be rather slanted and indeed it is. It doesn’t tell the story of migrants, of successful, happy, fulfilled migrants. There’s a lot of very sad stories of migrant mothers stuck in railway camps, grabbing their toddlers off the railway line and really having a very hard and miserable life. So Julia didn’t contribute to that.
Robert Castiglione
And why Australia? Why not Canada or?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Well, the alternatives that were offered at the time were South America or Australia. And they thought, well, the English-speaking world was probably the better bet. It’s like in the Les Murray poem about his wife’s grandfather. Yes. Paternal grandfather Jozsef. And they’d had the same sort of thought. Oh, that Australia. Less politics in Australia.
Ted Watt
Do you know that poem, simply called “Jozsef”?
Alan Tapper
I had thought that they made the decision to come to Australia in Florence. Was that not right?
Janet Kovesi Watt
No, I don’t think so.
Alan Tapper
I might be confusing it with someone else’s story.
Janet Kovesi Watt
That’s right. But actually that gives us some dates. It was 1950, they would have been in Innsbruck because that was a Holy Year. And Julius managed to make the journey down to Rome to take part in all the jollifications.
But I think they felt we can’t go on just being refugees in Austria. We’ve got to start a proper life. This isn’t really getting anywhere.
Alan Tapper
So they came with their parents?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes. So they all came out. Yes, indeed.
There was a nice story about his parents. Some good people from Kelmscott came out to the camp to see if they could find some deserving mature age migrants that they could befriend in some way and they invited Julius’s parents to stay at their place in Kelmscott in a proper house instead of in the camp. And they woke up the first morning to find that their hosts weren’t there. And a note on the kitchen table. I suppose they could just about read. “Sorry we had to go out. Make yourself at home. There’s food in the fridge”. And everything was unlocked. And they were just bowled over by this trust and this welcome.
Robert Castiglione
How old would Julius have been when he landed here.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Well, if he was born in 1930, then he was 20.
Robert Castiglione
His parents would have been?
Janet Kovesi Watt
40s, 50s.
Alan Tapper
So what did his father do when they got here?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Well, to some extent, he exercised his trade as an architect. Quite a lot of migrants got land in, I think it was Bassendean, land was going cheap there and he designed simple cheap houses for them to build. But then they lived at various places. They lived in South Perth at one stage and oh yes, some fellow migrant was living in North Perth. Of course, South Perth was a rather smarter address and he asked if they could post for him his letters back home from South Perth. Imagine that anyone ….
So South Perth and Mount Lawley were some places they lived. And I don’t know quite how they got to hear about the great big house in Vaucluse Street. I think old Mr. Shellabear, grandfather of the present Jeremy Shellabear, I think he even lent them part of the deposit. But Julius’s mother thought, okay, this is a big house, it’s got lots of rooms. We can let rooms for students. It’s near the Teachers College, near the University, on a bus route. And it can be a home and an income while we’re getting settled.
And then she could — I mean, as a woman with rather rudimentary English at that stage she could work at home. Otherwise she’d have had to sort of go out cleaning or something. And father sort of did various things around the house. By the time I knew him, he was already an invalid. When we came back in ‘59, he already spent most of his days just sitting in an armchair.
Alan Tapper
I guess I assumed that you and Julius had bought that house.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Oh, no, no, no. We sort of took it over. In fact, they put it in our name. I forget why. Well, and then they moved out to Shenton Park and let it to some other people who rented out rooms. And then those people, their lease ran out and so the obvious thing to do seemed to be to live in it with two very small children in this enormous house.
Catherine and Alec King came round for dinner. We proudly showed them this enormous space and Catherine said, “well, how many are you going to have?”
Ted Watt
Catherine rather disapproved of that sort of thing.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Too bad.
Alan Tapper
You were saying earlier that Julius’s family in Tata, his father was the brickworks manager?
Janet Kovesi Watt
He managed this brick and tile factory. Yes.
