We have never elected a leader who won the Nobel prize for literature (as Britain did, with Winston Churchill) or the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction (as happened with John Kennedy in the United States). We have not permitted any politically engaged intellectual to manage, then dissolve, our state (unlike Czechoslovakia under Vaclav Havel); to design our national coinage (as W.B. Yeats did in Ireland); to adorn our cabinet with a fine cultural pedigree (like Andrew Malraux did for General Charles de Gaulle); to transmute a tale of prison and exile into a work of art (Menachem Begin in Israel); to fight and win a civil war with no prior military experience (Leon Trotsky in Russia); or to build both a political and a literary reputation in gaol (Pandit Nehru during India's struggle for independence).

Were those remarkable leaders – Churchill, Kennedy, Havel, Yeats, Malraux, Begin, Trotsky and Nehru – distracted or diverted by their braininess? Possibly their standing as true intellectuals lent a degree of coherence to their thought, forensic self-examination to their actions, perspective to their sense of events, and grace to their handling of adversity. You might be, as Yeats styled himself in the Seanad, "a 60-year-old smiling public man", yet find that keeping your wit and your wits about you remained handy assets.

Is something wrong with us, or with those other countries? For much of my adult life in Australia, the term "academic" held nothing but pejorative connotations. The word evoked nerds, delicate blossoms, tall poppies and eggheads. "Academic" connoted theoretical, abstract, airy-fairy pursuit of the perfect as the enemy of the good. Rather than public, published intellectuals, we preferred plain men (and only men they were). From an entirely different angle, Vladimir Lenin and his heirs were just as harsh, deriding many brainy folk as "useful idiots" and eventually resolving to trust only neophytes with hands-on, dirt-under-the-fingernails engineering degrees.

In Australian politics in the old days, ministers sedulously maintained and displayed the habits, good and bad, of their previous occupations. Returned soldiers enjoyed a special cachet; medals made the man. Farmers sincerely regarded themselves as the custodians of true Australian values. Teachers thought change would happen if only they lectured and hectored their audiences for long enough. Lawyers argued a brief, without necessarily connecting their advocacy to empathy with others, a wider context for policy or a less self-centred view of the world.

One of those plain men, a most senior one, dismissed an aspiring intellectual colleague as being "exceedingly intelligent, but having no f---ing brains". I told another that part of the Old Parliament House – the bit running from the caucus room up past the chamber to the prime minister's office and cabinet – was the most intriguing corridor in all of Australia. He took pity on me, put his arm around my shoulder, and inquired whether I had ever seen the corridor between the stage door and the dressing rooms at the Pink Pussycat in King's Cross. That duo was among the brand of leaders we voters have taken to heart, deeply tribal rather than widely travelled, with gaps in formal education compensated by a laconic demeanour, one allied to rat cunning, with shrewdness and common sense outweighing technical expertise, and a capacity to get on with people and get things done rightly prized. Nothing prevents grounded leaders like that from, as Paul Keating said of his term as prime minister, "just thinking all the time".

A few gifted scribblers have surreptitiously slipped through the net. Alfred Deakin wrote eloquently about Australian politics, if for an English newspaper, even during his own term as prime minister. Richard Casey kept an elegant diary while in Washington during World War II, lamenting his failure to persuade Walt Disney to install a kangaroo or a koala alongside his mouse and duck. For Australians, that would have meant becoming part of Americans' family. Later on, Bert Kelly used his "Modest Member" column, politely but insistently, to advocate the lonely cause of economic rationalism. Later still, John Button thought clearly, wrote well (post-politics), saw the humour in things and loved to read. Stranded one night in Hobart, he told me that he did not mind "sleeping in the nuddy", "as long as I have my novel".

When I was younger and sillier, I suggested that the flag fall for entry to crowded Venice should be proof that you had published a book. Only intellectuals, in the simplest definition of that term, were going to be allowed in. I have grown up a little, but still think that intellectuals are more at home in Venice than in politics. Look at a few Australians who have tried to put this country on the right track. Bruce Petty, Hugh Stretton, Tim Flannery, Michael Long, Donald Horne, Phillip Adams, Gurrumul, Bob Santamaria – all of them have been better off away from the topsy-turvy hurly-burly.

A cautionary tale for would-be intellectual politicians, one which deserves not to be apocryphal, concerns Malraux. Asked to show off French culture by his president – a famously ugly man, all odd spikes and sharp angles – Malraux escorted de Gaulle to the Jeu de Paume. When the general identified a Monet, Malraux complimented him on knowledge of subject and brushwork before noting that the painting was actually a Manet. After de Gaulle tagged a Gauguin, Malraux banged on about similar technique and texture before remarking that van Gogh had done that one. De Gaulle retaliated, declaring that he was sure the painting in front of him was a Picasso. "No, my general", replied his minister, "that's a mirror." In coping with political masters, there is, indeed, a distinction between being exceedingly clever and having no brains.

Mark Thomas is a Canberra-based writer.