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At Sydney Teachers’ College and the University of Sydney, and through his publications and related work, Alexander Mackie developed his public persona as an academic. His private persona – particularly within his family – also reflected his academic values. The idea of a family of academics had its origins in the eighteenth century, when secular teachers began to replace religious orders in universities. Some sons even expected to occupy university posts held by their fathers.325 From the nineteenth century, merit and academic values prevailed over privileges of birth in academic careers. Such was the case with the Mackie family – the Mackies’ academic accomplishments were based not on primogeniture but on a search for knowledge and on merit gained through achievement.

A bachelor’s life

Having left his immediate family behind in Edinburgh, Alexander spent his early years in Australia principally in the company of men. Elizabeth Skillen, who had been appointed just before Alexander arrived, became one of his closest colleagues at Sydney Teachers’ College. Admired as a lecturer in English, she soon acquired the nickname ‘Good Queen Bess’. She later became an intimate friend of the Mackie family.326 But she was an exception. The staff at the teachers’ college and the University of Sydney were almost all male.

110Alexander’s new circle of friends and associates comprised not only academics but also other male professionals. The foundations of his early associations in Australia included not just the college and the university but also Sydney’s gentlemen’s clubs. By December 1906, Francis Anderson had arranged accommodation and temporary membership for Alexander at the Australian Club. The oldest gentlemen’s club in Sydney, the Australian Club had been associated with the University of Sydney since the university’s foundation in the 1850s. A number of chancellors of the university had been members, and the club’s roster included members of the judiciary and other university-based professions, such as medicine. When the Australian Club decided to move to Macquarie Street in the 1890s, the university financed the construction of a new clubhouse from the bequest of the philanthropist Henry Challis, who had been a member of the club.327 As Alexander told his father, the Australian Club was ‘well situated’ in Macquarie Street, overlooking the Botanic Gardens, the governor’s residence and other public buildings; ‘Macquarie is the most attractive quarter of the city and one end of it is given almost entirely to medical men.’328 In some ways, Macquarie Street in Sydney was a reminder of the residences of the medical professionals in Edinburgh.

Sydney’s gentlemen’s clubs sought to mirror other clubs in the Empire, particularly those in London. Academics often formed an important part of club culture. Over two-thirds of the professors who came to Australia from the mid-to late nineteenth century were drawn from the urban middle class.329 With his social and educational background, Alexander had reason to feel at home in the professional, middle-class world of Sydney. Clubs provided good dining, allowing him to meet with many university figures over lunch or dinner, including Professor Francis Anderson, Henry Barff (the university registrar) and Professor T.W. Edgeworth David, whose wife, Cara, was on the college staff and had previously been the head of the teachers’ college for women, which had just closed.330

111Through Sydney’s clubs, Alexander met another Scottish immigrant, Dr Gordon MacLeod, a medical graduate of Edinburgh. MacLeod became a close companion of Alexander’s soon after Alexander arrived in Sydney. They later shared rooms in ‘Wyoming’ at 175 Macquarie Street, close to the Australian Club. The architect-designed eight-storey building, constructed of reinforced masonry concrete, opened in 1911 as a city address appealing particularly to medical doctors and other professionals. ‘Wyoming’ still stands – an example of the Federation Free Style in Sydney, with its extensive stonework and Art Deco details.

Mackie and MacLeod often spent Saturday or Sunday exploring the suburbs of Sydney, travelling to Rockdale and walking, or to Pennant Hills and its orchards. Alexander became familiar with Sydney’s natural environment but not always with its bird life. On one occasion, he told his father that he had gone for a walk on the local golf course and ‘listened to the larks singing’ in ‘great numbers’ and ‘all very vigorous’.331 No doubt he meant the magpies, a branch of the Australian currawongs.

By July 1908, Alexander had confirmed his place within the university community by joining the University of Sydney Club, listing his residence as 157 Macquarie Street (the address of the Council of Education until the enactment of the 1880 Act).332 The University Club was formed in 1905 for staff and graduates. Its first patron was Sir Henry Normand MacLaurin, a Scottish-born medical doctor and chancellor of the university. Mackie came to know MacLaurin well during the negotiations to establish the teachers’ college within the university grounds.

While his early social contacts in Sydney were academics and professionals, Alexander quickly developed an interest in the general Australian way of life. During his first Christmas holidays in Australia, he boarded a ferry to Manly. Arriving at Manly wharf, he had a ‘bathe in the bay’, swimming in an area that was enclosed ‘to prevent sharks coming in’. In a letter to his father, Alexander wrote:

Having experienced the sun and sea in Sydney, Alexander would soon come into contact with academics, students and teachers in another part of the Australian natural environment. Just as nineteenth-century Oxford dons favoured participation in sports to build physique and character – as well as to engage with undergraduates – climbing mountains became a way of life for many Scottish academics. These academics were attracted to the athleticism of mountaineering, influenced in part by climbers in Europe and beyond. Educated at Glasgow and Oxford, the historian and liberal politician James Bryce helped to found an informal mountaineering club in the 1860s. Bryce ventured into and over the Carpathian Mountains and later climbed Mount Ararat, encountering Christian Armenians under Turkish rule.334 By the 1880s, students in Scotland were forming climbing clubs. Most of their focus was on the hard-to-access highlands in North-East Scotland, near Aberdeen. When Alexander went to Bangor in Wales, he carried with him a passion for climbing peaks, which he soon brought to Australia.

As the barrier between New South Wales and Victoria, the Snowy Mountains had often attracted interest from overseas visitors. John Lhotsky, of Czech background, travelled to the area in the 1830s, publishing A journey from Sydney to the Australian alps. In 1840, the Polish explorer and scientist Strzelecki named Mount Kosciuszko after the Polish patriot. The area continued to attract interest from scientists in the late nineteenth century. When Alexander arrived in Australia, there was a growing interest in the ‘ice age’ within the University of Sydney. Appointed professor of geology at the university in 1891, T.W. Edgeworth David soon extended his interest in glaciers to the Snowy River region. From 1901, he began a series of expeditions to the area to examine glacial formations.335 His geological work was recognised internationally.

113David’s scientific studies coincided with growing tourism in the Snowy Mountains. In January 1907, the New South Wales Tourism Department helped to organise a party of twenty-seven travellers under David’s leadership. Some members of the party had scientific expertise, such as C.A. Sussmilch, a lecturer in geology at Sydney Technical College, and E.C. Andrews, from the government geological survey. Some were David’s students at the university. David’s wife, Cara, accompanied six women on the expedition – the first time females had climbed the Snowy Mountains.

Alexander was invited to join the party as a friend of the Davids. Ernest Kilburn Scott, who lectured in engineering at the University of Sydney, kept a journal of the trip. Somewhat of a humourist, Kilburn Scott wrote that Mackie ‘rode round to Bangor’ – a clear reference to Alexander’s recent academic post in Wales. He also interviewed Alexander, describing him as ‘our new chum’, and asking him whether he was married and, if not, ‘what were his limitations’. Alexander replied, perhaps half in jest, ‘Just like a Scot of base lowland descent to ask such questions’.336

The trip began in Sydney. The group travelled by rail to Cooma and then drove by carriage to the junction of the Thredbo and Snowy Rivers at the foot of the ascent to the Kosciuszko Plateau. The party camped at the junction, where the government was erecting an accommodation house for tourists. For the first part of the ascent, the government had cleared a road. After that, it was a steep walk with the assistance of a bullock wagon. The trip extended over eight days and covered 100 miles.

In keeping with his usual practice as a correspondent, Alexander wrote regular letters to his father in Edinburgh while on this trip; in fact, he wrote to William every day of the trip.337 These letters are reproduced below, with notes to illuminate Alexander’s text. On several occasions, Alexander reflected that parts of the Kosciuszko area reminded him of the high country in Scotland. As usual, he began his letters to his father with ‘My dear Papa’ and closed with ‘Yours affectionately, A. Mackie’.

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129The expedition was not only symbolic but also formative in recognising the Snowy Mountains as a significant region for scientific research and tourism. When the party had returned to Sydney, Professor David published a number of articles in the press indicating that the trip had embraced ‘science and pleasure’. The expedition had confirmed that the Kosciuszko Plateau was a ‘resort both for health, pleasure and studies in natural history’.357

Professor David’s summertime adventure in the Snowy Mountains led on to an Antarctic expedition. At the end of 1907, David and two of his students, Douglas Mawson and Leo Cotton, joined the English explorer Ernest Shackleton in New Zealand to prepare for a visit to Antarctica. Aged fifty, David was given a leadership role. The group climbed Mount Erebus, the second highest volcano in Antarctica. David, Mawson and a young Forbes Mackay then dragged sleds from sea level to the ice plateau – one of the early epics of Antarctic exploration.358

Alexander Mackie’s climbing adventures were less significant in international terms, but they became a way of discovering Australia. In the three years from 1908 to 1910, he travelled to Tasmania in the summer holidays. Often staying at the Tasmanian Club in Hobart, he went walking, fishing and climbing. During his first trip, in January 1908, Alexander wrote to his father that he had spent ‘a long hard day’ trout fishing at the Broad River near Hobart. He told William that the river was ‘hardly larger than the Kirkney’ near Aberdeen but the water was ‘perfectly clear’; without a cloud in the sky, it was hard to get trout ‘without being seen’. He fished in the middle of the stream because the banks were overgrown, and his legs were ‘so badly sunburned’.359

Apart from fishing and walking, during these visits to Tasmania Alexander was often on the lookout for other immigrants. In 1908, he met an ‘old gentleman’ from Edinburgh who was a resident of Queensland and had first visited Tasmania in 1834.360 He also encountered an emigrant from Hanover who had come to Tasmania thirty years earlier, following the Franco-Prussian War of

1301870–71.361 And there were opportunities for social contact with other holidaymakers from Sydney. In 1909, Alexander had lunch near Hobart with William Cullen, who was the vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney (1908–11) and would soon become chancellor (1914–34). An eminent barrister, Cullen had just been appointed chief justice of New South Wales.362

