Clio's Lives
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where his teaching stimulated, among others, the young Max Crawford
(1906–91), who, together with Wood’s son F.L.W. (Fred) Wood (1903–89),
was among the Sydney graduates to find their way to Balliol in the 1920s.
An earlier example of the Sydney–Balliol axis was Hessel Duncan Hall
(1891–1976). After taking a master’s degree at Sydney, Hall studied under
A.L. Smith between 1915 and 1918, and wrote a thesis that became his
first publication on The British Commonwealth of Nations (1920) . Oxford’s
only postgraduate degree at that time was the Bachelor of Letters, while
the newfangled doctorate of philosophy arrived a few years later. But
Duncan Hall, after working in adult education in England for a few
years, failed to find secure academic employment in Australia and from
1926 he lived and worked overseas, producing in retirement a massive
19 Jones, Balliol College, 235.
20 See, for instance, his influence on Keith Hancock in Davidson, A Three-Cornered Life, 52–3.
21 B.H. Fletcher, ‘Founding a Tradition: G.A. Wood and J.F. Bruce, 1891–1930’, in B. Caine, B. Fletcher, M. Miller, R. Pesman and D. Schreuder, eds, History at Sydney: Centenary Reflections (Sydney: History Department, University of Sydney, 1992), 1–21.
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history of imperial constitutional development entitled Commonwealth
(1971). When the University of Queensland sent a history graduate to
Oxford in 1916, Bevil Molesworth (1891–1971), he also gravitated to
A.L. Smith and Balliol, and became a tutor in adult education, but in his
case it became a lifetime career in Australia, leading to appointment as the
Australian Broadcasting Commission’s first director of talks.
Meanwhile, the Balliol tradition spread to Melbourne after Ernest
Scott became professor of history in 1913. Aware of his lack of Oxford
connections, Scott no doubt took advice from Wood in the matter of
sending Melbourne graduates to the United Kingdom. In the years
immediately after the First World War, Melbourne alumni admitted to
Balliol included the philosophy graduates Clement Leslie (1898–1980)
and Boyce Gibson (1900–72) and the history students Esmonde Higgins
(1897–1960), Fred Alexander (1899–1996) and William Keith Hancock
(1898–1988).22 Leslie, after a short period lecturing in British universities,
moved into industry and the public service. Higgins embraced radical
politics, almost certainly to the detriment of his career prospects, but
devoted himself to adult education, thus replicating one of A.L. Smith’s
abiding interests. Boyce Gibson was also involved in adult education for
a few years before returning to a lifetime of teaching philosophy at the
University of Melbourne, and Fred Alexander was to pursue what almost
became a second career as director of adult education in Western Australia
from 1941 to 1954. However, Alexander’s main trajectory began as
assistant lecturer to Shann at the University of Western Australia in 1924,
where he remained until his retirement as professor in 1966. Hancock,
after becoming the first Australian elected to a fellowship at All Souls,
Oxford’s ancient and prestigious graduate college, was offered the chair
of history at Adelaide in 1924 in succession to Henderson – who was
retiring after periodic bouts of depression – and took up the position in
1926. Hancock and Alexander maintained a lifelong contact in which old
friendship was mingled with a competitive element.
Of course women who aspired to become historians did not participate
in the Oxbridge networks, apart from Kathleen Fitzpatrick (1905–90),23
and had to look elsewhere for stimulus and support. Jessie Stobo Webb
22 For particulars, see Elsie Lemon, ed., The Balliol College Register, Fourth E, 1916–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
23 Elizabeth Kleinmetz, A Brimming Cup: The Life of Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2013), 66–72.
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(1880–1944), who at the age of 28 was appointed lecturer in ancient
history at the University of Melbourne in 1908, and who spent three
decades as deputy to Scott and Crawford, did much to mobilise the
resources in Melbourne for intellectual companionship.24 An important
source of such support was created in 1910 with the establishment of the
Catalyst Club, a monthly discussion group bringing together professional
women, writers, artists and academics.25 This group found a home in
the Lyceum Club, founded in 1912 on the model of a London initiative
eight years earlier. Its membership was drawn from the same cohort as
the Catalyst Club, with the addition of women notable in philanthropy
and public service.26 This soon became, and has remained for a century,
an important meeting place for women of active intellectual and cultural
interests. Jessie Webb’s career illustrates the kind of enterprise that might
be fostered by membership of such a group. With one friend from the
Lyceum Club, she traversed Africa from Cape Town to Cairo; with
another she went travelling in central Australia in an Austin Seven in
1928 – all this besides the intellectual companionship.
Curiously, the Lyceum Club did not strike such deep roots in Sydney.
