by Doug Munro
of Melbourne historian Patricia Grimshaw, and Against the Odds, co-edited
7 Alexandra Hasluck, Portrait in a Mirror: An Autobiography (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1. In 1978, Alexandra Hasluck, who had published eight historical books, became the first Dame in the highest rank of the Order of Australia for her services to literature. See Geoffrey Bolton, Paul Hasluck: A Life (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2014), 465.
8 Amirah Inglis, Amirah: An Un-Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1983), 155.
9 Amirah Inglis, The Hammer & Sickle and the Washing Up: Memories of an Australian Woman Communist (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1983).
10 Helga Griffin, Sing Me that Lovely Song Again … (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2006).
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by University of Sydney historian Heather Radi.11 Almost all the women
in this scatter of anthropologists, historians, social scientists, scientists and
educators were the first members of their families to attend university,
and they show an emergent sense of female agency, a depiction of women
who, having gained university degrees and taken steps on the academic
or professional ladder, viewed themselves as representing, in Grimshaw’s
words, ‘an alternative role model for Australian girls’.12 Radi, who had
been tutoring and researching her PhD at the University of Sydney during
the mid-1960s, and then became a conspicuous feminist in the history
field, set the tone:
It took some time for me to grow into the work at the University in
the sense of doing anything that others did not do as well or better, but
I relished the independence which mother had wanted for me, and feared.
… As my interests shifted firmly to Australian History, my experience as
a woman and across class and culture was of recurring relevance for my
work. I was emotionally ready for Germaine [Greer] and followed friends
into the women’s movement and began encouraging students to work in
the area of women’s history. I contributed a segment on women’s history
to the first women’s history course taught at the University of Sydney and
had the pleasure of having my recommendations on the inclusion of the
study of migrants, Aborigines and women accepted for the Australian
History option for HSC [Higher School Certificate] Modern History.13
The sense of agency is modest. The male paradigm of selfhood and its
concern for ‘understanding’ and ‘making a coherent system out of life’
– as seen in Donald Horne’s earlier The Education of Young Donald 14 – is
absent from the women’s more tentative narratives. While Horne presents
his personal story firmly as ‘sociography’, the women place themselves
in a scheme where their own sense of agency is still compromised but
hopeful, their development again rooted largely in their relational pasts.
11 Patricia Grimshaw and Lynne Strahan, eds, The Half-Open Door: Sixteen Australian Women Look at Professional Life and Achievement (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982), 20; Madge Dawson and Heather Radi, eds, Against the Odds: Fifteen Professional Women Reflect on their Lives & Careers (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1984).
12 Patricia Grimshaw, ‘Introduction: Professional Women in Twentieth Century Australia’,
in Grimshaw and Strahan, The Half-Open Door, 9.
13 Heather Radi, ‘Thanks Mum’, in Dawson and Radi, Against the Odds, 185. In her chapter (‘Thanks Mum’, 170–85), Radi paid particular respect to her mother’s contribution to her progress.
It was a perspective many of the contributors to The Half-Open Door and Against the Odds shared.
14 Donald Horne, The Education of Young Donald (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1967).
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The University of Melbourne historian Kathleen Fitzpatrick contributed
to The Half-Open Door, but a year later published an autobiography
up until her returning from Oxford University to Australia in 1928.
It went into several editions and was judged ‘a contribution to Australian
letters’.15 Essentially, it was a deep reflection on Fitzpatrick’s childhood
and girlhood among an extended family at her grandmother’s house,
‘Hughenden’ in Victoria, and her education by Catholic nuns. Beautifully
written in her maturity, it gathers remembrance into a social context but
leaves her professional life, her ill-fated marriage to Brian Fitzpatrick
and her historical writings aside. Fitzpatrick, nonetheless, was one of the
very few privileged women to proceed from a degree at the University of
Melbourne to Oxford in 1926, where she was affected strongly by the
derisive treatment she received from her Oxford dons. Accordingly, she
avoided a master’s degree and the second-class honours degree she obtained
from Oxford profoundly undermined her confidence and sense of self-
worth. While she became a greatly admired member of the University of
Melbourne’s Department of History as a teacher and researcher, her own
sense of agency remained conservative and she declined the opportunity of
a professorship. ‘I have always believed’, she ends her chapter ‘A Cloistered
Life’ in The Half-Open Door, ‘that no one should be appointed to the
highest academic rank unless he or she is either a profound and original
thinker or a truly erudite person’.16
In sharp contrast, the Sydney historian Jill Ker Conway marked the
arrival of a highly motivated historian and a forceful communicator
who, with three books of memoir behind her, would come to dominate
the Australian women’s autobiographical scene. Her initial venture,
The Road from Coorain, published in 1989, introduced a newly minted
young historian from the University of Sydney in 1958, determinedly
steering her path away from the provincialism of Australian life to a richer
intellectual experience in the United States. Educated at a private girls’
school in Sydney after a childhood in the parched Australian landscape
of Hillston, New South Wales, she studied at the University of Sydney in
the later 1950s and found the teaching of Australian history ‘an exercise
15 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Solid Bluestone Foundations and Other Memories of a Melbourne Girlhood, 1908–1928 (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1983); Solid Bluestone Foundations: Memories of an Australian Girlhood (2nd ed.; Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1986); Fitzpatrick, Solid Bluestone Foundations: And Other Memories of a Melbourne Girlhood, 1908–1928, introduced by Susan Davies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998).
