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his desire to legitimate place and liberate the marginalised. Even when
he used his own symbolic image of the outsider in order to understand
hegemonic relations, class differences and inequality, it was ultimately
situated within the larger disciplines of philosophical ideas on origins,
72 Some major texts indebted to Bernard Smith’s historiography include Terry Smith, ‘The
Provincialism Problem’, Artforum, 12:6 (1974), 49–52; Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon, Charles Mereweather and Ann Stephen, The Necessity of Australian Art (Sydney: Power Publications, University of Sydney, 1988); Heather Barker and Charles Green, ‘No More Provincialism: Art & Text’, emaj, 5 (2010),
www.melbourneartjournal.unimelb.edu.au/E-MAJ.
73 Butler, Radical Revisionism, 12.
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identity and identification; indeed, he believed we must classify in order
to understand the historical agencies and shifting paradigms that have
shaped us.
If Bernard Smith used myths to frame his discourse on antipodeanism
and unravel the historical, scientific, cultural and political forces that
moulded Australian art and its modern cultural identity, he was equally
aware that utopias were an ideological construct of the emigrant and the
intellectual voyager, and both were fundamental to historical processes and
human progress. As he said, ‘I am a communist, in so much as a utopian
communist, I believe in the future—the hope is in the waiting’.74 In other
words, he had never shifted from his Marxist humanism and his belief
that a better future was possible for the world.
74 Bernard Smith, conversation with the author, 2011.
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Collective Biography
10
Australian Historians
Networking, 1914–1973
Geoffrey Bolton1
The Oxford English Dictionary defines networking as ‘the action or process
of making use of a network of people for the exchange of information,
etc., or for professional or other advantage’.2 Although recently prominent
in management theory, the art of networking has been practised over
many centuries in many societies, but its role in the Australian academic
community has been little explored. This essay represents a preliminary
excursion into the field, raising questions that more systematic researchers
may follow in time, and drawing unashamedly on the resources of the
Australian Dictionary of Biography. Beginning on the eve of the First World
War, the essay is bounded by the formation of the Australian Historical
Association in 1973, at which date the profession provided itself with
1 This essay is a lightly edited version of the paper prepared by Geoffrey Bolton for the ‘Workshop on Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians’ held at The Australian National University in July 2015. Professor Bolton had intended to make further revisions, which included adding some analysis of the social origins of the Australian historians who participated in the networks he had defined.
In all essential respects, however, we believe that the essay as presented here would have met with his approval, and we are very grateful to Carol Bolton for giving permission to make the modest editorial changes that we have incorporated.
For biographical information and insights, see Stuart Macintyre, Lenore Layman and Jenny
Gregory, eds, A Historian for all Seasons: Essays for Geoffrey Bolton (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2017).
2
Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com/view/Entry/235272?redirectedFrom=networking#eid.
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a formal structure for the creation and nurturing of networks that would
benefit the scholarly advancement of individuals and the coherence of the
discipline as a whole.
By 1914, each of the Australian states had established a university in its
capital city, and all had made some provision for the teaching of modern
history. Melbourne at its foundation in 1856 included modern history
among the disciplinary responsibilities of one of its first foundation
professors, the protean W.E. Hearn (1826–1922).3 When Hearn became
dean of law in 1879, he was followed by John Elkington (1841–88)
as professor of history and political economy with tenure for life.4
An entertaining lecturer but a cantankerous colleague, Elkington was no
dynamo. When a royal commission in 1903 inquired about his research,
he replied disarmingly: ‘I have work in hand, but I have not committed
myself to anything very extensive in book form so far.’5 After Elkington
was persuaded to retire in 1913, he was succeeded by Ernest Scott (1867–
1939), who although lacking a university degree of any kind possessed
a convincing record of publication, largely in the field of European
maritime exploration in eastern Australia and the Pacific.6 He would
prove a much more energetic networker than Elkington.
At the University of Sydney, the standing of modern history was assured in
1889 when the discipline became one of the chairs created by the Challis
bequest, although at first it was advertised at a lower salary than the
others, and was only increased when no credible applicants came forward.
The chair was awarded in 1891 to the 26-year-old G. Arnold Wood
3 Most of the individuals mentioned in this chapter have entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Readers are also referred to Stuart Macintyre and Julian Thomas, eds, The Discovery of Australian History, 1890–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), which contains separate chapters on several of the dramatis personae.
4 Geoffrey Blainey, A Centenary History of the University of Melbourne (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1957).
