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  body of scholarship connecting the writing of history directly with the

  lives of those who write it, and the contributions were initially presented

  as papers at an intensive workshop held at The Australian National

  University in July 2015. While the writing of historians’ lives by themselves

  or others is not new in itself – Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life and

  Writings, for example, appeared posthumously in 1796 – considerable

  discussion flowed during the 1980s and 1990s from the publication of

  Pierre Nora’s Essais d’ego-histoire.1 The extent of subsequent developments

  is demonstrated in the seminal work in the English language – Jeremy

  Popkin’s History, Historians, & Autobiography – where the significant

  increase in historians’ autobiographies and associated discussion of the

  genre becomes evident.2

  The early years of the twenty-first century have seen additional

  perspectives developed. The editors of a 2014 special issue of the

  Journal of Historical Biography, entitled ‘Telling Academic Lives’, offered

  a paradox: ‘we contend that, because the historians analysed here are at

  times flawed, selfish or narrow-minded individuals, they are ideally suited

  1 Pierre Nora, ed., Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987); see also Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 74–5.

  2 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography. A monograph-length study on biographies of historians has yet to appear, but see Doug Munro, ‘Biographies of Historians – or, The Cliographer’s Craft’, Australian Historical Studies, 43:1 (2012), 11–27, doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2011.640694.

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  to make a case for the humane: flawless and lifeless they are not, but

  human they are’.3 History, therefore, was an essentially humane pursuit,

  incompletely understood except through exploration of the characteristics

  of the historian either through autobiography or by authors who are

  themselves historians. For Jaume Aurell in 2016, specifically examining

  historians’ autobiographies, such works may be read moreover as ‘cultural

  artifacts that convey their authors’ theoretical perspectives on their lives

  and profession’, and as ‘privileged sources of intellectual history and, more

  specifically, of historiographical inquiry’.4

  Thus, Nora’s invitation to historians to make their own formation part

  of their historical study, and so to blur the distinction between objectivity

  and subjectivity, has continued to resonate during an era in which

  historians have long put aside pretensions of being objective. But the

  degree to which subjectivity is integral to historical practice remains an area

  of active debate. While this discussion has particular significance in the

  area of historians’ autobiographies, it also bears on the wider significance

  of biography as an underpinning to historiographical understanding.

  Accordingly, the contribution made by this book is to examine the ways

  in which biography and autobiography can enhance historiographical

  understanding in four principal areas, and to conduct a reconnaissance

  in each.

  The opening section is devoted specifically to historians’ autobiographies,

  considered especially in a context of gender-based analysis. As the

  Australian historian Ken Inglis once observed, ‘[a] lot of history is

  concealed autobiography’,5 a point that Sheila Fitzpatrick addresses in

  the opening contribution to the collection. Taking her own experience as

  historian and autobiographer as a point of departure, Fitzpatrick argues

  that the nature of history as an artistic pursuit ensures that there is a

  ‘personal subtext’ to historical writing that complicates not only the task

  of the autobiographer but also that of the biographer writing about the life

  of a person to whom they are personally close. This touches on questions

  of ‘truth’ and accuracy. Fitzpatrick takes up Philippe Lejeune’s injunction

  that writers of autobiography have a pact with their readership to get it

  3 Geoffrey Gray, Doug Munro and Christine Winter, ‘Editors’ Introduction: Telling Academic

  Lives’, Journal of Historical Biography, 16 (Autumn 2014), 2.

  4 Jaume Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention (New York/London: Routledge, 2016), 1–2.

  5 K.S. Inglis, This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1932–1983 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983), 1.

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  right, insofar as they are able.6 As she notes in her first autobiography,

  there is the question of honesty: ‘But honesty is another can of worms:

  what do we mean by it?’7

  There are those who insist that autobiography is a form of creative writing,

  a selective account that deploys techniques of the novelist – what to

  highlight, what to downplay, what to omit altogether, and which themes

  to develop. When writing autobiography, an author – historian or not –

  may indeed leave things out for many reasons, though without necessarily

  leading to serious distortions of the overall picture. Conversely, there are

  also cases when an autobiographer will draw attention to the certainty

  of alternative interpretations of the same event.8 Yet historians, when

  engaging in strict historical analysis, must also be selective, in the interests

  of maintaining relevance to a given question or for the sake of concise and

  focused exposition. Historians, moreover, adopt literary devices of many

  kinds, even in the chaste context of monographs or scholarly articles.

