A Man of Many Words Biography and Bibliography of James Thomas (“Jim”) Griffin (1929-2010)
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A Man of Many Words Biography and Bibliography of James Thomas (“Jim”) Griffin (1929-2010): teacher, academic historian, writer, singer. Compiled by Helga Griffin A Man of Many Words Bibliography of James Thomas (“Jim”) Griffin (1929-2010): teacher, academic historian, writer, singer. Helga Griffin Compiler Desktop Publication Canberra 2018 – online 2021 Copyright is with the Compiler. Contact details are on page 160. This text begins with a profile of Jim Griffin’s life and personality, followed by his work history and public involvements. The long bibliography of his writings and speeches is not exhaustive. Some special attention is devoted to Jim’s concern for the political situation in Bougainville, as well as his part in starting a Dictionary of Contemporary Biography of Papua New Guinea and that this project imploded after many months of activity (it seems during 1985-88). The text ends with Acknowledgements, the Compiler’s Credentials, Identification of the Photos, Sources used and Contact details. The original text, without photos, has paginated cross-references that link Jim’s life with his publications. That document is held in Box 52 of James (“Jim”) Griffin’s Papers in the Australian National Library. This online version here has removed the cross-references but has included some photos that illustrate parts of the text. iii Paginations for List of Contents: Abbreviations used in the Text and Bibliography v Profile of Jim’s Life and Personality 1 Photos 43 List of Jim Griffin’s Employment History with dates 50 Employment History 51 Bibliography of Jim Griffin’s Writings and Formal Speeches 84 Epilogue 138 Acknowledgements 139 Compiler 140 Contact details 141 iv Abbreviations used in the Text and Bibliography: ABC, Australian Broadcasting Commission / Corporation ABR, Australian Book Review ADB, Australian Dictionary of Biography AIIA, Australian Institute of International Affairs AJP, Australian Journal of Politics and History ANU, Australian National University ANZAAS, Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science ASIO, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation CAB, Current Affairs Bulletin CAE, College of Advanced Education CCAE, Canberra College of Advanced Education cv, curriculum vitae or work/life history CW, Catholic Worker DCBPNG, Dictionary of Contemporary Biography of Papua New Guinea JCUNQ, James Cook University of North Queensland ms, manuscript MUP, Melbourne University Press NLA, National Library of Australia ONA, Office of National Assessments PNG, Papua New Guinea RSSS, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU RSPAS etc, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies [and variations] TCAE, Townsville College of Advanced Education TDB, Townsville Daily Bulletin TPNG, Times of Papua New Guinea ts, transcript PNG, Papua New Guinea UPNG, University of Papua New Guinea v Profile of Jim’s Life and Personality Jim was born on 28 October 1929 in Warrnambool, a coastal town in Victoria’s Western District. As an adult he used to joke, with a touch of Aussie self- mockery, that his arrival in the world had coincided with the crash of Wall Street’s financial institutions. His young life was therefore bound up with the ensuing Great Depression in Australia’s economy, following on from the US disaster. There were also intimate tragedies within his immediate family, not subject to wry amusement. They cast some shadows, especially over his brother, Daniel (“Dan”), older by almost three years. Dan failed to navigate the obstacles in his life as well as Jim was to do. Although this text will focus on Jim almost exclusively, to raise a few details about Dan, as a corollary to his brother’s vicissitudes, may provide some clues for Jim’s personal insecurities embedded within the dynamics of his extraverted personality. Matched with other ambiguities in Jim’s personality, they have left traces in his writings. The few references in this text to me, his partner in life and compiler of this project, and to our family, are merely contextual. They should add perspective to Jim’s behaviour and personality. Dan and Jim’s father, Thomas James Griffin (1896-1930) was also born and raised in the Warrnambool-Koroit region. Of Irish Catholic descent, as an adolescent Thomas had enlisted for overseas military service at the youngest age possible, so his family maintained. Thomas fought at Gallipoli in Turkey and on the Western Front in France until evacuated well before that war ended. In 1926 he married a young local woman, Anne (“Annie”) Bowman (1904-75), the eldest of eleven siblings, also of Irish Catholic decent, and had three children with her: Daniel, Mary and James. Thomas and Annie were said to have managed a small shop in Warrnambool. Dan was two and a half and Jim nine months old when their father died. By then, Mary had also died. Annie Griffin’s