Starting from scratch

The first instalment of Geoffrey Blainey’s long-awaited autobiography weaves the historian into the historical record.

Author and historian Geoffrey Blainey.

Agatha Christie once wisecracked that an ‘‘archeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.’’ The joke is a neat one, but it also helps explain why the nearly 90-year-old Geoffrey Blainey, Australia’s best-known and most prolific historian, has grown noteworthy over time. It is because his long and celebrated life has itself increasingly become part of the warp and weft of our ­national story. The historian has entered our historical record.

That said, the dozens of publications that have issued from his pen over seven decades, the speeches and sinecures, academic postings and philanthropic roles, the honorary doctorates and national awards — all the accumulated garlands of a talented man’s industrious progress — tend to obscure the person wrapped inside them.

Before I Forget is Blainey’s effort to return to origins, to disentangle self from professional life. That is why his memoir covers only his early decades, concentrating on the period between his first, groundbreaking efforts, beginning with The Peaks of Lyell — an account of Tasmania’s Mount Lyell mine, written when he was still in his mid-20s — and ceasing when the author, in his mid-40s, is bathing in the long ­afterglow of his most influential work, The Tyranny of Distance.

Before I Forget, by Geoffrey Blainey.

This is a book concerned with the forces — familial, religious, cultural, social — that formed Blainey from earliest childhood, along with the education that shaped his historical approach. It is also a memoir that grants generous airtime to relatives, friends, teachers, colleagues and patrons who helped him on his way. It is a work rich in warm remembrance and gratitude. It is also one that reveals the root causes for some of his more controversial positions.

Blainey was born in 1930 and raised in various towns and regional centres in rural Victoria, a black-and-white world that he has hand-coloured in recollection. And while his depiction is plain in the telling, it gains from the sense it ­offers of a vanished Australia.

Blainey’s father was a Methodist minister, his forebears farmers and miners of the Victorian frontier. From them he inherited a strict sense of duty and a respect for the tenacity and grit of the Australian worker.

The world he grows into is perhaps more remarkable for what it lacks than what it possesses. The living for a Methodist minister and his family was characterised by thrift. The family skirted the edges of a poverty that marked most households, even those of the nascent middle class. Blainey recalls a childhood in which a spoonful of treacle stirred into his porridge was something of a treat. It was an era of toast with dripping, offal for dinner and poultry once a year for Christmas.

There were up to 70 students in Blainey’s school classes, and when he and others played sport, they made do with footballs made of tightly rolled newspaper. All Australian children of the 1930s, he remarks in passing, wore second-hand clothes as standard.

Still, he relates other kinds of plenty. Methodist communities were tight-knit, sociable, caring: from cradle to grave, they served most functions of the yet-to-exist welfare state. The Blainey household was filled with visitors and friends most days, church services were characterised by lusty hymn-singing, and the surrounding countryside of Leongatha or Ballarat, where children were largely left to run feral, served as adventure playgrounds and goads to the imagination.

Blainey’s mother was a reader. She was loving but allowed her children to take calculated risks. From her he gained ambition. His father rises off the page as a kind and dutiful man, if often absent, tending to his parishioners. What Blainey evidently inherited from him was industry and a rigorous mindset:

For more than half a century he was to keep a record of each Sunday service he presided over. He also recorded the biblical words he chose as the basis of his sermon, and the four hymns that were sung by the congregation … I did not realise how systematic he was until I saw, after his death, the notebooks in which these devotional details were recorded in ink, week after week, decade after decade … Handling statistics with pleasure, he knew the number of every one of the thousand and more hymns in the Methodist hymnbook. He knew too the precise chapter and verse in which thousands of verses could be found in the Bible.

If this sounds like the process Blainey turned to more secular ends as an historian, that’s ­because young Geoff was made from the same stuff. At first this tendency — related here with actuarial precision — was used to develop games based on his obsession with Australian rules football. The boy could use passing cars or cigarette cards to invent matches, with points awarded and winners and losers determined by chance.

Later on, in school, Blainey would use this data-driven mindset to broader ends. World War II sharpened his sense of the wider world and plunged him early into adult responsibility. He was soon working hard, top of his class in most subjects, his head stuffed with stray facts culled from old newspapers, statistical almanacs and whatever books he could get his hands on.

It was this bowerbird urge that first won him a Methodist scholarship to Wesley College in Melbourne, where he caught the eye of influential English master and critic AA Phillips, coiner of the phrase ‘‘cultural cringe’’, and then a place at the University of Melbourne, where that urge ­cohered into a passion for Australian history.

Those hoping for an exposition of Blainey’s theory of history will not find a great deal in ­Before I Forget. For all his empirical enthusiasm, the young student developed instinctively. He mentions the debt he owes to Thomas Babington Macaulay, the great Whig historian, a figure who walked the ground of significant sites, sketching lightly his imagined recreation of events before inking them in. But Blainey is not always comfortable with the teleology of progress for which Macaulay is a byword.

Just as often he is inspired by a dissatisfaction with established version of events laid down by others. Much of his work has been driven by a desire to wipe the slate clean: to strip away ideological assumptions and start again from scratch.