In 1910, Alexander spent a week ‘wandering in the wilds of Tasmania’. With two others, he explored the area around Deloraine in northern Tasmania, walking and climbing around the ‘Great Lake’. In a letter to his father, he described the lake as ‘a great sheet of water 28,000 acres of water with the tops of mountains showing all round’. He admired the mountain scenery, which he considered ‘quite equal … to anything in Scotland’. Walking fifteen miles to the end of the lake, he took shelter in a shepherd’s hut. In the following days, the party of three ‘wandered about the moors’, took ‘trips over rough roads’ and on one day walked forty to forty-five miles, ‘crossing rivers – looked like a “highland glen” in one place’. They reached Lake St Clair, which Alexander described as ‘quite different from the Great Lake and … really one of the finest pieces of scenery I have ever seen’. The trip ended after seven days.363

E.R. Holme, the new assistant professor of English at the University of Sydney, went with Alexander to Tasmania in January 1910. During that trip, Alexander had to forgo a climb at a spot known as the ‘Organ Pipes’ on Mount Wellington, near Hobart; as he told his father, ‘Holme has never done any climbing and indeed is too fat for anything of the sort so I had reluctantly to forego the conquest till I can find a more suitable companion for this is not an attempt that should be undertaken alone’.364

131Probably unknown to Alexander, Charles Darwin had climbed Mount Wellington in 1836. After visiting Sydney as part of a five-year voyage of discovery, the HMS Beagle had made a brief stop in Hobart. Darwin had failed in his first attempt to climb the mountain but succeeded in his second, finding that ‘in many parts the gum trees grew to a great size’, while in ‘some of the dampest ravines tree ferns flourished in an extraordinary manner’. Due to the climate, local aspect and composition of the population, Darwin preferred Hobart to Sydney even though he knew of the fate of the Aboriginal population in Tasmania.365

Alexander had been greatly impressed by Tasmania’s physical beauty, which reminded him of Scotland. In later years, he would return with his family. But in 1910, he knew that his home was in Sydney.

The marriage of Alec and Annie

In April 1910, Alexander found himself in an awkward social situation, out of place in mixed company. Following the University of Sydney’s Commemoration Day celebrations, there was a lunch party at the Hotel Australia. As Alexander told his father, attendees included ‘my old enemy Miss McDonald’ (the principal of Women’s College at the University of Sydney), various males from the university and medical and health figures, all of whom had brought ‘their respective wives’. He wrote to his father, ‘I suppose I was there to make up the necessary number of men’.366

Three months later, Alexander told his father that he had gone for a ‘motor run’ to Pennant Hills with his companion MacLeod and that he had visited Manly to see the inspector-general of the insane. Almost as an afterthought, he penned the following comment on the marital status of staff at Sydney Teachers’ College: ‘Dr Cole is to marry and I shall be left alone for all the members of the staff are married’.367 This seems an obvious signal of his intentions.

According to his daughter, Margaret, Alexander first caught sight of his future wife at a school ceremony soon after his arrival in Sydney. As part of his

132introduction to Sydney schools, he presented the prizes at Sydney Girls High in late 1906. There he saw ‘a beautiful auburn-haired girl’ who was receiving an award.368 Reputedly, Alexander kept a portrait of the young Scottish lass by his side for the rest of his life.369

Annie Burnett Duncan was the daughter of Scottish immigrants to New South Wales. Both her parents came from Keith in Banffshire, close to Huntly, where the Mackies originated. This area was in the heartland of traditional parish education, where the democratic ideal of the ‘lad o’ pairts’ flourished. In reality, as recent research suggests, only a few students continued to the end of school and even fewer went on to university. In this rural environment, many boys left school early to help on the farms.370 And so it was with the Duncan family.

Annie’s father, John Duncan, was the youngest of seven sons. His family had a small farm and were tenants of the Duke of Gordon. John attended school in winter and was engaged in farm work in summer. He left school early, working on the farm and learning the craft of boot making. In 1880, he sailed ‘steerage’ for Australia. Despite his interrupted schooling, John was literate and committed to education, although not necessarily for women. In Australia, he continued his education, perfecting his grammar and becoming interested in debating and politics.371

A family link to education and teaching can be found more clearly on Annie’s mother’s side. In late nineteenth-century Scotland, opportunities were emerging for women in teaching; males, such as Alexander Mackie, were turning away from teaching and towards academia and senior positions in education administration. Aboard the ship on which John Duncan sailed were two daughters of a Scottish baker: twenty-one-year-old Jessie Stuart and nineteen-year-old Mary Stuart. Jessie was a dressmaker, but her sister Mary had completed certificates as a ‘lady learned’ at the University of Aberdeen. They travelled second class but had friends in first class due to Mary’s talents as a singer. In Sydney, Mary

133presented herself for examination as a teacher and became the head of a school in Wollongong.372

Once in Sydney, Jessie Stuart married John Duncan. They settled in Manly, where John opened a boot-making shop. He later found a position with the Sydney Ferry Company, which had emerged from the North Shore Steam Ferry Company founded by Dugald Thomson and J.P. Garvan in the late 1870s. John became closely associated with Dugald Thomson, who was elected to the seat of North Sydney on a free trade platform in the first federal election in 1901. Thomson became minister for home affairs in the Reid government in 1904–05.373 Jessie worked for the retail merchants Thompson and Giles in George Street (John Thompson was the great-grandfather of the author of this study). Her household was open to recent arrivals from Scotland, including George Sutherland, who soon took up a position in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney and married Jessie’s daughter Mary.

As new settlers, the Duncans integrated into the Scots-Australian community and culture. Scottish culture in New South Wales was initially founded on a Caledonian Society of lowlanders and a Gaelic Society of highlanders. In the late 1870s, a new Highland Society was formed to represent all Scots in the colony. The aims of this society included promoting Gaelic language, literature and music and Highland games, supporting the social and intellectual improvement of members, caring for new arrivals and commemorating Scottish days. By 1892, soon after the Duncans had arrived in Sydney, the Highland Society had over 400 members.374 Dugald Thomson became a senior office holder in the society and probably helped to involve the Duncan family.

Annie Duncan, born in 1889, was the first of John and Jessie’s three children. She initially attended a small school run by a Scotswoman, but soon transferred to Manly Public School. From there, she won a scholarship to Sydney Girls High School. Founded in 1883, Sydney Girls High was a secondary school with a strong academic emphasis. Many of the girls matriculated to the University of Sydney. The school’s headmistress, Lucy Garvin, often had to steer a careful

134course between parents’ expectations of examination success for their daughters and the caution of the educational bureaucracy, who, as Alexander Mackie found in the 1920s, were trained as elementary school teachers with little understanding of how to teach academic subjects at a secondary level. In 1903, around the time Annie Duncan entered the school, there was an official report criticising Garvin’s administration. However, Garvin survived as head until 1918.375

While her father had a low opinion of the ‘female mind’, her mother – and her aunt’s example – encouraged Annie to consider attending university and pursuing a career in teaching. Annie entered the University of Sydney in 1909 on a bursary (awarded to high achieving students from ‘modest’ backgrounds). She studied in the Faculty of Arts and graduated with first class honours in both French and German. She was interviewed for a travelling scholarship to France but was told that it had been awarded to Alec Chisholm, later professor of French at the University of Melbourne. Annie taught in a small school and then enrolled in the new Diploma of Education.376 Her daughter, Margaret, later claimed that completing a degree with high academic standing had become the norm within the Duncan family – all but one of Annie’s generation were university graduates.377

Alexander Mackie was always keen to identify students with Scottish backgrounds. In July 1910, he wrote to his father in Edinburgh that among the recent university graduates was ‘one pretty girl with honours in modern languages’. This was an obvious reference to Annie, who he may have remembered from the awards ceremony at Sydney Girls High School five years earlier. In the later part of this correspondence, Alexander reminded his father that ‘I think I told you of the little Edinburgh girl who has just come from the Boroughmuir school with a charming Edinburgh accent. I nearly jumped out of my chair when she first spoke to me’ (whether this referred to Annie is not clear; it mentions Edinburgh connections, while Annie’s family came from North-East Scotland).378

135After completing the Diploma of Education, Annie taught for a year at Fort Street Girls High School, which opened in 1911. She was then appointed to the staff at Sydney Teachers’ College. Serious courting between Alexander and Annie blossomed. Annie called Alexander ‘Alec’, which soon became his name within his family. They went for bush walks in Frenchs Forest, across Middle Harbour. On 17 December 1912, there was an engagement tea party at ‘Farmers’, a retail store in the city – a small party attended by Peter Board’s family, Miss Skillen and Miss Simpson (who taught the Montessori method at the college). From Edinburgh, William Mackie sent best wishes to his future daughter-in-law, initiating correspondence that would continue over the following years. The two shared common interests in gardening and exchanged the intimacies of daily life.379

On 13 June 1913, Alec and Annie were wed at St Peter’s Presbyterian Church in North Sydney – the Duncans’ family kirk. Alexander was thirty-seven; Annie was twenty-four. This was a marriage of individuals committed to academic learning, but it was not a marriage of social equals. Annie was much younger than her new husband and could not match his status. Marriage put paid to her career at the college, and as a professor’s wife she did not find the stimulation she had expected from the academic world. In the words of her daughter, Margaret, ‘my mother’s hope that in marrying a professor she would be in a position to “meet intellectual people” was not an expectation of attending academic occasions. She wanted contact with people having her own level of education.’380 In her published memoirs, Margaret Mackie suggested that her mother wanted to model herself on Maybanke Anderson, the founder of the kindergarten movement in New South Wales and wife of Francis Anderson. Denied the opportunity for a career, Annie found some comfort in the Women’s Club, which was designed for university graduates and offered lectures and conversation. She also acted as a travellers’ aid at Central Station, greeting incoming passengers.381

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137For the first years of their marriage, Alexander and Annie lived at Neutral Bay, near the harbour. They had expected to find a house near the university, but contact with a member of Sydney’s Scottish community led to a change of direction. Alexander met Margaret Thyne, who had been his neighbour in Edinburgh.382 She was married to Andrew Reid, who had been a general importer and, in 1912, had become the sole proprietor of the manufacturing firm James Hardie, which he had joined as a bookkeeper when he came to Sydney in the 1880s. The Reids were part of a colony of Scots settlers on the Upper North Shore.

