The approach always differed from traditional political science. Even a course on Australian political parties could move from functions and interests to party 'theologies', hegemonic values and political parties 'as providers of meaning in a secular age'. Seeking some sense of this man, students read all the early books - The Lucky Country , of course, in its various editions, but also the histories, the discussion of Britain in God Is An Englishman , the novels and the polemics. The later autobiographies, more reliable clues perhaps, were not yet published, though honours students sometimes received notes from Donald scrawled on the back of rejected mss. There's a line through the page.
Teachers illuminate a subject but provide only partial glimpses of themselves.
The pattern of the books, the trajectory, was not immediately apparent. In the courses he offered at the start of the 1980s, Donald focussed on the mechanisms which build a culture. Whatever the subject, he explored the technology of hegemony. The ideas floated in lectures, worked up on seminars flowed into The Great Museum and, more directly, The Public Culture . Through exposition and discussion, Donald developed the motifs which have not characterised his writing for a decade.