You could say that a Soil Science student in Australia had a better chance of getting a positive introduction to Popper than a Philosophy student. That was when Keith Barley and Geoffrey Leeper were teaching Soil Science.
It actually started in New Zealand where a soil chemist called Hugh Parton was one of the circle of scientists who were friends and admirers of Popper. Of course the most distinguished was the Nobel winner John Eccles (originally from Melbourne). Colin Simkin showed me the transcript of a radio talk involving himself, Hugh Parton and an interviewer, talking about Popper’s ideas about science and society.
Just after the war Parton visited Melbourne uni and there was such a desperate shortage of accommodation that he slept on Geoff Leeper’s couch. He told Leeper about Popper and Geoff got hold of The Open Society and its Enemies.
Leeper was a secular humanist, an admirer of Bertrand Russell, and a member of the Rationalist Society of Victoria and the Rationalist Club on campus. One of his Soil Science students in the 1950s was Keith Barley, also inclined to secular humanism, so they rubbed shoulders outside the classroom in the Rationalist Club and Geoff introduce Keith to The Open Society.
In the 1960s I travelled from Tasmania to Adelaide to do postgraduate research with Keith Barley (on a recommendation from my Soil Science teacher, actually a religious believer who deplored Keith’s tendency to iconoclasm, not a term that meant a lot to me at the time).
When I decided to give up Soil Science and turn to Sociology he lent me The Poverty and The Open Society. Some people are grateful for that favour but many others are not:)
This is an affectioniate memory of Keith, written for his children because he died too young for them to see this side of him.
A bit more on Geoff Leeper, courtesy of google, he was a civil liberties activist in the 1930s, and was the acting president of the first committee that set up the official Council of Civil Liberties in Victoria. He does not have an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (very strange!) but his father has an entry where Geoffrey gets a one-line mention . “The second marriage produced two daughters and one son Geoffrey Winthrop, first professor of agricultural chemistry in the University of Melbourne.”
Popper in the universities.
You may ask what students of philosophy were told about Popper. Until the 1970s Australia had very few universities, the first and most important were the Uni of Melbourne and the Uni of Sydney. The third and fourth, serving very small numbers of people were the universities in Adelaide and Hobart (Tasmania). Up to the 1960s less than 2% of people went to uni so the numbers were miniscule compared with more recent times.
Through the 1950s and 1950s the leading teachers at Melbourne were dedicated to Wittgenstein and also communism. Not a healthy mix from a CR point of view.
Sydney was quite different due to the domination of John Anderson from the 1930s to almost 1970. He was a critical rationalist in many respects and he invited Popper to join the department in 1945 but Popper really wanted to get back to London. Anderson’s influence was good in some ways, certainly he promoted free thought and this had a tremendous impact on the intellectual life of Sydney, far beyond the philosophy schoool, so there was not the overwhelming ideology of the left that dominated among intellectuals in Melbourne (not just on account of the philosophers, but there were other factors as well).
Anderson’s influence died with him because he was prepared to be a big fish in a small pond. He promoted relentless criticism but he did not engage with the leading philosophical issues in the international literature and he did not encourage his best students to do so. People like John Passmore had to get away from his influence to do good work. I never saw a reference to Popper in his writings, although he agreed with many CR positions, and the same applies to his students. There is an exception, David Stove practically made a career out of rubbishing Popper and Stove’s friend and more distinguished colleague, David Armstrong, who taught at Sydney for decades did nothing to correct the impression put about by Stove.
