Academic and activist.
Vere Gordon Childe was active in the Australian labour movement as a young man, and wrote How Labour Governs, a study of parliamentary socialism, in 1923. He later became an archaeologist and prehistorian, the work for which he is better known. He retained an interest in popularising scholarship for a broader readership, and published What Happened in History in 1942, part of a movement of popular science books (such as C.W. Ceram's Gods, Graves, and Scholars) designed to demystify what had been exclusive and exclusionary academic pursuits.
Childe died at Govetts Leap in the Blue Mountains in 1957: his death was ruled accidental, but his suicide note to his colleague W.F. Grimes (sent before his death with a request that it remain unopened until 1968) was published in the 1980s.
Sources include Sally Green, Prehistorian: A Biography of V. Gordon Childe (Moonraker Press, 1981).
