AustLit

'Geoffrey Blainey (b. 1930) has had a most unusual trajectory for a historian. It  started conventionally enough when he enrolled in 1948 in Max Crawford’s history department at the University of Melbourne. He was one of several stellar students of that immediate postwar generation, and topped Manning Clark’s third year history course. At age 20, he then astonished everyone by taking on a full professor, R. S. Parker, in the country’s leading journal in the discipline, Historical Studies, as to whether Australian Federation was primarily motivated by economic considerations. His progression rapidly diverged from his fellow students in other ways. Instead of the usual career path as a tutor, followed by further study at Oxford, he embarked on a commissioned history of Mount Lyell Mining & Railway Company, published in 1954 as The Peaks of Lyell. That set his course for more than a decade, and a further six commissioned histories followed. Only in late 1961 did he become a teaching academic, beginning with a brief (and very successful) stint at the University of Adelaide followed by long-term employment at his alma mater, where he rose to become dean of the Faculty of Arts.' (Introduction)