Following the opening of the North Shore railway line in the 1890s, some of Sydney’s wealthy had built out of town homes on large blocks around Wahroonga. By World War One, it was becoming a more permanent and affluent suburb, part of the development of the Upper North Shore, appealing to new settlers such as the Mackies. Sydney architect William Hardy Wilson, who designed houses in the ‘colonial style’, built Purulia in the nearby suburb of Warrawee in 1913.383 In 1927, the local historian Charles Witham wrote that the Upper North Shore’s population was ‘about eighty four per cent Protestants’, including ‘many Scots’.384 Essentially, Wahroonga was becoming an upper-middle-class Scottish enclave with suburban aspirations and utilities, including new schools. Its location and ambience did not always suit Annie’s expectations as a French teacher with high academic qualifications who once had hopes of a career at the teachers’ college. For Alexander, there was bushland nearby and the prospect of walks.

In November 1914, Alexander asked the Sydney architect Edward N. Vennard to prepare plans for a residence at Wahroonga, fronting Woonona Avenue, on a property of 132 by 165 feet, next door to the Reids. By 1916, the Mackies had taken possession of the house and property. The site was within half a mile of Wahroonga railway station, but it was far from friends, such as Miss Skillen at the college, and distant from the Lower North Shore, where the Duncan family lived.385 The bridge across Sydney Harbour was still not built, and trips to the city and the university could take an hour each way by train, tram and ferry.

The Mackie house was built in the revived colonial style popularised by Hardy Wilson. It had pillars and a slate roof. The residence was named

138Drumgrain in recognition of the spinning wheel sent as a wedding present from a Scottish farm of the same name. For physical exercise, Alexander worked in the garden and went for daily walks. He had become interested in Australian plants and gained knowledge through his travels and treks. The Mackie garden soon produced fruit, vegetables and native flowers. For the next quarter-century, their home in Wahroonga would be the centre of the Mackies’ life in Sydney.

Bringing up Margaret and John

According to her daughter, Annie Mackie did not seek to be a mother. When she became pregnant soon after marriage, she told her new husband that she had no idea how to bring up children. Alexander apparently replied that she had better learn and even brought home books to help.386

Named after Alexander’s mother, who had died in childbirth, Margaret Davidson Mackie was born in Neutral Bay on 12 November 1914. In Edinburgh, William Mackie had already welcomed Annie as his daughter-in-law. A series of letters from mid-1913 suggests that since the wedding Alexander’s father had been in contact with his daughter-in-law more than with his own son. Almost every month he would send a letter telling Annie of his walks around Edinburgh and at Leith, familiarising her with Alexander’s childhood home and the surrounding area. For a man of his age, William was a good correspondent of changing times. In July 1913, he wrote about a ‘Sabbath walk’ in Edinburgh, visiting churches and encountering a ‘Wild Australia’ circus of horses and kangaroos as well as ‘blue jackets’ from the battleships in the Forth, a sign of possible war approaching.387

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140William welcomed Margaret’s birth with great delight. In October 1916, when the Mackie family had settled into their home at Wahroonga, he wrote to Annie that he was grateful for all the news and photos he was receiving because they ‘bring Margaret and yourself nearer to me’. With high expectations for two-year-old Margaret, he added that ‘She is looking quite at home and I am going to have a letter from her sometime soon’.388 As Christmas 1916 approached, William told Annie that Margaret ‘is seldom out of my thoughts though that is not to be wondered at as she is a dear little woman and for you to watch her development day by day will be a great joy. I wonder where she could have got the word “Fader” as I am sure I have not heard it since I was a boy at Huntly.’389

Annie was soon pregnant again. 1917 was a difficult year for her. Her close Scots-born friend, the sculptor John Christie Wright, was killed on the Western Front. He had been awarded the local Wynne Art Prize for a sculpture of Annie completed in 1913. Obviously conscious that his own mother had died giving birth to her second child, Alexander arranged for Annie to be hospitalised. On 9 August 1917, Annie wrote to Alexander from a private hospital in Killara, describing her nurse: ‘She is buxom and bonny and Macdonald by name, her voice proclaiming her origins.’390 After a difficult confinement, John Leslie Mackie was born on 25 August 1917. The baby was unwell for a number of months, but within a year all members of the household were commenting on his potential.391

Alexander determined that both his children would be educated at home before being sent to school. He was attracted to the ideas of the progressive Scottish educator A.S. Neill. In 1915, Neill published A dominie’s log, an account of the struggles of a young teacher in a single-teacher school in Scotland. Instead of traditional discipline and punishment, the teacher sought to appeal to the interests of the children. Alexander referred to the book in his lectures to students at Sydney Teachers’ College to show that children learn willingly, and even spontaneously. He decided to use some of Neill’s methods to help bring up his own children.392

During Annie’s second pregnancy, Alexander assumed more responsibility for Margaret. In 1917, he wrote regularly to his father, describing his young daughter’s progress. In May, Alexander reported that he and Margaret were finding ‘recuperation’. The colder weather was giving her cheeks colour not often seen

141in Sydney children, but more frequent north of the Tweed in Scotland. Margaret was ‘becoming more talkative’ and ‘her tongue is seldom at rest for long while she is awake’.393 A month later, Alexander wrote that Margaret was going with him to her grandmother’s in North Sydney at least twice a week. He noted that she liked the outing and ‘conducts herself quite well in the train’. She was ‘speaking very energetically’; Alexander managed to keep her quiet when she came into his study to play, but ‘after a time she asks anxiously if she can talk and I allow a few minutes relaxation of the rule’.394 Two months later, Alexander told his father that Margaret had recovered from a bout of illness and was now keen to help in the kitchen, cooking ‘a variety of miscellaneous objects’. He noted that ‘Make believe has begun and she now provides me cups of what she calls fresh air and takes an imaginary doll out for a walk’.395

Alexander’s letters to his father mentioned some of the academic forms of child study that had become popular in the field of education from the late nineteenth century. In some ways, these letters were Alexander’s own ‘dominie’s log’. They captured his young daughter’s growth, at least through the eyes of a parent. The adult Margaret had a different view of her early upbringing. In her unpublished manuscript A Wahroonga childhood, she wrote: ‘It was fairly clear that at this time that my father’s expertise in looking after very young children was not highly developed … My father had once, at a much earlier stage, been left in charge when I was in my pram, strapped in apparently securely. He had gone on with his gardening, believing that nothing untoward could possibly happen.’396

Much of the actual child rearing was left to Annie. After John’s birth, she began to make notes on the progress of both children.397 The Mackies also employed ‘housekeepers’, who helped Annie to look after the young children. Initially, a South African of Dutch descent, Mrs Termousheyen – who Margaret called ‘Toby’ – had much of the responsibility. In her memoirs, Margaret described Toby as one of her ‘early friends’. Another housekeeper, ‘Annie’, taught Margaret

142to read, concentrating on individual letters in a ‘rag alphabet book’. Margaret then passed her word skills on to her brother.398 Alexander was sceptical of such an approach, lest it lead to a distaste for learning. But these lessons fostered the children’s interest in words, even if they could not yet read text.399

Margaret and John also attended Sunday school at the Wahroonga Presbyterian Church. Modern methods of kindergarten teaching were practised at the Sunday school, although the local teacher was shocked when Margaret challenged the Adam and Eve story, presenting the view of human evolution she had learned from her father. Alexander had little interest in Presbyterian services and sermons

143but seems to have accepted that the Sunday school would introduce his children to the local congregation, many of whom were Scottish Australians.400

In 1921, Alexander and Annie travelled to Britain, taking seven-year-old Margaret and John, soon turning four, with them. Alexander was on study leave, intending to visit universities and attend the Imperial Education Conference. The trip was also an opportunity to visit his family in Edinburgh and Huntly and introduce them to Annie and the children. On 12 February 1921, the family sailed from Sydney on the Ormonde, a 14,000-ton Orient Line Royal Mail steamer bound for Toulon in the south of France. They disembarked in Toulon and made their way across France to Britain.401 Their time in France was obviously in recognition of Annie’s interest and university qualifications in French.

Just before the family left Sydney, they received news that William Mackie had died. This undoubtedly influenced the homecoming, which proved difficult in many ways. For several months in 1921, the family was based in Edinburgh, where Alexander’s sister, Maggie, still lived. As an eager academic – but perhaps a less dutiful husband and father – Alexander often left his family alone while he journeyed to conferences and visited university colleagues in England. Annie frequently felt deserted. Soon after arriving in Edinburgh, she suggested that her absent spouse should make more effort to write to her and should send a telegram when he arrived at his destination, lest she be ‘left anxious too long’. In August, while staying with Alexander’s aunt near Aberdeen, Annie wrote of sunny days and happy children but closed her letter with ‘You will be on your way to Thetford [in Suffolk] today. I hope you will have a pleasant time with your ideals and idealists.’402 Back in Edinburgh, as the dark winter nights closed in, she wrote to her husband ‘I had your letter this morning telling me of your further educational adventures. Won’t you soon have had enough of this wandering around?’403

Relations with Alexander’s extended family in Scotland complicated the journey. According to Margaret’s account, her mother had expected to stay with

144the children in a hotel in Edinburgh. Instead, Maggie offered them the use of the Mackie family home, where William Mackie had lived until his recent death. Maggie had worked hard to clean the house (including throwing out the extensive letters Annie had written to her father-in-law). She believed that having a home would make Annie and her young family independent. Annie felt obliged to take up this offer and therefore had to clean and maintain a house during her ‘holiday’ under conditions that were different from what she had known in Australia.404

Annie continued to find the ways of her Scottish in-laws difficult. When she accompanied Alexander on trips to London and Oxford, Margaret and John were left with Alexander’s sister, who lived within walking distance of Dean Terrace. Maggie was married to Robert Chisolm, but they had no children. She bought and dressed John, still aged three, in a kilt, but without underpants. He complained of the cold and developed a chill and a high temperature. Annie was then summoned by telegram and decided to return with the children to Dean Terrace, where they lived on ‘half a loaf of yesterday’s bread’ until she was able to replenish her housekeeping funds.405 Annie told Alexander ‘I didn’t think we are not “wanted” at Marjie’s place’.406 She was obviously missing her own family and the warmth of the Australian summer.

