“Paddy was always passionately interested in ideas,” Mr [Greg Lindsay] said. “He was one of the great Australians; dying on Australia Day was very fitting.”

Peter Coleman, former editor of Quadrant, described [McGuinness] as “a terrific editor to work with, courageous and imaginative”. “He published articles no one else would,” Coleman said.

Author and new Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle said of McGuinness: “He had a very strong eye for cant, humbug, hypocrisy and people who clothed the incoherence of their ideas in obfuscatory language. When he became editor of Quadrant in late 1997, he declared one of his targets would be postmodernism, which was then the main intellectual infection in our humanity departments of our universities. Within five years, postmodernism was dead.”

TRIBUTES flowed in yesterday from around the world for Padraic “Paddy” McGuinness, a unique character in Australian life and a man who had been central to the country’s cultural, journalistic and academic life for more than half a century.

The renowned commentator, journalist and self-proclaimed dissenter, a one-time daily columnist on The Australian, died aged 69 at his Balmain home on Saturday after a struggle with cancer.

McGuinness first came to public attention as a student activist – – his ASIO file is now on the National Archives website — and was a leading light during the heady days of intellectual ferment in the late 1950s and early 60s that saw the formation of the group known as the Sydney Push.

A baffled ASIO officer who examined the McGuinness file summed him up as “an individualist, a non-conformist and an anti- authoritarian”.

Both loved and reviled, always dressed in black faux-clerical garb, schooner in hand and holding court in his many favourite drinking holes across Sydney, McGuinness prided himself on pricking intellectual pretension wherever he found it. His exposure of cant and hypocrisy earned him friends from all sides of the political divide.

Greg Lindsay, founder of think tank The Centre for Independent Studies, argued and drank with McGuinness for 30 years.

“Paddy was always passionately interested in ideas,” Mr Lindsay said. “He was one of the great Australians; dying on Australia Day was very fitting.”

Most of McGuinness’s career was in journalism — as a columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian and as editor of The Australian Financial Review.

In recent years he was editor of the magazine Quadrant.

Senior columnist with The Australian Frank Devine, who knew McGuinness for 35 years, said: “Paddy was the quintessential independent thinker, scorning humbug and stupidity. He was a bloodthirsty predator among those he identified as members of the chattering classes.”

Long-term friend and columnist Jane Fraser said he was a proud man who had intensely disliked showing his vulnerability in his final months.

“He refused to discuss his illness with those close to him and would tell us: `Mind your own bloody business — and don’t send any bloody priests’,” Fraser said.

“He had that natural charisma which meant people were always fascinated by him. But he was more than generous with his time, whether you were famous, infamous or the cleaner. He wasn’t some big blustering crass thing; he was a very sensitive man.”

Peter Coleman, former editor of Quadrant, described McGuinness as “a terrific editor to work with, courageous and imaginative”. “He published articles no one else would,” Coleman said.

Author and new Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle said of McGuinness: “He had a very strong eye for cant, humbug, hypocrisy and people who clothed the incoherence of their ideas in obfuscatory language. When he became editor of Quadrant in late 1997, he declared one of his targets would be postmodernism, which was then the main intellectual infection in our humanity departments of our universities. Within five years, postmodernism was dead.”

Windschuttle said McGuinness was also one of the few voices brave enough to raise debate about Aborigines and the Stolen Generation at a time when even to question the topic was derided by the Left as immoral.

“He gave a voice to the carers, the workers and the officials whose voices had been deliberately excluded,” Windschuttle said.

Professor of Economics at the University of Singapore, Henry Ergas, who first met McGuinness in the 1970s, said: “I will always think of him as a reader over my shoulder, reminding me that ideas are so important they need to be expressed clearly, allowing them to genuinely form part of the great conversation of mankind.”

McGuinness’s funeral will be held at Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney at 2pm on Friday. The two speakers, both former employers, will be Devine and former governor-general and long-term friend Bill Hayden.

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