Wood’s school of history produced several graduates with distinguished
scholarly potential, whose careers followed varying trajectories. In 1920,
Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987) was awarded an overseas scholarship, but
her father did not allow her to take it up, and she worked as a librarian in
Sydney before entering into the literary partnership with Flora Eldershaw
(1897–1956) that produced several works of historical fiction and
history based on colonial New South Wales. Barnard’s older colleague
Myra Willard (1887–1971) received a postgraduate scholarship in 1920
that enabled her, under Wood’s supervision, to conduct research leading
to the publication of her History of the White Australia Policy in 1923.
It was the first book published by the Melbourne University Press and
remained the standard authority on the subject for almost half a century.27
Unfortunately, Willard wrote no more history, spending the rest of her
working life as a teacher and educational administrator. The one that
24 Ronald T. Ridley, Jessie Webb: A Memoir (Melbourne: History Department, University of Melbourne, 1994).
25 Anne Longmire, The Catalysts: Change and Continuity 1910–2010 (Melbourne: Anne Longmire and the Catalysts, 2011).
26 Joan M. Gillison, A History of the Lyceum Club, Melbourne (Melbourne: Lyceum Club, 1975).
27 See Sharon M. Harrison, ‘Myra Willard, 1887–1971’, in The Encyclopedia of Women and
Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia, www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0730b.htm
(accessed 19 December 2015).
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got away was Persia Campbell (1898–1974), whose scholarship to the
London School of Economics enabled her to write and publish Chinese
Coolie Immigration in 1923. She returned to Sydney for a few years but
married an American in 1930 and spent the rest of her life as
an academic
in the United States, becoming an early and respected authority on
consumer protection. In their choice of research topics, both Willard and
Campbell foreshadowed an outreach towards East and Southeast Asia and
the Pacific that would become one of the characteristics of the Sydney
school of history, but initially they were lone pioneers.
The rising interest in Australia’s place in international affairs following
the end of the First World War led to the formation of a number of
organisations in which university staff found themselves networking
with likeminded individuals from the professional and business world.
First in point of time was the Round Table movement, which had prewar
origins. It followed a visit from a tireless publicist for the British Empire,
Lionel Curtis, in 1910–11 and was intended to mobilise influential
public opinion in the major centres of the Empire with a view to
fostering closer ties between the member nations, perhaps ultimately
leading to some form of imperial federation. Groups were formed in
Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane (though after a few years the
Brisbane group faded out of existence). The Australians were not keen
on the concept of imperial federation, but they saw value in monthly
meetings among interested citizens who would then forward essays based
on their proceedings to a central London publication, the Round Table.
The movement flourished during the interwar period, and provided
a model of intellectual cooperation between the universities and the wider
community. Its historian, Leonie Foster, estimated that 26 per cent of the
membership was drawn from an academic background, 42 per cent from
other professions and 32 per cent from business or primary production.28
The Round Table provided a model for the League of Nations Union,
which originated in the United Kingdom. Its aim was similar: the
mobilisation of support among influential public opinion in the league’s
member nations. A Melbourne chapter was set up in 1921, its promoters
including the lawyer John Latham (1877–1964), the constitutional lawyer
Sir Harrison Moore (1867–1935), and the geologist and stockbroker E.C.
28 Leonie Foster, High Hopes: The Men and Motives of the Australian Round Table (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986); D.A. Low, ‘Australians and the Round Table, 1910–2010’ (paper read at seminar, ‘Preparing for Perth: An Action Agenda for 2011’, Canberra, 6 November 2010).
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Dyason (1886–1949), whose constructive role in forging links between
town and gown would repay further study. For three decades, Dyason was
a successful businessman, a respected economic advisor to governments,
a student of international relations with pacifist leanings, and, as Ernest
Scott’s brother-in-law, someone with good contacts at the University
of Melbourne.
In 1924, Archibald Charteris (1874–1940), professor of international law
and jurisprudence at the University of Sydney and formerly associated
with the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House,
London, founded the Australian Institute of International Affairs in
Sydney.29 Dyason was among those who within a few months started
a Victorian branch, and in 1925 he helped to promote an Australian
affiliate of the Institute of Pacific Relations, an American initiative
designed ‘to study the conditions of the Pacific people with a view to
the improvement of their mutual relationships’.30 The Victorian chapter
of the institute merged with the local branch of the Australian Institute of
International Affairs in 1932, but its Sydney counterpart in its early years
was more robust. Duncan Hall led the Australian delegation to the first
international conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations at Honolulu
in 1925 (where he seems to have scored a chair at a reputable American
university; another aspect of networking).31 Persia Campbell, G.V. Portus
(1883–1954) and the economist Richard Mills (1886–1952) published in
1928, on behalf of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Studies in Australian
Affairs. Gradually from the 1930s, the Australian Institute of International
Affairs and the Institute of Pacific Relations came to concentrate on
foreign policy, while the study of current affairs in Australia was taken
over by the Australian Institute of Political Science,32 publishers since
1929 of the Australian Quarterly. This was another medium linking public
intellectuals from within and outside the universities.