Alexander tried to maintain good relations with his sister and brother-in-law, but there were continuing differences and confusions, particularly concerning the children attending church. Maggie wanted to show her young niece and nephew off to the local congregation, but Annie was not warned of the proposed visit and would not let them attend because they were not properly dressed. Maggie tearfully reproached her brother, leading Alexander, ‘who disapproved of uncontrolled behaviour in children, let alone adults’, to tell Annie that ‘he had thought Maggie would have been beyond that sort of behaviour at her age’. When Maggie was able to take the children to church, she gave John an object to play with but expected Margaret to listen to the sermon, which meant nothing to a seven-year-old.407

145A trip to Huntly to see Alexander’s aunt proved equally awkward. Alexander remembered his days fishing in the Bogie and Deveron rivers with great affection. He pointed the ‘beautiful and undulating’ country out to Annie and took the children fishing for trout. His Aunt Jemina still lived in the family cottage, with a fuel stove and unplumbed bathroom fittings. When he was on leave in 1911, Alexander had arranged to give his aunt a bathroom, but a decade later it was still not installed. Annie found Aunt Jemina’s house very inconvenient, and not just for the lack of washing facilities. The ‘sabbath’ was strictly maintained – play was not allowed and children were expected to be quiet in the local kirk. To avoid such restrictions, Annie took the children to the nearby riverbank, but they fell into the river and returned to the house wet.408

In A Wahroonga childhood, Margaret has suggested that the tension between Annie and Aunt Jemina may have arisen because Alexander was no longer able to cater for his aunt now that he had a wife. Also, like Maggie, Jemina had no experience with children, and Annie, who had trained as a teacher, had strict standards regarding her children’s upbringing. Overall, Alexander’s relatives in Scotland had little understanding of the progressive views on education that Alexander and Annie preached and practised. Rather, they remembered the young Alexander, who had achieved so much in Scotland and had been an intimate part of the Mackie family. His sister, Maggie, found Alexander much changed from his days in Edinburgh, commenting about people ‘coming back with their professor ways’ while she had been left to take care of domestic duties for their father and her husband.409

Before the family left Britain, Annie turned once again to the children’s education. In Edinburgh, John had begun to practise reading, not only at home but also in the street. On one occasion, he asked his mother to pause while he worked out the meaning of a sign above a shop. He discovered that it said ‘cigarettes’, impressing passers-by.410 Annie began formal two-hour lessons with Margaret, who had now turned seven – the compulsory age for school attendance in New South Wales. These lessons continued when the family left Edinburgh and settled in

146Hove, near Brighton, for a short period. When Annie was sick with the flu, Alexander took over teaching, giving lessons not just on identifying words but also on ascertaining the meaning of sentences. Believing that the best form of English was that spoken in Edinburgh, with an educated Scottish accent, Alexander emphasised the importance of correct pronunciation. Margaret also learned multiplication tables in Hove, helped by the use of Montessori rods, which Margaret Simpson had introduced at Sydney Teachers’ College.411

The family sailed for home in early 1922, departing from Toulon aboard the Orvieto. Margaret could now read text fluently, including Cyril Burt’s academic study, Mental and scholastic tests, which had just been published in 1921. Alexander tested both children; Margaret came to understand the principles behind the tests, while John achieved far beyond his age. Margaret even began to take an interest in astronomy. This was the beginning of her attraction to education and learning, which was stimulated by the books Alexander brought home and by her own work as a junior Sunday school teacher at the local Presbyterian church.412

Drumgrain School

When the Mackies returned to Sydney in 1922, a more formal homeschooling regime commenced. Margaret completed two hours of unsupervised study each day while Annie continued with housework. Margaret’s school work was based on the formal New South Wales syllabus. When she told her father that she wanted to go to an actual school with other children, Alexander wrote ‘Drumgrain School’ on her lesson book, associating the name of the family home with a form of education.413 When John started formal lessons, both children began to write verse, which was reproduced in the Drumgrain News. Some of their work was later published in Schooling, the journal of Sydney Teachers’ College.

Alexander and Annie were united in their academic expectations for their children. But there were some differences in their perceptions of the children’s individual potential, based in part on gender, but also on the parents’ views of their

147own academic achievements. Overall, Alexander saw potential in both children. Annie tended to hold high expectations for John but less for Margaret. Margaret later wrote that she had felt she was being ‘singled out’ and even blamed for her mother’s disappointments in her own career. Margaret’s biographer, Kerin Power, points out that the records Alexander and Annie kept on Margaret’s and John’s progress suggest that as the children grew up, they were almost equal in vocabulary and intellectual development. Margaret was using two-word sentences at twenty months of age. By her second birthday, she was using five- and six-word sentences – within the expected range for a child of an educated family. Yet Annie, in particular, believed that John was special (when he was seven, she even asked the artist George Lambert to paint his portrait, just after the formal portrait of Alexander had been unveiled at the teachers’ college).414

In other ways, perceptions of gender roles played a part in the family. John had an interest in ‘mechanical objects’ but was not asked to help the family by

148going shopping. Margaret was found wanting in female accomplishments such as sewing and singing. Unlike her mother, she was not seen as ‘a beauty’. But she had a predilection for realism that would lead to an interest in philosophy and a career in teaching.415

In the mid-1920s, Professor John Adams stayed with the Mackies. Now retired from the University of London, he was on a world tour. Following his visit, he wrote to Annie, describing himself using the English slang term ‘roofter’: someone writing to acknowledge the ‘courtesy of a friendly roof – and yours has always been friendly in all conscience’. He described the children as ‘delightful youngsters under such a charming roof’. Adams worried about the ‘burden’ Annie’s husband had to bear and hoped ‘he will put the brakes on a bit’. It gave him ‘great joy to hear the warm praise of [Alexander] that I encountered on all sides – above all the recognition of [his] unusual combination of perfect courtesy with inflexible firmness’. Adams closed his letter with love to Margaret and John; ‘What an interesting pair they are, and “from interestinger to interestinger[”] – as Alice would say – they will get until they reach their majority’.416

Margaret and Abbotsleigh

In 1924, Margaret Mackie was enrolled at Abbotsleigh, ‘five minutes’ walk’ from the family home. Marian Clarke, an English migrant who had experience teaching in girls’ schools in her homeland and who held a Cambridge Certificate of Higher Education, had founded Abbotsleigh as a private venture school in 1886, following the example of other educated women in Sydney, including her sister Ellen Clarke, who had already opened Normanhurst at Ashfield. Abbotsleigh was established in North Sydney but soon moved to Parramatta, before settling at Wahroonga, where enrolment of both boarders and local day girls increased. The growing enrolments reflected the academic status of the school and the reputation of the headmistress.

The founding of Abbotsleigh, and its subsequent history, demonstrated a shift in Australian girls’ schools from a focus on the ‘polite accomplishments’

149expected of future married ladies towards a formal academic curriculum that allowed access to the public examinations administered by the universities. In 1913, on the eve of World War One, Australian-born Margaret Murray bought the school. With the war bringing about social change, she emphasised religious faith, encouraging her pupils to think about the importance of ‘service’ for women, while continuing to highlight Abbotsleigh-educated university graduates as role models. By that time, Abbotsleigh was formally recognised as a secondary school, accepting state registration and allowing its students to sit for state bursaries.417

When Margaret Mackie arrived at the school at the age of nine, her headmistress was Miss Murray, who was in her final year at Abbotsleigh. After being homeschooled, Margaret now had a new identity; she was told by the headmistress that, dressed in her school uniform, she ‘looked just like an Abbotsleigh girl’.418 Initially, Abbotsleigh found it difficult to judge where Margaret belonged. In her first week, she was first placed in the ‘elementary’ grade, which was designed for children as young as six. She was transferred almost immediately to first form and quickly on to second form. By the following week, she was in third form, which was essentially the beginning of secondary school at Abbotsleigh. Some of the girls in the form were much older than Margaret, as it was still common practice in many secondary schools to grade by ability and achievement rather than age.419

When Margaret entered Abbotsleigh, the school was on the cusp of transition. The Church of England had bought Abbotsleigh as part of a program of acquiring private venture schools in Sydney during the interwar years. The new headmistress, Dorothea Poole, had qualifications that stretched across the Empire. A graduate of the University of Adelaide, with qualifications from Cambridge University and Bedford College in London, she had taught in Adelaide and Melbourne before becoming the founding headmistress of Ballarat Church of England Girls’ Grammar School. Working with the Abbotsleigh Council, Poole insisted that the school remain (non-denominationally) Christian, continuing to accept pupils from the many Presbyterian families in the Wahroonga area.

150During the 1920s, the school built more facilities and increased its enrolments to almost 300 students. Poole continued to emphasise social service as a form of work for women, while recognising that opportunities for paid employment were slowly developing.420

With her experience in other Church schools in Australia, Miss Poole brought greater regularity to Abbotsleigh’s procedures and routine, which Margaret welcomed, provided that she could become familiar with what was required. In

151A Wahroonga childhood, Margaret noted that ‘Having spent much of my earlier years learning informally and not in organised lessons I delighted in organisation’. Since Abbotsleigh was ‘always orderly’, ‘lesson time was spent on lessons’. Discipline was not overt. Under Miss Poole, ‘troublesome girls’ were helped rather than expelled. If necessary, the girls were told that their behaviour was ‘not Abbotsleigh’. Overall, the school’s ethos was founded on the Christian ethic of service and correct conduct, reinforced in chapel and school assemblies.421

Abbotsleigh offered sport as well as drama and debating, all of which attracted Margaret, even though she had little experience of such group activities. At the same time, she found recognition for her academic achievements and encountered other girls with academic associations and aspirations. She completed the Intermediate Certificate with ‘A’ passes in six subjects and a ‘B’ in one. She later claimed that her achievements were an effort to demonstrate her intelligence to her parents. But she also recognised that her family life was of an ‘educative kind’, which conferred advantages on children. This was also the case for some of her classmates. Denise Dettman, who would go on to the University of Sydney and then to Oxford, was the daughter of the headmaster of Sydney Grammar School; Beatrice Brereton came from a distinguished academic and legal family and would go on to study psychology at the University of Sydney and pursue a career in child guidance. Margaret carried an understanding of the advantages of an educative home life into her career as a teacher, emphasising the importance of middle-class family values.422

