Barry Jones: A Thinking Reed

Everyone of my age can remember Barry Jones and the consummate ease with which he demolished questions on Pick a Box on the old black and white TV. He was known for taking issue with Bob Dyer about certain expected answers, most famously in response to a question about "the first British Governor-General of India", where he pointed out that Warren Hastings was only technically Governor of Bengal.

He went on to become a prolific writer, a Federal politician and farsighted minister for Science and then President of the Labor Party and finally an Australian Living Treasure. I was browsing in Readings in Lygon St a few months ago and there he was, at the classical records section, checking out some titles. Barry Jones books in my library include

• Dictionary of World Biography
• Decades of Decision 1860 - A compendium of Modern History
• Sleepers Wake! - Technology and the Future of Work
• Barry Jones - A Thinking Reed (autobiography)

I bought and read his autobiography A Thinking Reed in October 2012. It somehow felt appropriate that Chapter 1 should start with a review of his birth in Geelong in 1932 and a discussion of the obstetrician Dr Mary Clementina de Garis!

Everything he writes is golden - we are so lucky that he is still with us, along with the likes of Phillip Adams.

Here is a superb review by Paul Kauffman, adjunct professor at the National Institute for Governance in Canberra, 

Barry Jones, polymath and parliamentarian, has published an autobiography which is a primary text for Australian history. In fact he spent his early life teaching history at school and university before going onto greater things. Like the nineteenth century philosopher, John Stuart Mill, Barry Jones worked as a parliamentarian for many years because he thought that good ideas should make the world a better place. His 560 page autobiography, with a foreword by his friend, the broadcaster Phillip Adams, is almost a collection of fifteen essays, connected by the thread of Barry Jones’ life as a ‘thinking reed’, a quote from Pascal. When his parliamentary addresses referred to intellectuals such as Pascal, he would confuse his parliamentary audience, because as Phillip Adams observed, ‘When you talk about Pascal, they think you mean lollies.’

The book has five diamonds in it, which are the chapters when Jones was centre stage, rather than a (large and important) fly on the wall. As far as I can tell, they are an accurate, truthful and perceptive account of his most significant achievements. ‘Quiz Show’ covers the years in the 1960s when he dominated Pick a Box. ‘Death Penalty’ covers capital punishment, or ‘ritual murder’, and Jones’ ultimately successful campaigns to end capital punishment in Australia between 1962 and 1967. Among OECD countries, only the USA now carries out capital punishment.

Another chapter tells of Jones’ book Sleepers, Wake, which was almost never published after Melbourne University reviewers found it ‘too broad in scope’. The book was published in five languages, went through four editions and 20 reprints, and sold 100,000 copies, primarily in Australia and mostly as a final year and university textbook. It concerns technological change, and how it can enlarge or threaten human capacity. The book has amazing breadth. It argues against overspecialisation, and for service industries and the production of high value-added brand name goods. In Australia, Jones was 20 years ahead of his time.

Jones discusses his often frustrated role as Minister for Science from 1983 to 1990, sometimes without staff, and often without power. The power of television is indicated by the fact that when he was coming to the end of his Ministerial career people would approach him in the street and say, ‘We all loved you in the quizzes. What are you doing these days?’ Jones’ advocacy of new technology, IT and biotech industries did have remarkable influence in one country. The OECD review of Australia’s science and technology policies in 1984 included an Irish official, who read Jones’ works closely. Their 1986 report emphasises the importance of ‘knowledge-intensive’ services. The Irish official became principal adviser to the Irish prime minister, John Bruton, who told Jones that his policies significantly influenced Ireland’s technological revolution. Since implementing Jones’ policies, Ireland has enjoyed an annual growth of 10 per cent a year over many years, and has a per capita income about twice Australia’s.

The climax – or epitaph – of the book is Jones’ discussion of his ‘years of [intellectual] exile’: 1979, when belief in government economic intervention ‘collapsed’ around the world; 1989, when only ‘triumphant capitalism’ was left standing as a model after communism collapsed in Europe; and 2001 when ‘fear of terrorism debased democratic practice’.

It is likely that most people will not read the 560 pages of Jones’ intellectual autobiography. I suggest that the five ‘diamond’ chapters totalling 180 pages, with Adams’ foreword and the 17 photos of world figures that Jones has taken, should be published in paperback, with the provisional title ‘From Quiz Champion to Global Prophet’. If they are promoted among young people such as university students (at an age when people are most likely to be receptive to new ideas), this quality autobiography should have the readership and influence that it deserves.