Peter Beilharz

Peter and I were colleagues for over three decades, and friends in the latter part.

As colleagues, I always appreciated Peter’s fair-mindedness and professionalism. His courses were well prepared and efficiently run. In one phase, he oversaw the IV-Year Honours programme – the best it was ever managed in my experience, with his filing system being legendary. My greatest appreciation, however, was that in a large Sociology Department – at one point with 40 full-time tenured lecturers and above – which was overwhelmingly on the political Left, the ambience for a conservative like me was often uncomfortable, surrounded as I could be by prickly hostility. Peter himself was unfailingly courteous and friendly, for which I was grateful, although I never expressed this to him at the time.

We taught together in our final years at La Trobe, a foundation social theory course on the masters of the discipline. Peter covered Marx and historical sociology; I focused on Durkheim and Weber. We used a lecture/seminar format, attending each other’s lectures and both engaging in the discussion. The course worked well, I think, managing to set up a convivial dialogue between ourselves and the students. Peter had a deceptively easy-going lecturing style, informal and relaxed, even warm, very accessible to students. I soon came to realise that everything was carefully timed and prepared. The content was engaging, clear, balanced and fair. Peter’s was not a lecturing style I had ever come across, but it was effective. We shared a liking for including art and film to illustrate themes – he used JMW Turner, Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse, and I, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, 1962).

I suspect we were both surprised at how much we enjoyed teaching together. I, for one, had always preferred the freedom of teaching on my own. In retrospect, I suppose that both of us were relieved to find someone else who was non-ideological in their social and political orientations, and, perhaps in addition, out of tune with the fashionable post-modernism of the time – he as an old-style social democrat me as a Burkean conservative. We extended the experience, one year, into jointly running IV-Year Honours seminars, each choosing a seminal text to discuss over alternating weeks.

One of Peter’s greatest contributions as a colleague was under-appreciated in the Sociology Department. That was his international vision, and the frequency with which he visited other countries, notably the United States and Britain, and got to know a score of leading members of the discipline, encouraging them to visit Australia. He brought more than a few of them to Melbourne to lecture and participate in staff, postgraduate, and honours-student seminars at La Trobe. Regular visitors included Jeffrey Alexander from Yale and Keith Tester from Leeds/Hull.

The international traffic was facilitated through the Thesis Eleven Centre, which Peter set up, and ran with Trevor Hogan – including the tiresome, perennial challenge of fund raising. Peter had been one of the founders of the journal Thesis Eleven, and for much of its surprisingly long life was the person who drove it and kept it alive. Entrepreneurs are rare in the academic world, but Peter was a modest, unassuming member of that club. It could not have had a finer representative.

Through the Peter Beilharz era, La Trobe Sociology was cosmopolitan, part of an international network of scholars. Its senior students and its staff got the feel they were part of a global community. In one sense, this was a continuation of a role I had played in an earlier time, in a more haphazard manner, in attracting Agnes Heller to La Trobe for seven years, Werner Pelz for two decades and Anthony Giddens for six months – and making appointments like that of Johann Arnason. In that earlier period, Claudio Veliz had also played a dynamic outward-looking internationalist role – despite being on the receiving end of personal hostility from many staff. Sadly, since Peter left, the Department seems to have lost its global resonance and reach.

Peter had another significant indirect influence on colleagues, postgraduates and undergraduates, in terms of how seriously he took the vocation of scholar, and with it, the necessary international context. That was his office. He had wall-to-wall bookcases jampacked with meticulously cared-for hardbacks and neatly stacked journals. Orders came in from all around the globe. There were photos of scholars. His desk was busy but impeccably ordered. Overall, the room was bright, cheerful, welcoming – and serious. Peter had a good instinct for the impact of the aesthetic.

Peter’s friendship with Zygmunt Bauman is worth mentioning. Peter became a regular visitor to Zygmunt’s home in suburban Leeds – a habit he shared with Keith Tester. I know Zygmunt had a very warm and high regard for Peter, whom he treated as a confidant. This lean and tall, gentlemanly Polish sociologist played the role, in part, of benign father-figure. Peter reciprocated by editing some of the Bauman works and writing about them. Zygmunt Bauman was a rare figure in world sociology, not the least because of his wide-ranging, open-minded curiosity, and his relentlessly speculative mind, given to throwing established theories around like flypaper to see if any of them worked on the topic under discussion. Peter was understandably enthralled by this maverick figure. I suspect Bauman’s most influential theory, that of liquid modernity, may have struck a personal chord in Peter, but I may be wrong about this.

If Peter ever writes a memoir of the people he has known, the Bauman chapter should be one of the more interesting. I can testify that Zygmunt was a memorably warm and courteous, generous and gregarious host, but one needed a robust liver, being served screwdrivers at 11 o’clock in the morning.

Since Peter and I both left La Trobe at the end of 2014, we have kept up our friendship, regularly meeting in the inner city to chat about new directions and how things are going.

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Peter the Modernist, Hobart, 2014