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  CLIO’S LIVES

  BIOGRAPHIES AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

  OF HISTORIANS

  CLIO’S LIVES

  BIOGRAPHIES AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

  OF HISTORIANS

  EDITED BY DOUG MUNRO

  AND JOHN G. REID

  Published by ANU Press

  The Australian National University

  Acton ACT 2601, Australia

  Email: [email protected]

  This title is also available online at press.anu.edu.au

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Title:

  Clio’s lives : biographies and autobiographies

  of historians / editors: Doug Munro ;

  John G. Reid.

  ISBN:

  9781760461430 (paperback) 9781760461447 (ebook)

  Subjects: Historians--North America--Biography.

  Historians--Australia--Biography.

  Authorship in literature--North America--Biography.

  Authorship in literature--Australia--Biography.

  Other Creators/Contributors:

  Munro, Doug, editor.

  Reid, John G. (John Graham), 1948- editor.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

  system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying

  or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  The ANU.Lives Series in Biography is an initiative of the National Centre of Biography

  at The Australian National University, ncb.anu.edu.au.

  Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover image adapted from Clio, the Muse

  of History by Artemisia Gentileschi, 1632.

  This edition © 2017 ANU Press

  This volume is affectionately dedicated to the memory of

  Geoffrey Bolton (1931–2015)

  Geoffrey Bolton was an enthusiastic participant in the project

  from which this volume arose, and in the workshop at which his

  and the other essays were initially presented. An accomplished

  biographer, with four book-length biographies to his credit

  reaching back as far as 1958, he was also one of the finest

  Australian historians of an exceptionally productive generation

  of scholars. His presence was a highlight at the workshop.

  Despite deteriorating health, his characteristic combination of

  erudition and affability was undiminished. All of us were deeply

  privileged by his participation and, in sadly bidding him ave

  atque vale, we acknowledge gratefully the magnitude of his

  contribution to this and so many other scholarly endeavours.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

  List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

  1 . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

  Doug Munro and John G . Reid

  Autobiographies of Historians

  2 . Writing History/Writing about Yourself: What’s the Difference? . .17

  Sheila Fitzpatrick

  3 . Walvin, Fitzpatrick and Rickard: Three Autobiographies

  of Childhood and Coming of Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39

  Doug Munro and Geoffrey Gray

  4 . The Female Gaze: Australian Women Historians’

  Autobiographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65

  Ann Moyal

  Nation-Defining Authors

  5 . ‘A gigantic confession of life’: Autobiography, ‘National

  Awakening’ and the Invention of Manning Clark . . . . . . . . . . . . .81

  Mark McKenna

  6 . Ceci n’est pas Ramsay Cook: A Biographical

  Reconnaissance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .103

  Donald Wright

  Discipline-Defining Authors

  7 . Intersecting and Contrasting Lives: G .M . Trevelyan

  and Lytton Strachey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .137

  Alastair MacLachlan

  8 . An Ingrained Activist: The Early Years of Raphael Samuel . . . . .173

  Sophie Scott-Brown

  9 . Pursuing the Antipodean: Bernard Smith, Identity

  and History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .199

  Sheridan Palmer

  Collective Biography

  10 . Australian Historians Networking, 1914–1973 . . . . . . . . . . . . .227

  Geoffrey Bolton

  11 . Country and Kin Calling? Keith Hancock, the National

  Dictionary Collaboration, and the Promotion of Life Writing

  in Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .247

  Melanie Nolan

  12 . Imperial Women: Collective Biography, Gender

  and Yale-trained Historians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .273

  John G . Reid

  13 . Concluding Reflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .301

  Barbara Caine

  Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .307

  Acknowledgements

  This book had its origins in 2011, in a proposal by the two co-editors

  for a panel session at the then forthcoming 2015 Congress of the

  International Committee of Historical Sciences in Jinan, to be entitled

  ‘Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians: Their Historiographical

  Importance’. It turned out for the better that our proposal did not make

  the cut for the congress. We promptly turned to Professor Melanie Nolan

  – one of the proposed Jinan panelists – to see if the National Centre for

  Biography (NCB) at The Australian National University (ANU) would be

  willing to host a workshop based on the idea of the panel but expanded

  to become a more ambitious undertaking with a published collection

  of essays now to be the ultimate goal. She responded graciously and

  positively, and the intensive two-day workshop in Canberra on 4–5 July

  2015 proved to be a firm foundation for the book. By common consent,

  it was a memorable gathering. The participants gelled and the exchange of

  ideas flowed back and forth.