Alan Tapper
Have you been there?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Well, we, in our trip in ‘76, yes, we drove and waited at the level crossing just near their house. And we had to wait at the level crossing while a train loaded with tanks rumbled gently past and he said, “oh, I think our house is now lived in by several families”, obviously a big prosperous house.
And they were notable people in the town. His brother Paul used to tease her [their mother?], “you know, this is not Tata now. It doesn’t help to say, I’m Mrs. Kovesi”.
Alan Tapper
There is a story about a game they used to play at school which was like Cowboys and Indians, where they had bands around their heads and a number was on the cap. If you read the number on the cap, that’s it, you’re dead.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Bang, bang, you’re dead. Yes.
Alan Tapper
Go and lie down for a few minutes.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes, it was the Piarist school versus the Jesuit school. Hot rivalry between the two.
Piarists were founded by a chap called Joseph Callisanctius [or Calasanz]. And we saw a street in Rome, Callisanctius Via. He inherited an awful lot of money and decided to use it for schools, quality schools, giving a high class education.
Somewhere I was reading one of Mozart’s letters about his kids. He thought, they’re just mucking around at school. I’m going to check out the Piarists.
And yes, there were some notable Piarist schools in America and we visited one. And he greatly respected one of his former teachers in Hungary, who had also escaped and came and visited that school. So he was able to visit and they were able to meet.
That was my doing. I’m very proud of that. Ringing up the church office in Philadelphia to find out. All Julius knew was that this Father Bartoly was in Buffalo, I think it was. “And would that be the such-and-such preparatory school?” I think it might be. And they gave the number and I rang with, oh yes, well, he’s not here at the moment. And so on and so on. And then arranged for him to visit this other school near Swarthmore. So great.
Robert Castiglione
And Julius was able to meet up?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes, indeed. So we met Father Bartoly too. A very noble name that.
Alan Tapper
So when you left Oxford, you went to Edinburgh for a year?
Janet Kovesi Watt
I think it was only a year.
Ted Watt
Most of those Scottish temporary lectureships were for one year non-renewable.
Janet Kovesi Watt
I don’t remember about it being non-renewable, but in those days it was easy to get jobs. If you missed out on the first one, you were bound to get the second. Or, you know, there wasn’t this racking anxiety.
Alan Tapper
He was a top student from Oxford.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes. But there were other very good students from Oxford too. So he applied for the job in Armidale [NSW], got that. So that was three years. And then back here, the job came up here.
Alan Tapper
What was it like for you coming to Australia?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Just sort of interesting. I just, yeah, accepted it. But it did seem, you know, one waves goodbye, the boat train and — oh, golly, it’s all horribly poignant. When will I see them all again?
No, life was simple in Armidale. That’s all right.
Alan Tapper
Cold?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Cold in winter. Yes. High up. It was lovely driving down to the coast and we went down 3,000ft in half an hour. And we went from winter to spring. It was lovely.
Alan Tapper
Again, that whole period from when Julius came back to Perth in, what, ‘57?
Janet Kovesi Watt
No. Well, by the time he came back to the job, it was the end of ‘62.
Alan Tapper
Oh, good heavens.
Right, so there’s a period there where before any of us knew Julius. He was writing Moral Notions and he’d written it in ‘67. He’d written his dissertation on “How good is The Good?”, which prefigures part of the …
Janet Kovesi Watt
Well, does it ever.
Alan Tapper
I’ve got a scanned copy of that if anyone wants to read it. You gave me a copy at once, didn’t you?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Did I?
Alan Tapper
Well, well, I’ve now scanned it.
Robert Castiglione
And is this his honours dissertation?
Janet Kovesi Watt
His B Phil.
Alan Tapper
Tell us about writing Moral Notions.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Oh, [it] sort of went on and on.
Robin Tapper
I know that.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes, well, yes. Well, with me, it still does show that it’s written by a man for whom English was a second language. Yes, there’s more that I could have adjusted in the writing than I did at the time. And yes, sometimes it was obscure, but as soon as he explained it, I said, “oh, write it like that”, whatever it was.
