by Doug Munro
people, the cast’. Finally, the publication of Percival Serle’s two-volume
Dictionary of Australian Biography in 1949 convinced Fitzhardinge that
writing biographical dictionaries was ‘no longer a one-man job. It’s got to
be a team job on the model of the DNB’.41
At Oxford, on the advice of R.C. Mills, the chair of the interim council
at ANU, Fitzhardinge gave Hancock his report on the resources of the
National Library. Hancock was impressed with Fitzhardinge and wanted
to employ him as a bibliographical consultant on local materials for the
various high-powered heads of schools that he was proposing to bring out
to ANU. The Sydney University press project was aborted in 1948. When
he was appointed Reader in the Sources of Australian History at ANU
38 Davidson, A Three-Cornered Life; Gerald Walsh, ‘Recording “the Australian Experience”: Hancock and the Australian Dictionary of Biography’, in Low, Keith Hancock, 249–68. See also Nolan and Fernon, The ADB ’s Story, 5–9.
39 Keith Hancock, ‘Formation of the Australian Dictionary of Biography’, Box 69, Q31, ADBA, ANUA.
40 Laurie Fitzhardinge, Interview by Barbara Ross, 4–26 March 1987, TRC 2159, transcript,
NLA, p. 2.
41 Fitzhardinge, interview by Ross, 1987.
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on Hancock’s recommendation in 1951, Fitzhardinge proposed that the
ANU press project produce a dictionary of biography as its flagship. Again
he was unsuccessful. He suggested the dictionary idea more widely at the
1951 Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of
Science (ANZAAS) Conference, and started a Biographical Register in the
history department at ANU in 1954.42 As Head of History, Fitzhardinge
employed Pat Tillyrand and others to work on the card index, ‘building
up material’ for a dictionary.43 Later, Fitzhardinge described his efforts as
‘a typically Fitzhardingian feeble and waffly attempt’ to get the dictionary
off the ground: ‘I’d prepared a plan for the preparation, within our
resources more or less, of a dictionary of biography – not to be written
by the Department, to be an all-over effort, but not to be attempted all
at once’.44 He envisaged the annual publication of articles contributed
by Australian historians, which would build up, over the years, into
a dictionary of concise articles organised alphabetically.
Fitzhardinge acknowledged that it was Hancock, however, finally arriving
as inaugural professor of history and director of the Research School of
Social Sciences (RSSS) in 1957, who seized upon the dictionary idea and
‘turned imaginatively a set of cards into a great national achievement
of historical scholarship’.45 He, Fitzhardinge admitted, ‘could do things
which I would never have been able to do in a month of Sundays’.
Drawing on his experience of overseeing the Civil Histories, Hancock set
about organising a national collaboration. He wrote to all the professors
of history and economic history, and all specialists in Australian history,
inviting them to a conference in August 1957, together with non-
academic historians (including journalist-historians Malcolm Ellis and
Brian Fitzpatrick, Catholic archbishop and historian Dr Eris O’Brien and
military historian Gavin Long), to discuss how to ‘advance the study of
Australian history’.46 Ellis was one of the few attending who had both
written biography and reflected on Australian biographical practice.
He had published biographies of pastoralist John Macarthur, Governor
42 W. K. H. [Hancock], ‘The ADB’ (12 April 1962), Box 69, Q31, ADBA, ANUA. ‘Excerpt from
Statement prepared by Professor Hancock. Formation of the Australian Dictionary of Biography’, Box 69, Q31, ADBA, ANUA.
43 George Temperly, Obituary ‘Patience (Pat) Australie Wardle nee Tillyard (20 June 1910–22
April 1992)’, Canberra Historical Journal, no. 30 (September 1992), 5–7.
44 Fitzhardinge, interview by Ross, 1987.
45 ‘Notes and News, Arrival of Hancock in Canberra’, Historical Studies, 7:28 (1957), 486–7.
46 Fred A. Alexander, Boyce Gibson, Margaret Gowing and Robin Gollan, ‘Hancock: Some
Reminiscences’, Historical Studies, 13:51 (1968), 229–306, doi.org/10.1080/10314616808595379.
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11 . CouNtRY aND KiN CalliNG?
Lachlan Macquarie and architect Francis Greenway. He was on record
in 1955 as describing most Australian biographies as being like ‘licking
the cold outside of a champagne bottle on a thirsty day’.47 Hancock,
however, deftly steered the conversation of this first conference, by,
and for, Australian historians, towards a dictionary project: by the end,
they agreed that a ‘Concise Dictionary of Australian Biography’ was
the single most important priority for stimulating the development of
Australian history.48
As well as Hancock’s first publication in 1926 on Ricasoli as dictator of
Tuscany, he had lectured on Machiavelli’s morality and expediency, and
in the early 1950s he began to research General Jan Christiaan Smuts’
biography. He was not hampered in his own biographical projects by lack
of knowledge of milieu, but he was aware that some of his colleagues
thought the problem of a lack of historiographical context was acting as
a governor on the writing of Australian biography. As late as during the
1930s, academics such as Gerry Portus had maintained that ‘Australian
history was not deserving of being a university subject’.49 Ernest Scott
introduced a course at Melbourne in the early 1930s; in 1946, Clark
became the second historian to teach a full-length course in Australian
history, and he was soon followed by others.50 Moreover, Fred Johns,
whose 1906 Johns’s Notable Australians was the precursor of Who’s Who in
Australia, had wanted to stimulate academic biography and bequeathed
the sum of £1,500 to the University of Adelaide in 1932 for the purpose
of founding ‘the Fred Johns Scholarship for Biography’ to encourage the
writing of biographies on eminent Australians.51 The scholarly journal
Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand had been founded in 1940
and a body of scholarly articles on Australian history was being published.