16 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, ‘A Cloistered Life’, in Grimshaw and Strahan, The Half-Open Door, 133.
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in frustration’. She shone in history but her rejection as a university
medallist for the cadet corps of the Australian Department of External
Affairs deeply marked her, and she dusted her feet of Australia and left
the country for a research scholarship at Harvard. The Road from Coorain
catches her awareness of the need to escape from the cultural attitudes of
a patriarchal society that constrained clever women. The book, with its
strong intellectual underlay, descriptive power and potent sense of female
force, put Ker Conway on the Australian and American map.17
Her second autobiography, True North (1994), traces her scholarly
evolution at Harvard, her marriage to the senior Canadi
an historian, John
Conway, and their time at the University of Toronto where she became
vice-principal. Already a broad scholar of American women, Ker Conway
was sought out at the age of 39 to become the first woman president of
Smith College, setting the stage for a dynamic period of growth at this
then conservative women’s institution. Her book A Woman’s Education
(2001) is in part a personal story but also a record of her successful
administration at Smith College. Drawing on her own hard pastoral
background, she wrote with spirit: ‘I could learn what I needed to know
to deal with almost any problem.’ Candid, informing and interrogative,
a certain solipsism, however, marks the narrative. Ker Conway herself
took up American citizenship; however, for an Australian audience, her
three memoirs – both in their recording and their genre – offer a key
illustration of the pertinence of confident feminine thinking.18
There appears sometimes a work that, differing in perspective and
evocative in character, claims a special place in our historiography. One
such is historian Jan Bassett’s The Facing Island. Drawing upon letters she
had written to her since deceased grandmother Edie, a resident of Phillip
Island in Port Phillip Bay, enabled Bassett to reconstruct her own life as a
grandchild on the island. Interlacing chapters, meanwhile, introduced into
the narrative the letters her grandmother had received when a girl from a
young New Zealand soldier who, in August 1916, dropped a message in
a bottle in Bass Strait on his route to the First World War. Relational and
sociological in conveying these profoundly intergenerational recollections,
Bassett also infuses her book with her own intellectual curiosity and
17 Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain: An Australian Memoir (Adelaide and New York: Heinemann and Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), quotation from 184.
18 Jill Ker Conway, True North: A Memoir (London: Hutchinson, 1994); Ker Conway, A Woman’s Education (New York: Knopf, 2001), 70.
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passion for travel and with allusion to her historical researches on the lives
and experiences of Australian war nurses across the twentieth century.19
Throughout, her writing is tempered by the knowledge that she is facing
death from cancer at the age of 46 and by her concern to make sense of
her life. At one time a teacher of history at La Trobe University and a
researcher at the University of Melbourne, she reflects, ‘I have measured
out my life in books’, and concludes: ‘I considered that I had served an
apprenticeship as a historian and was ready to put my skills to further
use. I had published a number of books, was working on another, and
had plans for lots more.’20 Jan Bassett died in 1999 without seeing her
evocative personal story in print.
In surveying the reach of women historians’ autobiographical writings
in Australia, I have found great resonance and a distinctive connection
between author and the craft of writing history in Inga Clendinnen’s
Tiger’s Eye. Renowned historian of the Aztecs and Maya of Mexico,
Clendinnen, a Melbourne academic, fell dangerously ill in her early 50s
and, after a liver transplant, spent months of hospitalisation in which
she endured what she calls ‘unscheduled and surprising transformations’.