Alan Tapper
But it does seem that he knew where he was going with it. I mean, the book is so polished and — I don’t mean the sentence construction.
Janet Kovesi Watt
It was sort of a combination of his thesis and his thought and Professor Austin’s lectures.
Alan Tapper
So you think Austin played a part in treating his thinking?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Oh, yes, oh undoubtedly.
Alan Tapper
Okay.
Janet Kovesi Watt
It was just this very straightforward down to earth, like, would you have met your death by accident? Just the detail.
Alan Tapper
I think people who read Moral Notions, apart from those of us who’ve known Julius, people who read it seem to have a problem that it is so dense.
Janet Kovesi Watt
It’s very brief.
Alan Tapper
Yes, it’s very brief. It’s packed with ideas. There are so many ideas on each page, and you keep going to the end of it, and there’s more and more coming up, and these are all implications of the starting point. So it’s like a very clear logical structure in some ways, but in other ways, it’s like the sort of thing that someone might write after many years of worrying about the questions.
And the other thing that struck me, reading it and working on it again is — this is like a book that was written just the other day.
Janet Kovesi Watt
So, good, it doesn’t date.
Alan Tapper
I’m biassed on this, but.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Except, of course, things like the misticket because you don’t have them. I got given a misticket once in Edinburgh. Special little machines for printing the ticket. Did it for the wrong fare stage.
Alan Tapper
My memory is of doing Julius’s second year Social Philosophy course. And the first thing that struck you was the accent. And later I thought someone said about Julius’s accent, and I said, well, he doesn’t have an accent.
Janet Kovesi Watt
I love Mrs. Gates [story] enormously.
Chris Ulyatt
It took me two years to crack his accent.
Alan Tapper
Yes. I think it was hard. And the word that was hardest was “misticket”. Because Julius said “misty cat”.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes, the different stress. I mean, he would say not “Bay View Terrace”, but “Bay View Terrace” as often as not. Yeah. There’s something about the Hungarian stress. And, of course, he simply could not detect the difference in sound between rag and rug. It just sounded the same. And Hungarian “e” is pronounced “a” anyway. So Kovesi was Kervishi really.
Chris Ulyatt
Then you’ve got the “v” for “vite vine”.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Oh, the “vite vine”. Yes.
Robert Castiglione
Certainly there was a pretty active trade in bad Julius imitations in my year, I can tell you that. I won’t reveal who it was. It was pretty funny. Gestures, too.
Alan Tapper
And the circles drawn on the board that explained things. Yeah. Yes.
Janet Kovesi Watt
They’re all the little circles. Yes. Oh, and the time when somebody pre-drew a whole lot of circles so …
Robert Castiglione
You wouldn’t have to worry. That’s very good.
Robin Tapper
Did you do a lot when you talked about Moral Notions, Janet? You were reading it and helping. I mean, you were an editor?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes, I was. I realise I wouldn’t have called it editing at the time, but I realise that is what I was doing. Yes.
Robin Tapper
And when you said about – when he explained it, it was simple, “write it like that”.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes. No, it was torment trying to do the same with his writing on Moses Hess, because it was such utter nonsense and so obscure and so peculiar and having to try to understand it well enough to help him to explain it. Oh, I did hate that, it went slow, dear.
Alan Tapper
What do you remember, Bob, when you first came and started working with Julius?
Bob Ewin
I wanted to come here because of Moral Notions. The worst thing was disappointment because he was away in Swarthmore for six months.
Robin Tapper
So really Moral Notions was that …?
Bob Ewin
Yeah, I told him once I made three attempts to read that and knocked off when I got to the sentence that said “this is no harder than the fact–value distinction”. When I got past that and read the rest he was —
Looking back from now, there’s a couple of things that stand out. One is, I think all the stuff Julius did was actually driven by interest in the problems he was working on. There was no careerism. He didn’t push to publish things. There were things he could have published but he let them wait because he thought he could make them better. Never got around to it.