5 Quoted in Norman Harper, ‘Elkington, John Simeon (1841–1922)’, Australian Dictionary
of Biography ( ADB), National Centre of Biography, The Australian National University, adb.anu.edu.
au/biography/elkington-john-simeon-6100/text10451, published first in hardcopy 1981 (accessed 19 December 2015). These years in the life of the Melbourne history department are recounted by Richard Sellick, ‘Empires and Empiricism: The Teaching of History at the University of Melbourne, 1855–1936’, in Fay Anderson and Stuart Macintyre, eds, The Life of the Past: The Discipline of History at the University of Melbourne, 1855–2005 (Melbourne: Department of History, University of Melbourne, 2005), 3–38.
6 Stuart Macintyre, A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994). Scott’s works included Terre Napoleon: A History of French Explorations and Projects in Australia (London: Methuen, 1910); Laperouse (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1912); and The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders, R.N. (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1914).
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(1856–1928).7 He was to be a significant influence. Appointees at other
Australian universities, most of them equally youthful, were expected to
combine the teaching of history with other disciplines. Thus the University
of Tasmania in 1893 appointed the 25-year-old William Jethro Brown
(1868–1930) as one of its three foundation professors with responsibility
for history and law, followed in 1906 by Robert Dunbabin (1869–1949)
as lecturer in history and classics.8 George Henderson (1870–1944), at
the age of 32, became professor of history and English language at the
University of Adelaide in 1902.9 The two newest universities, Queensland
(1911) and Western Australia (1913), made foundation appointments
in the field. The University of Queensland appointed the 27-year-old
Edward Shann (1872–1935) to a lectureship in 1911, but by 1913 he
was poached as professor of economics and history by the University of
Western Australia.10 Queensland then appointed two lecturers, Henry
Alcock (1886–1947) and Alexander Melbourne (1888–1943). Both
were still in their 20s, but Alcock was to be the senior; he had graduated
from Oxford with first-class honours, whereas Melbourne was entirely
Australian-educated.11
By 1914, there were enough academic historians in Australian universities
to call for some structured means of professional communication, but
they were still too few to support a dedicated disciplinary association.
A convenient umbrella existed in the Australasian Association for the
Advancement of Science.12 Established in 1888, largely on the initiative of
the University of Sydney mineralogist and chemist Archibald Liversidge
(1846–1927), the association conducted congresses at different cities
in Australia and New Zealand every year or two, and soon established
itself as a valued meeting place for the exchange of scholarly ideas as well
7 R.M. Crawford, ‘A Bit of a Rebel’: The Life and Work of George Arnold Wood (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975), 108; see also John A. Moses, Prussian-German Militarism 1914–18 in Australian Perspective: The Thought of George Arnold Wood (Bern: P. Lang, 2001).
8 Alison Alexander, ‘History’, in Alison Alexander, ed., The Companion to Tasmanian History (Hobart: Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, 2005), www.utas.edu.au/
library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/H/History.htm.
9 Tamson Pietsch, ‘ Imperium and Libertas: G.C. Henderson and “Colonial Historical Research”
at Adelaide’, in Wilfrid Prest, ed., Pasts Present: History at Australia’s Third University (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2014), 77–85.
10 C.B. Schedvin and J.E. Carr, ‘Edward Shann: A Radical Liberal Before his Time’, in Macintyre and Thomas, The Discovery of Australian History, 55.
11 Geoffrey Bolton, ‘A.C.V. Melbourne: Prophet without Honour’, in Macintyre and Thomas,
The Discovery of Australian History, 111, 114.
12 The association changed its name to Australian and New Zealand Association for the
Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) in 1930.
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as outreach to a wider public.13 The association in its early decades was
a broad church, accommodating many subjects from the social sciences
and, even for a time, the humanities. Geography was a foundation
participant, forming Section E, and in those years of fluid boundaries
between disciplines it was easy for historians to take part in its proceedings.
By the years preceding the First World War, the association was providing
historians with a pulpit for expounding their ideas; at the 1911 Sydney
congress, for example, Henderson was able to exhort his colleagues to
use Australian materials as a means of training their students in research
skills.14 Eventually, in 1928, History was to take over Section E, leaving
Geography and Oceanography to re-establish themselves further down
the alphabet as Section P.15
Even with the contacts provided by Australian and New Zealand
Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS), the number of
historians at Australian universities was still limited, and their teaching
responsibilities so demanding that the discipline could benefit from the
stimulus of ideas imported from a wider world. At that time, the United
Kingdom was the predominant source of such ideas, and the universities
of Oxford and Cambridge were seen as the intellectual powerhouses.
