‘Biography and Life-Writing Can Re-Make the Nation’: A Review of Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19, 1991-1995 (A-Z)

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alison Holland and David Carment for their thoughts and suggestions on a draft and to Elizabeth Laughton for her research assistance quantifying the ADB entries. This essay has not been peer reviewed.

No potential conflict of interest has been reported by the author.

Notes

1 Margaret Conrad, Kadriye Ercikan, Gerald Friesen, Jocelyn Letourneau, Delphin Muise, David Northrup and Peter Seixas, Canadians and Their Pasts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).

2 Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London: Routledge, 2019); and Sigurour Gylfi Magnusson and Istvan M.Szijarto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2013).

3 Jill Roe, ‘Biography Today: A Commentary’, in ‘Special Issue: Biography and Life-Writing’, eds Tanya Evans, Robert Reynolds and Tom Roberts, Australian Historical Studies 43, no. 1 (2012): 107–18, 111.

4 Oxford Dictionary of Biography, https://www.oxforddnb.com/page/history-of-the-dictionary-of-national-biography/history-of-the-dictionary-of-national-biography (accessed 28 October 2021); the quotation comes from Laura Carter, Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918–1979 (London: Oxford University Press, 2021), 43, 114.

5 Melanie Nolan and Christine Fernon, eds, The ADB’s Story (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013), https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/anu-lives-series-biography/adbs-story (accessed 28 October 2021).

6 Joan B. Landes, ed., Feminism, the Public and the Private (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

7 Tanya Evans, Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

8 Jeannette Tsoulos, Australian survey response, 5 October 2016, cited in Evans, 63.

9 See also Amy Smith, ‘Family Webs: The Impact of Women’s Genealogy Research on Family Communication’ (PhD thesis, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University, 2008). Her research was based on interviews with twenty-two family historians.

10 Melanie Nolan, The Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19, 1991–1995 (A–Z), general editor Melanie Nolan, managing editor Malcolm Allbrook (Canberra: ANU Press, 2021), 54.

11 Melanie Nolan, ‘The Australian Dictionary of Biography and Family History’, in Family History and Historians in Australia and New Zealand, eds Malcolm Allbrook and Sophie Scott-Brown (London: Routledge, 2021), 53–72.

12 Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble Publishers, 1994).

13 Nolan, ‘The Australian Dictionary’, 54.

14 For an excellent discussion of the need to expand our categories of familial relations see Sophie Scott-Brown, ‘Family History: The Next Generation’, History Workshop Online, 20 September 2021, https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/family-history-the-next-generation/ (accessed 1 October 2021).

15 Malcolm Allbrook and Melanie Nolan, ‘Australian Historians and Biography’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 1 (2018): 20.

16 Tanya Evans and Robert Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Special Issue: Biography and Life-Writing’, 1–10, 2.

17 Jill Roe, Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2010).

18 On the concern over numbers see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/coronavirus-college-enrollment.html; https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/19/incredibly-frustrating-australian-year-12-students-express-dismay-at-skyrocketing-fees-for-arts-degrees; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/19/doubling-university-fees-for-the-arts-will-leave-australia-less-equipped-for-our-complex-world (all accessed 4 December 2020).

19 Alan Booth, ‘Pedagogy and the Practice of Academic History in Late-Twentieth-Century Britain’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 13, no. 3 (2009): 317–44.

20 Allbrook and Nolan, 3–23, 4, 12.

21 Erica Cervini, ‘Reading the Silence of My Great-Grandmother: The Role of Life-Writing in Locating the Hidden Life of a Jewish Woman’ (PhD thesis, Victoria University, 2019). She has self-published this as a book, Yizkor for Rose: A Life Lost and Found. Readers may also be interested in listening to an interview with Erica on ABC Radio National‘s program Life Matters: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/how-your-family-history-could-enrich-us-all/12497166 (accessed 23 November 2020).

22 Louise Blake, ‘Women and Community on the Upper Goulburn Goldfields’ (PhD thesis, Monash University, 2019). For another example of a family history PhD thesis see Jennifer Barrera, ‘The Millers: Historical Analysis of an Early Australian Colonial Family’ (PhD thesis, Federation University 2020).

23 Allbrook and Nolan, 17.

24 Kim TallBear, ‘Making Love and Relations beyond Settler Sex and Family’, in Making Kin, Not Population: Toward Feminist STS Pro-Kin and Non-Natalist Politics of Population and Environment, eds Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018). See also Sandy O’Sullivan, ‘The Colonial Project of Gender (and Everything Else)’, Genealogy 5, no. 67 (2021), https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy5030067 (accessed 28 October 2021).

25 Shauna Bostock-Smith, ‘From Colonisation to My Generation: An Aboriginal Historian’s Family History Research from Past to Present’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2020), https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/224483 (accessed 28 October 2021). Shauna is currently writing up her thesis into a book to be published by Allen and Unwin.

26 Jane McCabe, Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Judith Bennett and Angela Wanhalla, eds, Mother’s Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and US Servicemen, World War II (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016); Alice Echols, Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse and a Hidden History of Banking in America (New York: The New Press, 2017); Rachel Buchanan, Ko Taranaki Te Maunga (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2018). For recent discussion on the dismissal of family history and the aims of the #HistoriansCollaborate network, see Mike Esbester, ‘Thoughts on Collaboration: The Start of a Manifesto’, http://www.railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk/thoughts-on-collaboration-the-start-of-a-manifesto/ and https://nataliepithers.wixsite.com/historianscollab (both accessed 26 September 2019).

