by Doug Munro
were among the 1 per cent of ADB authors who contributed 20 or more
articles. Even the publisher, Gwyn James, contributed four ADB articles.
Many working party and national committee members having written
ADB articles went on to write full biographies. To give just one example
of this much-observed phenomenon, Auchmuty was the first member
listed on the ADB’s National Committee.66 In 1966, Auchmuty’s ADB
entry on Governor John Hunter was published, in 1968 he published
a full biography on Hunter, and in 1971 he edited a collection of ‘ADB
colleagues’ on Australia’s first governors, consisting of himself on Hunter,
Margaret Steven on Arthur Phillip, Michael Roe on Philip Gidley King,
John Bach on William Bligh, Marjorie Barnard on Lachlan Macquarie
and Ruth Teale on Thomas Brisbane.67 Barnard went on to write 2 ADB
articles, Auchmuty 3, Bach 4, Steven 24, Roe 33, and Teale 57.68
Kick-starting Australian ego-histoire:
From national to familial tribes
Crawford’s survey of ‘Australian’ biographical works between 1933 and
1947 lists just 35 monographs in 15 years. There followed a tsunami of life
writing in Australia. A search of the National Library of Australia catalogue,
Trove, in 2013 lists over 13,000 ‘Australian biographical’ works.69 If one
breaks it down by decade, the rising popularity of biography is clear and
other patterns can be discerned. Of course, counting is problematic.
Crawford’s counting was biased, as was Popkin’s in arguing for 1983 as
a crucial turning point in Australian historians’ autobiographical writing,
following Nora’s work. Popkin’s calculations only stand up if we venture
66 See, Nolan and Fernon, The ADB ’s Story, 32.
67 J.J. Auchmuty, ‘Hunter, John (1737–1821)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, (MUP), 1966; John Hunter (Melbourne: Oxford University Press 1968); The First Australian governors (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1971). See also Kenneth R. Dutton, Auchmuty: The life of James Johnston Auchmuty (1909-1981) (Brisbane: Boombana Publications, 2000).
68 ADB Author Database.
69 Trove, National Library of Australia online catalogue, catalogue.nla.gov.au/Search (accessed
15 December 2013).
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judgements by which earlier works can be dismissed as being of poor
‘quality’. For example, Francis Patrick Clune (1893–1971) wrote over
60 books, including accounts of Frank Gardiner (1945) and Ben Hall
(1947) and, in 1933, an autobiographical work in Try Anything Once.
A number of historians also wrote autobiographical work long before ego-
histoire popularised the genre: Garnet Vere Portus (1883–1954) wrote his
autobiography, Happy Highways, in 1953; Alan Moorehead (1910–83)
wrote his, A Late Education: Episodes in Life, in 1970; and Paul Hasluck
(1905–91), Mucking Around, in 1977 and so on.70 Patsy Adam-Smith
even published a volume of her autobiography in 1964 before writing
history.71 These all predate Popkin’s ‘count’, but his analysis is based on
there being little historians’ biography and autobiography before 1983.
He was, of course, concentrating on academic historians.
Despite the undercounting, was there a turning point in the 1980s
nonetheless? The evidence suggests that there was, but that defining it
is not simply a matter of volume. Hermione Lee has observed we can
identify the ‘popularity of certain kinds of biographies in different
countries, periods and cultures … [which] provides an insight into that
society. What does that society value, what does it care about, who are its
visible – and invisible – men and women?’72 In Australia, for instance,
radical historians concentrated upon the close relationship between the
‘being’ of the human finding its essence in the being of place. A wave of
work appeared, especially in the 1970s and 1980s on Ned Kelly, Peter
Lalor, Henry Lawson and William Lane – bushrangers, militants, poets
and socialists.73 Especially in the wake of transnationalism, subjects have
since diversified: there is considerable interest in the recent past but, above
all, historians have written family biographies and memoirs as much
as topos.
70 Francis Patrick Clune, Try Anything Once: The Autobiography of a Wanderer (Sydney: Angus
& Robertson, 1933); Portus, Happy Highways; Alan Moorehead, A Late Education: Episodes in a Life (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970); Paul Hasluck, Mucking About: An Autobiography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1977). Portus was an academic historian, at the University of Adelaide, while the others did not work within the academy.
71 Patsy Adam-Smith, Hear the Train Blow: An Australian Childhood (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1964).
72 Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199533541.001.0001.
73 See Lloyd Ross, William Lane and the Australian Labour Movement (Sydney: Forward Press, 1937); John Molony, I am Ned Kelly (Ringwood, Melbourne: Allen Lane, 1980); Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement, 1920–1955
(Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985); and Bede Nairn, The ‘Big Fella’: Jack Lang and the Australian Labor Party 1891–1949 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986).