  It is true that the range of reasons for selectivity may extend further

  for an autobiographer than for a historian writing as such. There may

  be omissions in deference to the sensibilities of immediate family or in

  the face of even stronger constraints – as in the case, as noted by Sheila

  Fitzpatrick in this volume, of A.J.P. Taylor’s A Personal History, which

  omitted any mention of his second wife in the light of her threat of legal

  action if she were brought into the picture.9 In short, autobiography is

  not – and it cannot be – the whole, entire, unvarnished truth, but neither

  is it a fictional genre. And, as a context within which to understand an

  author’s analytical work, it can be intensely revealing.

  Accordingly, Doug Munro and Geoffrey Gray, in a comparative study

  of three accounts by historians of their formative years, note the

  increasingly revelatory nature of historians’ memoirs generally and go on

  to discuss the overlap between family histories and autobiographies of

  childhood as well as teasing out many of the dominant themes of the

  6 Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

  7 Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010), 5.

  8 See, for example, David Lamb, ed., Just Beyond Reach: Peter Noel Lamb: Selected Memoirs (Sydney: Rankin, 2003), 66, 77–8. The former page reference reads, ‘anything I write about family dynamics runs the risk of being seen as partial, incomplete, arbitrary, misleading, inaccurate or worse

  – memory clouded with emotion is a problematic arc
hive to be mined – so I won’t even try to

  apologise in advance for my selection of “facts.”’

  9 See A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), x; Adam Sisman, A.J.P.

  Taylor: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 397.

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  subgenre.10 They also identify the increasing tendency of autobiographies

  of childhood, and historians’ memoirs generally, to adopt the methods of

  conventional monographs – although often lacking in the trappings

  of footnotes, bibliographies and index. Notwithstanding variability

  in quality, historians’ autobiographies are now normally the products

  of careful deliberation and research, which their authors approach and

  execute as they would any other piece of serious historical writing. This is

  in contrast with, say, the earlier autobiographies of male Australian

  historians where there is some, but not much, internal evidence of them

  having an archival basis rather than being written from memory.11 Munro

  and Gray’s message is that historians’ autobiographies of the better sort

  represent serious scholarship and ought to be so regarded.

  Finally in this section, Ann Moyal examines autobiographical writing by

  women historians in Australia over an extended period of two centuries,

  placing special emphasis on the distinctively gendered elements of

  autobiographies by such historians as Jill Ker Conway and Sheila Fitzpatrick,

  as well as her own autobiographical work. Moyal situates these works

  within a wider Australian tradition of women’s autobiographies that – by

  contrast with the ‘personal odysseys of pioneering endeavour’ that suffused

  male autobiography – were ‘franker, relational, concerned with childhood,

  people and places, some masquerading as regional or local history’. They

  were often adjudged by male critics to be trivial, but Moyal shows how

  they collectively represented a unique cultural influence, and also how

  by the 1980s women’s autobiographies, notably those by historians,

  came to embody ‘an emerging awareness of the advent of professional

  careers’. While not all of the historians considered in this section of the

  book are women – John Rickard and James Walvin are the exceptions –

  10 Jill Roe, Our Fathers Cleared the Bush: Remembering Eyre Peninsula (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2016) also illustrates the indeterminate boundaries and the extent to which autobiography is a mixed genre, the author using her own experiences and those of her family to introduce aspects of a regional story while explicitly deploying her training as a historian to contextualise and historicise.

  11 G.V. Portus, Happy Highways (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1953); W.K. Hancock, Country and Calling (London: Faber & Faber, 1954); Hancock, Professing History (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975); Paul Hasluck, Mucking About: An Autobiography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1977); Fred Alexander, On Campus and Off: Reminiscences of the First Professor of Modern History at the University of Western Australia, 1916–1986 (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1987); Russel Ward, A Radical Life: The Autobiography of Russel Ward (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1988); Manning Clark, The Puzzles of Childhood (Ringwood: Viking, 1989); Clark, The Quest for Grace (Ringwood: Viking, 1990); Clark, A Historian’s Apprenticeship (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992). One never knows: in an email, Geoffrey Gray suggested to us that Hasluck often made the claim that he wrote from memory, including the writing of Mucking About – but ‘with a file at his elbow’.

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  nevertheless, the three essays, taken together, offer confirmation of the

  value of gender-based analysis of historians’ autobiographies and of the

  distinctness of women’s autobiographical writing.

