Clio's Lives

by Doug Munro

there was the visiting of old haunts – ‘a helpful jogger of memories’ –

  and the use of family photos. The latter seemed inconsequential initially

  because they are atypical in the sense that everyone is attired in their

  Sunday best, in keeping with Emma Walvin’s concern for outward

  appearances as the confirmation of respectability. As Walvin explains, the

  photos are ‘both misleading and revealing. Though we looked nothing

  like that in normal, everyday life, our Whitsuntide appearance provides

  a telling insight into some of our mother’s most cherished values’ (pp.

  51–2). But they turned out to be very useful, so more the pity that none

  appear in Different Times. Although it was not archivally based, Walvin’s

  aim was to write a book ‘that will stand or fall by the quality of the writing

  and how far it evokes a past time’.32

  As well as recounting some of his own childhood, Walvin presents

  a remembrance of working-class life that locates his family within the

  broader story of the industrial north during the 1940s and 1950s. In doing

  so, he stresses that much of what his friends and family experienced was

  illustrative rather than exceptional. Joe Eyre’s was ‘a story in miniature’

  (p. 4) – he was ‘one of untold legions who came home from the war

  harbouring hidden scars that troubled him to his dying days’ (p. xi).

  He and his estranged wife were ‘one tiny example of what was happening

  worldwide, as millions of people struggled to piece together lives shattered

  by warfare and upheaval’ (p. 68). Walvin’s father’s illness and slow decline,

  awful though it was, was ‘a common and familiar story’ (p. 36). Many other

  women besides his mother ‘were wrestling with similar circumstances’ in

  the postwar years (p. 46). Eric Richards is an exact contemporary of Walvin

  31 Inputs of siblings should not be underestimated. Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) regretted that his two elder brothers were ‘no longer here to correct and amplify my record’ when writing his own autobiography. Quoted in Francis West, ‘A Broken Mirror: Gilbert Murray’s Reflections on

  an Australian Childhood’, in Christopher Stary, ed., Gilbert Murray Reassessed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 33.

  32 Walvin, email, 26 November 2014.

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  CLIo'S LIvES

  and he too grew up in working-class Britain. Also a grammar school boy

  who went to a red-brick university on a scholarship, Richards predicts

  that Different Times will become a primary document of its times.33

  Fitzpatrick wrote the first draft of My Father’s Daughter entirely from

  memory. She then compared her memory with her parents’ papers in the

  National Library of Australia, and other family papers, talked to friends

  and family members, and checked other archival sources. She was horrified

  at the fragility of her memory: ‘practically everything I remembered

  was slightly or significantly wrong, or at any rate contested by other

  accounts’ (p. 6).34 It would be more than useful to have had these itemised

  in footnotes, but Fitzpatrick does give numerous clues in the body of

  her text. The book she writes also bears the hallmarks of an essentially

  objectivist approach to history, in itself an offshoot of her study of Russian

  history where she had to steer between the shoals of the competing and

  polarised dominant interpretations.35 She draws a distinction between

  ‘honesty as emotional truth and honesty as factual accuracy’ (p. 5) and

  says she is ‘writing memoirs, not a history of my life’ (p. 8). Fitzpatrick

  equates ‘emotional truth’ with what she remembers, as distinct from strict

  factual accuracy. Yet, in practice, she still writes very much as a historian

  and this concern with fidelity to fact and nuance is the major strength

  of My Father’s Daughter.

  Final remarks

  This chapter is not intended as a cheerleading narrative about the bountiful

  virtues of historians’ autobiographies. Their variations in quality preclude

  such a tactic. But we do feel that they ought to be more highly valued

  than they probably are at present, and childhood memoirs in particular.

  Historians’ accounts of their childhood are often the best parts of their

  autobiographies. They are typically less inhibited and circumspect than

  the accounts of their careers. Once the memoir intrudes onto academic

  33 Eric Richards, ‘Emigrants and Migrants’, in Philip Payton, ed., Emigrants and Migrants: Essays in Honour of Eric Richards (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2017), 142.

  34 See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Can You Write a History of Yourself: Thoughts of a Historian turned Memoirist’, Griffith Review, 33 (2011), griffithreview.com/edition-33-such-is-life/can-you-write-a-

  history-of-yourself.

  35 See Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist and Alexander M. Martin, ‘An Interview with Sheila Fitzpatrick’, Kritika, 8:3 (2007), 479–86, doi.org/10.1353/kri.2007.0034; Fitzpatrick, ‘Revisionism in Soviet History’, History & Theory, 46 (2007), 77–91, doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00429.x.