The journal’s editor from 1940 to 1949, the historian Gwyn James, had
47 Malcolm Henry Ellis, ‘The Writing of Australian Biographies’, Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand, 6:24 (1955), 432, doi.org/10.1080/10314615508595013.
48 Robin Gollan, ‘Canberra History Conference’, Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand, 8:29
(1957), 81, doi.org/10.1080/10314615708595099; Ellis, ‘The Writing of Australian Biographies’, 432.
W. K. H. [Hancock], ‘The ADB’ (12 April 1962), Box 69, Q31, ADBA, ANUA; ‘Excerpt from Statement prepared by Professor Hancock. Formation of the Australian Dictionary of Biography’, Box 69, Q31, ADBA, ANUA; Stuart Macintyre, ‘Biography’, in Davison et al., The Oxford Companion to Australian History, 72.
49 Mark McKenna, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2011), 250.
50 My thanks to Stuart Macintyre for drawing my attention to Scott’s pioneering course at
Melbourne, email, 9 July 2016.
51 Johns’s Notable Australians became Wh
o’s Who in Australia, published in 1927–8, 1933–4, 1935, 1938, 1941, 1944, 1947, 1950 and 1955; and then triennially from 1959 to 1988.
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also been appointed director of Melbourne University Press (MUP) and,
over the period of his tenure from 1943 to 1962, he began to welcome
academic biography.52 Academic historians began to publish biography,
including Margaret Kiddle on Caroline Chishom with MUP in 1957
and others followed such as George Mackaness and Kathleen Fitzpatrick.
Fitzhardinge himself seriously began his biography of W. Hughes in
1952 (although volume one did not appear until 1964 and volume two
in 1979).53
So an Australian dictionary of biography project in the late 1950s was
a timely proposal. There was a developing disciplinary infrastructure,
as well as a broader historical consciousness. Indeed, writing in 1962,
Green noted that Australian history ‘stretches out behind its present like
a long wake’ and was being populated; the developing universities were
providing ‘biographers with opportunities’ but, above all, a large element
in Australia ‘in the best sense’ had become ‘literate’.54 Australia had 6
universities and approximately 10,500 students before 1939; there were
10 universities with 53,000 students by 1960; there were 19 universities
with 148,000 students by 1975.55 The number of historians grew in leaps
and bounds.
There was also agreement among those who attended the 1957 conference
that the growing sources in Australia would sustain good biography,
taking account of human agency and consciousness. Australian historians’
intellectual reference point was the English historical philosopher and
idealist R.G. Collingwood, who emphasised not how a biographical
subject might appear from an external perspective but rather how the
person’s thought processes could be assessed. Collingwood argued in
The Idea of History that history consisted of ‘recollection’ of the ‘thinking of
historical personages’.56 This required depth of evidence and the maturity
to interpret it. It required biographical understanding, too. Similarly,
Wilhelm Dilthey had written on how the past is based on personal
memory and the importance of narrative to ideas of subjectivity. He held
52 Peter Ryan, Final Proof: Memoirs of a Publisher (Sydney: Quadrant Books, 2010).
53 Argus, 9 December 1952, 3. Stephen Foster interview of L.F. Fitzhardinge on 5 August 1992, ANU History Project, ANUA 44, Transcripts and tapes of oral history interviews, interview no. 26
by Stephen Foster, 5 August 1992, pp. 14–17, ANU Archives.
54 Green, A History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied, 1355–6.
55 Jim Breen, Higher Education in Australia: Structure, Policy & Debate (Melbourne: Monash University, 2002), sections 5.2, 5.3.
56 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946).
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that reflective autobiographical material helped understand human and
historical life: ‘[U]nderstanding the meaning of history requires both an
inner articulation of the temporal structures of our own experience and
the interpretation of the external objectifications of others.’ E.H. Carr
was to use and popularise Dilthey’s ideas in his lectures published in
1961 as What is History? .57 Concerns about the availability of sources
that were sufficiently rich to sustain research on an Australian subject’s
consciousness were assuaged by the developing archives collections.
Indeed, Fitzhardinge’s job at the Commonwealth National Library from
1934 to 1946 had been Historical Research Officer in charge of Australian
collections.58 Australia’s national archives were separated from the National
Library in 1954.59 As collections of papers developed, specialist Australian
biographical bibliographies also appeared.60
More difficult to overcome, however, was a prejudice against biography.
