by Doug Munro
argues that he never resolved the dilemmas of being an Antipodean-
born European.17 Second, Hancock’s two volumes of memoirs epitomise
the struggle he had in disentangling the personal and the professional.
Reviewers noted that the ‘best part’ of his first memoir was his childhood
reminiscences.18 While his first wife, Theaden Brocklebank, is deliberately
excluded from discussion in the first volume, she does appear in the
second volume.19 He also ‘draws a veil’ over disagreements he had with
other scholars at ANU, observing that ‘those stories better not be told’.20
Hancock, as an Australian historian writing his memoirs, had a lot of
work to do in defending his positions on the nation, as well as the extent
to which he wrote about his professional and personal life. One aspect
of Hancock’s engagement with Australian life writing, which Popkin
neglects, is Hancock’s being the leading figure in the establishment of the
Australian Dictionary of Biography ( ADB) at ANU in the late 1950s.21 Three
decades later, there were 306 biographies of historians in the ADB for the
period between 1788 and 1990; nearly 2.5 per cent of the ADB’s 12,500
subjects who died before 1990 are fielded, or indexed, as ‘historians’.22
In this way, Hancock was responsible for the writing of many Australian
historians’ lives as well as his own.
While Hancock struggled with being himself the subject of a biography,
his ambivalence waned over time.23 He had begun pondering his life in
the light of R.G. Collingwood’s autobiography. Hancock initially bridled
at Davidson’s suggestion of a biography on himself. He had after all
17 Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘The Autobiographies: Country and Calling and Professing History’
presented at a ‘Sir Keith Hancock Symposium’ held in The Australian National University in
Canberra in 1998, for the centenary of Hancock’s birth and 10 years after his death; and ‘“History is about Chaps”: Professional, National and Gender Identities in Hancock’s Autobiographies’, in Low, Keith Hancock, 271.
18 C.E. Carrington, review of Country and Calling by W.K. Hancock, International Affairs, 31:2
(1955), 210.
19 O’Brien, review of A Three-Cornered Life; Holton, ‘“History is about Chaps”’, 271.
20 Moyal, Breakfast with Beaverbrook, 137–49, tells the stories, as does Davidson, A Three-Cornered Life, ch. 6.
21 Melanie Nolan and Christine Fernon, eds, The ADB ’s Story (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013).
22 See ADB website, adb.anu.edu.au/facets/?facet=occf, for a breakdown of the distribution among 13 categories: general (188), military (40), religious (15), economic (11), architecture (8), art (7), music (6), medical (5), labour (4), legal (4), political (3), social (3), and literary (2).
23 See Davidson, A Three-Cornered Life, 485, for a discussion of his change of mind on this issue.
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burned all his and his first wife Theaden’s correspondence after her death,
although he used extensive ‘records I kept at that time of her state of
health’.24 As he warmed to the idea, Hancock teased Davidson by showing
him personal diaries and personal papers that he was (literally) not allowed
to touch. At the launch of Volume 10 of the ADB in 1986, however,
Hancock publicly praised Davidson’s biography of Dame Nellie Melba as
the ‘best brief life of a prima donna that anyone has ever written or ever
will write’.25 Melba’s article was controversial for its explicit discussion
of her facelift as the cause of her death from septicaemia.26 Hancock
opined that ADB articles were ‘more scholarly’ than the British Dictionary
of National Biography ( DNB) articles because ADB authors had ‘delved
deep into primary sources’ and wrote on a wide variety of subjects. That
evening, Davidson said that privately Hancock gave him an ‘encoded
message of approval’ to be his biographer.27
In various ways, Hancock was not only central to overcoming a general
reluctance towards all forms of life writing in Australia, and by and for
historians in particular, but also to influencing the kind of biography
written. In leading the way, he was not only party to, but also a subject of,
the transition. As Macintyre noted in the 1998 Companion to Australian
History ‘[h]istorians have largely dropped their suspicion of the genre of
biography’; now, ‘[t]hose who regard biography as a mere ancillary of
their discipline underestimate it’.28 Popkin, of course, did not consider
biographies of historians in his analysis. Indeed, many commentators
continue to distinguish between history and biography, and by kinds of
life writing, too. While they include autobiographies, they draw the line
at memoirs, believing autobiographies to be fuller and documented, while
memoirs are mere perspectives based on memory.29 However, I would
argue that this refined distinction is still fraught; at the very least there is
a continuum. Jaume Aurell has noted that some historians ‘design their
autobiographies in the same way as they articulate their historical texts’.
24 Hancock, Professing History, 24.
25 W.K. Hancock, speech notes, launch of vol. 10, ADB, Box 116, Q31, ADB Archives (ADBA),
Australian National University Archives (ANUA).
26 Jim Davidson, ‘Melba, Dame Nellie (1861–1931)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, The Australian National University, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/melba-dame-
nellie-7551/text13175, published first in hardcopy 1986 (accessed 6 October 2016).
