The Level-headed Revolutionary

Brian Medlin (1927-2004) - philosopher, activist, socialist, bushman, environmentalist, poet and author of short stories - wrote much more than he published during his lifetime.

This collection includes five of his essays, dealing with how to stay sane and constructive in the face of environmental crisis, with the nature of philosophy and the contemporary university, and with the very meaning of life and death. They are as relevant and urgent now as when he wrote them 30 years ago.

The essays are complemented by a selection of his poetry and by four of the short stories he wrote under the pseudonym Timothy Tregonning, only two of which have been previously published. Set in the early 20th century, the stories draw us into the mixed fortunes of a working class family in South Australia's mid north. Medlin's unique voice, humane, witty and vigorous, leaps off every page.

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University, South Australia. She has written and edited books and given public lectures on, inter alia, Iris Murdoch, Brian Medlin, J.M. Coetzee, Jane Austen, Matthew Flinders and South Australian history.

Wallace McKitrick has been an Honorary Adjunct Fellow at the University of Adelaide and a senior policy officer with the Australian Government's Ministry for the Arts. He was a student of Brian Medlin in the 1960s and 70s and remained a close friend thereafter.

Susan Petrilli is Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She has published widely on the philosophy of language, semiotics and translation theory.

Praise for Brian Medlin

'[Medlin] is the best writer of all Anglophone philosophers since the second world war. His work reveals a strongly Australian character.' - Professor Roy Edgley

'Brian Medlin is a poet as well as a philosopher. He is also a prophet crying out to his people. Prophets are needed.' - Dame Iris Murdoch