AustLit

'Weston Bate will be best remembered for his influence on local history writing, his pioneering urban history methods, his passion for the poetics of the historian's craft, his insistence on the value of community networks, and his fascination with the dynamics of local/central power relationships. Born in 1924 in Surrey Hills, Melbourne, Bate attended Surrey Hills State School before going on to Scotch College. His mother, Mary Akers, hailed from California where his maternal grandfather had been a fruit farmer, and his Lancashire-born father, Ernest, was Deputy then Chief Engineer with the Victorian State Electricity Commission. During the war he spent two years as a pilot in England as part of the Empire Air Training Scheme, and on his return took advantage of a returned serviceman's tertiary scholarship to study English and History at the University of Melbourne, graduating with a BA in 1948. Under the influence of Max Crawford, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and John O’Brien, history got under Bate's skin. He soon embarked on a tandem endeavour; a teaching career at Brighton and later Melbourne Grammar, and a history MA, the latter completed in 1952 as ‘The History of Brighton, 1841–1859: A Study of the Private Township Formed on Henry Dendy's Special Survey in 1841’. He married Janice Wilson in 1955, continued his teaching career, and saw the birth of four of his six children by the time of the 1962 publication of an expanded version of the thesis.' (Introduction)