Pick
a letter
Geoffrey Blainey
Diane
Langmore (ed.)
AUSTRALIAN DICTIONARY OF BIOGRAPHY VOL. 17, 1981–1990, A–K
MUP,
$100 hb, 677 pp, 9780522853827
This is the latest volume of a reference work which should sit
on the shelves of every muni-cipal library. It assesses the lives
of people, mostly prominent, who died in the years 1981–90.
It lists them in alphabetical order; a further volume will be
needed to embrace the 600 or 700 people whose surnames began with
the letters L to Z.
Here is Kalgoorlie-born airman Wallace Kyle, dropping bombs on
enemy-occupied Holland from a height of fifty feet. Here are little-known
discoverers of mining fields and little-known leaders of Aboriginal
causes, alongside politicians such as Henry Bolte who were household
names. Here is V.V. Hickman, a Tasmanian scientist after whom
a spider is named, walking regularly to work with his lunch in
his gladstone bag, a man of routines but still suffering nightmares
after World War I. Here, standing on the cricket pitch, is George
Hele who began his cricket career by keeping wickets for the Brompton
Methodists in Adelaide and then became an umpire in the bodyline
series of 1932–33: he thought Harold Larwood’s fast
bowling was vicious though permitted by the prevailing rules of
cricket.
Many of the biographies tell of the tensions facing people who
lived in a century of swift changes. Here is Gordon Greenwood,
who edited a jubilee history of Australia which was widely read
in schools and universities in the late 1950s and 1960s. A decade
later, while ‘operating in the tradition of the god-professor’,
he was swept downstream, a cigarette still in his hand, by the
‘radical and democratising pressures’ sweeping through
the University of Queensland. His family had suffered an earlier
set of pressures; it is fascinating to learn that the likeable
but strong-willed Gordon was born in small-town South Australia
with a German surname, which was altered from Nadebaum to Greenwood
during World War I.
We read about Bob Dyer, whose radio and television show Pick-a-Box
elevated Barry Jones to his first taste of fame; and here is Jones
himself writing – with his customary vigour and flair –
the brief biography of the Victorian lawyer and politician John
Galbally, an opponent of capital punishment. Galbally was buried,
Jones tells us, with his worn copy of Shakespeare by his side.
From the pen of the volume’s editor, Diane Langmore, comes
an engaging article on Lady Casey and another on Sir Percy Chatterton,
who was prominent in Papua New Guinea when it was more or less
part of national life. Chatterton, who had ‘a remarkably
booming voice for his size’, migrated from Lancashire to
Papua in 1924 to conduct a school near Port Moresby, and later
sat in the independent parliament, where he gave much of his eloquence
to ‘lost causes’.
Anyone with a strong interest in Australian history will gain
from reading a cross section of biographies. The volume will surprise
readers even in fields where they are already well informed. Here
is Harold E. Corbould, the son of a Queensland mining promoter,
about whom I wrote at length in 1960. I had barely heard of the
son but now learn that, with the aid of his father’s mining
money, he became a successful pastoralist, and a huge donor both
to the Salvation Army and to the conservation movement in Queensland.
Incidentally, some of the most readable or incisive articles come
from contributors who are not historians.
This volume, while impressive, is not the most captivating in
the series. It could be that some of the earlier volumes stand
out partly because they contained long, outstanding essays on
major national figures, especially politicians. This volume, purely
by chance, contains few such people. Two of the longer and most
revealing essays are on the historian Sir Keith Hancock, by Jim
Davidson, and on the Nobel laureate Sir Macfarlane Burnet, by
Sir Gustav Nossal. But there are many excellent middle-size articles
which outline a career, capture a personality and sum up the life.
One is Peter Ryan’s essay on the versatile ‘Mac’
Ball, one of those ‘who combined high learning and genuine
cultivation with a relaxed and authentic attachment to the ordinary
citizens of their country’.
Some readers will notice that matters of importance are skirted
over or omitted. For example, the evocative biography of A.R.
Chisholm, a Bathurst boy of humble origins who became, in his
heyday, perhaps the nation’s foremost banner-carrier of French
language and literature, omits to record that for long he was
a very influential member of the board of Commonwealth Literary
Fund (CLF), at a time when it was vital to cultural life. And
yet the omission is understandable. A glance at Chisholm’s
own shortish entry in successive editions of Who’s Who
in Australia reveals no mention of the CLF. Likewise, the
biography of Robert Blackwood (1906–82), the first chancellor
of Monash University, offers only a couple of guarded sentences
about his long business career as an executive and director of
Dunlop, at a time when it was a huge manufacturing company with
products in every Australian household. Some would argue that
Blackwood did as much for Australian manufacturing as he did for
Australian universities and other learned bodies. Indeed, his
business career, more than anything else, was to prepare him for
his honorary post as an effective leader of a new university.
Similarly, the biography of Arthur W. Coles, a founder of the
big chain of stores, is fascinating on his business career –
and the career of several of his brothers – but does not
say enough about his decisive role as an Independent ‘Liberal’
MP during one of the crucial events in Australian political history,
the accession in 1941 of perhaps the most important of all federal
ministries, the unelected Curtin government. The prime minister
whom Coles deposed was Arthur Fadden, and in his autobiography,
They Called Me Artie (1969), he gave an account which should
ideally be set alongside Coles’s own loaded version of this
nation-changing episode. I sympathise with Stella M. Barber, the
author of the article on Coles. I assume that it was impossible
to describe adequately Coles’s business and political roles
within the number of words allotted to his whole life. These three
essays on Chisholm, Blackwood and Coles are excellent contributions
in their own right.
This is the dilemma of a national dictionary of biography: the
allocation of space. After the Australian Dictionary of Biography
was founded, the decision was made to include a very wide range
of lives. Every volume deliberately includes certain lives because
they were typical rather than influential. Thereby Australia’s
dictionary is more comprehensive than almost any other comparable
national dictionary. This is one of its virtues and a source of
pride to its succession of dedicated editors. But if the project
was not to become too voluminous, space had to be sacrificed from
another quarter. In my view, insufficient words are available
to encapsulate some of those lives of higher public interest.
The recent volumes of the English Dictionary of National Biography,
on average, allow more words to each life which the editors deem
worthy of record.
It is too late to challenge the wide span of our ADB. It
has happened. Moreover, it enhances the book for those –
they can’t be many – who read a volume right through
rather than look up particular entries. The Australian version
is equalitarian and encompasses lives of intense interest that,
without this policy, could not possibly be selected for inclusion.
But the policy carries a disadvantage. Sometimes there is not
enough space to do justice to some of the more influential lives
– the ones that will be looked up most frequently.
And yet this volume, the seventeenth so far, is a rich treasury,
both in little-known lives and well-known ones.
Geoffrey
Blainey's many publications include The Tyranny of Distance
(1966) and A Short History of the 20th Century (2005).
AUSTRALIAN
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