Francis West argued that historians such as Sir Lewis Namier, noted
historian of the British Parliament, and the Cambridge historian and
Tudor specialist Geoffrey Elton belittled biography. To some extent, West
misread both historians’ ‘opposition’ to biography; the point is that they
both grappled with the relationship between the individual and human
nature.61 West was right to argue, however, that academic historians had
shunned biography; in the twentieth century, biography had been the
work of ‘non-historians’. 62 The rise of structuralism and social history
undermined explanations based on the role of the individual in history.
Hancock devoted a chapter of his Professing History to these issues,
explaining historians’ reluctance to write biography and criticising that
reluctance. He argued that during the postwar period, historians had been
‘unduly subservient to the then fashionable doctrine that history is always
made by “impersonal forces, never persons”’. He lamented the popularity
of Marxist ideas of history from below, and sociological ideas of statistical
57 H.P. Rickman, ed., Meaning in History: W. Dilthey’s Thoughts on History and Society (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961), 15; E.H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Knopf, 1962).
58 Peter Cochrane, Remarkable Occurrences: The National Library of Australia’s First 100 Years (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2001), 27.
59 See, for instance, Hilary Golder, Documenting a Nation: Australian Archives – The First Fifty Years (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994).
60 See Ulrich Ellis, Select Bibliography of Australian Political Biography and Autobiography (Canberra: Ulrich Ellis, 1958).
61 See, for instance, Linda Colley, Lewis Namier (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 72–89.
62 Francis West, Biography as History: The Annual Lecture delivered to The Australian Academy of the Humanities at its Fourth Annual General Meeting at Canberra on 15 May 1973 (Sydney: Sydney University Press for the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1973), 1.
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averages that had undermined biography.63 More prosaically, Hancock
was all too aware of how a dictionary of biography would in turn help
to promote biography. As he argued to the ANU council in May 1962,
‘when I started work on Smuts, I found good cause to curse the lack
of a South African DNB … If a Dictionary had existed, I should have
been saved a year or more of finicky work’, tracking down references to
hundreds of individuals.64
As Hancock convinced others it would, the ADB was established and
proved to be the midwife of much Australian biographical practice.
So, initially based on a plan Ellis proposed, with the cooperation of the
state universities, and the general public, the ADB began. Articles started
to be drafted in 1959 and the first two volumes of the ADB were published
in 1966 and 1967. Retrospectively, delivering in 1973 the annual lecture
to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, West credited the ‘Past
President, Sir Keith Hancock, and his official ancestor as Chairman of
the Australian Humanities Research Council, Professor James Auchmuty’
for regarding biography as ‘the proper concern’ of an historian over the
&
nbsp; objections of some distinguished historians, and for helping turn around
attitudes. Instead of resorting to Britain, students were born and bred
in Australia. Hancock welcomed the burgeoning of Australian biography
under his supervision. For example, 10 per cent of the first 60 PhDs at
the ANU were biographies and a number of others were biographical.
This was not surprising, given that potential supervisors Fitzhardinge,
Hancock and Manning Clark had written and were writing biographies,
were involved in the ADB project, were writing memoirs and were being
interviewed about their lives; in Clark’s case in 1967 as part of pioneering
series of interviews by the oral historian Hazel de Berg.65
63 Hancock, ‘My Particular Person’, in Professing History, 43–65.
64 Hancock Notes [towards a history of the ADB], Box 69, Q31, ADBA, ANUA. Hancock’s
‘prehistory’ paper has not survived but his speaking notes for the ANU Council meeting of 11 May 1962 were comprehensive.
65 W.K. Hancock, Smuts (2 vols; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962–8); L.F. Fitzhardinge, William Morris Hughes: A Political Biography (2 vols; Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1964–78). Hazel de Berg interviewed Clark on 25 May 1967, NLA, about his childhood, his work and how he collected his material, and Bernard Smith in 1975. The National Library holds interviews of Clark by a succession of interviewers, including Hazel de Berg, 1967 (DeB 253–54), Don Baker, 1985 (TRC 1187), Neville Meaney, 1986–87 (TRC 2053), Michelle Rowland, 1986 (TRC 2141) and Terry Lane, 1990 (ROH
907.2092 C594). ANU had its own Oral History Program in the 1980s and 1990s, which included
Manning Clark (1990 and 1991) and Robin (Bob) Gollan (1993). Other historians who wrote their autobiographies such as John Molony (2008) and John Mulvaney (2010) were included as interviewees in a more recent oral history project focusing on the ANU Emeritus Faculty.
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From the outset, the chairs of the working parties across the country were
contributing authors: Gregory McMinn (Newcastle), Edwin Tapp (New
England), Bede Nairn (NSW), Allan Morrison (Queensland), Harold
Finnis (South Australia), Geoffrey Serle (Victoria), Frank Clifton Green
(Tasmania) and Frank Crowley (Western Australia), along with many
of the working party members. McMinn, Nairn, Morrison and Serle