Following illness, Margaret took the opportunity to repeat part of her secondary schooling, sitting for the Leaving Certificate examination twice and gaining an extra year at Abbotsleigh. In A Wahroonga childhood, she wrote ‘I was never bored with schooling. This may have been partly because of my late start, but the quality of the school is also a relevant factor’.423 Margaret left Abbotsleigh at the end of 1932, after completing the Leaving Certificate the second time. She won an exhibition to the University of Sydney, intending to become a teacher. Margaret’s history teacher, L.A. Greenwood, wrote to Annie that Margaret had

152brought ‘honour to her home, her school and herself, and I rejoice with you on her fine achievement. I shall always be interested in her career and wish her much joy in the profession she has chosen.’424

John and Knox Grammar School

Knox Grammar School opened in 1924, just down the highway, south of Abbotsleigh. One of its founders was the prominent industrialist Andrew Reid, the Mackies’ neighbour. The school was associated with the Presbyterian Assembly, catering for many of the new settlers on the Upper North Shore. Knox’s first headmaster was Neil Harcourt MacNeil, the son of a Presbyterian minister. MacNeil was educated at Scotch College in Melbourne; he rowed in the school eight, played in the first cricket eleven and was dux. After studying classics at the University of Melbourne, he was selected as Rhodes Scholar for Victoria in 1914. In England, he enlisted in November 1914 and was awarded the Military Cross. He was transferred to the Royal Flying School in 1917. After the war, MacNeil studied history at Balliol College at Oxford, where he won a blue for rowing. In 1920–21, he studied divinity at the University of Edinburgh. He then turned to teaching, receiving a teacher’s diploma from the University of London. MacNeil taught at Cheltenham College before returning to Australia to become the foundation head of Knox. The Knox College Council promised a ‘liberal education’ at the school, and MacNeil was committed to a curriculum that included ‘all manly sports’.425

MacNeil was of a younger generation than Alexander Mackie, which may have hindered close personal associations between them. Further, MacNeil’s support for the English public school tradition of ‘athleticism’ may not have appealed to Alexander. But there were some obvious points of convergence: their strong scholastic backgrounds; the tradition of liberal Presbyterianism; their respective periods of study in Edinburgh; and MacNeil’s commitment to professional qualifications in teaching, which was uncommon in Australian corporate or independent schools in the 1920s. MacNeil also supported similar curriculum and examination reforms to Alexander.

153On these grounds, Alexander may have felt confident in enrolling his son, John, at Knox, initially in the preparatory school. While there are no surviving reminiscences of John’s experiences, school reports detailing his academic progress are still extant. Knox was a small school when John was enrolled in 1925, but by 1930 it had over 300 students. In 1926, John was in the upper prep; he was almost nine years old, the average age for the class. Among nineteen boys in the form, he was placed second. His only problem seemed to be arithmetic, but his abilities in this area were improving. The next year John was first in his class. His form master commented that John had ‘gained 1st place against very strong and keen competition. His excellent work is the result of steady effort and a clever young mind. To teach him is a pleasure.’ John’s headmaster, MacNeil, added, ‘We expect much of this young man’.426

In the secondary school, John’s achievements exceeded his peers’. By 1927, aged just ten, he was placed first in the second form; the average age of the form was twelve and a half. A similar age gap (between two and three years) was maintained throughout John’s school career, and he remained top of his class. Although he was not a sportsman, it was noted that, at just under twelve, he was willing to play rugby, despite his small size and lack of experience, and to take his ‘share of the knocks and kicks’. By 1930, aged twelve years and eight months, he was first in the fifth form; most of the boys in this form were fifteen years old. His form master commented that John already had a ‘keen appreciation of literary values, a good memory and sound and independent critical judgment. I can report in equally favourable terms of his mathematics. His conduct and demeanour are always exemplary.’427

Studying academic subjects helped to transform the intelligent John into a scholar and intellectual. Staff at Knox only expressed two reservations about John in his school reports. Some thought that he needed ‘more balance’, which could be achieved by taking games more seriously, even though he was a willing participant in rugby. And some found his emerging style difficult, noting that he had ‘a questioning and logical mind but he should avoid becoming unduly

154argumentative’. To this, MacNeil added, ‘A nice analytical mind that must not be allowed to become penickity [sic]’.428

In 1931, at age fourteen, John was already preparing himself not just for university but also for the academic life of a philosopher, following his father. From 1932 to 1934, he repeated the Leaving Certificate three times to gain a scholarship, eventually enrolling at the University of Sydney in 1935.

The University of Sydney

Margaret and John Mackie had grown up in Wahroonga with little understanding of what their father did across the harbour, at the college and the university. According to Margaret, this was partly due to Annie’s influence. Their mother often emphasised what she could have achieved, failing to indicate what Alexander was doing as college principal and university professor.429

When they enrolled in the 1930s, both Margaret and John were soon caught up in the environment of the University of Sydney. The university was still a small community, with just over 3,000 students, almost one-third of whom were in the Faculty of Arts. The student body had become increasingly active from the late 1920s, when a Student Representative Council was established. The onset of the Great Depression and the deterioration of international affairs in Europe often divided student opinion, separating conservatives and radicals. By the early 1930s, with a growing crisis in the economic and political world order, there was amplified and intense politicisation among the students. In this climate, there was increasing focus on the views of John Anderson, who had been appointed professor of philosophy in 1927. A friend of Alexander Mackie, Anderson, even more than Alexander, adopted the role of the intellectual critic within and outside the university. An enemy of the ‘establishment’, Anderson was a fierce advocate of free speech and the right to protest against religion, as well as against capitalism and imperialism. There was strong student support for his views, leading to the emergence of a student movement calling itself ‘Andersonian’.430

155The Mackies and Andersons lived near each other on the Upper North Shore. But Margaret only encountered John Anderson’s views after she entered the university. They came as almost an epiphany. As Margaret wrote in her memoirs, she was attracted to Anderson’s claim that there was ‘no central purpose’ in life – an assertion that ran counter to all she had previously believed.431 Accepting his views as a new authority, and without consulting her parents, Margaret joined the Freethought Society, which was supported by Anderson’s followers.432 In 1934, Anderson was president of the Freethought Society; Margaret Mackie and J.A. Passmore were vice-presidents. Margaret was also prominent in the Andersonian-influenced Literary Society. Here she encountered Oliver Somerville, a ‘flamboyant poet’ and bohemian radical. When Margaret eventually broke with him, Somerville published the following poem:

Over the next three years, between 1934 and 1937, Margaret Mackie became prominent within university student politics, making numerous public appearances, including standing on a lorry in Moore Park on Labour Day, representing the Sydney Joint Committee for Peace and supporting the Trotskyists against the Stalinists.434

These activities reinforced Margaret’s desire to become a teacher, although she was not sure of her parents’ views on her choice of occupation. Ironically, this decision would eventually distance her from John Anderson. According to Kerin Power, at first Anderson responded to the idea of Margaret becoming a teacher with the claim that ‘All you need is to do something no one else is doing’.

156However, in effect, he distanced himself from Margaret and tended to support his student and mistress Ruth Walker, who was given preferment and a position in the Department of Philosophy.435

Margaret’s immediate aim was to graduate from Oxford. She achieved first class honours in English and philosophy in her final year at the University of Sydney. With financial support from her parents, and after a formal entrance exam, she was admitted to Somerville College at Oxford – the most significant of the women’s colleges founded in the nineteenth century – in 1937. At John Anderson’s suggestion, she studied the ‘modern greats’ of philosophy, politics and economics.

John Mackie was less visible than his sister as a student activist, though he generally adopted an ‘Andersonian’ outlook and even organised the vote for the Communist Party. Interested in classics and mathematics at school, John became an avid student of philosophy under John Anderson’s supervision.436 He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1938 with first class honours in Greek and Latin and the G.S. Caird Scholarship in philosophy. Winning the Wentworth Scholarship, John was admitted to Oriel College in 1938. Both his parents came to Oxford to see him begin his new academic studies.437

Their experiences at the University of Sydney in the late 1930s were formative for both Margaret and John, albeit in different ways. When Anderson died in 1962, John offered his own careful analysis of his former teacher’s significance. He noted that Anderson’s ‘central doctrine is that there is only one way of being, that of ordinary things in space and time, and that every question is a simple issue of truth and falsity, that there are no different degrees or kinds of truth’. Furthermore, Anderson saw ethics as ‘a study of the qualities of human activities; there can be no science of what is right or obligatory, and the study or moral judgements would belong to sociology, not to ethics’ – this would become a central tenet of John Mackie’s own philosophy.438

Another student of Anderson, P.H. Partridge, who became professor of philosophy at the Australian National University, later argued that Anderson’s early

157commitment to idealism in Scotland – before he became a materialist and communist – had shaped his view that philosophy provided the necessary mental apparatus for understanding and criticism illuminating all fields of enquiry. Criticism of beliefs and social institutions was Anderson’s fundamental method of analysis, supplemented by speculation and theoretical imagination. But according to Partridge, Anderson was no disinterested scholar; he saw controversy and polemic as conditions of intellectual vigour. In the end, Anderson’s influence was provincial, confined to the University of Sydney. Anderson had sought to create his own school of philosophy, while many of his students (including Partridge and John Mackie) had pursued international or transnational paths.439

Oxford

Some see the years from 1914 to around 1950 as a golden era for undergraduates at the University of Oxford. Even more than Cambridge, Oxford was a destination for students from across the Empire. This international interest was stimulated, in part, by the award of Rhodes Scholarships.440

Margaret Mackie found life at Oxford far different from the radical student life she had known at Sydney. In the 1930s, an upper-class masculine culture still permeated the university and colleges. Per university statute, women could only comprise one-fifth of undergraduates. Australian women at Oxford were rare, marked by their accents, like Australian men. Margaret approached the Labour Club, expecting to be welcomed, only to find that her views were not wanted. According to her biographer, she told her brother, John, that the Labour Club was composed of ‘Communists with ancestral estates’. The philosophy taught at Oxford was still based on Kant’s moral imperatives and included none of John Anderson’s ‘realism’.441

