Category Archives: History writing

Prize-winning histories 2022

Posted on December 27, 2022 | 2 comments

I notice that a few book bloggers have done us a great service by compiling a list of the books that won various literary awards during the year. Doing the same for histories is a little more complex because some awards are for historians rather than histories (e.g. the History Council of South Australia, History Council of Western Australia), while others include histories alongside biographies as part of non-fiction generally. Some awards are for essays, articles, chapters and historical interpretations, with less emphasis on published books. However, here is what I have found for published full-length history books during 2022 (and I know I have probably missed some) :

Ernest Scott Prize – the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand or to the history of colonisation published in the previous year. Administered through University of Melbourne

Dr. Lucy Mackintosh Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

Emeritus Professor Janet McCalman for Vandemonians: The Repressed History of Colonial Victorians

W.K.Hancock Prize -for first book, awarded biennially

Jason Gibson, Ceremony Men: Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection (exorbitantly expensive! Go for the e-book)

Chief Minister’s Northern Territory History Book Award – most significant historical book about the Northern Territory (NT) published in the last 12 months.

Mark McKenna Return to Uluru (my review here)

NSW Premiers History Awards

Australian History Prize: Alexis Bergantz French Connection: Australia’s Cosmopolitan Ambitions

General History Prize (International) Mina Roces The Filipino Migration Experience: Global Agents of Change

Young People’s History Award Aunty Shaa Smith, Neeyan Smith, Uncle Bud Marshall with Yandaarra including Sarah Wright, Lara Daley and Paul Hodge The Dunggiirr Brothers and the Caring Song of the Whale

Kay Daniels Award – biennial award recognising outstanding original research with a bearing on Australian convict history and heritage including in its international context.

Bill Bell, Crusoe’s Books: Readers in the Empire of Print 1800-1918

Prime Ministers Literary Awards

Australian History Christine Helliwell Semut: The Untold Story of a Secret Australian Operation in WWII Borneo

Non-Fiction Mark Willacy Rogue Forces: An Explosive Insiders’ Account of Australian SAS War Crimes in Afghanistan

Queensland Premiers Literary Awards

Queensland Premiers Award for a Work of State Significance Quentin Beresford Wounded Country: The Murray-Darling Basin a Contested History

University of Queensland Non Fiction Award Claire G. Coleman Lies, Damned Lies: A Personal Exploration of the Impact of Colonisation   

The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award Chelsea Watego Another Day in the Colony 

Victorian Community History Awards

Winner Janet McCalman Vandemonians: The Repressed History of Colonial Victoria

Judges’ Special Prize David Rowe About Corayo: A Thematic History of Greater Geelong

History Publication Award Barbara Minchinton The Women of Little Lon (my review here)

Community Diversity Award Alexandra Dellios Heritage Making and Migrant Subjects in the Deindustrialising Region of the Latrobe Valley

2 Comments

Posted in History writing

Vale Stuart Macintyre

Posted on November 25, 2021 | 2 comments

Many tributes are flowing for the historian Stuart Macintyre. He was a prolific historian, both as author of his own volumes and as a collaborator with other historians. His best known works are probably The Oxford History of Australia, Volume 4, 1901–1942: The Succeeding Age (1986), A Concise History of Australia (2016, 4th edition) and Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s (2015). The second volume of his history of the Communist Party The Party: The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning is scheduled to be published early next year, coming 23 years after the first volume The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia From Origins to Illegality (1999). As a co-writer and editor, he was a historian of historians, as in A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History (1994) and The Discovery of Australian History 1890-1939 (1995) which I reviewed here. He was keenly aware of the discipline of history and the uses to which it has been put, as in The Historian’s Conscience (2004) and The History Wars (2003) which he wrote with Anna Clark.

