history
A GIANT OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
Michael Roe
K.S. Inglis
Observing Australia 1959-1999
Edited and introduced by Craig Wilcox
MUP $29.95pb, 272pp
0 522 84866 4
KENNET STANLEY INGLIS, born in 1929, is one of the giants of Australian historiography. The least obvious, although not the least important of his many virtues is application to research. To that base he adds creative imagination, strengthened by vast human insight and sympathy. His prose is comparable among Australian historians with that of W.K. Hancock and Geoffrey Blainey, marvellous lucidity combining with equal wit.
Inglis has spent his life within universities, again in a most serendipitous way. In 1947 he entered Melbourne's school of history, then at the apex of its remarkable richness. There followed postgraduate work at Oxford in those mid-1950s years when the British connection retained its power and when a good doctorate led to a better book (in this case Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England). Back in Australia, Inglis joined Hugh Stretton's department at Adelaide, which around 1960 assembled phenomenal talent. Next, he joined Manning Clark in his hey-day, at ANU's School of General Studies, an experience echoed in this collection through a splendid obituary of Clark. Soon Inglis moved again -- surely to the greatest challenge of his career, as Professor and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Papua New Guinea. There he stayed during the potent years of that country's early independence, before taking a chair at the Institute of Advanced Studies, ANU. Founders of that institution had seen it as providing national leadership. Inglis met that role especially through his work for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the massive bicentennial project, Australians.
All the while Inglis wrote books and essays. The latter appeared not only in professional journals but in such outlets as Overland, Meanjin, and Nation. His work for the last-named in the earlier 1960s established Inglis among those Australian academics to make a major contribution to our journalism. (There have been a fair number of these, Walter Murdoch perhaps the supreme exemplar, but the tradition wilts as the academy becomes more inverted/professional and the press more mediocre.) The present book presents a selection of these essays. Craig Wilcox, a former student of Inglis's and himself primarily an historian of military matters, introduces them well, his own comments being supplemented by retrospective notes from the author. The result is a delightful, informative book, further valuable in presenting a bibliography of Inglis's publications.
The supreme virtue of the selection (aided by the commentary) is that the reader learns insight into most of Inglis's key professional concerns. The supreme example is 'Anzac, the substitute religion', where so far back as 1960, Inglis foreshadowed his exploration of all that the first war meant to Australian consciousness. The subject branched in several directions, most fruitfully into a study of 'monuments and ceremonies as evidence for historians' (the title of another essay now anthologised), this having its fulfilment in Inglis's most recent monograph, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. But Inglis ever has been interested in traditional religion too, evident here in 'Billy Graham in Australia', a still earlier essay than 'Anzac', evocative of 1950s Australia while showing knowledge of pertinent universals. 'The Stuart Case' recalls Inglis's monograph on the conviction of an alleged child-murderer in pre-Dunstan South Australia. That subject too has various ties, one of them pursued in musings of great wisdom on 'multiculturalism and national identity'. 'The ABC as history' serves a like purpose for another of Inglis's works, although this essay does not have quite the usual sparkle. That comment could be made of the ABC book itself, the result of its inherent demands.
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