27 Graeme Davison, Lost Relations: Fortunes of My Family in Australia’s Golden Age (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2015).

28 Penny Russell, ‘Travelling Steerage: Class, Commerce, Religion and Family in Colonial Sydney’, Journal of Australian Studies 38, no. 4 (2014): 383–95.

29 Paul Irish, Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney (Sydney: NewSouth, 2017); Michael Bennett, Pathfinders: A History of Aboriginal Trackers in NSW (Sydney: NewSouth, 2020); Betty O’Neil, The Other Side of Absence: Discovering My Father’s Secrets (Sydney: Simon and Schuster, 2020); Bettina Bradbury, Caroline’s Dilemma: A Colonial Inheritance Saga (Sydney: NewSouth, 2019); Alana Piper, ‘Did They See It Coming? How Fortune-Telling Took Hold in Australia – with Women as Clients and Criminals’, The Conversation, 3 February 2020; Alana is co-authoring a book on Mary Scales with descendant Samedhi Driscoll; Marian Lorrison, ‘Love and Other Bruises: Passion and Yearning in a Time of Social Transformation’ (PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2020); Jane Messer, https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/projects/raven-mother-finding-bella-bad-mother-silenced-woman-a-cross-cult (accessed 28 October 2021); Cassandra Pybus, Truganni: Journey through the Apocalypse (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2020).

30 These questions were asked and explored at the webinar hosted by the Society of Australian Genealogists and organised by the Centre for Applied History in partnership with Jerome de Groot on 18 December 2020: https://sag.org.au/event-4050592?fbclid=IwAR0vJc_OS1K7vyRg_jquL1LQmFBzeAb8RxGQ3BEkJ1bfCp_uH5fA6iFL_Is (accessed 28 October 2021). A special issue of the journal Life Writing is planned on this theme, due for publication in late 2022/early 2023.

31 https://adb.anu.edu.au/faqs/#start (accessed 27 October 2021).

32 https://historicalthinking.ca/historical-significance (accessed 29 July 2021).

33 Nolan, ‘The Australian Dictionary’, 54.

34 https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/47335?show=full (accessed 28 October 2021).

35 Thanks to David Carment for this source on information.

36 See https://adb.anu.edu.au/about-us/working-parties/ (accessed 28 October 2021).

37 Graeme Davison, ‘Paradigms of Public History’, Australian Historical Studies 24, no. 96 (1991): 4–15, 4; see also Graeme Davison, ‘“Yarning in the Street”: The Evolution of Australian Public History’, in A Historian for All Seasons: Essays for Geoffrey Bolton, eds Stuart Macintyre, Lenore Layman and Jenny Gregory (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2017), 71–97.

38 Graeme Davison, ‘Public History’, Oxford Companion to Australian History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 538.

39 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Public History’, in her History in Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2006 [2000]), 141; and Paul Ashton and Meg Foster, ‘Public Histories’, in New Directions in Social and Cultural History, eds Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 153. For a defence of the professional historian see James Gardner, ‘Trust, Risk and Public History: A View from the United States’, Public History Review 17 (2010): 53.

40 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), 8. For Samuel’s contribution to public history, see Hilda Kean, ‘Public History and Raphael Samuel: A Forgotten Radical Pedagogy?’, Public History Review 11 (2004): 51; Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990). And see: Ann Curthoys, ‘Crossing Over: Academic and Popular History’, Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 1, no. 1 (2012): 718; Anna Clark, ‘Ordinary People’s History’, Journal of Australian Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 201–16; Hilda Kean and Paul Ashton, People and Their Pasts: Public History Today (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Hilda Kean, Paul Martin and Sally J. Morgan, eds, Seeing History: Public History in Britain Now (London: Francis Bootle, 2000); Jerome de Groot, ‘Genealogy, Hobby, Politics and Science’, in his Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2009).

41 See https://historianscollaborate.com/ (accessed 1 May 2021); and Evans. On the political purpose of collaboration see Susan D. Greenbaum, Glenn Jacobs and Prentice Zinn, Collaborating for Change: A Participatory Action Research Casebook (London: Rutgers University Press, 2020).

42 For an excellent example of how we can up-end biographical tropes, see Kate Fullagar, The Warrior, the Voyager and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); and for an example of a memoirist doing this, read Yves Rees, All About Yves: Notes from a Transition (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2021). For an excellent discussion of the problems with the tropes of contemporary biography and the narrating of lives, listen to this podcast interview with Yves Rees talking to producers Ashley Barnwell and Signe Ravn, Narrative Now, 2 September 2021, https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/episode-5-talking-turning-points-and-trans-memoir/id1532699261?i=1000534066136 (accessed 28 October 2021).

43 In its press release the ADB suggest that the volume contains 680 entries. I am not certain why there is a discrepancy between their figures and Elizabeth’s, https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/australian-dictionary-biography/australian-dictionary-biography-volume-19 (accessed 28 October 2021).

44 Many thanks to Elizabeth Laughton, a Macquarie University student, for her work quantifying these entries for me.

45 Roe, ‘Biography Today’, 116.

46 Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (London: Penguin Classics, 2018).

47 TallBear, 152. See also O’Sullivan.

48 Peter Seixas, ed., Theorizing Historical Consciousness (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); and Peter Seixas and Tom Morton, The Big Six: Historical Thinking Concepts Student Book (Calgary, Canada: Nelson, 2012).

49 Evans, 104.

50 https://adb.anu.edu.au/about-us/ (accessed 1 October 2021).