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So Australian biography has been characterised by three principal
developments of late. First, sometime in the era spanning the end of the
twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the connection
with time and place was loosened, with new transnational themes
emerging. This was in keeping with wider developments. Whereas Frank
Moorhouse’s Grand Days, the first in a trilogy – about a young Australian,
Edith Campbell Berry, at the League of Nations – was excluded from
consideration for the Miles Franklin Prize in 1994 because it was deemed
not to have sufficient Australian content, this was controversial and
his second volume in 2001, Dark Palace, won. Similarly, if we survey
the National Biography Award (NBA) we can see the question about
‘quintessential’ Australian biography broadening. Geoffrey Cain agitated
for the foundation of the NBA, a biannual award in 1996 and annual
since 2000, which the State Library of New South Wales administers.
Cain with fellow philanthropist Michael Crouch have provided the
funding. ‘Australian biography’ had been broadly defined:
The subject of the work is to be an Australian or have made a significant
contribution to Australia. Other subjects may be considered if the author
is an Australian citizen or permanent resident and the work provides
a particularly Australian perspective of the subject.74
About half the winners have been unambiguously Australians writing
about Australian subjects. Brian Matthews’s biography of historian
Manning Clark won in 2010.75 Sheila Fitzpatrick’s account of being
a Soviet historian working in Soviet archives and teaching and writing in
the United States was shortlisted in 2014.76 Of course, this international
dimension is particularly pertinent in a country Europeans settled from
1788; which attracted 2 million migrants between 1945 and 1965; and
<
br /> with a quarter of Australians being ‘foreign born’ in 2007, and more than
43 per cent of whom were either born overseas themselves or had one
74 ‘National Biography Awards’, State Library of New South Wales website, www.sl.nsw.gov.au/
about/awards/national_biography (accessed 16 December 2013). See also Melanie Nolan, ‘Country and Lives: Australian Biography and its History’, in Cercles: Revue Pluridisciplinare du Monde Anglophone, no. 35 (March 2015), 96–117.
75 Brian Matthews, Manning Clark: A Life (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008).
76 Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010); Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2013).
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parent who was born overseas.77 So there is increasing acknowledgement
of the variety of Australian lives. There is now a growing literature on the
relationship between self and nation.78 As Ros Pesman notes:
To place Australian experience in a wider framework is not to reject
Australian nationality and culture, but to emphasize their connections
with the rest of the world, their porous and permeable qualities. Identity
and nationality are, like everything else, not fixed structures, but processes
in the making. There is no Australian ‘identity’, only ‘identities’, and these
have been forged abroad as well as at home, in contact and in collision
with others, as well as in isolation.79
By 2014, the former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales,
Edmund Capon, was declaring that Australia’s greatest visual artists,
including twentieth-century artists Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Russell
Drysdale, were virtually unknown overseas or else ignored because their
work was ‘too strongly defined by place’.80 By contrast, Capon argued,
Australian literature had more international impact because cosmopolitan
themes were increasingly harnessed to national stories. Transnational
biography has become fashionable and had impact starting, as Popkin
noted, with Conway’s The Road from Coorain.81 The ‘system of cultural
signification’ that makes up the nation is ambivalent precisely because it is
in constant flux.
Second, with diversity have come more searching questions about
biography itself, notably concerning its gendered character. There
have been an increasing number of women historians’ memoirs and
biographies.82 Yet just two women, Jessie Webb and Kathleen Fitzpatrick,
are among the 10 historians Macintyre and Thomas profiled in their
1995 collection, The Discovery of Australian History.83 Women made up
11 per cent, or 13 of the 118, historians profiled in the 1998 Oxford
Companion to Australian History. Moreover, women historians such
as Alexandra Hasluck, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Catherine Berndt, Maie
77 ‘Population’, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Migration, Australia, 2008–09 (cat. no. 3412.0).
78 See Suzanne Falkiner, The Writers’ Landscape: Wilderness (Sydney: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
79 Ros Pesman, Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17.
80 Sydney Morning Herald, 10 September 2014.
81 Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain.
82 See Jane Carey and Patricia Grimshaw, Women Historians and Women’s History: Kathleen Fitzpatrick (1905–1990), Margaret Kiddle (1914–1958), and the Melbourne History School
(Melbourne: Department of History, University of Melbourne, 2001).
83 Stuart Macintyre and Julian Thomas, eds, The Discovery of Australian History 1890–1939
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995) .