27 Davidson, A Three-Cornered Life, x.
28 Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre, eds, The Oxford Companion to Australian History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), 72.
29 Robert Drewe, Seymour Biography Lecture, 17 September 2015, National Library of Australia (NLA), www.nla.gov.au/audio/robert-drewe; McCooey, Artful Histories, 5, also distinguishes between history and autobiography.
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11 . CouNtRY aND KiN CalliNG?
We can consider some autobiographies as a valid form of history, and
one might include some memoirs too.30 For instance, biographies have
increasingly been based, in turn, on rich ‘first-person’ archival material,
diaries and correspondence. Some memoirs are increasingly researched and
are referenced. If autobiographies break down the methodological divide
between history writing and subjective sources, so too can biographies.
In the face of debates about the differences between primary and
secondary life writing, and amidst a current multitude of memoirs by,
and biographies about, Australian historians, in this essay I consider the
history of biographical practices among those in the Australian academy
from the vantage point of Hancock’s experience. I chart the history of
Australian historians’ memoirs and biographies and their changing
natures, considering especially the recent emergence of historians’ family
memoirs. This analysis complements assessments, such as Popkin’s,
which concentrate on national identity; it seeks to broaden the changes
in quantity and kind of life writing over time that we should consider.
Kick-starting Australian biography writing
Hancock and the ADB were central to the evolution of Australian
biography from the foundation of ANU. When planning for ANU began
in earnest at the end of the Second World War, H.C. Coombs was charged
with consulting expatriates, such as Hancock, on the shape of the new
research university. Hancock, together with medical scientist Sir Howard
Florey, physicist Mark Oliphant and anthropologist Raymond Firth made
up the Academic Advisory Committee, which met the Interim Council
in Canberra over Easter 1948 to discuss the university. The committee
invited Hancock to advise it on the proposed school of social sciences.
In turn, in preparation, Hancock invited a number of Australian social
scientists to report on recent developments in their fields, their opinion
on the main directions for future research, and ‘the facilities which are
necessary for the encouragement of research’. Professor R.M. (Max)
Crawford at the University of Melbourne wrote the survey on the
discipline of history. He argued generally that social scientists needed to
be ‘brought together’ in Canberra. In terms of history, there were seven
great needs: the collection, preservation and cataloguing of documents;
30 Jaume Aurell, ‘Autobiography as Unconventional History: Constructing the Author’, Rethinking History, 10:3 (2006), 433–49, doi.org/10.1080/13642520600816213.
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public policy history; interpretative histories of Australia (Melbourne was
planning a five-volume history of Australia); regional history; histories
of private institutions; Pacific history; and biography.
Three of the academic advisors, Mark Oliphant, Keith Hancock and
Howard Florey, reviewing proposed sites for ANU, Canberra, Easter 1948
Source: oliphant Papers, Barr Smith Library, university of Adelaide . Reproduced in
Stephen Foster and Margaret varghese, The Making of the Australian National University
1946–1996 (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & unwin, 1996), p . 44 . openresearch-repository .anu .
edu .au/handle/1885/11333 .
Above all, Crawford saw a special role for the ANU historians in
a dictionary project: ‘[t]here is, I believe, more work being done now in
Australia biography, a field in which we have in the past done relatively
little’. Crawford provided a list of just three dozen biographies of
published between 1933 and 1947.31 Similarly, H.M. Green’s survey of
biography as part of a more general survey of Australian literature in 1951
argued that the first Australian biographies were akin to ‘extended, more
considered, and permanent version of the obituary’. Green pointed to
just three ‘outstanding’ Australian biographies before the 1950s: Nettie
Palmer’s biography of her uncle and High Court Judge, Henry Bournes
31 Raymond Maxwell Crawford, ‘Present state of historical research in Australia, and comments on main directions which research may take’, Research in the Social Sciences in Australia, Reports Prepared at the Request of Professor Keith Hancock, January 1948, tabled in the Minutes, 10 October 1947, p. 3, ANU Council, box 26, series 19, ANUA. This study was subsequently published as Research in the Social Sciences in Australia: Reports Prepared at the Request of Professor W.K. Hancock (Canberra: The Australian National University, 1948).
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11 . CouNtRY aND KiN CalliNG?
Higgins; M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Phillip of Australia (‘the’ author was,
in reality, a professional collaboration between Marjorie Barnard and
Flora Eldershaw, the subject being Arthur Phillip, the first governor
of New South Wales (NSW), 1788–92); and H.V. Evatt’s Australian
Labour Leader, a memoir of William Holman, NSW Premier 1913–20.32
Crawford distinguished between the historian’s and ANU’s roles:
I do not need to labour the point that biographical studies will teach us
about much more than the persons studied. This is work for individual
scholars. The role of the National University might be the eventual
production of an Australian Dictionary of National Biography.33
Interim Council meeting with academic advisors, April 1948
Pictured from left, moving clockwise around table (according to writing on back of
photograph): Sir Frederic Eggleston, Ernest Clark, Professor D . Copland, R .G . osborne,
Professor R .C . Mills, Dr H .C . Coombs, A .S . Brown, Mr Goodes, Professor R .D . Wright,
Mr McDonald, Lord Florey, Professor M . oliphant, Professor R . Firth, Professor K . Hancock, C .S . Daley and Sir Robert Garran .