Even her brother’s arrival did little to make Margaret feel welcome in Oxford, although the siblings travelled to Europe together in 1938, at the time of the Munich crisis. John introduced his sister to Professor Enoch Powell, who had

158returned to Oxford after a brief period at the University of Sydney. John’s introduction of Margaret was an indication of how women were regarded at Oxford at the time: ‘I have invited my sister. She is moderately intelligent, for a woman!’442

The nascent feminist atmosphere at Somerville rescued Margaret. The head of the college reminded her of the ‘oppressed women’ of Oxford. At the same time, the college maintained a strict moral code, ‘sending down’ a student who had a man in her room after 10 pm.443 The Somerville tutor Lucy Sutherland replaced Anderson as Margaret’s mentor. Australian-born and educated in South Africa, Sutherland was conservative in politics, but grounded in history as an academic discipline and the importance of evidence, rather than exposition of the philosophy of John Anderson. A scholar of the eighteenth century, she and Margaret remained lifelong friends. Sutherland rose to become the first pro-vice-chancellor at Oxford in 1960.444

Despite Lucy Sutherland’s support, Margaret struggled with her final exams in 1939; the exams occurred at almost the same time as her father’s stroke during his visit to England. Margaret gained second class honours in PPE (philosophy, politics and economics), rather than the first class results she had desired. Arriving home the day World War Two broke out, she confronted the need to take care of her parents and enrolled in the Diploma of Education at the University of Sydney.445

As a male with strong academic credentials, John Mackie had an easier time at Oxford. But he was still required to overcome certain hurdles. Despite his brilliant academic career at Sydney, John undertook an undergraduate degree in the classical greats (literae humaniores). Requiring students from the dominions to complete an undergraduate degree was common practice at Oxford. In 1922, W.K. Hancock, a Rhodes Scholar from Victoria who soon became the foremost historian of Australia and the Empire, had wanted to begin his research by enrolling in the recently established DPhil, but he was persuaded to take an undergraduate degree first, like other ‘colonials’. This practice persisted until the 1960s.446

159John graduated from Oxford in 1940 with first class honours and immediately began working towards his DPhil, studying ‘Logic and the method of modern physics’. In late 1941, he abandoned this research to join the army, doing technical work on ‘radiolocation’. H.H. Price, a fellow of New College and Wykeham professor of logic at Oxford, wrote a reference indicating that he had never seen John’s written work but had heard him ‘read several papers on philosophical subjects’. Price had ‘no doubt’ of John’s ability, regarding him as ‘one of the three or four ablest young philosophers who have emerged in Oxford in the past year or so’. According to Price, John was ‘clear-headed and ingenious, and very pertinacious in argument; and there is no doubt about his keenness or his power of hard work’. Moreover, John had ‘classical’ and ‘scientific’ training, an ‘unusual advantage which few philosophers in this country, young or old, can claim to share’.

Margaret’s postwar career

At the end of World War Two, universities and colleges in Britain and Australia still catered for an intellectual and social elite constituting less than one-tenth of school leavers. By the 1970s, increased government intervention and spending

160initiated the transition to mass higher education, increasing access to a variety of tertiary institutions. Margaret and John Mackie were partly caught up in this process, although their experiences, values and networks were largely tied to the prewar academic world.

The siblings followed different paths in academic life. Margaret was committed to improving teaching in schools as part of the move towards universal comprehensive secondary education in the 1950s and 1960s. John became a prominent scholar, pursuing academic research in philosophy. In the early postwar years, the two were still drawn together as part of the Mackie family. But by the 1970s, they were drawn apart by separate academic lives.

Like many families in Australia, the war disrupted the Mackie family in numerous ways. Under strained financial circumstances, Alexander and Annie had sold their family home in 1939 and moved to Annie’s parents’ residence at 15 Priory Road, North Sydney. The two often lived apart, each spending time near Mittagong in the Southern Highlands.448 The end of the war led to an improvement in Alexander’s health. He even began to visit Sydney Teachers’ College. But he never fully recovered from the stroke he had suffered in 1939, while in England.

Margaret had returned to Sydney at the beginning of the war to complete her studies and be near her parents. After finishing a Diploma of Education at the University of Sydney, she began her teaching career in state schools, commencing in Sydney and then moving to the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. When she had attended Abbotsleigh, she had little interest in teaching in middle-class schools. Her aim was to bring progressive education to students in rural areas. Even during her teaching practice, she sought to introduce democratic forms of communication, including sitting down to talk, rather than standing before the class.449

In 1949, Margaret returned to Britain, where she re-established contact with Lucy Sutherland, acting as Sutherland’s research assistant. She enrolled for an Oxford BLitt on the Education Act 1944 for England and Wales, which had helped to lay the foundation for a tripartite division between grammar, technical

161and modern secondary schools. Her thesis was rejected, but the experience seems to have stimulated a continuing interest in education research and publication.450

Before leaving for Britain, Margaret had visited the Department of Education in Sydney to enquire about future job prospects. She had met with a number of officials, including Harold Wyndham, a former student of her father’s and now secretary of the department. Upon her return to Australia in 1951, Wyndham informed Margaret that she had been appointed to a lectureship at Armidale Teachers’ College.451 Ironically, S.H. Smith, her father’s nemesis, had established this residential college in 1928. Co-educational but with segregated living for men and women, the Armidale college was, in many ways, designed to counter the progressive views that Alexander Mackie promoted at Sydney Teachers’ College. By the 1950s, Armidale Teachers’ College had become progressive under its new principal, G.W. Bassett. Margaret taught the history and philosophy of education at the college and lectured in the Diploma of Education in the extramural program of the University of New England (which had been established in 1939 as a college of the University of Sydney).

The city of Armidale in northern New South Wales became Margaret’s home for the next half-century. She stayed in touch with her family by correspondence and visited her mother in Sydney during college holidays. Her family background and her education, including an Oxford degree, could be considered an advantage, but Margaret was conscious of the suspicions directed towards those who had once followed John Anderson. In the anti-communist climate of this period, she was determined not to be seen to be attached to any social movement, and she did not reveal her political or religious beliefs.

Margaret kept a low profile in Armidale and had few career ambitions. She was appointed head of department at the teachers’ college but stepped aside when a male complained about her appointment.452 Instead, she concentrated on teaching and worked towards becoming a published author, writing books appealing to both academics and teachers. Few other lecturers at the college had similar goals; they relied on the publications of others in teaching their classes.

162Margaret soon demonstrated that teaching should be research-based, drawing on the lecturer’s own enquiries. In this way, she carried on the traditions of scholarship and research that had been established at Sydney Teachers’ College.

According to her biographer, three prominent influences shaped Margaret’s worldview. The first was her father, who had educated her at home and whose values continued to shape hers. Alexander died five years after Margaret had started at Armidale. According to Margaret, his legacy to her included his liberalism, his philosophical foundations in the Greeks, his communication skills and his intellectual development within the Scottish traditions of frugality and hard work. The second was Professor John Anderson, who had become less significant for her after she left the University of Sydney, but who had introduced her to the ‘secular ethic’, whereby people saw ends in themselves. Third were other philosophers who she saw as more significant than John Anderson in the area of education, including the American John Dewey, who had raised the question of human capabilities.453

In just over a decade, beginning in the mid-1960s, Margaret wrote five books on education. Education in the inquiring society was published in 1966

163by the ACER, which her father had helped to found in 1931. The book was based on the premise that increased leisure allowed for more learning. Influenced, in part, by the views of John Anderson, Margaret argued that taking time to think rationally could lead to ‘objective truth’. The publication of this book resulted in invitations to overseas conferences and other contacts. Margaret visited the University of York in England, where her brother was a professor. He had sent a copy of Education in the inquiring society to the professor of education at the university, who was apparently impressed. John believed that it was his sister’s connection with John Anderson that impressed student audiences at York.454

Margaret’s most significant publication was Educative teaching, released in 1968. This book was written for a readership comprising teachers, parents and the general community. It was divided into two parts. The first part, entitled ‘The theory of education’, explored the history and philosophy of education since the Greeks, recent social and educational change, including her own experiences, and the contributions of twentieth-century philosophers such as Dewey. In this part, Margaret asserted that the main purpose of education was fostering ‘understanding’, which was developed through the stimulation of learning with a focus on enquiry and creative thinking. This emphasis undoubtedly reflected her own early education at Drumgrain. For Margaret, the idea of education fostering understanding became the aim for schools in postwar Australia. Harold Wyndham, then director-general of education in New South Wales, had designed a system of comprehensive schools that had begun to operate from 1962.455 With the introduction of the Wyndham scheme, all students had access to secondary education, thereby overcoming some of the earlier concern about the effect of social class on educational opportunities.

In keeping with interwar progressivism, including her father’s views, Margaret believed that students should be the focus of education and learning. She also followed her father in emphasising teaching as a profession committed to student learning. Like her father, she saw progressive methods as supporting an academic curriculum, rather than the emphasis on ‘social adjustment’ in postwar American schools. Issues of the mind were ‘good’, in an ethical sense; Margaret

164believed that goodness was not relative but could be imparted through learning. Despite her past association with John Anderson, she claimed that teaching religion could be educative and that church schools should be part of a diverse society. Accepting that matters of social class were becoming less prominent in education, she still saw the need to provide for different groups to participate in the provision of education. The final section of ‘The theory of education’ outlined Dewey’s view that democracy was the appropriate aim for society and his advocacy of a school curriculum focused on activities that would help to achieve social change by bringing people together.

The second part of Educative teaching was on ‘The classroom’, showing how the theory of education that Margaret had outlined should be related to teaching. The opening chapter on ‘The first lesson’ was directed at beginning teachers. It outlined ways for a teacher to form a relationship with a class by avoiding excessive discipline and to use lesson plans to engage students in co-operative ‘Deweyean’-type activities. Most of the following chapters focused on understanding students. Margaret argued that classroom discipline should arise from order and the common and co-operative efforts of students. Young people were becoming seen as ‘teenagers’, and this could lead to discussion in class of the social and other pressures they were facing. Margaret accepted the need for examinations to satisfy employers and universities but emphasised a curriculum built around the humanities and sciences. The final chapters of ‘The classroom’ indicated that comprehensive schools were replacing more elite secondary schools. Margaret contended that those in teacher education should recognise that it was not so much method as social understanding that created good and successful teachers who helped to produce ‘interested and active thinkers’.456

Margaret wrote two further books on educational theory and practice. In 1970, she co-authored What is right – a series of case studies considering the ethics of education, written as constructed narratives – with Gwen Kelly. In 1977, three years after retiring from Armidale Teachers’ College, she published Philosophy and school administration. Drawing upon her earlier books, this work was designed for school principals and those involved in school administration. Outlining both theory and practice, Margaret pointed out the significance of

165‘critical incidents’ in the life of a school and discussed ‘current controversies’ in educational policy and administration.