minuscule widow’s pension, as the surviving wife of a soldier who had not been killed, was a pitiful income. Australia’s economic Depression of course worsened her situation. She became a weaver in the Warrnambool woollen mills, having been obliged to move with her sons back into the crowded home her parents were renting. Later in life, Jim used to say, with genuine remorse that, “Dan and I would not let any suitor come within 1 cooee of our mother”. She stayed a widow all her long life, contributing financially to her own and her larger family’s upkeep, initially for a couple of decades in the rented home of her parents. While they were young, Annie’s sons were left predominantly in the care of her commanding mother, Mary Jane (born McAloon) who had produced her many children with her husband, Daniel Bowman, an agricultural labourer and gardener. He became “Grandy” to his grand-children and was much loved by their offspring. Himself the oldest son of a local Irish farmer, whose property he did not inherit, Grandy acquired his passionate interest in horse racing from his father and, from fellow-Irish, his life-long brogue. Without a father, the two Griffin boys became more firmly allied with their mother’s Bowman family, their uncles and aunts and their cousins. All his life Jim remembered most of the birthdays of his close relatives. Given the Depression, Jim’s grandfather apparently faced intermittent lack of paid work. At one time, he was employed as one of the labourers building the Warrnambool breakwater. Intended to provide a safer harbour for ships, and for the local fishermen, against the squalls of the Great Southern Ocean, the government instituted this scheme among many as emergency work. Jim’s working class sympathies were grounded in this early childhood, as was his love of wind-blown coastal environments. He acquired his interest in horse- racing from his grand-father (without a need to gamble) and imbibed pro- Irish-Catholic, anti-English-Protestant attitudes. A story told over and again, with Jim’s touches of amused scepticism, maintained that “Grandy” genuinely believed members of the British royal family to have been born mentally deficient because they were afflicted by a history of inbreeding. Grandy’s own limited education shielded him from historical accuracy. Jim’s passionate belief in the injustices suffered by so many Irish people from English colonial policy, and at the hands of overwhelming English colonisers, prefigured his reading and writing as an adult about that tragic chapter in history. Questions raised during his childhood near a grand coast-line littered with shipwrecks may well have contributed to the development of Jim’s historical imagination. Warrnambool is part of a once volcanic landscape. The Tower 2 Hill Reserve with its picturesque cradle lake sits within a dormant volcano in neighbouring Koroit. Painted in 1855 by Eugene von Guérard, the reserve has been drawing numerous visitors each year. Aboriginal communities lived in the local district. Their stone fish traps along the ocean’s foreshore are known to scholars, as are their woven fibre baskets with which local aborigines caught young eels in the upper confluence of the Hopkins River. The tragic history of Aboriginal dispossession by early settlers had morphed into national amnesia by the time Jim was a child. He only addressed this dilemma in the 1960s well after he became a history teacher. Jim acquired a rare text about the early European settlement of Warrnambool. Although he did not regard it as impressive, he had the greatest difficulty parting with it when a local grazier offered a ridiculously high price for the book. Some of us thought Jim would surely settle in Warrnambool in old age, so deeply entrenched was his identification with that part of the world. And he did, in 2010, within his coffin, in Warrnambool Cemetery. His grave looks down to the Hopkins River at its estuary by the ocean. The words “victim” or “blame”, seem not to have had personal currency in the Bowman-Griffin family. Thomas Griffin’s two sons had inherited their father’s talent as a humourist: as a teller of tall tales, as a joker, and as a tease. Whenever his father’s name was mentioned -- even long after his death, so Jim maintained -- the faces of those who had known him well beamed into broad smiles. There were also amusing story tellers among the Bowmans. It must have been a pressure-cooked extended family in expressive Irish style, nevertheless generous with affections. Insecurity was never entirely absent. As Jim once said about his childhood, with amusement and totally without blame: “Grandmother used the ploy of threatening the orphanage for us children if we proved too difficult”. He maintained that as a child he was never unhappy about deprivations and that, without a father, he had no father to blame. He later on used that analogy about the contemporary history of Thailand: that, having never been colonised, Thailand could not blame colonisers for its shortcomings.