Clio's Lives
Page 39
started its own Bulletin, renamed Business Archives and History in 1960,
transforming into the Australian Economic History Review in 1967, and
finally its ownership being transferred to the newly founded Economic
History Society of Australasia. In the meantime, the Australian Society for
the Study of Religious History was set up in 1959 and began publishing
the Journal of Religious History in 1960, while a Sydney branch of the
Australian Society for Labour History was established in 1962. The
founding of the society had been discussed in Canberra some two years
previously by Keith Hancock and the visiting British historian Asa Briggs,
and formally launched in 1961 at the congress of the ANZAAS in Brisbane
in May 1961. Its journal, Labour History, began publication in 1962.50
The appearance of such specialisms, coinciding with the unprecedented
expansion in universities and their funding that followed the Murray
Report in 1957, raised questions about future networking among
historians. The time had now come in the eyes of some for the creation of
some umbrella organisation that might serve as a network for all historians
and avert fragmentation. During the 1950s, the Social Sciences Research
Council and its counterpart in the Humanities, both by-products of the
era of postwar reconstruction, had struggled to find a purpose. By the
50 Stephen Morgan and Martin Shanahan, ‘The Supply of Economic History in Australasia:
The Australian Economic History Review at 50’, Australian Economic History Review, 50:3 (2010), 217–
39, doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8446.2010.00303.x; Bruce Mansfield, ‘Sydney History and Religion: A Memoir’, Quadrant, 49:11 (2005), 56–9; Eric Fry, ‘The Labour History Society (ASSLH): A Memoir of its First Twenty Years’, Labour History, 77 (1999), 83–96, doi.org/10.2307/27516671;
Melanie Nolan, ‘Entwined Associations: Labour History and its People in Canberra’, in Melanie Nolan, ed., Labour History and its People, Twelfth Biennial National Labour History Conference (Canberra: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2011), 1–15.
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10 . AuSTRALIAN HISToRIANS NETWoRKING, 1914–1973
later 1960s, it became increasingly certain that both would become
learned academies, along the lines of the Australian Academy of Science,
and history would be represented in both, but this was hardly a substitute
for a body entirely consecrated to history in its various forms.51
ANZAAS still provided a regular national meeting place at which seniors
in the profession might lay down their notions of future directions for the
discipline, juniors might find an audience and all participants exchange
ideas and gossip (and who knows how much networking took place in
the pubs and restaurants outside the formal hours of meeting?). Some
historians enjoyed the opportunity of catching up with important new
developments in other social sciences such as anthropology and geography,
and saw value in remaining within ANZAAS. Others grew increasingly
insistent that there should be a body, probably along the lines of the
long-established American Historical Association, that could speak and
exercise pressure on behalf of the discipline as a whole. During the later
1960s, the issue was regularly aired at Section E meetings of ANZAAS,
among the strongest advocates of a new association being Frank Crowley
and George Rudé.
Eventually the decision was taken at the ANZAAS conference in Perth
in 1973 to create a new Australian Historical Association. A.G.L. Shaw
(1916–2012), professor at Monash University and a historian with links to
both the Melbourne and the Sydney schools, was to be the first president.
For a few years, the new association would coexist with ANZAAS, with
some historians attending both; however, by the 1980s, ANZAAS itself
was facing decline because many scientific and medical scholars preferred
to support the organisations representing their specialised interests.
The decision to form the Australian Historical Association was taken just
in time, in the sense that new sub-branches of the discipline of history
were proliferating. A number of women historians – Anne Summers,
Beverley Kingston and Miriam Rechter prominent among them – were
preparing the first major critiques of the neglected place of women in
Australian history, supported by a lively growth of collectives and working
parties keen to set the story straight. Environmental history was coming
into view. Among younger historians there was a dawning realisation,
growing in depth and conviction, that the history of Australia had not
51 Stuart Macintyre, The Poor Relation: A History of Social Sciences in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010).
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begun in 1788 and had not subsequently been a story of the peaceful
spread of flocks and herds across an empty land. Aboriginal history would
have to be accommodated not only as a branch of the discipline but
would also need to be integrated into the mainstream historical narratives.
The conversations that enabled communication among historians from
both the newer and the older fields of historical endeavour could best be
conducted under the aegis of the Australian Historical Association. Such
during the ensuing 40 years has proved to be the case.