Three fitting obituaries by Janet McCalman, Brian Aarons and Tim Rowse are reproduced on Open Labour’s page: https://www.openlabor.net.au/2021/11/24/stuart-macintyre-a-history-warrior/

2 Comments

Posted in Historians, History writing

‘Death of a Notary’ by Donna Merwick

Posted on August 29, 2021 | 10 comments

I read in the newspaper this morning that Donna Merwick (1932-2021) has died. Donna Merwick was an American-born historian who worked as a Lecturer in History at the University of Melbourne between 1968 and 1995. She entered the Order of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1953, and completed her M.A. and Ph.D as a sister until leaving the order in 1968 to take up her position at the University of Melbourne. She is known as one of the members of the ‘Melbourne School’ of history comprising her husband Greg Dening (a former priest), and La Trobe University historians Rhys Isaac and Inga Clendinnen, although in an interview in The Australasian Journal of American Studies published in Vol. 34 No.1 (July 2015), she questions the idea that there was ever such a ‘school’. It’s an interesting interview, combining personal and professional academic considerations (albeit referring to academics of the 1970s and 1980s in a very different academic environment) and is available through JSTOR at State Libraries. She has an entry in the online Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth Century Australia. While I could never in any way hope to emulate it, the history writing of this ‘Melbourne School’ (her skepticism about its existence notwithstanding) has been a huge influence on the way I read and appreciate history.

I read her Death of a Notary back in 2008, before I started this blog, and so I dug out my reading journal to see how I responded to it then. I was obviously mightily impressed. Reading it now, what I like is that in prefiguring some of the current trends in history writing of imagination and extrapolation from other sources (particularly in books written for a wider, popular rather than academic audience), she justifies and delineates where the sources start and finish, revealing her thinking as a historian. Here’s what I said at the time:

1999, 186 p. text and 51 p. ‘Notes and Reflections’

What a brilliant and original book! It is in effect two books. The first is a conversational, present tense, rather speculative narrative that pieces together the small documentary fragments that refer to Janse, the Dutch-speaking notary in Albany, who commits suicide in the late 17th century, a number of years after the English have taken possession of New Amsterdam. The British renamed it ‘New York’ and incorporated it into the British common law tradition, introducing the English language and British colonial bureaucracy. It is largely chronological, told in dated episodes, that change their focus from father to son, and from New Amsterdam to Amsterdam and then back to Albany again. She incorporates observations from parallel, but different experiences that have been documented to supplement where Janse’s record is silent, and she invents, drawing on this other data to give the narrative life and image.

In the second, ‘Notes and Reflection’ section, we see the historian with her hard-hat on. Every ‘invention’ in the first part is sourced and validated; every assumption is justified, and every source is credited. The sheer volume and perspiration is here for all to see in this second part with its more clinical and measured tone.

Brilliant.

My rating (then) 10/10

Sourced from: La Trobe University Library. I see that it is available online through the Internet Archive too, although I’m not sure how much of it you are able to access.

10 Comments

Posted in Book reviews, Historians, History writing

Friday essay: the ‘great Australian silence’ 50 years on by Anna Clark

Posted on August 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-great-australian-silence-50-years-on-100737

An excellent essay in The Conversation by historian Anna Clark reflecting on WEH Stanner’s 1968 Boyer Lectures where he coined the term ‘the great Australian silence’ to describe the occlusion of indigenous people from narratives of Australian history. Her essay comes fifty years after those essays, but also in the contemporary context of the political response to the Uluru statement and  Lyndall Ryan and others’ work on the massacre map.

I encourage you to read it.

Leave a comment

Posted in Australian history, Historians, History writing, Uncategorized

The Seymour Biography Lecture: Ray Monk

Posted on September 23, 2014 | 1 comment

monk

“How Can I be a Logician before I’m a Human Being?” The Role of Biography in the Understanding of Intellectuals, Seymour Biography Lecture, 22 September 2014

“I don’t even know who this guy is….” I thought while RSVPing for the Seymour Biography lecture in Melbourne, held last night.  When I looked the books he’s written, I understand why.  While I’ve read many historical and literary biographies, I must confess to not being overly attracted to biographies of philosophers and scientists.  However, in my own work on Judge Willis, I share the problem of working on a man who has a body of work in the intellectual realm (in my own case, an accumulation of addresses to a jury and written judgements) which, while abstract and de-personalized (in a way that, perhaps, a fiction oeuvre for a writer is not), is also integral to his own identity.

