Australian Dictionary of Biography

Graham Little, c.1999

Supplied by family

Frank Graham Little (1939–2000), political scientist, was born on 1 November 1939 in Belfast, eldest of five surviving children and only son of Protestant parents Frank Graham Little, grocery manager and later insurance assessor, and his wife Margaret Winifred, née Dodds. The family moved to England in 1949 and Graham attended schools at Westgate-on-Sea, Kent, and Hampstead, London, replacing his northern Irish accent with the softer tones of southern England. Emigrating to Australia with his family in 1954, he attended Melbourne High School (1955–56), then studied commerce and education at the University of Melbourne (BCom Hons, 1962; BEd, 1965). While completing his education degree, he was a tutor in economic history (1963–65) at Monash University. He was also a resident tutor in commerce at Ormond College, University of Melbourne, where he met Jenifer Margaret Alexander (BA, 1963; DipEd, 1964), a schoolteacher and a daughter of the college’s vice-master. On 20 February 1965 at College Church, Parkville, the couple were married by the Reverend Dr Davis McCaughey, the college master. They were to have one daughter, Jessica (b. 1977).

The newlyweds moved to Canberra where Little conducted doctoral research in qualitative sociology at the Australian National University (PhD, 1970), for which he interviewed 120 students of the University of Melbourne. His thesis became his first book, The University Experience (1970), in which his skill at interpreting interview material to uncover the links between psychology and social experience was already apparent. He honed this skill and extended its scope as a Fulbright research fellow (1969–71) in political science and political psychology at Yale University, Connecticut. In the United States of America he worked with the pioneers of political psychology—Robert Lane, Fred Greenstein, Harold Lasswell, David Riesman, and Daniel Levinson—all of whom were using long interviews and case studies.

In 1972 Little returned to a lectureship in political science at the University of Melbourne. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1974 and reader in 1987. The professor of his department was Alan Fraser ‘Foo’ Davies, who was also using long interviews and case studies and was deeply interested in the insights psychoanalysis could provide into the passions that animated political life. Little’s work took on a more explicitly psychoanalytic bent, and he undertook a personal analysis with the psychoanalyst Clara Geroe and later with Bill Blomfield. In 1973 he published Politics and Personal Style, with case studies of three of the students he had interviewed for his doctoral research. In keeping with the spirit of the 1970s he argued that the personal is political in showing how early family experience and the inner world inform a person’s politics. Two years later he published Faces on the Campus: A Psycho-Social Study (1975), written while he was on sabbatical in Chicago at the Centre for Psychosocial Studies and the Institute for Psychoanalysis. He was an active member of the International Society of Political Psychology after its formation in 1978.

Little was a gifted teacher, and a group of talented students gathered around him and Davies, making up for a time what was known as the ‘Melbourne Psycho-Social Group.’ Its seminars attracted a wide range of people interested in applied psychoanalysis, including analysts, artists, and writers. In 1985 he published Political Ensembles: A Psychosocial Approach to Politics and Leadership, the product of ten years hard work and countless interviews with people about their feelings towards political leaders. It is a complex and difficult book, which lacks the light grace of his later writing, but it provided the solid basis which enabled him to write subsequently with such insight about leaders and their followers. Strong Leadership (1988), on Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Malcolm Fraser, quickly followed.

After Political Ensembles Little’s writing shifted towards more public modes. He had never been content with the narrow audiences of much academic publication, wanting to contribute more directly to public understanding. As well, after Davies died suddenly in 1987, his university department became a less congenial place for him, as his other colleagues had little interest in applying psychoanalytic insights to political life. While continuing to teach, Little reinvented himself as a writer, journalist, and interviewer. In 1988 he presented a television interview series for the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) called Speaking for Myself, in which his skills as a listener encouraged public figures to relax into self-reflection. He also wrote regularly for newspapers, especially the Age, on Australia’s leaders.

In the 1990s Little allowed his writing to range. He published a monograph on friendship (1993), and an autobiography, Letter to My Daughter (1995), in which he returned to his childhood in Protestant Belfast and England and interrogated his troubled relationship with his father. His last book, The Public Emotions: From Mourning to Hope (1999), published six months before his sudden death, examined the pervasiveness of emotion in public life, and argued for greater emotional literacy in both politicians and the public.

Graham Little connected the insights and knowledge of psychoanalysis with the public world of politics and found ways to communicate his ideas to a public generally uninterested in psychoanalytic knowledge. He had a generous mind, sharing his insights and listening in turn to those of others. His colleague John Cash observed that ‘he was a fierce friend, demanding but generous’ (2000, 835). Survived by his wife and daughter, he died of a heart attack on 24 February 2000 at Carlton and was cremated.