After her retirement from the college, Margaret continued to play an active part in the Armidale community. In her eighties, she participated in adult education at the college for students from the Pacific Islands. She also taught philosophy to school children. Her memoirs, entitled Is there a difference between thinking, believing and knowing?, were published in 2006, a century after her father’s appointment as principal of Sydney Teachers’ College.

In many ways Margaret Mackie was Alexander Mackie’s best academic disciple. She transposed many of his ideas into publications based on research and teaching. Margaret died in 2009.

John’s transnational academic career

During World War Two, there was much concern in the Mackie family about John’s whereabouts and wellbeing. John served in the British Army, working with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He was stationed in England until mid-1942 and then in the Middle East, where he was fascinated by Egypt. In Italy, he was involved in the fighting to capture the peninsula. He was promoted to lieutenant in October 1942 and to captain in April 1945, and was mentioned in despatches for distinguished service. With hostilities ceasing in Italy by the end of 1944, John began preparing to return to academic life.457 He generally remained quiet about his wartime experiences, but they probably affected his postwar views, particularly in the areas of ethics and moral judgement.

In January 1945, John applied for lectureships in philosophy and moral philosophy that had been advertised at the University of Sydney. His applications included a written reference provided by Professor Price at Oxford before John joined the army. Professor John Anderson also wrote a testimonial:

167At that time, John Mackie was still with the British Army; his mother, Annie, acted as an intermediary with the University of Sydney. In March 1945, the registrar informed her that John had been appointed to the lectureship in moral and political philosophy. It was a further nine months before the British Army allowed John’s release. He arrived back in Sydney in January 1946.459

In the immediate postwar years, the University of Sydney was being transformed by the first wave of ex-servicemen supported by the Commonwealth Reconstruction Scheme. Increasing costs and uncertain salaries were concerns of both the university Senate and the Association of University Teachers (formed in 1944).460 Despite the growth in student numbers, there were many continuities with the University of Sydney John had known before the war. Many previous staff were still at the university; courses and programs of study remained the same as in 1939.

In 1938, John Anderson had been joined in the philosophy department by another Scot, Alan Ker Stout, who was appointed professor of moral and political philosophy – the area in which John Mackie became a lecturer. Some inside and outside the university expected Stout to be a moderating influence on Anderson. But in 1943, Anderson delivered an address before the New Education Fellowship claiming that religion had no place in education because it limited enquiry. Members of the New South Wales parliament saw this as an attack on the Christian foundations of the University of Sydney. The university Senate defended the principle of free speech, but there was opposition from the churches, which increasingly saw the teaching of philosophy at the University of Sydney as anti-religious.461 John Mackie’s close association with John Anderson would create difficulty in his academic career in Australia.

Once home, John Mackie wrote two articles that demonstrated a concern for the postwar world and a willingness to express views that might cause controversy. The first was a short piece published in The Australian Highway, the journal of the WEA (the Workers’ Educational Association, which offered adult education). Entitled ‘Some impressions of Palestine’, the article recounted his

168experiences in 1943, when he spent a brief period on a Jewish collective farm. Describing the Jews’ way of life as ‘European in standards and outlook’ and the Arabs’ as ‘still entirely medieval’, John suggested that his aim was not to take sides but to give a ‘clearer idea of the interests involved’.

Most of John’s time in Palestine was spent at the Jewish settlement (essentially a kibbutz, although he did not use this term). The collective farm had its origins in the socialist experiments of the early Zionist settlers in the region. The community took collective responsibility for the upbringing of all the children on the settlement. John found mutual respect between the settlement and local Arab farmers. But the Zionist ideal of Israel as a Jewish homeland was competing with the ideal of a federation of Arab states supported by the wealthy classes in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere. According to John’s account, the present troubles arose from the desire of many European Jews, ‘the survivors of Nazism’, to immigrate to Palestine. Australia and America could relieve the pressure by taking in more Jewish immigrants. John hoped that the experiment of the Jewish collective could continue while America and Britain supported the economic development of Palestine.462 Two years after the publication of John’s article, the creation of the state of Israel would lead to ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.

John’s second article, published in 1946 and entitled ‘The refutation of morals’, related, in part, to the continuing controversies in which John Anderson was involved. Anderson had criticised planning during the war and in the early postwar years as an indication of the ‘servile state’, distancing himself from his earlier support for communism. Of more interest to the University of Sydney Senate was his attack on religion and the churches in 1943, leading to the university censuring him for his remarks.463 In ‘The refutation of morals’, John Mackie claimed that ‘We have shown that the great mass of what is called moral thought is, not nonsense, but error, the imagining of objective facts and qualities of things where there exists nothing but our feelings of desire and approval’.464 This was his first postwar public statement asserting that ethics were subjective, rather than objective.

169The article distanced him from most postwar Andersonians, who saw religion as ‘nonsense’, but it also made new enemies among supporters of Christianity.

In effect, the articles on Palestine and ethics show John reaching out to the community in an effort to explain current issues in the postwar world. During the war, the University of Sydney had commenced publishing a Current Affairs Bulletin each fortnight. A Department of Adult Education was formed in 1946, which enrolled students in extramural programs. John also took the opportunity to use radio broadcasts.465

In 1947, John married Joan Armiger Meredith. Born in 1927, she had attended Fort Street Girls High School and matriculated to the University of Sydney in 1943 with first class honours in English, Latin and French. In 1946, she had graduated with first class honours in English and philosophy, having been a student of John Mackie.466 Like William Mackie’s warm response to Annie when she married into the family, John’s marriage brought joy to Alexander, who was delighted by his new daughter-in-law’s charms. By 1949, the newlyweds had a son named Alexander, called ‘Sandy’ after John Anderson’s son. They were living in the Burley Griffin-inspired suburb of Castlecrag. In the interwar years, Castlecrag had attracted artists and others, many of whom were probably known to, if not friends of, the Mackies. By the 1940s, it was attracting a new generation of residents, such as the Mackies. John and Joan lived at Wildflowers at the end of Edinburgh Road – the house that the artist Bim Hilder had built for his mother in 1930.467

Correspondence from Joan Mackie in 1949 described her life at Castlecrag and revealed her close relationship with her father-in-law. On 15 March, she wrote to ‘Professor Mackie’, thanking him for three jugs he gave her as presents. She assured him that young Alexander was ‘thriving’, even though he had been told by local boys that Santa Claus did not exist. On hearing this story, according to Joan, John had replied that this would be ‘one disillusionment that Alexander would be spared as he would be never encouraged in the illusion in the first place’. According to John, Santa Claus was a ‘symbol of gratuitous present giving’

170that had a pernicious influence on the ‘young’s morals and … in his place should be set the ideal of present giving as a reward for virtue’.468 Obviously, John had become the ‘philosopher father’.

Joan wrote again to ‘Professor Mackie’ on 27 March, thanking him for his letter and for a gift of Pyrex dishes. Her correspondence on this occasion was more playful. Both gifts, she wrote, would solve ‘problems associated with Alexander’: the dishes would prove invaluable when the ‘aforesaid gentleman has reached the stage of demanding variety in his diet’ and her father-in-law’s advice on ‘an important metaphysical problem, should save the little craft, near the outset of its voyage of the Rocks of Idealism and the Whirpool of Scepticism. What in particular appeals to me is the rejection of the doctrine of Adult conscience – a dangerous doctrine responsible for more extravagant error (if that is possible) in later life.’ The letter continued in a light-hearted, philosophical fashion for a few more paragraphs, touching on subjects such as the biography of the novelist John Buchan.469

By April 1951, John Mackie had applied for promotion to senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. With Stephen Roberts, the vice-chancellor, in the chair, the committee considering his application noted that, since his appointment in 1946, John had completed six articles and eight reviews and had been the assistant editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. The committee unanimously recommended that he be promoted.470

A year later, John was indirectly involved in one of the great Australian academic scandals of the postwar period. During the 1940s, academics in Australia had gained status through contributions to the war effort. The idea of the modern Australian university was linked to nation building through research and professional expertise.471 By the early 1950s, with the election of the Menzies Liberal government, there was a new campaign against communism and a call for ‘moral re-armament’. When the small University of Tasmania created its first chair in philosophy, Sir John Morris, the university chancellor and chief

171justice of Tasmania, decided that he would not appoint atheists or moral relativists. His view received support from the prominent liberal intellectual Frederic Eggleston. Born in 1875 – the same year as Alexander Mackie – and a follower of philosophic idealism in his youth, Eggleston believed in the role of the state in areas such as education. He had played a major role in the planning of the Australian National University. But the moral relativism of the early postwar years disturbed him.

Two of the four candidates for the chair were part of the linguistic analysis school based at Melbourne. The third was John Mackie; Eggleston saw John’s 1946 paper on morality as a ‘typical example of the superficial way in which present day students dispose of questions of such importance’. Eggleston recommended the remaining candidate, Sydney Sparkes Orr, even though Orr’s head of department at Melbourne ranked him well below the other three candidates. A year after his appointment, Orr was accused of seducing a student, leading to a decade-long controversy that was fought out in the courts.472

In 1955, the year his father died, John was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Located in Dunedin, on the east coast of the South Island, Otago had been established as part of the Scottish diaspora of the 1850s. Philosophy and a medical school were part of the founding traditions.473 J.A. Passmore was professor of philosophy at Otago from 1950 to 1955. A graduate of the University of Sydney, Passmore had been a student of John Anderson and had taught philosophy as an assistant lecturer at Sydney from 1934 to 1949. After Otago, Passmore went on to Oxford and then to the Australian National University, where he was a reader and then a professor (appointed as reader in 1958 and retiring in 1979), becoming Australia’s most published and decorated academic philosopher.