1990
1996
2001
2012

Ray Monk is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, coming from a background in the philosophy of mathematics. Although his four works are based on philosophers and, more recently, a scientist, he does not believe that biography necessarily contributes to an understanding of all philosophers and moreover, that you can’t evaluate the philosophy in terms of the life of its proponent.   However, he was attracted to write about Wittgenstein after reading two very different appraisals of Wittgenstein’s work and concluding that, if these writers had understood Wittgenstein as a man, they would not have developed particular misunderstands in their analysis.

In a very academic-y way, he investigated the methodology of biography writing before embarking on his biography of Wittgenstein.   In effect, he followed Biography 101, commencing with classical biographies,  Samuel Johnson and Boswell, Virginia Woolf, and ending up with Richard Ellman’s Oscar Wilde and Andrew Hodge’s Turing: The Enigma as exemplars for his own work.

In his presentation, he focussed on Johnson’s own reflections on biography that he expressed through two articles ‘Biography’ in The Rambler in 1750 and ‘On Biography’ in The Idler 1759.  He addressed five questions from Johnson:

1. What is the relation between biography of other genres, most particularly history and fiction?  His answer- there’s an overlap.

2. Who deserves a biography? Many philosophers don’t live sufficiently interesting lives to warrant a biography, he said.

3. What details to include? He mentioned that there were facts that he had omitted from his two-volume work on Russell – a publication that he seemed oddly apologetic about.  He explained that had he included them, they would have completely skewed the response to the book, and so he omitted them.

4. What are the moral responsibilities of the biographer? He identified three- to the subject; to the public and to the truth. Although he nominated the ultimate responsibility to the truth, he noted that surviving relatives often have a stake as well.

5. Can one know the inner life?  Johnson believed that this was not possible: “By conjecture only can one man judge of another’s motives or sentiments”. Monk disputed this very 18th century view, giving examples in his books where he had looked to action as a window on the inner life.

There is a particular challenge, I think, in writing biographies of intellectuals, as opposed to biographies of politicians or literary figures.  There is the content of their philosophy, as well as their own life as part of a familial, historical and intellectual milieu.  Monk noted the tendency of academic biographers, in particular, to give a quote from the philosopher’s work then in the following paragraph to proceed to paraphrase and explain it. Just leave the quote alone, he advised.

He noted that a biography is not just a collection of facts: that the facts need to be shaped, and that the biographer has a point of view. He finished with a very Wittgensteinian idea that is particularly applicable to biography-writing “The understanding that exists in seeing connections”.

There’s a very good review from the Guardian (10/11/12) of his Oppenheimer book which also discusses Monk as a biographer. You’ll get a good taste of the lecture from this article.

More:

I’ve been frustrated in the past that the Seymour Biography Lecture has been delivered in Canberra and, as far as I’m aware, not in Melbourne as well. But I’ve just found podcasts or transcripts of recent lectures on the NLA site. Ah, isn’t the internet a wonderful thing?

1 Comment

Posted in Biography, History writing, What I've been listening to, Writing

Tagged ,

‘Connecting’ at the masterclass

Posted on September 11, 2014 | 4 comments

Well, now I can tell you what happens at a masterclass!  There were about eighteen or so participants, drawn from universities across Australia, but the majority were from the University of Tasmania. The masterclass was hosted by Penny Edmonds from the University of Tasmania,  and several Uni of Tasmania academics attended including Anna Johnston (who wrote The Paper Wars which I reviewed here), Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Kristyn Harman, whose book Aboriginal Convicts: Australian, Khoisan and Maori Exiles recently won the Kay Daniels award.