So there’s that he was a genuine professional in the proper sense of the word, as opposed to career philosophy. And the other was the enormous imagination, which you see in the originality in Moral Notions.
But the version [?] that really struck me was the way he could deal with people such as Marx and he could grasp those in pictures that I couldn’t even get hold of at all. And part of this, part of it was just a pictorial imagination, I think. But the other part was having worked right through the history of that stuff. He was never pulling a text out in isolation. It was always within the history.
But there are the two things, the originality and the fact that this bloke did this because this is interesting and important and not for the pay check at the end of the month.
Alan Tapper
I think the imagination and the ability with arguments, including other people’s arguments. And you saw that in the seminars, when someone else came to give a paper, Julius would see the structure, the logic of the argument. And he was so good at reductio ad absurdum, what’s the next step, what’s the next step. And his mind was very quick at that. But his knowledge of the history of ideas and all of that was so alive to him.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Because having experienced communism as it really was in real life.
Alan Tapper
Having that whole mixture of stuff.
Robert Castiglione
Was he one of — did Lukács teach him for a year?
Janet Kovesi Watt
I think Lukács was among the lecturers when he was there.
Robert Castiglione
I seem to remember him mentioning that. I’m pretty sure that he mentioned he …
Alan Tapper
I thought that he had studied with Lukács — at least attended lectures.
Robert Castiglione
And Lukács’s struggle with integrity and stuff. I just remember discussion with that about that. It was very interesting to me. He sort of admired Lukács, but at the same time — I’ve kind of lost it.
Alan Tapper
The bit I remember was, roughly, Lukács, granted that he was struggling with how to have integrity in the situation, he solved it by going and abasing himself in front of the tough guys in Moscow. I pretty much remember him pretty much saying something like that.
So in effect he said of himself, even though he is vastly more knowledgeable and smarter and probably more ethical, nevertheless they must have the truth. And so the question is, how on earth could it be that a bunch of thugs in Moscow had the truth and that an educated person like Lukács should go and put himself at their feet?
That sort of question interests you. That’s the question of ideology. I think it runs right through, maybe even in Moral Notions. I’m not sure.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Your thing about the reductio ad absurdum. You get that theme in Why?, like the thing about the lowest bad. Okay, we may talk about the highest good. How about the lowest bad. The philosophy of cookery. Same sort of thing, just different context.
Robert Castiglione
Of course, that’s the third thing is humour. Yes, I really, really think that’s spot on. His humour too is notable.
Victoria Castiglione
His playfulness with language too.
Robert Castiglione
Naughty playfulness.
Victoria Castiglione
I always remember his commentary on Christmas. How he loved the dinner but hated the din.
Alan Tapper
His jokes about the difference between something being high that isn’t noble and deep that isn’t meaningful. He could go on like this and do it easily.
Bob Ewin
My favourite thing was still the Immanuel Kant Fan Club dinner. He practised his speech and intended to say “I stand before you as a round square”. That is as a conservative. When he got in there, what he said was, “I stand before you as a square circle”. I suppose it was better that way.
Alan Tapper
I have another memory which is when I used to come up here and Julius was here. I was sort of just standing over there and I don’t know how it came up, but unemployment was a big issue at the time. And I started off some conversation about unemployment and work. I don’t know what it was. And Julius talked for half an hour on the history and the idea of work and different attitudes to work. It stuck in my mind that this just came off the top of his head. And he was so full of seeing it in terms of its role in the Marxist theory, the labour theory of value. On and on. He carried it all around. It was all just ready, turn on the tap.
Robert Castiglione
He did operate very well under a kind of pressure. I remember he gave a talk once and he should have done some preparation for it and he didn’t. But assisted by two swiftly drunk glasses of wine, he really stood up and spoke for three quarters of an hour, essentially no notes, really beautifully structured. And I remember being so impressed. I can’t remember the event. But others had very diligently prepared their papers and you know, he didn’t have any notes.
