History of Australian and New Zealand Thought

Importance of the history of Australian thought

2010-11-25T20:28:00.001+11:00

In his blog round up at Catallaxy Files, Rafe commented that one of his new year's resolutions was to get this blog moving again. I, too, feel this need.

The blog originally began because of a perceived gap in public discussion about the history of Australian and New Zealand thought. You see, it is hard to understand how and what people think now if you don't know what they thought in the past. The past is always with us, often unseen.

I am old enough in a personal sense to have lived through a number of changes in thinking. Wearing my historian's hat, I also spend a fair bit of time looking at aspects of the past. There I am concerned with what happened and, to a degree, why. Increasingly in my research, I feel the need to drill down, to break through the bounds imposed by present thought and perceptions to actually understand just how people saw their world.

Recently in A personal memoir on Mel Ward, I looked at aspects of the life of one man through the prism set by my relationships with him. What I didn't really say in that post is that the period I was talking about was a period in which different ideas clashed, a clash that affected Mel and his work. It wasn't just a clash between past and new ideas, but also between different concepts of the new.

Another recent post, Can New Zealand match Australian incomes?, was in part a discussion on a current policy debate. However, clashes of ideas and different ways of thinking again underlay that debate.

The idea, for example, that the role of Government is simply to set the institutional framework, to provide certain services, and then the market will deliver the best result is one part of that debate. The views and influence of management writer Michael Porter is another part.

In Mapping the Australian blogosphere, I looked at research that attempted to map links across the Australian blogosphere. One feature of the results was the way that like minded blogs clustered around nodes. Club Troppo was one such node, Catallaxy Files another.

Club Troppo describes its role in these terms: Politics, economics, law and life from a 'radical centrist' perspective, defined by Noel Pearson as "the intense resolution of the tensions between opposing principles". Catallaxy Files, by contrast, espouses free markets, the Austrian School of Economics, and sometimes Libertarian positions. Different blogs, different positions.

But how do these blogs fit into the history of Australian thought? They didn't just arise. Clearly, both have different groups of followers. So what do they draw from?

To my mind, this is quite an important question: both blogs are concerned with the now; both blogs have been classified by the Australian National Library's Pandora Project as worthy of permanent retention so that their shadow will continue; yet they are very different and have different impacts.

So returning to my opening point, I guess that you can expect Rafe and to try to grow this blog. The need is still there.

Don Aitkin's What was it all for?

2009-11-29T13:43:00.001+11:00

This is one of a number of a number of parallel posts recording my reactions to Don Aitkin's What was it all for? The Reshaping of Australia. (Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2005). I will add a full list of posts later.

Because the book centres on social change in Australia over fifty or so years, it contains a lot of material on the changing way Australian's think. The use of the Armidale High School leaving certificate class of 1953 as a prism provides a personal element to the story.

Overall, I think that the book illuminates many of the changes that have taken place not just in Australia, but in other countries as well.

Death of Bruce Mitchell

2009-11-11T20:57:00.001+11:00

It has been a very long time since we posted. It's not that we have lost interest, just that posting has been hard in the middle of busy lives. I hope that we will do better in future.

Belshaw's world: In memory of Bruce Mitchell records the death of University of New England historian Bruce Mitchell. Bruce began as a Labor historian, then became heavily involved in local and regional history. Here he made a significant contribution not just in terms of his own work but, more importantly, through the contribution of his students.

Follow The Sun - Aussie travel posters from 1930 - 1950

2008-11-19T11:53:00.000+11:00

Continuing our series on resources that can be used to flesh out the history of Australian and New Zealand Thought, Australia's National Library had a fantastic exhibition of Australian travel posters from 1930 to 1950.

Visual material of this type can be a great help in understanding the way people thought of themselves, how they wanted to be thought of by others.

Our thanks to the Other Andrew for drawing the exhibition to our attention via his post To Australia Via Suez Canal!

