AustLit

'Imagine your grandfather was interviewed about his life, over many hours, some 80 years ago. Everything he says is written down, enough to fill more than 20 notebooks.' (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. P. Elkin, who was never slow to seize an opportunity to promote himself and the importance of anthropology, wrote to the Prime Minister, John Curtin, pointing out that problems associated with the administration of ‘native peoples’ during war could be resolved only through anthropological research. These problems, he added, would increase in number and complexity as a result of the war, especially in northern Australia and Australia’s external territories of Papua and New Guinea. Consequently, it was no longer simply a matter of understanding cultural contact, and social organisation, economic life, local customs and religion. It was necessary also to examine the psychological and sociological effects of the war, and of the military administration. The attitudes of the ‘natives to the white man and his administration’ had to be understood if ‘the latter [was] to succeed’ once the war had ended. He anticipated an increased role for himself and some of his selected students, two of whom were Ronald Berndt (1916–90) and Catherine Berndt (née Webb) (1918–94). This chapter focuses on the early career of Ronald rather than Catherine; she is no less important at this time but it is Ronald who ends up with a tenured academic career in anthropology. We can say, however, that as their careers took shape Catherine, perhaps putting aside her ambitions, increasingly devoted herself to actively supporting, developing and helping make Ronald’s career.'  (Introduction)

William Edward Hanley Stanner (1905–81) came to anthropology as a mature-age student having first worked as a bank clerk and journalist. He was twenty-three when he attended his first anthropology lectures at the University of Sydney, given by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Camilla Wedgwood and Raymond Firth. On completion of his degree—in both economics and anthropology—he was sent to Daly River, NT, where he conducted research for his MA, awarded in May 1934. Returning to Daly River in 1934–35, he spent a brief period at the newly founded Catholic mission at Port Keats (now Wadeye), which became his primary field site until he ceased fieldwork in 1959. For the second half of 1935, he tutored at the University of Sydney (as part of his research fellowship obligations). In between completing his degree and leaving for London, he worked also in the NSW Premier’s office advising on economic matters and writing speeches. In 1937 and 1938 he attended the London School of Economics (LSE), at his own expense. Raymond Firth assisted him by employing him as his amanuensis for Human Types, a general volume on anthropology. Stanner acknowledged this was ‘of great assistance to his own [work and]…closely allied with the thesis I am preparing…it has been a great stimulus to me and also a discipline for some of the methods I have been applying to my own work.’  He was awarded his doctorate, ‘Economic Change in North Australian Tribes’, in 1938.  As there were no positions for anthropologists in Australian universities, he remained in Britain, finding work with the Oxford Social Studies Research Committee, which saw him in Kenya when war was declared.'  (Introduction)

'Herbert Ian Priestley Hogbin was born in England in 1904 and emigrated with his family to Australia in February 1914. He attended school in Leeton, in country New South Wales, and then Fort Street High School in Sydney. He attended the University of Sydney, on an education bursary, where he completed, in 1926, a Bachelor of Arts and a Diploma in Education. Hogbin attended Radcliffe-Brown’s lectures on social anthropology—Anthropology I and Anthropology II—in the newly formed Department of Anthropology. Faced with a shortage of fieldworkers, Radcliffe-Brown persuaded—as Hogbin remarked later—a scarcely prepared twenty-two-year-old to join an expedition to Rennell Island and Ontong Java in 1927. Hogbin’s fieldwork was the first research conducted under the auspices of the Australian National Research Council (ANRC). Those scholars considered for fellowships ‘should be men of unusual promise [who] should be assured of either a definite University post or of a connection with teaching, research or scientific work having a direct bearing on some biological aspect of human welfare’  He was awarded his MA in Anthropology (for his work on Ontong Java) on 12 August 1929, the same year he left for the London School of Economics (LSE) to write his doctoral dissertation under Bronislaw Malinowski—later published as Law and Order in Polynesia (1934).' (Introduction)

'Scholars at War is the first scholarly publication to examine the effect World War II had on the careers of Australasian social scientists. It links a group of scholars through geography, transnational, national and personal scholarly networks, and shared intellectual traditions, explores their use, and contextualizes their experiences and contributions within wider examinations of the role of intellectuals in war.

'Scholars at War is structured around historical portraits of individual Australasian social scientists. They are not a tight group; rather a cohort of scholars serendipitously involved in and affected by war who share a point of origin. Analyzing practitioners of the social sciences during war brings to the fore specific networks, beliefs and institutions that transcend politically defined spaces. Individual lives help us to make sense of the historical process, helping us illuminate particular events and the larger cultural, social and even political processes of a moment in time.'(Publication summary)

'This is a book with a foreword (Michael Dodson), a prologue (Craddock Morton) and an introduction (Michael Davis), which are united in the belief that it presents the ‘views of non-Indigenous people who wrote about Indigenous heritage in their own words’ (pp.viii, ix, xiv, xx). To be precise, the volume is actually about Aboriginal heritage; the Torres Strait Islands are not included. Davis writes that his aim ‘in this book is not to discuss Indigenous cultural heritage as such, nor to describe a history of heritage production; rather, it is to describe textual representations of this heritage’ (p.xv)' (Introduction)

'In a paper published in Australian Aboriginal Studies, Bob Reece (2007:54) explains his purpose in writing about Daisy Bates:

'My purpose here is not to rehabilitate Bates as an ethnographer…As an historian, I see it as my ultimate task to make available from her extensive correspondence sufficient of her own writings for people to make up their minds about her motivation and beliefs, and about what kind of person she really was.

'He charts her early life in Ireland, arrival and work in Australia, her interest in Aboriginal peoples and her consequent development as a fieldworker (a self-taught anthropologist), and her final days working as a journalist in Adelaide. Reece makes the assertion that she was the first to undertake intensive participant/observer fieldwork, which became the template for modern anthropological fieldwork. (This is contested by the work of AC Haddon in the Torres Strait in 1898, and Baldwin Spencer in Central Australia in the 1890s). She is described as not engaging in theory, just stating the facts as she witnessed them — empiricism at its most pure. In response to a criticism by JB Cleland that she was misled by informants who provided the answers that they thought she wanted, Reece defends her: it ‘is hardly a convincing accusation against a highly experienced field worker who was perfectly aware of the hazard’ (p.88). Her unsubstantiated arguments about the existence of wholesale cannibalism among the desert people seems to seriously undermine his defence.'  (Introduction)

'The Indomitable Miss Pink is a sympathetic portrait of Olive Muriel Pink—watercolourist, botanist, anthropologist, activist and advocate, scourge, indefatigable letter writer, loyal friend, radical and conservative, pursuer of truth and justice, and eccentric. She was a woman of fierce principle and determination, if not outright stubbornness, in her advocacy of what she perceived were Aboriginal interests. Her unwillingness to play the political game and her forthrightness did not, however, make her an effective lobbyist for the causes she held dear. Pink’s life falls into three main phases: the first was her youth in Tasmania, her training as an artist at the Julian Ashton School of Art, and her working life in Sydney as a draftswoman; the second phase began with her study of anthropology; and the third, with her return to Alice Springs in 1944, lasted until her death. But, above all, Pink was indomitable! The book is therefore more than ‘a life in anthropology’, although it was anthropology that changed Pink’s life (p. 53).' (Introduction)

'Both of these books are introductory texts for Aboriginal history and studies; both are directed towards students, teachers and a more general audience although Aboriginal Australia is far more specific, designed to act as a text for Aboriginal Studies and is an outcome of the Open Learning course, 'Aboriginal Studies: Aboriginal Australia', produced by the University of South Australia, where the three editors work.' (Introduction)