Australian Dictionary of Biography

Patrick O'Brien, by Loui Seselja, 1998

National Library of Australia

Patrick (Paddy) John O’Brien (1937–1998), political scientist, was born on 12 January 1937, at Wodonga, Victoria, son of John Cornelius O’Brien, stock dealer, and his wife Monica Augusta, née Coore, both Victorian-born. With his brothers, Denis and Roger, Paddy was brought up at Croydon in outer Melbourne, attending Catholic primary schools before secondary education at St Kevin’s College, Toorak. A neighbour was the historian Manning Clark, who O’Brien would later criticise for his ‘revolutionary romanticism’ (O’Brien 1977, 115). The death of his father when Paddy was eight was followed by that of his brother, Denis, in 1951 while serving in the Korean War. O’Brien’s lifelong aversion to communism was entrenched after a prominent public figure implied that Denis’s death had been pointless.

O’Brien left school early to work as a copy boy at the Argus newspaper, whose managing director was Sir Errol Knox, a relative of his mother; he also became a star Australian Rules footballer for Croydon. On 8 April 1961, at St Edmund’s Catholic Church, Croydon, he married Valerie Joy Prowse, a machinist and a neighbour; they were to have three children, Simon, Rebecca, and Brigid. Having completed his secondary education as a part-time student, he worked in the early 1960s as a teacher at the Melbourne School of Printing and Graphic Arts. As a mature-age student at the University of Melbourne, he studied (1962–67) political science (BA Hons, 1971), completing a thesis on the Catholic Worker, a Melbourne journal which combined religious and political analysis. Among other activities he became president of the Australian Labor Party Club, which opposed the activities of the extreme left on campus.

In 1969 O’Brien took up a lectureship in political science at the University of Western Australia (UWA); with a long list of publications and public activities he gained promotions to senior lecturer (1977), and associate professor (1986). In Perth and in wider academic and media circles, he became a prominent and at times controversial figure. He broadened his opposition to communism into a critique of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right. In this vein he spent a sabbatical leave (1990) in Poland studying the Solidarity movement and similar groups who were learning to successfully resist Soviet imperialism by nurturing civil society groupings. The same year he won a Fulbright scholarship to undertake research (1991–92) at the University of California, Berkeley, United States of America. His research led him to warn against political regimes which seized and corrupted the internal organs of their own societies, in Western as well as East European countries. His critiques of the left in The Saviours (1977) and of the right in The Liberals (1985) revealed him as an analyst beyond the conventional categories of the time.

These views were apparent in two of O’Brien’s public campaigns. With others he led opposition to the State Labor premier Brian Burke’s promotion of government involvement in commercial activities—widely known as ‘WA Inc.’—which he saw as an attempt to suborn the activities of citizens in a free polity. One of the early critics of the Burke style of government, he co-authored with Anthony McAdam Burke’s Shambles (1987), and with Martyn Webb co-edited Executive State (1991). In 1998 he was elected a Western Australian delegate to the Constitutional Convention on whether Australia should become a republic. He supported the option of a popularly elected president, opposing the model of parliamentary choice, which he thought an attempted power grab by its proposers. But he maintained a republican position, which he outlined in his tract The People’s Case (1995). In all his public activities he opposed those who sought a stranglehold on power in order to institutionalise themselves as a self-perpetuating elite. He believed that the people are sovereign, and this influence should be more clearly acknowledged in constitutional arrangements. A complex personality, at first glance O’Brien appeared a wild Irish Australian iconoclast, a sociable person who enjoyed meeting friends in the pub and loved Australian Rules football. But underneath was a more formal character, a well-spoken man of genteel English background with an imposing, even charming, presence. His students encountered a resourceful, interested, and challenging teacher. When speaking he poured out his ideas in a heady mixture, so that the listener could see at work the processes of his thinking. His mind was always a work in progress, never a finished product. Some thought him not salonfähig, too rough around the edges to be a member of any coterie; others were attracted to his generosity of spirit. He liked being in the midst of public contention and taking risks, traits that made him enemies as well as friends. During the 1970s and 1980s he became the bête noire of left-wing staff and students on campus who mounted an unsuccessful campaign to have him sacked. A frequent performer in public, he did not appear to care what others thought of him, though at times he retired to lick his wounds after some ill-judged intervention. The boldness of his public assertions went hand in hand with an inner shyness and an uncomplicated attitude to life. His departmental head, Gordon Reid, believed that every department needed a maverick like O’Brien.

On 9 August 1998 O’Brien died unexpectedly, suffering a heart attack while walking home from a party. He was survived by his wife and their son and two daughters; he was cremated. In 1999 his friends established a foundation in his memory; UWA awards an annual scholarship bearing his name.