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93 The rate has dramatically increased from 1950–1959 (2,119), 1960–1969 (2,040), 1970–
1979 (2,432), 1980–1989 (3,789), 1990–1999 (6,803) to 2000–2009 (135,046), trove.nla.gov.au/
result?q=%27Australian+family+biographies%27 (accessed 15 September 2017).
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nation to family.94 Historians, including David Walker, John Rickard and
Graeme Davison, are consulting their own personal biochemical archives
to produce family histories.95 When macular degeneration dimmed his
eyesight, for instance, Walker turned to family history, something he had
previously avoided. He had ‘to rethink the kind of history I was able to
write. I had to find another, more personal voice and another way of
writing. The mix of the historical and the personal seemed promising’.
How, he asks, can we reconcile or accommodate the competing claims
of the big events of history with the constant flow of small, day-to-day
trials and pleasures? He was disconcerted to find that ‘the lives, values
and preoccupations of most of my forebears had no place in the national
story’, so he has rewritten the national story. The trend is similar among
biographies of historians.96 And the list of historians writing their ‘family
memoirs’ continues to grow apace: in the last decade, in addition to
Walker, Rickard and Davison, there have been Tim Bonyhady, Marjorie
Theobald, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Jill Roe, and others such as John Molony and
Ann Moyal, writing second instalments.97 These accounts include female,
Chinese, working-class and Irish relatives. Some are intergenerational,
and some are about circles and networks. Russel Ward wrote his
autobiography, A Radical Life; a generation later, his daughter Biff wrote
hers.98 A range of related biographies, such as that by Keith McKenry
on John Meredith, have also appeared.99 Similarly, Don Watson wrote a
94 John Rickard, ‘Pointers to the Future of Family History’, review of Good Living Street: The Fortunes of my Viennese Family by Tim Bonyhady, Australian Historical Studies, 44:3 (2011),
457–62, doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2013.817289.
95 David Walker, Not Dark Yet: A Personal History (Sydney: Giramondo, 2011); John Rickard, An Imperial Affair: Portrait of an Australian Marriage (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2013); Graeme Davison, Lost Relations: Fortunes of my Family in Australia’s Golden Age (Sydney: Allen
& Unwin, 2015).
96 See, for instance, Elizabeth Kleinhenz, A Brimming Cup. The Life of Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2013); Geoffrey Bolton, Paul Hasluck: A Life (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2014).
97 Tim Bonyhady, Good Living Street: The Fortunes of my Viennese Family (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011); Marjorie Theobald, ‘The Wealth Beneath their Feet’: A Family on the Castlemaine Goldfields (Melbourne: Arcadia, 2010); Jill Roe, Our Fathers Cleared the Bush: Remembering Eyre Peninsula (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2016); John Molony, Luther’s Pine: An Autobiography (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2004); Molony, By Wendouree: Memories 1951–1963 (Ballan, Vic.: Connor Court Publishing, 2010); Ann Moyal, A Woman of Influence: Science, Men & History (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2014).
98 Russel Ward, A Radical Life: The Autobiography of Russel Ward (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1988). See, for example, Don Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick: A Radical Life (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1979); and Amirah Inglis, The Hammer & Sickle and the Washing Up: Memories of an Australian Woman Communist (South Melbourne: Hyland House, 1995). Biff Ward, In my Mother’s Hands: A Disturbing Memoir of Family Life (Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2014).
99 Keith McKenry, More than a Life. John Meredith and the Fight for Australian Tradition (Sydney: Rosenberg, 2014).
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biography of Brian Fitzpatrick, and there are biographies of and by his
first wife and his daughter.100 Most recently Judith Armstrong has written
a biography of Dymphna Lodewyckz, ‘wife, mother, research assistant
and unofficial editor for her husband’, Manning Clark.101
Conclusion: Fuller circumstances in which
historians construct history
In this essay, I have considered the history of biographical practices
of Hancock, the ADB and the wider historical community more generally.
During the middle years of the twentieth century, many historians did not
regard biography as the best practice of history. Hancock argued in 1976
that Collingwood and others were wrong when they said that biography
was ‘poor history’. He thought that they were overreacting to the excesses
of pseudo- and psycho-biographies by Lytton Strachey and others and,
more recently, social history perspectives:
I found rather more perplexing that assertion made by another philosopher
R.G. Collingwood that every work of biography is not only non-historical
but anti-historical. It seems to me that Collingwood was hitting below the
belt, for he also had published an autobiography … I had applauded his
contention that the subject-matter of history is past experience re-enacted
in the historian’s mind; but I parted company from him when he went on
to argue that human experience is all mind and no body.102
Hancock increasingly became interested in biographical consciousness
and, first, topos or locality in Australians’ biographies and, second, in
family. As noted at the outset, conspicuously early, Hancock himself
wrote about his origins from the manse but very little about ‘my wife’;
there were many more references to his first wife, Theaden, in Professing
History in 1976. By the time of his death, he gave approval to Davidson
to write the biography. The ADB has also started to create ‘big data’ for
families and to mediate systematically between families and broader
developments, navigating family relations structurally and historically by
100 Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick; Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Solid Bluestone Foundations; Kleinhenz, A Brimming Cup; Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010); and A Spy in the Archives (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2013).