246
11
Country and Kin Cal ing? Keith
Hancock, the National Dictionary
Col aboration, and the Promotion
of Life Writing in Australia1
Melanie Nolan
Australian historians and ego-histoire
In his international comparison of history, historians and autobiography
in 2005, Jeremy D. Popkin concluded that Australian historians were early
to, and enthusiastic about, the ego-histoire movement or the ‘setting down
[of] one’s own story’. Australians anticipated Pierre Nora’s collection of
essays, Essais d’ego-histoire, which was published in 1987.2 They had already
founded ‘a series of autobiographical lectures in 1984’, which resulted in
a number of publications, and Australian historians’ memoirs thereafter
appeared at a rate of more than one a year.3 When he considered Australian
1 I thank Ann Curthoys and the editors for their comments on an earlier draft.
2 Pierre Nora ed., Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 7.
3 Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 74. In ‘ Ego-histoire Down Under: Australian Historian-Autobiographers’, Australian Historical Studies, 38:129 (2007), 110, doi.org/10.1080/10314610708601234, Popkin dates the Australian memoir bulge from 1982 when collective projects including ‘a volume of professional women’s narratives, The Half-Open Door, which appeared in 1982, and the four volumes of essays starting with the Victorian History Institute’s 1984 forum in which R.M. Crawford, Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey participated’. Patricia Grimshaw and Lynne Strahan, eds, The Half-Open Door: Sixteen Australian Women Look at Professional Life and Achievement (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982); 247
CLIo'S LIvES
historians’ memoirs more specifically in 2007, Popkin argued that ‘[o]n
a proportional basis, more historians from Australia than from any other
country’ ha
ve written ego-histoire: he had identified ‘more than three
dozen different’ Australian historians who had written her or his memoirs
compared to just 200 United States historians’ published memoirs.4 Popkin
also argued that contemporary Australian historians’ memoirs helped to
establish ‘a tradition of first-person writing, a relatively recent development
in their own culture’ and that they had greater impact in Australia than
groups of other historians elsewhere in other countries. Works by both male
and female authors such as Keith Hancock, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Bernard
Smith, Jill Ker Conway, Manning Clark, Ann Moyal and Inga Clendinnen
constituted a distinctive strain of historical life writing generally and had
become major contributions to the national literature.5 This creative non-
fiction won major mainstream literary prizes, not simply specialist history
ones. Australian historians’ life writing had a greater impact within society
than French or US contemporaries had in theirs, according to Popkin,
because of the literary quality of the work and the ‘high degree of authorial
self-consciousness’ in the context of a relatively new sense of Australian
cultural identity.
This work has been methodologically important to the profession, too,
in two ways. First, historians’ personal lives and experience challenged
received versions of the national past. Popkin argued:
Australian historians have used their personal stories to dramatise the
issue of Australia’s relationship to Britain and Europe, its ability to define
a distinctive national personality, the role of gender in that definition and
how Australia might come to terms with its troubled relationship to its
Aboriginal population.6
R.M. Crawford, Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey, Making History (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble/
Penguin, 1985); Bain Attwood, ed., Boundaries of the Past (Melbourne: History Institute, 1990); Bain Attwood and Joy Damousi, eds, Feminist Histories (Melbourne: History Institute, 1991); Bain Attwood, ed., Labour Histories (Melbourne: Monash University Printing Services, 1994).
4 Popkin, ‘ Ego-histoire Down Under’, 110, 119.
5 W.K. Hancock, Country and Calling (London: Faber & Faber, 1954); Hancock, Professing History (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1976); Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Solid Bluestone Foundations: Memories of an Australian Girlhood (Ringwood: Penguin, 1983); Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain (New York: Knopf, 1989); Manning Clark, The Puzzles of Childhood (Ringwood: Viking, 1989); Clark, The Quest for Grace (Ringwood: Viking, 1990); Bernard Smith, The Boy Adeodatus: The Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990); Ann Moyal, Breakfast with Beaverbrook: Memoirs of an Independent Woman (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1995); Inga Clendinnen, Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2000). For instance, Smith’s Adeodatus won both the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the National Book Council Prize.
6 Popkin, ‘ Ego-histoire Down Under’, 123.
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11 . CouNtRY aND KiN CalliNG?
Indeed, Indigenous Australian historians’ autobiographies, including
those of Gordon Briscoe and of the contributors to the recent collection,
Ngapartji Ngapartji, discussed how these scholars’ life histories have
impacted on their research on Indigenous Australians and their more
general perspectives, just as occurred for women historians earlier.7
Their experience led them to question the national Australian narratives.