But the major drawcard, for me at least, was the presence of  Dr. Zoe Laidlaw, Reader in British Imperial and Colonial History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Continue reading →

4 Comments

Posted in Colonial biography, Historians, History writing, Settler colonialism

Oooh goody!

Posted on September 9, 2014 | 7 comments

I’m really looking forward to the Masterclass on “Networks of Empire & Transnational History’ that is being conducted down at the University of Tasmania tomorrow.  It’s being conducted by Zoe Laidlaw, one of my capital letter Historians I Admire Very Much.  It was her book ‘Colonial Connections’, along with Kirsten McKenzie’s ‘Scandal in the Colonies’ that spurred me to write about ‘my’ judge in the way I’m doing.   So I’m down in Hobart, one of my very favourite cities, having had an indulgent day off looking through the newly renovated Museum of Tasmania  and Narryna, a historic home in Battery Point.  The Jetstar God actually smiled on me and the plane left on time, and I was upgraded in my accommodation fromthe rather poky cheapest room to something rather more salubrious.  But I’m using my tablet and only just managed to get the bluetooth keyboard to work, and I’ve discovered that I have absolutely no idea how to make a new paragraph.  I probably sound very very excited, but it’s just my technological ignorance!

 

 

7 Comments

Posted in History writing

Terrific article about Clare Wright’s ‘Forgotten Rebels’

Posted on August 29, 2014 | 1 comment

the-forgotten-rebels-of-eureka

There’s an excellent article by Zora Simic on The Conversation website that locates Clare Wright’s much acclaimed book Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (see my review here) within other feminist Australian histories over the past forty years.  She refers specifically to three other books that sit here on the shelf beside me.

The first, Damned Whores and God’s Police by Anne Summers was published in 1975 (while she was still a doctoral student!) with the subtitle “The Colonization of  Women in Australia”.  This subtitle was dropped from the 1994 and 2002 revised editions.  Its republication decades apart is significant.  The 1994 version included a new introduction and a controversial epilogue “Letter to the Next Generation”.  The 2002 edition included all the material from the first and second editions and a timeline of achievements by Australian women 1788-2001.

dixson1976

1976 edition

the-real-matilda1999

1999 edition

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second is Miriam Dixson’s The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia 1788-1975.  It, too, has gone through several editions.  It was published in 1976, revised in 1984 with a third edition in 1994 and a fourth in 1999. By the 1999 edition it had grown by two chapters, along with a new introduction.  When Ann Curthoys wrote a twenty-year retrospective review of four foundational feminist Australian histories for Australian Historical Review (Vol 27, No 106 pp 1-13) she noted that the the book had an open engagement with international theoriests, with a heavy emphasis on the early colonial period.  However, she was struck, twenty years after its publication, by the emphasis on women’s passivity.

Curthoy’s review also examined Damned Whores and God’s Police,  Beverley Kingston’s My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann which examined the unrecognized work of women in the home, and a book I had not heard of- Gentle Invaders which focussed on the regulation of women’s wages.  Curthoy’s article is a good one, and worth looking up if you have access to it (bring out your State Library of Victoria card, people, and read it online).  Zora Simic’s article here is not unlike it yet another twenty years further on.

1994 edition

1994 edition

2006 edition

2006 edition

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, Simic locates Clare Wright’s book alongside the 1994 book Creating a Nation, co-written by Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly and republished in a second edition with an additional chapter in 2006..   In Ann Curthoy’s survey article she had been particularly surprised by the absence of discussion of race in the four texts she reviewed, and this book directly challenges this by the integration of Aboriginal experience into their analysis, with three chapters devoted to this often-dismissed aspect.  It certainly starts dramatically, with an Aboriginal woman going into labour on the beach in 1791. This  imagery is carried throughout the book, giving a new meaning to “the birth of a nation”.

