Clio's Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies Of
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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 and 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). xi 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