It was perhaps an unforeseen result of G. Arnold Wood’s 37 years in
the Sydney chair that Balliol College, Oxford, was to become for several
decades a highly significant influence on many historians in Australia.
Balliol was one of the oldest colleges at Oxford, founded in 1263 by the
widow of a nobleman with estates in Scotland and the north of England
as penance for her husband’s role in the highway robbery of the Bishop
of Durham’s treasury.16 After some centuries of mediocrity, enlivened
at intervals by the production of alumni such as Adam Smith, Balliol
came to the fore in the second half of the nineteenth century in the wake
of reforms at Oxford University. These confirmed the arrangements by
which the university served as the examining body that awarded degrees,
but in its constituent colleges undergraduates lived communally and
received most or all of their tuition. The BA in modern history took
three years, a preliminary first year followed by six terms without written
13 Roy MacLeod, ed., The Commonwealth of Science: ANZAAS and the Scientific Enterprise in Australia, 1888–1988 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), ch. 1.
14 Elizabeth Kwan, ‘G.C. Henderson: Advocate of “Systematic and Scientific” Research in
Australian History’, in Macintyre and Thomas, The Discovery of Australian History, 37.
15 MacLeod, The Commonwealth of Science, 365–6.
16 John Jones, Balliol College: A History, 1263–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2–3.
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examinations until a week-long marathon at their conclusion. Graduates
from other universities in the United Kingdom, the United States or the
British Empire were excused the preliminary first year. A compulsory
ingredient of the course for nearly a century was the study of a sequence of
mediaeval charters, edited by Bishop William Stubbs (1872) and tracing
the development of early English constitutional history; it became an
influential model for the use of documents in undergraduate teaching.
Balliol had never lost its original connection with Scotland and the north
of England, and under a notable Master, Benjamin Jowett (1870–93), and
his successors, the college extended its outreach. If some Oxford colleges
seemed like sheltered workshops for the privileged classes, Balliol placed
its emphasis on intellectual excellence: the hallmark of a Balliol man,
it was said, was his tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority. But
it was not a socially snobbish college. Balliol, in Jim Davidson’s words,
‘had the reputation of requiring ability from its entrants rather than
good connections. It led the way in taking Indians and later Africans’.17
For Australians and other ‘colonials’, Balliol provided a more hospitable
environment than most. It was not surprising that in the heyday of the
British Empire, Balliol was well to the fore in producing Imperial statesmen
such as Lord Milner and Lord Curzon, nor that when the South African
millionaire Alfred Beit endowed a chair of imperial and Commonwealth
history at Oxford it was located at Balliol.
But Balliol’s sense of imperial mission was tempered by a strong sense
of social conscience. This went beyond a belief in the civilising and
humanitarian missions of Empire to an abiding concern with issues
of inequalit
y and poverty. The young G. Arnold Wood, who came up
to Balliol in 1885, was remembered by his tutors as ‘dyed in the wool
in Puritan Nonconformity, Cobdenism, Gladstonian Liberalism, the
humanitarian ideals of John Bright and the political philosophy of John
Morley’.18 Concern for Empire could tilt into anti-imperialism, and Wood
famously took a lot of criticism in Sydney for his opposition to the South
African war of 1899–1902. His values had been nurtured at Balliol and
he integrated them into his teaching in Australia.
17 Jim Davidson, A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian WK Hancock (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), 50.
18 Crawford, ‘ A Bit of a Rebel’, 1.
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It was not surprising that when Wood’s teaching produced a promising
history graduate in James Fawthrop Bruce (1888–1978), who sought
further study in Britain, he directed the young man to Oxford, and
specifically to Balliol College, but the decision was not based merely on
collegial loyalty. Balliol had built up one of the strongest and longest-
lasting teams of history tutors of any college in Oxford. Foremost among
them was Arthur Lionel Smith (1850–1924), tutor from 1882, dean
from 1907 and master from 1916 until his death in 1924. A.L. Smith
was a firm upholder of archival research as the foundation for sound
historical writing, and he combined this approach with an insistence on
the academic’s responsibility for outreach into the wider community.
He was a role model for many of his students. No doubt it helped that
he was among the first generation of Oxford dons who were permitted
to marry, and of his nine children, seven were daughters.19 The Smiths
were a hospitable couple who frequently invited undergraduates to
their house, especially those from overseas. One daughter married the
Australian medical researcher who later became Sir Hugh Cairns. The
young Australians who went to Balliol remembered Smith with respect
and affection.20
James Bruce returned from Balliol to Sydney in 1915 to take up an
appointment as lecturer and deputy to Wood (associate professor from
1924).21 One of his strengths was in the history of Renaissance Italy,