Her description of her illnesses is a masterly section of her book. Trapped
in her hospital cot at night, she drew her book’s title from the remembrance
of a tiger at the zoo, padding up and down with his indifferent sweeping
gaze. He was, she found, the one animal who did not acknowledge
he was in a cage, and his image and his searchlight eyes became her
salvation.21 Writing about her childhood, her insights sharp, she realised
that ‘the marshland between memory and invention is treacherous’.22
But, caught up by chance, she was led to the journal of G.A. Robinson,
Chief Protector of the Aborigines for Port Phillip District, conducting
a journey on horseback in the early 1840s from Melbourne to Portland,
and was restored, after illness, to the writing of history. It was her ‘ticket in
a bottle’, and here lies the core of Clendinnen’s compelling book.
19 Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992); Bassett, The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary of Australian History (Melbourne/New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Bassett, ed., As We Wave You Goodbye: Australian Women and War (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998).
20 Jan Bassett, The Facing Island: A Personal History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 141. It was a characteristically aware and brave reflection.
21 Inga Clendinnen, Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2000), 20–1, 192.
22 Ibid., 73.
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Thereafter, as a historian, she put herself to know and interpret Robinson’s
journal of events and to recreate him sharply and empathetically on the
page. It makes splendid reading. Committed and sympathetic in his
dealings with the Aborigines, she writes, he ‘contrived ways to live with
the appalling, immutable fact of Aboriginal death’. Adjusting, he kept
himself busy. ‘Every night,’ she probes, ‘this burdened, driven man steals
time from sleep to assemble his information, to fix the flux of experience,
to assemble his information, to construct his self-exposing account of
things.’ Robinson is hopelessly divided. ‘He picks up a skull and puts it
in the van’, she writes, and then he continues with his travels and general
observations: ‘From horror to banality in a breath.’ But, as Clendinnen
observes, ‘the horror is preserved, and now it is there on record, for any of
us to read’. ‘It is possible’, she sums up, ‘that someone, some day, will read,
and remember.’ Complex, duplicitous, Robinson ‘speaks to us and moves
us still’. For Clendinnen, it was ‘the miracle of history’. Blending personal
agency and her deep ‘immersion in the experiences and mind of a stranger
dead long before I was born’, it yielded a work that her publisher claimed
as a ‘triumph for the importance of history’, and, for me, marked a major
autobiographical thrust.23
My own role as an autobiographer also turned directly on ‘encounters
with history’ and on historiography. But my first venture, Breakfast with
Beaverbrook: Memoirs of an Independent Woman (1995), arose in part from
a strong feminist conviction that women had appeared in contemporary
Australian male memoirs exclusively as mistresses or wives, but, as I had
enjoyed a historian’s life, there seemed a good reason to present a new
perspective. It was my good fortune as a history graduate from the
University of Sydney on a scholarship in London to have an early encounter
with the charismatic and powerful Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, which
became the centrepiece of my book. Beaverbrook, still the dominant press
lord of the Daily Express, had during the 1950s purchased some of the key
political papers of Great Britain including the Lloyd George and Lady
Lloyd George Papers and the Curzon Papers, and the Bonar Law
Papers
earlier acquired by Will. At the age of 75 – to the great annoyance of
academic historians – he had planned to keep them in his sole possession
and become a historian.
23 The quotations concerning Robinson are in ibid., 191–218.
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My appointment as his personal research assistant, with its life of glamour,
excitement and tireless work, led to the publication in 1956 of the book
Men and Power, which placed Lord Beaverbrook as a historian on the
international stage.24 He himself was a participant in history. A Canadian
by birth and a Member of the House of Commons, he had been at the
centre of manoeuvres in the British Parliament in 1916 to bring down
Herbert Asquith and install Lloyd George in the Prime Minister’s seat. His
interest now lay in writing of the two critical last years of the First World
War and the battle for power between the generals and the politicians.
It was history of a gripping political kind and it became ‘Our War’.
My book provides a detailed account of the collaborative methodology,
aided by the clever archivist Sheila Lambert (Mrs Elton, from her marriage
to Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton), by which we worked.25 But the critical
point about this ‘encounter with history’ was the uniqueness of the man.
Examined against the documents of the period, Lord Beaverbrook’s
firsthand knowledge of the players in those two vital years of war gave
him a mastery over the documentary material that no other historian,
working systematically through the records later, could hope to achieve.
It was this combination that placed him in special command of this piece
of British political history and, significantly, won him the acclaim of the
historians of the ivory tower. Lord Beaverbrook died in 1964 and, despite
the amazing range of his career, he wanted to be remembered for his
books. Breakfast with Beaverbrook gave me the opportunity to illuminate
the processes and outcomes of his historical work.
My second ‘encounter with history’ occurred when I returned to Australia
in 1959 to help another distinguished but very different historian,
Sir Keith Hancock, establish the Australian Dictionary of Biography. In his