29 J.D. Legge, Australian Outlook: A History of the Australian Institute of International Affairs (Canberra: Department of International Relations, The Australian National University, 1999).
30 Quoted in Susan Hogan and Heather Radi, ‘Campbell, Persia Gwendoline Crawford (1898–
1974)’, ADB, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/campbell-persia-gwendoline-crawford-9682/text17087,
published first in hardcopy 1993 (accessed 19 December 2015).
31 Hall was professor of international relations at Syracuse University, in New York State, during the 1926–27 academic year.
32 Since 2006, the Australian Institute of Policy and Science.
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By 1928, then, networking among Australian historians was facilitated
by three different lines of access. Participation in the regular meetings of
ANZAAS was consolidated by the recognition of history as a discipline
deserving a section of its own. The institutes specialising in aspects
of foreign and domestic policy brought together academics and members
of the business and professional communities. And, less measurable but
no less pervasive, the shared experience of overseas study, especially at
Balliol College and, to a lesser extent, the London School of Economics,
shaped the thinking of a significant number of historians and political
scientists. But then the unexpected and tragic death of G. Arnold Wood in
1928 led to lasting change in the character of the Sydney and Melbourne
departments of history.
In choosing Wood’s successor in the Challis chair, the selectors made
a bold decision, appointing the 28-year-old Melbourne graduate
Stephen Henry Roberts (1901–71).33 This meant passing over the two
remaining members of Wood’s staff, James Bruce and Fred Wood, both
Balliol alumni. Bruce soon left to take an appointment as foundation
professor of history at the University of the Punjab, which was to become
one of the leading schools in the Indian subcontinent. Fred Wood left
in 1935 to become professor of history at Victoria University College,
New Zealand. From that time on, the Sydney connection with Balliol
College weakened, although during the 1930s the economic historian
R.B. Madgwick (1905–79) enrolled there as a postgraduate between 1933
and 1935. His doctoral thesis saw publication as Immigration to Eastern
Australia, 1788–1851 (1937). Maintaining a tradition, in his subsequent
career ‘he pioneered a massive scheme of adult education’ as director of
army education during the Second World War.34
The University of Sydney acquired in Stephen Roberts a young dy
namo
with a record of research productivity unequalled until Geoffrey Blainey
in the 1950s. From a rural background, Roberts took a swag of prizes
at the University of Melbourne, where he was then appointed assistant
lecturer under Scott. His pioneering History of Australian Land Settlement
(1924) was followed by Population Problems in the Pacific (1927), a work
33 For Roberts, I draw on D.M. Schreuder, ‘An Unconventional Founder: Stephen Roberts and the Professionalisation of the Historical Discipline’, in Macintyre and Thomas, The Discovery of Australian History, 125–45; Schreuder, ‘A “Second Foundation”: S.H. Roberts as Challis Professor, 1929–47’, in Caine et al., History at Sydney, 27–45.
34 Andrew Spaull, ‘Madgwick, Sir Robert Bowden (1905–1979)’, ADB, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/
madgwick-sir-robert-bowden-11032, published first in hardcopy 2000 (accessed 3 October 2016).
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stimulated by attending the Institute of Pacific Relations conference at
Honolulu in 1925. Awarded an overseas scholarship, he preferred instead
of Oxford or Cambridge to enrol at the London School of Economics
between 1927 and 1929, where his supervisors included Harold Laski
(1893–1950). His doctoral thesis was published in 1929 as the two-
volume History of French Colonial Policy, 1870–1925. The theme built
on Scott’s early interest in French exploration but also harmonised with
the growing tendency of historians based at the University of Sydney to
look to the Pacific and East Asia for their subject matter. This tendency
was strengthened when G.C. Henderson, after his resignation from the
University of Adelaide, devoted his energies to research on the history of
Fiji using materials in the Mitchell Library; he was eventually appointed
an honorary research professor in Roberts’s department and participated
in the creation of a fourth-year honours class in Australian and Pacific
history.35
Roberts himself during the 1930s consolidated his reputation in
international studies with Australia and the Far East (1935) and The House
that Hitler Built (1937).36 After the Australian Broadcasting Commission
was formed in 1932, he was one of its first and most prominent news
commentators. He involved himself with the Australian Institute for
International Affairs, the Institute for Pacific Relations and the Round