Janet Kovesi Watt
What about the Plato turning himself upside down? Tell the story about that.
Alan Tapper
This is at the AAP conference in Canberra in 1978. I thought you were there.
Chris Ulyatt
Yeah, I was there.
Alan Tapper
And Julius was to deliver his paper on “Did Plato turn himself upside down?” And it was a big lecture theatre and it was half full at least and very distinguished people. And he started reading the paper and he got probably towards the bottom of the first page, he said I can’t do this, put it down. And he then talked, he said what he wanted to say without a note for 40 minutes. And the flow of it was just perfect.
Janet Kovesi Watt
It was just that he read very badly. He was quite right to not do it, but to speak.
Alan Tapper
But he knew what he was going to say and it was just about flawless. And when he got to the end, there was a silence and people were sort of taking it in. And then the Greek experts were sitting up the front and they asked him two or three questions and he answered those. Then there’s more silence. And then there was a great booming voice from up the back of the room which said, “Do you mean to say that Aristotle didn’t understand what Plato was on about?” And Julius, he just held the moment for just a little bit. And then he said, “well, Aristotle, you know, in Plato’s academy you had to do geometry and maths and poetry and dancing and so on. I think Aristotle didn’t get past the dancing class”.
And the whole room just collapsed because it was David Armstrong. The booming voice was a huge put down and his just sort of ability to sidestep that. And then he gave a serious answer. He didn’t just leave it at that. He wasn’t playing any games about it.
And people talked about it as everyone went out. Everyone was talking about that moment. It was like Armstrong, he was kind of due to have a fall like that.
Robert Castiglione
I think Julius did have a view about using wit and humour as a rhetorical device to deal with absurdity or with. I remember a discussion about that.
Robin Tapper
One of the things, the idea of closed thought, closed systems of thought, was really important. And I think for me that was really helpful to me. Reading what he wrote about that and Moral Notions was really important to me. Moral Notions and Ernst Gombrich’s Sense of Order actually to me go together. But I won’t try and explain. But the closed thought structure and humour as a way of breaking that open, that’s where I was seeing it. I don’t know where to go with that — that seems to go together.
Alan Tapper
What’s the motto of Why?
Janet Kovesi Watt
I’m sorry?
Alan Tapper
What’s the motto of Why? Who will save us if we can’t laugh at ourselves?
Janet Kovesi Watt
Oh. Oh, yes. Oh, motto.
Alan Tapper
I mean, the other thing that strikes me is he was so inclusive of people. He made it seem so natural that he would talk about things after lectures. And it is natural, but almost very few other teachers did that. And that led to invitations to Vaucluse Street. Well, I mean, that was such a privilege.
Robert Castiglione
It was what you dreamt that university might be like.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yeah, well, I think.
Alan Tapper
Except I assumed it was like that.
Janet Kovesi Watt
That’s right. His account, and Ted would confirm this, of the university in the 50s, when it was very small and there was just one ref [refectory] and everybody entered the ref and there was great camaraderie between lecturers and students. Would you confirm this? He certainly felt it.
Ted Watt
Some lecturers and students.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Okay. Anyway, just that it was small, intimate. No, I envied his accounts of it, actually. Oxford was not like that.
Alan Tapper
Those classes we held at Vaucluse Street, you brought your own flagon of wine if you were presenting your paper.
Chris Ulyatt
I remember the taste. Brown Brothers.
Alan Tapper
Brown Brothers. Sorry, you were up market. There were cheaper ones than that.
Ted Watt
They made a good flagon red.
Alan Tapper
Bought at the bottle shop at Steve’s?
Chris Ulyatt
Yeah, but the good thing about Brown Brothers is there was a cork and a screw-top lid.
Alan Tapper
That was a problem there?
Chris Ulyatt
Well, it meant if there was any left, which was unusual, you could take it home.
Alan Tapper
Well, pretty well anyone who came to Perth went to your place — visiting philosophers, history of ideas people and. And former students.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Robert Conquest.