Second, autobiographical works also helped to break down the wall or
methodological divide between history and autobiography, which had
been premised on the view that memoirs were private, subjective and
‘beyond the reach of historical investigation’ while history was research-
based and in accordance with the documentary record.8 Many others have
questioned what is sometimes described as the ‘illusion of objectivity’,9
but ego-histoire confronted this issue directly in terms of source material.10
Not only did many memoirists resort to documentary evidence but
historians, as well as biographers, used subjective material. As Popkin
argued, biographies of historians and their own ego-histoire were important
factors in the wider reconciliation between history and autobiography.11
Popkin singled out the trailblazing importance for Australian historians of
W.K. (Keith) Hancock’s reflections: his 1954 volume of memoirs, Country
and Calling, and his 1976 extended autobiographical essay, Professing
History.12 Historians regard Hancock as Australia’s greatest historian because
he displayed an impressive range, quality and volume of work. He also
held an impressive range, quality and number of political involvements,
appointments and honours.13 Hancock’s biographer, Jim Davidson, notes
that ‘Hancock’s once immense reputation is now hard for Australians to
7 Gordon Briscoe, Racial Folly: A Twentieth Century Aboriginal Family (Canberra: ANU E Press and Aboriginal History, 2010); Vanessa Castejon, Anna Cole, Oliver Haag and Karen Hughes, eds, Ngapartji Ngapartji: In Turn, in Turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014).
8 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography, 17, 90.
9 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511816345.
10 Luisa Passerini and Alexander Geppert, ‘Historians in Flux: The Concept, Task, and Challenge of Ego-histoire’, Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories, special issue, European Ego-histoires: Historiography and the Self, 1970–2000, 3 (2001), 7–18.
11 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography, 12.
12 Hancock, Country and Calling; Hancock, Professing History; Popkin ‘ Ego-histoire Down Under’, 109. See also Jaume Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention (New York/London: Routledge, 2015), 485 – together with G.V. Portus’s autobiography, Happy Highways (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1953); and David McCooey, Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), doi.org/10.1017/
CBO9781139084956.
13 D.A. Low, ed., Keith Hancock: The legacy of an Historian (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001).
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grasp: most of it was earned outside Australia, and the Commonwealth
context which gave it coherence has virtually collapsed’.14 Stuart Macintyre
famously suggested in 2010 that ‘if there were a Nobel Prize for History,
Hancock would surely have won it’.15 Hancock (1898–1988) attained a First
in History at Melbourne University (BA Hons, 1920), and was a temporary
lecturer at the University of Western Australia before taking up a Rhodes
Scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford (BA, 1923; MA, 1930). He secured
a prize fellowship at All Souls (1923) and the next year, at the age of 26,
he became a ‘boy professor’ of history at Adelaide University (1924–34).
He then held chairs successively at Birmingham (1934–44), Oxford
(1944–49), Institute of Commonwealth Studies London (1949–56) and
The Australian National University (ANU) (1957–65). He became an ANU
Visiting Fellow and founding director of the Australian Academy of the
Humanities in 1969 in his ‘retirement’. Hancock wrote more than 20 books:
most importantly, Australia (1930), Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs
(1937–42), British War Economy (with Margaret Gowing, 1949), Smuts:
The Sanguine Years, 1870–1919, vol. 1 (1962), Smuts: The Fields of Force,
1919–50, vol. 2 (1968), and Discovering Monaro (1972), as well as his two
works of professional memoir and reflection. His British knighthood in
1953 stemmed from his most famous service in managing and editing the
28 volumes of the British Civil Histories of War. Hancock was involved in
a mission to Uganda on behalf of the British government in 1954. The
Italian government appointed him to the Order of Merit of the Republic of
Italy in 1961, on the strength of his first, and least known, work on Ricasoli
and the Risorgimento in Tuscany in 1926, which Mussolini’s ascendancy
had rendered relevant. The Australian government instigated his Knight
Commander of the Order of the British Empire award in 1965 primarily
for his role at ANU, with which he had been associated from its foundation
in 1946 when he was one of the inaugural four ‘academic advisors’.16
Australian historians’ struggle with the challenge of writing ‘their own
history’ was played out poignantly in Hancock’s own biographical
practices, negotiating the conflicts of a historian writing his own history
14 Jim Davidson, A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W. K. Hancock (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009), 510.
15 Tom Griffiths, The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft (Carlton, Vic.: Black Inc., 2016), 42–60.
16 See, for instance, Robin Gollan, ‘Sir (William) Keith Hancock 1898-1988’, Proceedings of the Australian Academy of Humanities, vol. 14 (Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1990), 61–63; and Jim Davidson, ‘Hancock, Sir William Keith (1898-1988)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 17 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007).
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11 . CouNtRY aND KiN CalliNG?
and the separate dilemma of what he called ‘country and calling’ during
the twentieth century. First, Hancock’s writings and life abound with
tensions arising from his being both an insider and outsider: Davidson
describes a three-cornered life in terms of country, while Sandra Holton