101 Judith Armstrong, Dymphna (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016).
102 Hancock, Professing History, 53–5.
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mapping families. Rather than just linking to other family members in its
websites, it is naming the relationships between family members (mother,
grandfather and so on) in order for complex family trees across multiple
generations to be automatically generated as a visualisation and be easily
navigated, including of course for historians in the ADB. This perspective
undermines elitist and unrepresentative approaches.
Hancock might have had a three-cornered life, have been ‘neither
a founder of history in a new Australian university, and have not spent
a career building the subject in a particular institution’, but he was
instrumental in the foundation of the ADB and in promoting life writing
in Australia.103 Over the years, the ADB has been itself subject to the same
forces of change as those affecting Hancock. It is now commissioning
and editing lives that are perilously close to the present, such as those
who died between 1991 and 2000. Hancock not only wrote mainly about
events i
n his own lifetime but he also wrote about events in which he
was himself involved, for example chairing the Namirembe Conference
– which created a new constitutional monarchy for Buganda in 1954 –
while writing on the Commonwealth. Hancock began writing his second
volume of memoirs with two chapters he had ‘left over’ from his history of
his involvement in protest against the Black Mountain tower in Canberra.
He came to see autobiography, and biography, both as part of the task of
professing history. It should be noted that in his wake, while there are
306 biographies of historians in the ADB for the period between 1788
and 1990, the proportion of historians in the ADB overall is more than
the proportion of Indigenous Australian subjects, although the ADB has
a current project to rectify this.104
While it is commonplace today to regard biography as just one form
of history, many argue that autobiography and memoir can involve
history but are, nevertheless, conceptually distinct. Others question
these distinctions.105 Hancock came to see varieties of life writing on
a continuum, and this is the position argued in this essay too. He was
involved in the events of the time and knew some of the subjects he wrote
103 Julian Thomas, ‘Keith Hancock: Professing the Profession’, in Macintyre and Thomas,
The Discovery of Australian History, 146.
104 Melanie Nolan, ‘“Insufficiently Engineered”: A Dictionary Designed to Stand the Test of Time?’
in Nolan and Fernon, The ADB ’s Story, 26; Biography Footnotes, 15 (2015), 5.
105 Aurell, ‘Autobiography as Unconventional History’; Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘Invitation
to Historians: Confessions of a Postmodern (?) Historian’, Rethinking History, 8:1 (2004), 149–66,
doi.org/10.1080/13642520410001649787.
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about. He researched his memoirs. Similarly, Australians’ public lives are
increasingly being placed in their familial and wider contexts. Whatever
our view on these debates and approaches, the academic status of both
memoir and biography has changed in the last three decades as subjectivity
– once swept off the academic stage, particularly with postmodernism
decreeing the ‘death of the subject’ – has now reappeared.106 While interest
in the individual coherent self continues strongly outside the academy,
within it historians have returned to this genre in recent years to write
about themselves and/or other historians. Some interest in historians’
personal and familial circumstances is prurient, some in keeping with
a wider genealogical and family consciousness in the history. Much of it is
motivated by the thought that how, and in what circumstances in all
its fullness, one writes helps to understand the history that a historian
constructs.
106 Barbara Taylor, AHR Roundtable, ‘Separations of Soul: Solitude, Biography, History’, American Historical Review, 114:3 (2009), 641.
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12
Imperial Women: Col ective
Biography, Gender and
Yale-trained Historians
John G . Reid
On 23 May 1931, a reception at Yale University marked the retirement of
Charles McLean Andrews from the Department of History. At 68 years
of age, Andrews had completed some 42 years as an active historian – at
Bryn Mawr College from 1889 to 1907, at Johns Hopkins University
from 1907 to 1910, and at Yale thereafter – since receiving his doctorate
from Johns Hopkins and publishing his dissertation on The River Towns
of Connecticut: A Study of Wethersfield, Hartford, and Windsor.1 Although,
as the son of a prominent clergyman of the short-lived Catholic Apostolic
Church who lived and made his evangelical base in Wethersfield, Andrews
had written a dissertation that was in a sense a local study of his own
home territory, his interests as a historian were nevertheless wide-ranging.
