The contribution to Australia’s cultural life by my old friend and long-standing colleague Peter Coleman demonstrated that to be an intellectual in public you do not have to be a wanker. Coleman was a real-life intellectual, a brilliant writer (not so much of a public speaker) communicating, through his journalistic, editorial, and political professionalism and as an author of so many influential and thought-provoking books, a set of ‘cultural freedom’ principles that are increasingly under challenge.