Bruce Grant is an Australian writer who has been a journalist, foreign correspondent, diplomat, novelist and author of several books on Australian politics and foreign policy.
Early life
Bruce Grant was born Perth in 1925 and grew up in outback Western Australia. His success in a state exam won him a place at Perth Modern School.
Journalist
Grant cut short his final year of secondary schooling to join Perth afternoon newspaper, the Daily News as a reporter. After military service, he studied Arts at the University of Melbourne, under Manning Clark, and where he could combine the academic study with a diploma course in journalism. From that he launched a career writing criticism on Australian film and theatre noting in 1958, that;
If we get a dramatist with the same poetic vision for lonely heroism as the painter Sidney Nolan and novelist Patrick White, the stage will need more air.
He was employed by Melbourne's The Age newspaper, where he was the only university graduate on staff. In 1954 he left the country to become the paper's London correspondent, covering subjects as diverse as that city's premiere of the Australian playSummer of the Seventeenth Doll; Robert Menzies' 1956 failed attempt to negotiate with Egypt's president Gamal Nasser during the Suez Crisis; and the Hungarian revolution. In 1964, Grant resigned as The Age’s Washington correspondent, having reported from there during the terms of two Presidents, Kennedy and Johnson.
Intellectual, creative and administrative contributions to the arts
Grant was witness to, and an influence on, centres of power in Australia for several decades, as journalist and foreign correspondent, diplomat, public intellectual, and advisor to Menzies, whose letter of reference to ambassadors facilitated his reporting as Asian correspondent, and to subsequent governments from Whitlam to Hawke and Keating. He was chairman of the Australia-Indonesia Institute and his book Indonesia remains a classic and insightful study of Australia's relations with its most powerful near neighbour. As Australian High Commissioner to India he was an early advocate of the importance of Asia to Australia, having asked as he diverged from his career as journalist;
Can the newspapers stop Australia from turning inward, from becoming isolationist?
Grant campaigned to abolish the White Australia policy, opposed the Vietnam war as counterproductive to Australia's credibility in S.E. Asia, and joined the Australian Committee for a New China Policy, urging recognition of the People's Republic of China. Through his The Boat People he analysed, and promoted understanding of, the political causes and social ramifications of increasing numbers of Vietnamese refugees arriving by boat on Australia's shores. Consultant to the federal Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Gareth Evans, 1988–91, they co-wrote Australia's Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s. In 2008 he initiated the colloquium 'Australia as a Middle-Ranking Power' hosted in Canberra at Manning Clark House in Conjunction with the Australian Institute of International Affairs. In 2017 Grant released his memoir Subtle moments: scenes on a life's journey, named from a phrase from Albert Camus who wrote of "that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life... contemplat that series of unrelated actions which become his fate"
