The beginnings of a long struggle

In moments of depression, perhaps at the end of a long struggle with a virus," wrote a former editor of the Listener, the great Monte Holcroft, "the stranger aspects of our civilisation make us wonder if life itself has not become a sort of illness.

- Russell Brown

" Holcroft did not say what virus he was referring to, but the editorial was published on October 12, 1962, a month after the Sabin polio vaccine was rolled out to New Zealand adults, completing population coverage and effectively ending the epidemic that had washed back seven times in the previous half century. It had indeed been a long struggle.

We have been through a much shorter struggle with a virus and we might look around now and also perceive "a sort of illness" in "the stranger aspects of our civilisation".

The new malaise of which Holcroft complained was a contemporary culture in which, he believed, music, drama and the visual arts had swung so hard towards experiment and abstraction that they had lost touch with their basic jobs.