  Moyal’s chapter also underlines the sheer prevalence of historians’

  autobiographies by Australian women. By Moyal’s count, 13 Australian

  women historians have, between them, written 23 book-length

  autobiographies – a number that probably rivals those by counterparts

  in the rest of the world combined.12 Arguing, indeed, that Australian

  historians, both men and women, are the world’s most productive at the

  autobiographer’s art, Jeremy Popkin suggested a convergence of reasons

  for this proliferation.13 In Popkin’s view, these autobiographies are often

  of high literary quality and are recognised as having made ‘an important

  contribution to their society’s overall tradition of first-person writing’. The

  autobiographers are often prominent historians who are well integrated

  into the country’s intellectual and national life, and so have cultural

  authority. The cumulative effect is to impart to historians’ autobiographies

  a respectability and legitimacy that encourages imitators. As Popkin says,

  one can now ‘speak of a genuine corpus of historians’ autobiographies,

  as opposed to a few isolated individual initiatives’,14 and the genre is

  12 Autobiographies by non-Australian women historians include Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (Westport, CT: Wildcat, 1982); Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986); Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From that Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989); Annie Kriegel, Ce que j’ai cru comprendre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991); Arlette Farge, Le goût de l’archive (Paris: Seuil, 1989); Susan Groag Bell, Between Worlds: In Czechoslovakia, England, and America (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1991); Deirdre McCloskey, Crossing: A Memoir (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), doi.org/10.7208/

  chicago/9780226556727.001.0001; Régine Pernoud, Villa Paradis: Souvenirs (Paris: Stock, 1994); Lousa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation, Italy, 1968 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996); Maria Tippett, Becoming Myself: A Memoir (Toronto: Stoddart, 1996); Jenifer Hart, Ask Me No More: An Autobiography (London: Peter Halban, 1998); Elisabeth Roudinesco, Génealogies (Paris: Fayard, 2002); Sheila Rowbotham, Remembering the Sixties (New York: Verso, 2002); Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Lerner, Living with History/Making Social Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009),

  doi.org/10.5149/9780807887868_lerner; Antonia Fraser, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010); Fraser, My History: A Memoir of Growing Up (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015). There are also several collections of autobiographical essays by women – such as Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds, Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, the Political, the Professional (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) – as well as numerous stand-alone journal articles.

  13 Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘ Ego-histoire Down Under: Australian Historian-Autobiographers’, Australian Historical Studies, 38:129 (2007), 107, doi.org/10.1080/10314610708601234.

  14 Ibid., 106. Biographical study of Australian historians also shows no sign of abating, as instanced by the recent publication of Tom Griffiths, The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2016).

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  propelling itself forward under its own momentum. The autobiographies

  have often, Popkin adds, made an important contribution to national

  debates, not least on the recurring question of national identity.

  This latter point also connects with the essays in the book’s second

  section – one on an Australian historian, one on a Canadian – which

  focus on historians who have taken a crucial ro
le in articulating and

  explaining national senses of identity. Mark McKenna’s examination of

  the autobiographical writings of the profoundly influential Australian

  historian Manning Clark shows that these works represented ‘the final

  expression of Clark’s fictive historical style’ and can be read as ‘allegories

  of [Australian] national awakening’. Thus, Clark engaged in a form

  of self-invention through the telling of stories both about himself and

  about the emergence of the modern nation. Donald Wright, meanwhile,

  examines the early life of the Canadian historian Ramsay Cook, finding

  there the elements of the outlook of a historian very different from Clark,

  but who nevertheless grappled with comparable currents of national

  emergence – centrally concerned in this case with the development of

  a bilingual and multicultural Canada during the 1960s and 1970s, and

  the resulting need to attend to minority rights and to explain French-

  speaking to English-speaking Canada. The interrogation of the history

  of each national experience by each respective historian was profoundly

  influenced by personal formation and evolution, and each historian in

  turn conceptualised uniquely influential interpretive patterns in the

  understanding of Australia and Canada as national societies. And, therefore,

  both McKenna and Wright engage deeply with the relationship between

  analysis and imagination both in the lives of their subjects and in their

  own practice of the biographer’s art.

  Part of this grappling with questions of national emergence involved

  the portrayal of a very public figure, notably in the case of Manning

  Clark as a partisan for the cause of the Australian Labor Party. In turn,

  it entailed questions of self-definition, and in this respect Clark made

  much of pivotal moments in his life. One of these was walking through

  the streets of Bonn in November 1938, the morning after Kristallnacht.

  Viewing the broken glass and contemplating the violence, said Clark,

  affected his outlook on life – only that Clark was in England at the time,

  arriving in Bonn a fortnight later. Instead, he had appropriated his wife

  Dymphna’s account of the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht. For the