Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians, Edited by Doug Munro and John G
11 Country and Kin Calling? Keith Hancock, the National Dictionary Collaboration, and the Promotion of Life Writing in Australia1 Melanie Nolan Australian historians and ego-histoire In his international comparison of history, historians and autobiography in 2005, Jeremy D. Popkin concluded that Australian historians were early to, and enthusiastic about, the ego-histoire movement or the ‘setting down [of] one’s own story’. Australians anticipated Pierre Nora’s collection of essays, Essais d’ego-histoire, which was published in 1987.2 They had already founded ‘a series of autobiographical lectures in 1984’, which resulted in a number of publications, and Australian historians’ memoirs thereafter appeared at a rate of more than one a year.3 When he considered Australian 1 I thank Ann Curthoys and the editors for their comments on an earlier draft. 2 Pierre Nora ed., Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 7. 3 Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 74. In ‘Ego-histoire Down Under: Australian Historian-Autobiographers’, Australian Historical Studies, 38:129 (2007), 110, doi.org/10.1080/10314610708601234, Popkin dates the Australian memoir bulge from 1982 when collective projects including ‘a volume of professional women’s narratives, The Half-Open Door, which appeared in 1982, and the four volumes of essays starting with the Victorian History Institute’s 1984 forum in which R.M. Crawford, Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey participated’. Patricia Grimshaw and Lynne
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