His work is characterised by provisional ­inklings, bolstered by the aggregation of facts into arguments of total conviction. That he often admits uncertainty about the rightness of these convictions is a measure of an ingrained professional scepticism. That he mounts them anyway is an indication of his certitude.

But this more commanding figure was a long way off when, as a young graduate, he sat in Manning Clark’s tutorials and said scarcely a word, before turning in a paper excellent enough for Clark, in his own autobiography, to recall the shock of reading it.

Blainey is at his best when relating the merits and eccentricities of his teachers and peers. There were, it turns out, plenty of intellectual types around for him to know and judge.

Despite his genuine regard for many of these women and men, Melbourne University in the late 40s and early 50s was shaped by a left-wing thinking that began to rankle the minister’s son. After years as a schoolboy socialist, he drifted back to the middle of the political road.

It was partly a suspicion of what he regarded as the armchair Marxism of the academy in these years that led him on an interesting tangent.

Having refused, out of principle, to pay the nominal charge required to earn a full degree, despite having performed superbly, the young historian went freelance.

He became instead the court scribe to the new mining aristocracy of postwar Australia, taking individual commissions to write on subjects that fired his imagination — and which, in the case of resource extraction, had initially drawn his family to Australia.

The Peaks of Lyell was the first of these. It was written according to Macaulay’s method, with the young historian tramping in the footsteps of early prospectors, picking over tailings and exploring abandoned underground workings in Tasmania’s remote northwest, before retiring to the archives to put flesh on the bones of his suppositions, the ‘‘dust of the past’’ still on his hands. The result was as idiosyncratic and gripping, deeply researched yet animated by passion. Nothing like it had appeared in this country.

In the decades that followed, he did the same for everyone from a plastics company to the Reserve Bank and BHP: accepting commissions to produce histories that celebrated, though not wholly uncritically, the organisations that built modern industrial Australia, the firms on which postwar prosperity was built.

It was from these that his reputation expanded sufficiently to warrant a return to university teaching, as well as offers from publishers to produce books of larger, more thematically ambitious form.

But the very fascinations that drove Blainey’s early career also brought him into conflict with his peers and portions of the Australian community. The emerging green movement was hostile to Blainey’s respect for the big end of town; meanwhile, those who approved of the nation’s multicultural turn in the 80s where aghast when Blainey — by then head of department at his old alma mater — posed concerns about large-scale Asian migration, regarding it as a cost-free virtue signal for the urban bourgeoisie but a potential point of contention for those working-class areas where new migrants tended to move.

On the latter front, Blainey has been proved correct to some extent. When those who decry the arrival of Donald Trump and other rising populists in the West point today to the economic disenfranchisement of white working-class citizens as a primary driver, they are restating Blainey’s original argument.

But if he was correct about the friction immigration would bring to certain communities, he was not so quick to anticipate the positive social and cultural impacts that non-Anglo Australians would provide. The racially homogenous world that formed him taught only half the ­lesson.

The ledger with regard to environmental questions is less obviously in his favour. In the same decade that Blainey decried a concentration of Asian migration, he publicly deplored a kneejerk refusal on the part of the green movement to countenance the exploitation of minerals such as uranium. As HBO’s recent re­creation of the Chernobyl disaster and Richard Lloyd Parry’s haunting Fukushima narrative Ghosts of the Tsunami have reminded us, ­concerns raised about the end-use of such materials were not overblown.

It is, however, possible to thread the needle in regard to Blainey’s career, his blind spots and his virtues. Every formative experience of the young Blainey, from the small-town idyll of his childhood to the corporate patronage that aided his early books, created a benign frame through which the historian viewed the world.

On the evidence of Before I Forget, his failure has been to revise this frame to take account of changed circumstances. The gentleman bankers, arts-minded Tory politicians and tough-but-fair mining magnates of his youth are no more. They have been replaced by venture capitalists, shallow technocrats and vast multinational corporations: less noble, generous and civic-minded iterations of the old ideal.

And the terra nullius of his childhood, one which welcomed any amount of exploitation? It is no longer virgin. Critics could reasonably ask whether Blainey is too sanguine about the benevolence of today’s supercharged extractive industries. If, as he claims, his love of place — of Australia in all its facets — has been the essential inspiration for his career, then the potential for its degradation should be a subject worth investigating. A good conservative is surely driven to conserve.

Perhaps it is unfair to ask a figure so senior to turn on this pin. What survives in this memoir is a sense of Australia at a more innocent ­moment. It truly was a country of battlers and heroes, worthy of interrogation, celebration and critique.

No one has done more than Blainey to make that folk history into a dominant mythos of ­nation.

Here, in personal, intimate mode, he makes us nostalgic for that more hardscrabble and worthy version of ourselves.

Blainey is Whiggish in that he sees continuities between past and present Australia, a country on a long upward curve.

But the ‘‘clean slate’’ side of his historical practice might furnish an opposing inkling: that we’ve drifted too far from old decencies to claim them as our birthright any more.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Before I Forget: An Early Memoir

By Geoffrey Bainey. Hamish Hamilton, 352pp, $45 (HB)