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  3 . WALvIN, FITzPATRICK AND RICKARD

  life there are, as Popkin observes, tacit rules surrounding the ‘obligations

  to maintain the group’s image in the eyes of outsiders’, which lends

  a certain blandness to many historians’ autobiographies.36 Perhaps this

  is a common malaise for academic autobiographies generally, rather than

  being specific to historians. A.J.P. Taylor, as one of his biographers points

  out, ‘did himself no [professional] favours’ by writing an autobiography

  ( A Personal History, 1983) that was inaccurate, spiteful and disparaging

  of others.37 He broke all the unwritten rules. In writing memoirs of

  childhood, however, historians need not worry about professional censure

  of that sort and they typically have a frankness and freshness about them,

  although the sensibilities of family members may have some bearing on

  content. The problem with the genre is that one’s childhood is the time

  of life where the written record is likely to be at its sparsest, and where

  memory is the principal source.

  A more important consideration is that historians’ autobiographies,

  whether of childhood or beyond, are becoming more monographic

  – in the sense of being research-based – as the three memoirists

  have demonstrated.38 Neither do historians typically find the task of

  autobiography an easy one. Rickard hints as much in acknowledging the

  help of members of an academic life-writing group in Melbourne (p. vii),

  and this despite a comparable experience in writing about the dynamics

  of Alfred Deakin’s family.39 Of course, there are ‘good’ autobiographies

  and ‘bad’ autobiographies, just as there are ‘good’ monographs and ‘bad’

  monographs. We doubt whether the three memoirists would regard

  their autobiographies as their most important work, but this is not to

  downplay their merits. Each book was a serious undertaking, involving

  all the historian’s skills. They were written with a concern to ‘get it right’,

  or at least as accurately as could be managed. Is it not high time that

  historians’ autobiographies of this sort receive the credit due to them as

  serious pieces of research?

  36 Popkin, History
, Historians, & Autobiography, 152.

  37 Kathleen Burk, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2000), 365.

  38 And generational family histories by historians even more so, because their authors are dealing in large part with events before they were born and are therefore dependent on archival sources: e.g. David Walker, Not Dark Yet: A Personal History (Sydney: Giramondo, 2011); Graeme Davison, Lost Relations: Fortunes of my Family in Australia’s Golden Age (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2015).

  39 John Rickard, A Family Romance: The Deakins at Home (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996).

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  4

  The Female Gaze:

  Australian Women

  Historians’ Autobiographies

  Ann Moyal

  A striking number of Australian women have ventured into the

  autobiographical genre. While a slew of immigrant men were producing

  their personal odysseys of pioneering endeavour and the exploration

  and appropriation of a new land in the nineteenth century, a regiment

  of women from diverse backgrounds began to record their remembered

  experiences and specific local responses to colonial life. The women’s stories

  were very different. Franker, relational, concerned with childhood, people

  and places, some masquerading as regional or local history, in a strongly

  masculine society they were often judged as ‘unimportant’ or ‘trivial’ and

  not given publication at the time of writing. But they came to lay the

  foundation of ‘a complementary culture’ to male autobiography with its

  ongoing emphasis on national identity and image, and they have been

  judged by literary and historical scholars as a rich and unique reading

  experience.1

  1 Joy Hooton, Stories of Herself When Young: Autobiographies of Childhood by Australian Women (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990), Introduction. This source provides a rich study

  of Australian autobiography.

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  Turning to women historians in Australia, their contribution to the

  autobiographical genre across the twentieth century stands well within

  this tradition. The focus of their work remains strongly linked to

  reminiscences of childhood; to personal influences, relationships and

  places; and, by the 1980s, to an emerging awareness of the advent of

  professional careers. Yet, it is important to note that many decades before

  professional training for women became available, two earlier women

  strode the stage in linking their personal lives to national meaning. The

  first was the electoral reformer, prominent social commentator, journalist

  and writer in South Australia, Catherine Helen Spence, who in her

  An Autobiography published in 1910, at the age of 85, claimed firmly

  that her life and career had identified her ‘with the evolution of South

  Australia from a province to an important state in the commonwealth’,

  and ended with the strong words, ‘by my writings and my spoken

  addresses, I showed that one woman had a steady grasp on politics and

  on sociology’.2 The second woman was Dame Mary Gilmore – teacher,

  writer, influential commentator – who, in her two autobiographical works

  in 1934–35, Old Days, Old Ways and More Recollections, saw herself firmly

  as a ‘tribal mother’ in the contemporary male world and as ‘the wise old

  woman with a unique understanding of the past’.3

  Several decades later, the distinguished public figure Maie Casey, publishing

  her memoir An Australian Story 1837–1907 in 1962, offered a different

  mode in representing her special connection to the country’s historical

  past. Casey made her own childhood her autobiographical baseline, and

  worked backwards through her family history so as to situate it within the

  evolution of Australia. She used what she describes as ‘a mixture of record

  and memory’ in which, by means of research among historical documents

  and letters, family myth, and personal memory, she hoped to place and

  secure her own, her family’s and her country’s identities, and preserve

  them from disappearance.4

  2 Catherine Helen Spence, An Autobiography (Adelaide: W. Thomas Printer, 1910), 100.

  3 Mary Gilmore, Old Days, Old Ways: A Book of Recollections (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934); Gilmore, More Recollections (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1935). W.H. Wilde, ‘Gilmore, Dame Mary Jean (1865–1962), Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, The Australian National University, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/gilmore-dame-mary-jean-6391/

  text10923, published first in hardcopy 1983 (accessed 10 August 2015).