Alan Tapper
Oh, yes, I’ve forgotten about him.
I remember a discussion on Marx after Alan Ryan had given a paper and Julius and Ryan were just sitting down, the two of them got into a bit of a disagreement and it went on for some time. And the conclusion of it was Alan Ryan saying quietly to Julius, “Julius, I think you know more about Marx than I do”.
Robert Castiglione
Well, yeah, he knew about Marx in the kind of context that you spoke about. And that was not usual, you know, people divorcing Marx like some sort of canonical text. But he knew a context if you like and he knew that movement and I found it hugely elucidating. And there was a sense, protective, too, to know.
Alan Tapper
Protective? Yeah, there’s a sense in which he saw the same sort of things going on around him. He saw that as not a historical remnant but a kind of pattern of thought that it’s easy to slip into. The sort of three stage history thing that he talked about so often — various different three stage histories.
Bob Ewin
Take the same pattern over to some of the things he said about religion too. Just picking out — it’s like a picture in his mind. You can do a number of things to explain. The same model.
Alan Tapper
Yeah, same model. And in those pictures it’s usually that we in the present are situated at the end of the second phase, about to leap into the third. Why?
Janet Kovesi Watt
So we were at Cambridge, I was having dinner at — you [Ted] would know what this establishment was, a kind of theology college. No, I can’t remember the name of the place. Obviously some philosophy student hall. Well, it was probably that then. Yes. Anyway, there was a young Jesuit there, a postgraduate student probably, who was rather giving himself airs and he came from Panama and he implied that he had special insights because he came from the Third World. And Julius said, “well, I come from the Second World”. And it just sort of floored everybody. No one had thought of a second world. There was a first one and there was a third.
Robert Castiglione
That’s right. That’s a very strategic Julius move, very characteristic.
Chris Ulyatt
For example, there was his other remark that “we are the ancients” that floored quite a few people.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Is that the ancient world isn’t some strange alien?
Chris Ulyatt
“We are the ancients”. We’re the ones that have got all the accumulated wisdom and knowledge and trial and error that’s preceded.
Janet Kovesi Watt
They’re the same sort of people.
Alan Tapper
I don’t remember that.
You guys, Robert and Victoria, you did the Plato course with Julius, is that right?
Victoria Castiglione
No, we did moral philosophy and he did.
Robert Castiglione
When did we do Nietzsche?
Victoria Castiglione
That was part of the philosophy.
Robert Castiglione
Philosophy it was. That’s right. And he could be very, very kind. I remember a young woman who gave an absolutely devastatingly awful talk about Nietzsche. It was really terrible and you know, we were all — But Julius was really, you know, kind at the end of it. I remember he was very kind to her and just made sure that was all okay. That’s what I remember. We were kind of ready to tear it apart. You know. But he stopped that. Do you remember?
Victoria Castiglione
I remember the panache with which she delivered it. It was really just a string of quotes. But I mean she struck the table. Tremendously dramatic.
Robert Castiglione
It was. Yeah, Julius was very, very kind, yes.
Robin Tapper
Kindness I was thinking of.
Alan Tapper
Well, I guess we’ve probably come down to the finish.
Victoria Castiglione
Did we get Ted’s story? No, I was waiting for Ted’s story.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Ted’s story.
Ted Watt
Oh, that was fun. About the two Jews in Tel Aviv.
Victoria Castiglione
You said that you probably knew Julius before most of the rest of us.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Well, yes, yes.
Ted Watt
I think he would have started in ‘52. I started in ‘51, but I was part time, so probably as soon as I was full time he was around. I certainly remember him during my two remaining undergraduate years, simply as somebody that everyone knew and that everyone liked and someone who joined everything.
He was member of the Labor Club at one stage and he was, I think, probably the first student I knew who subsequently became a branch member of the Liberal Party. Certainly the first Catholic I knew at that time. If Catholics were interested in politics, they were aligned with the Labor Party. And it struck me as a peculiar thing to do, but it’s not actually wrong. But perhaps it was an example of the fact that he was a foreigner and didn’t know how things were done.