  Accordingly, we are very grateful to Melanie and all at the NCB – and

  especially Karen Ciuffetelli, who took care of key organisational matters –

  for being our hosts at the workshop. A number of ANU scholars attended

  and contributed notably to the discussions; in particular, Malcolm

  Allbrook, Frank Bongiorno and Chris Wallace were kind enough to

  chair sessions. Ann Curthoys and Stuart Macintyre were unable to attend

  the workshop, but provided behind-the-scenes support. We also thank

  Tom Griffiths, who presented a paper on Eleanor Dark that could not

  appear in the collection because it was already committed elsewhere, but

  that added greatly to the workshop.1 Funding support came from the

  NCB itself, and from the Gorsebrook Research Institute of Saint Mary’s

  University (Halifax, Nova Scotia).

  1 Tom Griffiths, ‘The Timeless Land: Eleanor Dark’, in Griffiths, The Art of Time Travel: Historians a
nd their Craft (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2016), 16–41.

  ix

  CLIo'S LIvES

  As the collection made its way from workshop to book, we again

  received valued support from a number of quarters. As we have noted

  in the dedication, the presence of Geoffrey Bolton was a highlight of the

  workshop, and we are very grateful to Carol Bolton for giving us the

  editorial freedom to prepare his now posthumous essay for publication.

  For helpful comments on the collection and on the specific essays, we

  thank warmly the two peer reviews and the members of the Editorial

  Board of the ANU.Lives Series in Biography. As editors, of course, we

  are deeply grateful to all of the contributing authors, not only for their

  fine essays but also for being receptive to our suggestions and dealing

  with them so expeditiously. An especial role was kindly taken by Barbara

  Caine, who provided the closing commentary at the workshop and then

  also contributed the Concluding Reflections to the book.

  Finally, the publication process through ANU Press was smooth and

  expeditious, and we especially thank Geoff Hunt for his expert copy-

  editing.

  Our profound gratitude to one and all!

  Doug Munro

  John G. Reid

  x

  List of Contributors

  Geoffrey Bolton (1931–2015) was a prolific and versatile historian and

  biographer. In a long and distinguished career, he held chairs of history at

  the University of Western Australia, Murdoch University, the University

  of Queensland and Edith Cowan University, and also served as foundation

  director of the Australian Studies Centre in London. His work for the

  Australian Dictionary of Biography included the authorship of 94 entries.

  A recent publication in his honour is A Historian for All Seasons: Essays for

  Geoffrey Bolton, edited by Stuart Macintyre, Lenore Layman and Jenny

  Gregory (Monash University Publishing, 2017).

  Barbara Caine is Professor of History and Head of the School of

  Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney. She has

  worked extensively on historical biography and on the importance

  of individual lives in writing history. Her publications include Destined

  to be Wives (Oxford University Press, 1986); Bombay to Bloomsbury:

  A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford University Press, 2005);

  and Biography and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). She is currently

  writing a history of women’s autobiography.

  Sheila Fitzpatrick is Professor of History at the University of Sydney

  and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the University of Chicago.

  Her recent books include two memoirs, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of

  an Australian childhood (Melbourne University Press, 2010) and A Spy in

  the Archives (Melbourne University Press, 2014), a monograph, On Stalin’s

  Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Princeton

  University Press and Melbourne University Press, 2015) and a book

  on her late husband’s experiences as a displaced person in Germany in

  the 1940s, Mischka’s War: A European odyssey of the 1940s (Melbourne

  University Press, 2017).

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  CLIo'S LIvES

  Geoffrey Gray is an Adjunct Professor of History at the University

  of Queensland. He is author of A Cautious Silence: The Politics of Australian

  Anthropology (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007); Abrogating Responsibility:

  Vesteys Anthropology and the future of Aboriginal people (Australian

  Scholarly Publishing, 2015); and co-editor (with Doug Munro and

  Christine Winter) of a special issue of the Journal of Historical Biography,

  16 (2014) on the theme ‘Telling Academic Lives’. He is presently a Chief

  Investigator on the ARC Linkage Grant, ‘Serving our Country: Aboriginal

  and Torres Strait Islander People in the Defence of Australia’.

  Mark McKenna is Professor of History at the University of Sydney.

  He has published widely in biography, the history of Australian

  republicanism and Indigenous history. An Eye for Eternity, his biography

  of the Australian historian Manning Clark, won five national awards

  including the 2012 Prime Minister’s Prize for Non-Fiction. His most recent

  book is From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories (Miegunyah Press, 2016).