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Casey and Nettie Palmer did not get as much space as the men they
were married to, and Ann Blainey, author of five biographies, got none
at all – although, to be fair, her award-winning biography on Dame
Nellie Melba was written after the companion had been published.
The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia
lists 73 women historians out of 680 individual entries, about 11 per cent,
albeit including living historians.84 The ADB will eventually have perhaps
four times as many historians: certainly those who died before 1991
mentioned in the Companion are all in the ADB. The Oxford Companion
is revealing because it discusses the schools, groups and ideas as it profiles
the 118 historians, in much more detail than the ADB. Moreover, a small
number have substantial entries and are consequently signalled as more
important: C.E.W. Bean (1879–1968), Geoffrey Blainey (1930– ),
Geoffrey Bolton (1931–2015), Noel Butlin (1921–91), Vere Gordon
Childe (1892–1957), Manning Clark (1915–91), Timothy Coghlan
(1855–1926), Brian Fitzpatrick (1905–65), Robin Gollan (1917–2007),
Keith Hancock (1898–1988), Paul Hasluck (1905–93), John Mulvaney
(1925–2016), Stephen Roberts (1901–71), Ernest Scott (1867–1939),
and Russel Ward (1914–95). Max Crawford is relegated to a short entry;
much of the analysis of him and his ‘school of history’ was published after
1995.85 Women, however, lack prominence then and now. Biographies
on women do raise unsettling questions about ‘the search for identity in
Australian biography’. Bill Wilde notes that Matthews, in his biography
of Louisa Lawson, female newspaper proprietor and mother of poet
Henry Lawson, asks the same questions that Virginia Woolf, author and
an experimenter in biographical methodology, asked: the central problem
of biography was how to weld together the ‘granite-like solidity’ of truth
or fact and the ‘rainbow-like intangibility of personality or character’.86
Despite all the ‘multivocality’, Ann Curthoys noted in her Russel Ward
84 Australian Women’s Archives Project, The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia, www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/about.html (accessed 26 June 2015).
85 Robert Dare, ‘Max Crawford and the Study of History’, in Macintyre and Thomas, The Discovery of Australian History, 174–91; Stuart Macintyre and Peter McPhee, eds, Max Crawford’s School of History (Melbourne: Department of History, University of Melbourne, 2000); Fay Anderson, An Historian’s Life: Max Crawford and the Politics of Academic Freedom (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005); Robert Dare, ‘Theory and Method’, 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, 2006), 339–53.
86 W.H. (Bill) Wilde, The Search for Identity in Australian Biography (The 1990 Colin Roderick Lectures; Townsville, Qld: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies and James Cook University, 1991); Brian Matthews, Louisa (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1987); Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow (London: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 149.
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Annual Lecture in 1992: ‘While we might undertake a feminist analysis of
the gendered character of the debate about conceptions of the nation, we
have not yet been able to redefine what national identity might mean.’87
In terms of biography, while national identity might not have been
redefined, conceptions of appropriate subjects and sources have led to
consideration of networks, particularly familial o
nes, and increasingly this
tendency has gender implications.88
Indeed, thirdly, the most notable recent pattern is not ‘simply’ the inclusion
of women historians but that, increasingly, male and female historians are
both writing about their families as much as themselves. Of course this is
part of a wider phenomenon, too. As Hans Render and others have shown,
this interest in families is part of the tendency towards interiority (biography)
and has been attended by an interest in the social meaning of an individual
life.89 Linda Colley has shown the global significance of the life of Elizabeth
Marsh.90 Family-centred history is another method increasingly used by
historians themselves, such as Alison Light in her family account, Common
People.91 Frank Vandiver noted the advantages of family biography more
generally:
Theoretically the advantage of a family biography is that it allows
a perspective that delves into the ‘thick issues of relationships’ and
which is not slanted by a focus on any one participant (or his or her
version of the historical allowing character and personality to more fully
emerge. As a result the biographer has more ‘clay’ from which to interpret
meanings, nuances, and appreciations.92
Searching ‘Australian family biographies’ in Trove by decade reveals starkly
the trajectory of the popularity of this new genre.93 As others have noted,
the focus of Australian historians’ biographies seems to be moving from
87 Ann Curthoys, Australian Legends: Histories, Identities, Geneaologies (Armidale, NSW: University of New England Union, 1992).
88 See Alison Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Fig Tree, 2014), xxvii ff., for a discussion on changing attitudes among professional historians to family history.
89 Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, eds, Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2013).
90 Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007).
91 Light, Common People, 34.
92 Frank E. Vandiver, ‘Biography as an Agent of Humanism’, in Stephen B. Oates, ed., Biography as High Adventure: Life Writers Speak on their Art (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986).