AustLit

'This volume of essays was inspired by the increasing though still-limited 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.  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.' (Introduction)

'Once a comparatively rare beast, historians’ autobiographies are becoming prevalent to the point of being commonplace. Since the 1980s, such works have crystallised into a genre and have become a historiographic growth area. Limiting the head count to monograph-length works, a dozen historians’ memoirs were published in the 1970s, rising to three dozen in the 1980s, five dozen in the 1990s, and the contributions continue apace. Once on the fringes of the historical enterprise, historians’ memoirs are now edging closer to centre stage. Increasing frequency has lent respectability. There remain significant pockets of resistance, the usual canards being that autobiography is inescapably egotistical, self-indulgent and narcissistic. Nonetheless, the genre is rapidly gaining acceptance and being treated seriously – and not simply historians’ autobiographies but autobiography by academics generally. Almost without exception, historians’ autobiographies contain a chapter or chapters on childhood and coming of age. In parallel with the increasing prevalence of historians’ autobiographies, a subgenre devoted to the childhoods through to the young adulthoods of historians has also become a growth area. We are concerned in this chapter with three such works: Sheila Fitzpatrick’s My Father’s Daughter (2010); John Rickard’s An Imperial Affair (2013); and James Walvin’s Different Times (2014).' (Introduction)

'A striking number of Australian women have ventured into the autobiographical genre. While a slew of immigrant men were producing their personal odysseys of pioneering endeavour and the exploration and appropriation of a new land in the nineteenth century, a regiment of women from diverse backgrounds began to record their remembered experiences and specific local responses to colonial life. The women’s stories were very different. Franker, relational, concerned with childhood, people and places, some masquerading as regional or local history, in a strongly masculine society they were often judged as ‘unimportant’ or ‘trivial’ and not given publication at the time of writing. But they came to lay the foundation of ‘a complementary culture’ to male autobiography with its ongoing emphasis on national identity and image, and they have been judged by literary and historical scholars as a rich and unique reading experience.'  (Introduction)

'Identity mattered to Bernard Smith, probably more than for most people. As an illegitimate child and a fostered ward of the state, anonymity had haunted him, but it also drove his ambitions. By using these two opposing structures as tension rods, identity and anonymity, he sought validation through his work and recognition as an art and cultural historian. His revision of Australia’s modern cultural evolution, written from a fiercely independent position, was based around colonial inheritance, cultural traffic and transformation, but it was also intended to shake up an ‘uncritical culture’ and situate it in a more conspicuous international position. From the mid-1940s, his historiography became the benchmark for scholars and artists in their pursuit of, or argument with, Antipodean identity and cultural autonomy, and this chapter seeks to explain why Bernard Smith’s rethinking of antipodeanism – a term he coined – and his aim to legitimate Australian culture within a globalised postwar world was a pioneering and brilliant study of cultural origins and evolution; at a personal level it reflected his own genesis.' (Introduction)

'The Oxford English Dictionary defines networking as ‘the action or process of making use of a network of people for the exchange of information, etc., or for professional or other advantage’. Although recently prominent in management theory, the art of networking has been practised over many centuries in many societies, but its role in the Australian academic community has been little explored. This essay represents a preliminary excursion into the field, raising questions that more systematic researchers may follow in time, and drawing unashamedly on the resources of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Beginning on the eve of the First World War, the essay is bounded by the formation of the Australian Historical Association in 1973, at which date the profession provided itself with a formal structure for the creation and nurturing of networks that would benefit the scholarly advancement of individuals and the coherence of the discipline as a whole.' (Introduction)

'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-histoiremovement 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. 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. When he considered Australian historians’ memoirs more specifically in 2007, Popkin argued that ‘[o]n a proportional basis, more historians from Australia than from any other country’ have written ego-histoire: he had identified ‘more than three dozen different’ Australian historians who had written her or his memoirs compared to just 200 United States historians’ published memoirs. Popkin also argued that contemporary Australian historians’ memoirs helped to establish ‘a tradition of first-person writing, a relatively recent development in their own culture’ and that they had greater impact in Australia than groups of other historians elsewhere in other countries. Works by both male and female authors such as Keith Hancock, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Bernard Smith, Jill Ker Conway, Manning Clark, Ann Moyal and Inga Clendinnen constituted a distinctive strain of historical life writing generally and had become major contributions to the national literature. This creative non-fiction won major mainstream literary prizes, not simply specialist history ones. Australian historians’ life writing had a greater impact within society than French or US contemporaries had in theirs, according to Popkin, because of the literary quality of the work and the ‘high degree of authorial self-consciousness’ in the context of a relatively new sense of Australian cultural identity.' (Introduction)

'In the last couple of decades, many historians have sought to move beyond the longstanding and probably futile quest to establish the precise place of biography in history and instead explore a number of new ways of thinking about the relationship between history and individual lives. One of these ways focuses on historians themselves and on the different kinds of insights that an exploration of their lives can offer. As one can see in this volume, several different approaches have been taken to this question, with some historians turning to write their own autobiographies, and exploring the broader historical understanding that can be gained from describing and analysing one’s own experience, while others have sought rather to see whether a study of the lives of particular historians, either individually or in groups, offers a new understanding of the kinds of history that they wrote and of broader developments within the discipline.' (Introduction)