  Alastair MacLachlan is an Adjunct Professor at the Humanities

  Research Centre and the Research School of the Humanities and Arts at

  The Australian National University. A pupil of Sir John Plumb and an early

  modernist by training, he has written on the British Marxist historians

  and is completing a dual biography of Trevelyan and Strachey, The Pedestal

  and the Keyhole. His most recent publication in the field is ‘Becoming

  National? G. M. Trevelyan: The Dilemmas of a Liberal (Inter)nationalist,

  1900–1945’, Humanities Research, 19:1 (2013), 32–43 (special issue

  on ‘Nationalism and Biography’, co-edited by Jonathan Herne and

  Christian Wicke).

  Ann Moyal, AM, LittD (ANU), Hon DLitt (Syd), FAHA, is a historian

  of Australian science, a biographer and an autobiographer. The author of

  many books and papers, she has conducted research and some teaching

  in a number of Australian universities. She founded the Independent

  Scholars Association of Australia in 1995 and is a member of the Emeritus

  Fellowship at The Australian National University.

  Doug Munro is an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of

  Queensland. Previously a historian of the Pacific Islands, he has become

  more interested in auto/biography and in telling academic lives. He has

  written on such diverse historians as George Rudé, G.R. Elton and J.W.

  Davidson, and has co-edited two previous books for ANU Press – Scholars

  at War: Australasian Social Scientists, 1939–1945 (with Geoffrey Gray and

  xii

  LIST oF CoNTRIBuToRS

  Christine Winter, 2012), and Bearing Witness: Essays in Honour of Brij V.

  Lal (with Jack Corbett, 2017). He is currently writing a history of the

  New Zealand Opera Company, 1954–1971.

  Melanie Nolan is Professor of History, Director of the National

  Centre of Biography and General Editor of the Australian Dictionary

  of Biography at The Australian National University. She has published

  extensively on Australasian history; Kin: A Collective Biography of a New

  Zealand Working-Class Family (Canterbury University Press, 2005) won

  the 2006 ARANZ Ian Wards Prize and was shortlisted for the 2007

  Ernest Scott Prize. She co-edited, with Christine Fernon, The ADB ’s Story

  (ANU E Press, 2013) and chairs the editorial committee of ANU Press’s

  series in biography, ANU.Lives. She is currently working on a survey

  of biography and history.

  Sheridan Palmer is an independent art historian, curator and an

  Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her interests are

  in Australian and European art from the twentieth century to the

  present, with an emphasis on the lives of artists and art historians.

  She has published Centre of the Periphery: Three European Art Historians

  in Melbourne (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008) and more

  recently Hegel’s Ow
l: The Life of Bernard Smith (Power Publications,

  2016). She is currently co-editing with Rex Butler Antipodean Perspectives:

  Selected Writings of Bernard Smith (Monash University Publishing) and

  researching post-war modernism.

  John G. Reid is Professor of History at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax,

  Nova Scotia. His research areas include early modern north-eastern

  North America, the history of higher education, and sport history.

  The author of Viola Florence Barnes, 1885–1979: A Historian’s Biography

  (University of Toronto Press, 2005), his editorial publications include

  Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c.1550–1850

  (Cambridge University Press, 2012; co-edited with H.V. Bowen and

  Elizabeth Mancke). He is a former co-editor of Acadiensis: Journal of the

  History of the Atlantic Region, and is currently researching the history

  of cricket in Nova Scotia to 1914.

  Sophie Scott-Brown gained her PhD in modern history from

  The Australian National University in 2015. Her research uses lives to

  illuminate contemporary British and Australian intellectual history.

  Previous work has included the first biographical portrait of British

  xiii

  CLIo'S LIvES

  historian Raphael Samuel ( The Histories of Raphael Samuel: A Portrait

  of a People’s Historian, ANU Press, 2017), and histories of Australian

  readers’ encounters with English writers. She is currently working

  on a study of the life and work of Anglo-Australian anthropologist

  Phyllis Kaberry.

  Donald Wright is Professor of Political Science at the University

  of New Brunswick. His research interests include biography,

  historiography, and the politics of memory. He is the author of

  The Professionalization of History in English Canada (University

  of Toronto Press, 2005), and Donald Creighton: A Life in History

  (University of Toronto Press, 2015), a finalist for the 2017 Canada Prize

  for best book in the humanities and social sciences. He is now writing

  a biography of Canadian historian and public intellectual Ramsay Cook

  (1931–2016).

  xiv

  1

  Introduction

  Doug Munro and John G . Reid

  This volume of essays was inspired by the increasing though still-limited