An article of John Mackie’s was published in Mind in April 1955, while he was in Dunedin (published in Oxford, Mind was one of the leading international journals in philosophy for almost a century). Entitled ‘Evil and omnipotence’, the article considered the question of a deity and the problem of evil. John argued that the existence of evil made the idea of monotheistic religion untenable.

172Opposing Christians and others who held to the idea of ‘free will’ as a way of justifying an omnipresent god, John argued that human free will was no defence for believing in such a god: an omnipresent god would have endowed all of us with free will and moral perfection, resulting in humans choosing good in every situation. Reprinted on many occasions, ‘Evil and omnipotence’ became a defining statement for those who questioned the existence of a god.

John only stayed in New Zealand for four years, but he was very active at the university and in the local community. He was the head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Otago and became dean of arts in 1957. In 1958, he was elected to the Academic Board and Curriculum Committee of the proposed University of New Zealand. As at Sydney, John’s activities also included radio broadcasts as a way to reach into the community.

Following John Anderson’s retirement, John Mackie applied for the vacant chair of philosophy at the University of Sydney. He nominated Anderson and Professor Stout from Sydney, Professors Partridge and Passmore from the Australian National University, Professor Prior from the University of Canterbury and Dr F.G. Soper, the vice-chancellor at Otago, as his referees. He later added G.E. Hughes, professor of philosophy at the University of Wellington. All of these referees were Australasian, demonstrating John’s reputation in Australia and New Zealand. His application for the chair indicated his formal academic qualifications and the breadth of his teaching experience at Sydney and Otago. His education and experience reflected his interest in a number of areas, including Greek philosophy, political and legal philosophy and the logic of ethics. He had recently been working on logic and metaphysics and had studied the ‘formal analysis’ of arguments used in various fields, ‘especially in scientific and historical investigation, in ethics and metaphysics’. He was also interested in how to teach philosophy and in the ‘linguistic movement’ of contemporary philosophers. But he admitted that he had not ‘undertaken any large scale research work’. Apart from the Cromer Prize of 1941, his only research was embodied in articles, discussions and reviews, of which he listed twenty-seven individual items.474

The selection committee for the chair was composed of the vice-chancellor, the deputy vice-chancellor, the chair of the Professorial Board and eight professors

173from the university, including Stout, who was one of John’s referees. There were eight applicants for the position. John Anderson and Professor Partridge were asked to give their opinions, and, as a result, the list of applicants was reduced to three: H. Putnam, D.A.T. Gasking and John Mackie. The committee agreed to appoint John, highlighting his academic record and previous appointments, and noting that his referees spoke highly of his ‘intellectual ability and of the breadth and thoroughness of his scholarship’ and believed that, on ‘personal and academic grounds’, he was well suited for the position. John’s ‘main strength’ lay in criticism, with one referee stating that he had ‘never known a man more acute philosophically or more lucid’. The committee described John as ‘a superb expositor and teacher and to be an admirable administrator’ who had made a contribution to the ‘whole academic life’ of the University of Otago.475

So the University of Sydney had chosen one of its own who already had an outstanding record as an academic, even if he had yet to fulfil his potential as a scholar. The decision was not unanimous; two of the committee members argued that the American scholar Putnam had better qualifications. Born in Chicago in 1926, of Jewish background, Hilary Whitehall Putnam’s early life was spent in France. Putnam studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and completed a PhD at Harvard in the area of logical positivism, then the dominant school of philosophy in America. He was teaching at Princeton when he applied for the chair at Sydney. Putnam would go on to have a distinguished career in America, focusing on areas such as the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mathematics and becoming an emeritus professor at Harvard.476

For the University of Sydney in the late 1950s, Putnam’s background and qualifications may have been a little too exotic – they were certainly outside the British world of scholarship with which Sydney academics were familiar. The committee made enquiries about Putnam in America, but it seems that none of its members knew him. In contrast, most knew John Mackie, and his personal qualities, which continued to stand him in good stead throughout his career. The philosopher Keith Campbell later wrote that John was: ‘Meticulous, courteous,

174industrious, with a degree of devotion to duty striking in one who held that moral values lack any objective foundation, he was universally admired as an outstandingly capable and committed philosopher’s philosopher’.477

Sections of the Catholic Church in Sydney, as well as Archbishop Gough of the Sydney Anglican Diocese, condemned John’s appointment, arguing that it undermined religion and posed a threat to moral standards in the community. They saw him not just continuing the views of Anderson but also expressing his own opinion that the presence of evil in the world was a clear indication that god did not exist. They began a campaign to pressure the university to ensure that there was room for more diverse opinions not only in the Department of Philosophy but also in other areas, such as psychology (which had a continuing attachment to philosophy).478 The campaign died out in the early 1960s, but it may have affected John’s decisions as to where his future lay.

John had returned to the University of Sydney in the wake of the Murray Committee’s 1957 report. Chaired by the Scottish economist Keith Murray, who was educated at Edinburgh University and was the chair of the University Grants Committee in Britain, the Murray Committee produced a short report on the state of Australia’s universities. Its major suggestion was that the Commonwealth government should prepare for the growth of the student population by creating an Australian University Grants Committee, which would make recommendations to the prime minister, including on the award of triennial grants for buildings and capital development.479 Accepted by the Menzies Liberal government, the Murray Committee’s report led to financial endowments for Australia’s universities. Fifteen buildings were constructed at the University of Sydney in the 1960s, including the Fisher Library, which soon became the best resourced academic library in the southern hemisphere. In almost all departments, staff numbers increased at least fourfold.480

John was obviously aware of the potential impact of the new endowment, but he seemed less interested in the Murray Report’s significance for Australia

175than in what Keith Murray had achieved in Britain as chair of the University Grants Committee. In eleven years, from 1952, Murray had initiated a program that involved building seven new universities in England and Scotland and influenced the construction of another in Northern Ireland. Architecturally, these institutions were ‘plateglass’ ‘concrete brutalist constructions’ on ‘greenfield’ sites. As educational institutions, they were ‘residential’ and usually collegiate, emulating Oxford and Cambridge.481

In 1961, John took his first study leave since the war, returning to Britain to see the changes occurring in higher education. Residing with his family, mainly in Oxford, he spent much of his time attending conferences, giving lectures throughout Britain and investigating new teaching methods and arrangements of courses in philosophy. He was also

In May 1963, John informed the registrar of the University of Sydney that he had been appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of York, which had been established on 500 acres to the south-east of the cathedral city of York. He indicated that he was sorry to resign the Challis chair at Sydney; he had long been attached to the university and it had always treated him with generosity. There were

176John’s comments on the ‘system of school education’ in New South Wales were probably a reference to the Wyndham scheme of comprehensive schools, which formed much of the context of Margaret Mackie’s publications. In contrast, and in the wake of the Education Act 1944, which had been Margaret’s study, the English education system continued to divide students into different schools according to their academic abilities, measured by their performance in the Eleven Plus examination, which was based on IQ tests. In this way, the selective academic grammar schools were preserved. For an academic and intellectual such as John Mackie, who had experienced challenges to the idea of academic freedom in Sydney, the prospect of a grammar school education for his children, providing a foundation for studies in classics and philosophy at university, probably had some appeal.484

The Mackie family’s move to England became permanent. After a brief period as foundation professor of philosophy at York, John became a fellow of University College at Oxford in 1967. The university had changed in the thirty years since he had studied there. Social access had widened to include more students from state grammar schools. Entry to Oxford was based more on merit than on social class. There was increasing criticism of the college system, which opponents believed fragmented the endeavours of the university.485 Despite the changed environment, the move from York to Oxford allowed John to focus more on publications in his discipline.

Just as his sister had become Alexander Mackie’s prime disciple in education, so John Mackie was, in some ways, returning to the field of moral philosophy that had engaged his father in the late nineteenth century. In his long career as a professional philosopher, John had developed interests in a number of areas that engaged both his academic colleagues and the general community. In 1974, he was made a fellow of the British Academy, recognising his contribution to areas such as metaethics and the philosophy of religion.

A moral sceptic since the 1940s, John had worked principally within British intellectual traditions, having no empathy for postwar American trends emphasising the philosophy of language. In five years, he produced a core of books

177examining major and fundamental problems. Truth, probability and paradox, published in 1973, was a series of essays that reflected a faith in ‘fairly simple, common sense, perhaps old fashioned ways of thinking’.486 The cement of the universe, also released in 1973, was a study of causation, relying heavily on the views of the eighteenth-century Scottish ‘common sense’ philosopher David Hume.

John’s 1976 book Problems from Locke discussed the philosopher John Locke, who many see as the foundation of ideas of liberalism, liberty and toleration in Britain. John’s best received book was the 1977 work Ethics: inventing right and wrong, which began with the bold statement ‘there are no objective values’. In this book, John pointed out that his moral scepticism was formed by the ‘Kantian and post-Kantian tradition of English moral philosophy’.487 In his next book, he turned not so much to the traditions of English moral philosophy as to the Scottish scepticism of David Hume, who had provided the theory that morality was based not so much on reason as on sentiment.488 This book was, in some ways, a return to the world of the Scottish Enlightenment that had formed much of Alexander Mackie’s worldview.

John’s sustained analysis of moral theory was a tour de force, elevating him to a highly significant intellectual not just in Britain but across the transatlantic world. Some in Britain saw his strength as ‘his sympathy, his faith in common sense, and the shining clarity of his thinking’. His writing was ‘fluent and unpretentiously lucid; it puts everything in the open’. John’s approach was more at home with analysing Locke and Hume than the philosophy of continental Europe.489 Australian philosophers might suggest that John Mackie had adapted John Anderson’s view of ‘realism, and produced, through a rigorous analysis, a theory of morality based on empiricism’.490 No one recognised that much of what John had learned about philosophy and philosophical approaches might have begun with his father and mother at Drumgrain School in the 1920s.

178John Mackie died of cancer in 1981. Two of his children, Penelope and David, have become philosophers in Britain and another daughter teaches at Rice University in Texas. The Mackie family’s association with Australia has not been revived.