I  was prompted by Simic’s review to read Curthoy’s article  just after reading that the gender pay gap in Australia has soared to 18%, the highest in 30 years and since data was collected.  I noted with interest that Curthoy’s survey article made much of the context that the four books she examined were written i.e. in the early 1970s, during the Whitlam government and at a time of rapid increase in female enrolment at universities.  She wrote of the limitations of Gentle Invaders, written by two authors who had met in the heady days of the Womens Electoral Lobby, preparing the case for a minimum wage for women in the 1974 National Wage Case.  On a day when I also read about the threat to the Renewable Energy Target and the further relaxation of 457 visas, all that seems such a very long time ago.

References:

Zora Simic ” Noted Works: The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka” http://theconversation.com/noted-works-the-forgotten-rebels-of-eureka-26584

Ann Curthoys  “Visions, Nightmares, Dreams: Women’s History 1975” Australian Historical Studies  Vol 27, Issue 106  pp 1-13.

1 Comment

Posted in Australian history, History writing

Ben Wilson ‘The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain 1789-1837’

Posted on August 13, 2014 | Leave a comment

wilson1

2007, 389 p & notes

One of the basic questions in writing history is how to define the period under examination.  Sometimes historians use seminal events- particularly military ones- as markers.  Others use famous people: “the age of Beethoven” or “Austen’s world”.  Centuries can be used as markers, stretched out to form “the long 18th century” or “the long 19th century”. A recent approach, reflecting no doubt the effect of sociology on history, has been to look at generations.

My own research takes an individual life as its starting point: that of John Walpole Willis, born in 1793.  I’ve been interested in some time in the mental furniture with which his mind would have been stocked, having grown to adulthood in pre-Victorian times, yet living most of his professional life under Victoria’s reign.  As a judge, his pronouncements from the bench seem steeped in Victorian rectitude, but he was himself born in Georgian times.  Using the British royal family as periodization (Georgian, Victorian) is convenient, but it doesn’t explain how any qualitative change from one era to another occurred. How did the rambunctious disorder and ribaldry of Georgian times turn into the moralistic earnestness of Victorian times? How did this affect the way that people thought? Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Book reviews, History writing, Nineteenth Century British History

‘What’s Wrong with Anzac?’ Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds.

Posted on April 11, 2014 | 20 comments

whatswrongwithanzac

2010, 167 p.
I doubt that this book will be reissued in the next two years. I’m sure that the publishers have had an asterisk against 2014 and 2015 as bumper years for military history, with the centenary of WW I in 2014 and the Gallipoli centenary in 2015. This book, originally published in 2010, is not likely to sit comfortably on the shelves with big books with big blokey authors that would have been scheduled specially to take advantage of all this interest. But many of the sentiments expressed by the historians who have contributed to it will continue to bubble along underneath all the ceremony, emotion and hyperbole.  You can find it manifested in the Honest History website.

In 2009 historian Marilyn Lake was invited by the History Teachers Association of Victoria and the University of Melbourne to give a lecture on ‘The Myth of Anzac’ in a series on mythologies. A condensed version of the address was published in The Age soon afterwards.

In it, she argued that in the 21st century Australia should reclaim the values of equality and justice which in an earlier era was thought to define a distinctive ‘Australian’ ethos. She suggested that it was inappropriate for “a modern democratic nation to adopt an Imperial, masculinist, militarist event as the focus of our national self-definition in the twenty-first century.” (p.3)

A furore erupted online- a “mixture of hostility and support, personal abuse and thoughtful reflection”. In her introduction to this book, she briefly mentions the abuse but outlines in more detail some of the more reflective responses posted onto the Comments section of the Age website.

This book is a compilation, then, of chapters written by a number of authors (both male and female) in response to the questions raised by Lake’s article and the commentary that surrounded it. Continue reading →

20 Comments

Posted in ANZAC, Australian history, Australian Women Writers Challenge 2014, History writing