A few years later, on some centenary or other, he noticed anniversaries, he again organised a series of talks in honour of however many years it was since the birth or death or something of St. Augustine. People participated in that.
Alan Tapper
You were saying about finding the Peanuts cartoon.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Oh, yes. For a long time he’d been wanting an example to illustrate this particular pattern of argument where people get stuck in a rut and keep arguing or keep thinking about something, even when the grounds for it are no longer there. And yes, I was looking through our album, The Peanuts Treasury, and there was the story about the potato chip, which just illustrated it perfectly.
“No, it’s not a butterfly, it’s a potato chip.” “How does a potato chip get all the way from Brazil?”
Robert Castiglione
So you must have been delighted.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Yes, and I’m very pleased that I made this major contribution to the sport.
Alan Tapper
What did you make of the fact that Moral Notions had such a reception in Mind and yet seemed to just sort of drop out of the discussion?
Janet Kovesi Watt
It was curious. No, he knew it was going to be reviewed in Mind and we were in Bath at the time and he drove over to Bristol to consult the university library there and came back almost speechless with excitement that it had got this huge review.
Robin Tapper
And it’s as if there’s some — it’s still being written about. I mean, is that what you’re finding?
Alan Tapper
Well, I mean, I think myself, it’s like. Like, I don’t know. I mean, part of the putting together of this book is partly that Brian Mooney saw there was a real need for it and he knew of it firsthand from me of Julius, and got a sense of what he was on about.
And then there was after the book that Bob and I did where we quoted the MacIntyre statement that Moral Notions had never received its due. And to me that was a breakthrough. I didn’t know that someone like him or anyone would have thought that. I didn’t know. So we produced the second edition, thinking it’s a worthwhile thing to do, but not knowing whether it would be seen that way by other philosophers.
And then with Google you can find those people who quoted Julius. And I knew by chance, I think, that Jean Bethke Elshtain was an admirer of Julius. In one of the articles you made a statement that said “a much neglected book”. We knew that Philippa Foot still valued it. That was important. I knew of Dennis Patterson because I seem to remember Julius talking about him. I’m pretty sure I remember that.
The other thing is there was a Chinese philosophy scholar [A.C. Cua] who had written a number of papers in which he compared Moral Notions with Chinese understanding of concepts. And I remember being at Vaucluse Street one day and Julius had just received the latest Journal of the History of Ideas or something like that, and there was this article by this fellow. So we tried to track him down, but he died a few years ago.
And that’s a bit of a pity, but you can now find out who has quoted who. And so that’s at least made it possible for us to get outside of the circle of those people and know Julius individually.
And the other thing is that Brian in Singapore persuaded his two or three of his colleagues that Moral Notions was worth working on. And so they’ve been having a weekly or fortnightly reading of the book. And the papers that they’re writing are the result of that. And again, that was partly chance, that I happened to be up there last year or the year before. So maybe it’s still yet to be properly understood.
Chris Ulyatt
Makes sense if it’s the list of Google hits on Moral Notions or on Julius. Sorry, how extensive is the Google hit list?
Alan Tapper
Well, it’s like, I mean, if it’s merely mentioning another person’s name that doesn’t mean that much, but it does sometimes indicate that Moral Notions was being read and really people were thinking about it from all sorts of different angles. So I’ve collected a year ago, I suppose I collected all the references I could and it came to a couple of pages, like 20 or more.
But as Google’s network expands, more and more are coming in. So I did a brief check of it recently and there was a whole lot of names that I hadn’t seen before, and quite a few from a sociological background, a handful anyway, some also interested in Kuhn and paradigms and that sort of thing, and seeing Julius as in the light of that sort of discussion.
Janet Kovesi Watt
Thank you, Alan, for doing this.
Robert Castiglione
Thanks Alan. That was a great idea.
Alan Tapper
Thank you all.