Source: australian official photograph, Department of information (photographer unknown).
32 H.M. Green, A History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied: A Critical Review of all Forms of Literature Produced in Australia from the First Books Published After the Arrival of the First Fleet until 1950 (Revised ed.; 2 vols.; Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1985), II, 1367–92; Nettie Palmer, Henry Bournes Higgins (London: Harrap, 1931); M. Barnard Eldershaw, Phillip of Australia (London: Harrap, 1938); H.V. Evatt, Australian Labour Leader: The Story of W.A. Holman and the Labour Movement (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1942).
33 Crawford, ‘Present state of historical research in Australia’, 3.
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This proposal struck a chord with Hancock. The ANU charter was
a nation-building one: to encourage, and provide facilities for, research and
postgraduate study, both generally and in relation to subjects of national
importance to Australia.34 The dictionary project could play a tangible role
in promoting Australian history. Above all, no other Australian university
was in a position to develop a dictionary project, and ANU could show
intellectual leadership in this regard and develop a national collaboration
around the project. Hancock had been slightly involved in the DNB in
wartime Britain, serving on its national committee. In his biography,
Davidson cites Hancock’s role in the DNB, as do others, observing that
he ‘rarely thought it worth mentioning’.35 Perhaps he did not mention it
because the DNB was not an elaborate organisation at this time: Hancock
is thanked in a list of 86 others in the supplementary volume on Britons
who died between 1941 and 1950, and is thanked along with 43 others
for ‘their advice’ in the decadal successor of those who died between 1951
and 1960.36 The project was an ‘Oxford project’ and Hancock was friends
with both editors, L.G. Wickham Legg and Bill Williams; the latter was
a co-fellow of Balliol and a Warden of Rhodes House, itself a centre for
Commonwealth Studies, Hancock’s specialty. The editors did not have
a national collaborative network; they were merely adding supplements
to Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee’s initial project. Hancock’s honing of
skills in a large collaborative historical project in Britain arose not from
the DNB but primarily from the series of histories about the nation at war
that he designed and managed for the War Histories Branch, attached
to the Cabinet Office. His plan for this undertaking was approved and
he appointed 10 historians. He thus became general editor for the next
dozen years on the 28 volumes that comprised the Civil Histories of the
History of the Second World War, his duties involving not only writing the
first volume but also managing directly for five years about 40 historians
and researchers.37
<
br /> 34 Hon. John Johnstone Dedman, MP, Minister for Post-War Reconstruction, ‘Second Reading
Speech – Australian National University Bill 1946’, Hansard, 19 June 1946.
35 Davidson, A Three-Cornered Life, 393.
36 L.G. Wickham Legg and E.T. Williams, eds, The Dictionary of National Biography, 1941–1950
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), v.
37 The War Histories Branch of the Cabinet Office staff numbered 122 in 1949, of whom 20
were employed part time. The 28 historians and 48 researchers were divided about equally between military and civil histories of the war. See Jose Harris, ‘Thucydides Amongst the Mandarins: Hancock and the World War II Civil Histories’, in Low, Keith Hancock, 122–48.
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Others have narrated the difficulty ANU experienced in appointing
Hancock the inaugural director of the Research School of Social Sciences.38
He did not take up that position up until 1957. Meanwhile, Laurie
Fitzhardinge was drumming up support for a dictionary of Australian
biography. Fitzhardinge taught classics at the University of Sydney from
1946 to 1950. He was charged with setting up a Sydney University press,
which involved his travelling, with his family, to Britain for a year in 1947
to 1948 to visit university printing presses. He was based at the Clarendon
Press at Oxford University. He spent a brief afternoon at the Dictionary of
National Biography with the editor of the supplement, Hancock’s friend
Wickham Legg, who had been Fitzhardinge’s moral tutor in New College,
Oxford, from 1931 to 1933. Fitzhardinge thought that a dictionary of
biography should be a flagship project for a nascent university press.39
He loved dictionaries himself; wet Sunday afternoons of his childhood
spent reading his way through the Dictionary of National Biography in his
school library had been ‘an endless source of enjoyment … I devised games,
dodging about in it, opening a volume at random and then following all
the cross references and following up the cross references to that, and so
on’.40 His experience of working at the National Library from 1934 to
1944 and writing Australian biography taught him how ‘very difficult’ it
was ‘to get even the most elementary background information about the