Much of his early post-dissertation work was in English medieval history,
but increasingly he moved into American history of the colonial era.
Indeed, as Richard R. Johnson argued some years ago, he can properly be
1 Charles McLean Andrews, The River Towns of Connecticut: A Study of Wethersfield, Hartford, and Windsor, Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science, Seventh Series, VII-VIII-IX (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1889). I am very grateful to my research assistant Samantha Bourgoin for the thorough biographical reconnaissance that was foundational to this essay, and also to Michael Frost and other staff members in Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
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regarded as having defined and originated US colonial history as a historical
field.2 By the time that Andrews was publishing his multivolume work,
The Colonial Period of American History – the first volume of which won him
the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for History – his emphasis on the institutions that
bound the colonies to the metropolis had been communicated to many of
his graduate students and would lead to his posthumous historiographical
designation as the founder and leader of the ‘imperial school’.3 His own
view, however, was that his contribution was to colonial rather than imperial
history, as he explained in 1926 to one of his recent doctoral graduates:
Approaching the colonies from the English side, and so seeing them in
quite a new light, showed me that they had never been properly studied
before and that their history could not be understood when interpreted
– as was ordinarily the case – in the American field only. I saw that the
‘colonial’ aspect had been almost entirely left out and it is that aspect that
I have tried to present.4
It was thus appropriate that the centrepiece of Andrews’s retirement
reception was the presentation of a Festschrift entitled Essays in Colonial
History Presented to Charles McLean Andrews by his Students.5 The book
contained 12 essays, nine contributed by Yale PhD graduates. One
author, Mary Patterson Clarke of Beaver College in Pennsylvania, was
still working on the Yale dissertation she would complete in the following
year, while two others were PhD graduates from Johns Hopkins. Nellie
Neilson, the Mount Holyoke scholar who was later to become the first
woman president of the American Historical Association and who in
1931 could reasonably be seen as Andrews’s most distinguished former
student, had studied with him at Bryn Mawr in his earlier field of interest
and so, ‘hopelessly mediaeval by nature’, she could ‘make no scholarly
contribution in his honor to this volume of colonial studies’, but instead
wrote the Introduction.6 Of the 12 authors of the substantive essays, four
2 Richard R. Johnson, ‘Charles McLean Andrews and the Invention of American Colonial
History’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 43:4 (October 1986), 519–41. Andrews had also been the subject of an intellectual biography published some 13 years after his death in 1943: A.S.
Eisenstadt, Charles McLean Andrews: A Study in American Historical Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956).
3 Johnson, ‘Charles McLean Andrews’, 528–9.
4 Charles McLean Andrews (hereafter CMA) to Hastings Eells (copy),
5 March 1926, Charles
McLean Andrews Papers (MS 38), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library (hereafter
CMAP), Box 24, Folder 289.
5
Essays in Colonial History Presented to Charles McLean Andrews by his Students (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931; reprinted Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1966). The presentation copy is in CMAP, Box 98, Folder 1035.
6 Nellie Neilson, ‘Introduction’, in Essays in Colonial History, 1.
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were women. In addition to Clarke, Viola Florence Barnes of Mount
Holyoke College contributed the lead essay, while others were authored by
Isabel MacBeath Calder of Wells College and Dora Mae Clark of Wilson
College. The proportion of women authors, along with their exclusive
concentration in women’s colleges, is already suggestive in gender terms.
However, for those historians interested in the gender dimensions of the
discipline of history, and in the history of academic and professional
women in the twentieth-century United States, it is another part of the
book that has attracted the greatest attention.
Charles McLean Andrews
Source: Courtesy of Special Collections, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins university .
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Nel ie Neilson
Source: Courtesy of Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections .
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12 . IMPERIAL WoMEN
The four-page Dedication of Essays in Colonial History not only affirmed
to Andrews that ‘for your skill as a teacher and your kindliness and
sympathy as a man, your students hold you in the warmest affection’,
but also – in the reprinted edition of 1966 although not, oddly, in the
original edition of 1931 – carried a signature list of 114 names. They
comprised 50 women and 64 men.7 The first to comment on this gender
distribution, with some 44 per cent of the former students being women,
was Ian K. Steele in a 1984 paper that remained unpublished; two years
later, Johnson elaborated by noting that ‘the fact that women composed
over 40 percent of those who listed themselves as Andrews’s students …
may have hampered the spread of his message and methods because of the