  4 Maie Casey, An Australian Story, 1837–1907 (London: Michael Joseph, 1962); see also Hooton, Stories of Herself When Young, 71–3.

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  4 . THE FEMALE GAzE

  From a singularly different background, yet impelled by a kindred drive

  to capture and contain the true Australian essence, in this case of ‘the

  humble workers of the outback’, the populist historian Patsy Adam-Smith

  published her autobiographical Hear the Train Blow in 1964. Adam-

  Smith was brought up during the Depression in a railway fettler family

  as an adopted daughter, a biological fact she did not learn until her teens.

  The concept of social identity and recognition, united with her need

  for a personal sense of belonging and of historical remembrance, lay at

  the heart of her autobiography. Writing in a later edition, she affirmed:

  ‘In some ways it is as though we never lived. There is no monument to

  the toilers of a land and they wouldn’t expect it. But a nation will be

  poorer if it forgets them.’5 Her book, rooted in the bush ethos and in the

  gusto and innovation of the workers, went into a number of editions and

  enjoyed wide acclaim. It also provided Adam-Smith with the background

  for her subsequent prolific output of popular Australian historical works

  (she published 32 books) for which she used manuscripts, oral history

  and memory in spreading and rehearsing her stories of the railways, ships,

  workers, Anzacs and prisoners of war.6

  By the 1980s, trained Australian women historians, moved perhaps

  by the advances in feminist thinking of the 1970s, were turning to

  autobiography. Alexandra Hasluck, a graduate of the University of

  Western Australia, published her Portrait in a Mirror (1981). Hasluck

  had emerged as an independent historian from the late 1950s when the

  Australian Dictionary of Biography ( ADB) recruited her to the first Western

  Australian Working Party. Her autobiography was a record as the wife of

  the politician, later historian, and Governor-General, Paul Hasluck, and

  of travel and encounters, but she paused to make some passing criticism

  of a tendency on the part of academic historians (‘well-known’ ones,

  she emphasised) to ‘requote old errors’ and ‘retell old stories’, without

  bothering to read new works. Yet this memoir by the first trained female

  historian proved to be less a reflection of self-endeavour and historical

  enquiry than a collective relational embrace. Looking into the mirror ‘not

  5 Patsy Adam-Smith, Hear the Train Blow: Patsy Adam-Smith’s Classic Autobiography of Growing Up in the Bush (Melbourne: Nelson, 1987), 180 (emphasis added).

  6 Adam-Smith’s other autobi
ographical work is also an amalgam of mixed research involving

  the use of manuscripts, oral testimony and memory. See There Was a Ship (Adelaide: Rigby, 1967); The Barcoo Salute (Adelaide: Rigby, 1973); When We Rode the Rails (Sydney: Landsdown, 1983); Goodbye Girlie (Ringwood: Viking, 1994).

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  only does my own face look back at me,’ she wrote, ‘but also the faces of

  ancestors and contemporaries, all wanting to get into the picture: and I

  cannot keep them out’.7

  In 1983, the University of Melbourne history graduate Amirah Inglis

  published Amirah: An Un-Australian Childhood, the personal story of

  her upbringing by Polish Jewish parents to be a communist and a non-

  religious Jew. An immigrant child and student in Melbourne balancing

  a deeply entrenched cultural heritage with a new egalitarian setting, her

  book reveals a complex search for identity between the inherited old

  world and a society that offered opportunity but also societal challenge.

  This book, too, made its focus on childhood, the family and girlhood,

  although at university in 1944, she records, ‘it was impossible to avoid

  the discomforts of being a Jew’, but, ‘discovering the anti-Semitism of

  Karl Marx and of Australian trade unionists was’, she wrote with candour,

  ‘a miserable experience’.8 Inglis’s second autobiography published in

  1995, The Hammer & Sickle and the Washing Up, frames her first marriage to the historian Ian Turner.9 A decade later came the voice of another

  historian migrant, Helga Griffin, a long-time researcher for the ADB,

  drawn this time from a Turkish and German background and faced with

  a difficult acclimatisation begun in a prisoner-of-war camp. In her Sing

  Me that Lovely Song Again … , Griffin offered a detailed, penetrating

  and rigorously investigative account of her early challenges, her Catholic

  schooling and her emergence through childhood and university to meet

  her future husband, historian Jim Griffin. Through its many pages,

  however, it did not touch on her historian’s life.10

  In the early 1980s, a selection of Melbourne and Sydney women academic

  historians, together with professional colleagues from other disciplines,

  took on the task of describing their experiences and advancement in

  a male-structured world in The Half-Open Door, co-edited by University