Picture Australia - a great source of photos

2008-11-12T18:12:00.000+11:00

Continuing our series on reference sources, Picture Australia provides access to a wide range of visual material held in various official collections around Australia.

Australia and New Zealand on screen

2008-11-07T17:43:00.000+11:00

Australian Screen is a very useful source of information on Australian films including home movies. I find some of the curator's comments mildly annoying because I disagree with them, but that's a carp.

NZ on Screen is the New Zealand equivalent.

Australian Biography

2008-11-03T16:18:00.001+11:00

This is the first of a couple of posts simply reporting on a couple of on-line reference sources that you can use if you are interested in particular periods. It follows from an earlier post that Rafe did, The history of technology in Australia , providing a link to an invaluable on-line history of technology in Australia.

We already have the links to the Australian and New Zealand Dictionaries of Biography on the side bar. These are great because of the way you can follow through on areas and topics.

Another interesting Australian on-line biographical resource is Australian Biography, material on a range of Australians originally prepared by Film Australia. I found it because I was looking for material on Thomas Kenneally.

The Lord's Prayer and the Australian Parliament - hints about the changing ways Australians think

2008-10-31T11:51:00.001+11:00

In a post on my personal blog, In defence of the Lord's Prayer in the Australian Parliament, I mounted a case for the continued use of the Lord's Prayer at the start of sessions in the Federal Parliament. The comments that followed left me in a minority of one!

I found the discussion interesting in part because of the hints it provided about changes in the way Australians think. I want to explore those hints in this post. My discussion does not pretend to be rigorous, simply putting ideas forward for further discussion.

To set the scene, the Lord's Prayer has, to my knowledge, been used in the Australian Parliament since Federation. This passed without comment until quite recently when persistent moves began to have it dropped. Listening to the debates on the matter, the proponents are quite passionate about it. So what has changed?

In teasing this through, I am not arguing positions. Rather, I am pointing to various linked themes and asking questions. I am providing links to some of my own posts where I see these as relevant.

Is/was Australian a Christian Country?

I got drawn into this one in Was Australia a Christian country - and what comes now. However, there is a broader question.

In the past, the question as to whether or not Australia was a Christian country was primarily of interest to the Churches promoting spiritual and moral revival. There was, I think, a usually implicit assumption that Australia was in fact a Christian country even if observance by many was quite nominal.

The need to argue, to prove if you like, that Australia is not and indeed never has been a Christian country is (I think) quite new. This got me thinking. When did it first emerge, who argued it, why was it seen as important?

Separation of Church and State

The argument here is that the retention of the prayer is a breach of the principle of separation of church and state. Now for reasons I outlined in Freedom of religion in Australia - a historical note, church and state have always been separate in Australia, with freedom of religion actually enshrined in the constitution. This did not prevent us then or now using the Lord's Prayer as a matter of custom, having military chaplains, using a variety of religious symbols in public activities and so on.

In all this, there has always been a view in Australia that churches should butt out of politics. This was, I think, most pronounced on the non-Labor side. I haven't checked my sources, but I can think of a number of pronouncements by Liberal politicians. The position on the Labor side was more complicated because of the traditional linkages as well as changing relationships between that Party and elements within the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic vote was very important to the Party.

Again, something has changed with the concept of separation of church and state somehow gaining extra power. Again, I wondered in my mind when this first happened, who argued it?

Changing attitudes to religion

The discussion provided a number of hints about Australia's changing attitudes to religion.

Australians have always been a fairly irreligious lot. Some years ago I had a friend who was doing religious studies as part of her university course. The bible was one of the set texts. When she got into a lift carrying the bible, she suddenly had half the lift to herself! More recently at a parents' function at my daughters' Anglican school, a number of parents complained about the emphasis the school placed on religion. I actually found this quite odd. After all, they had chosen to send their daughters to a church school.

In recent years, church attendances along with the proportion of the population claiming especially Christian affiliation have been in decline. Yet in all this, I have the strong impression, one that could be checked through media mapping, that we talk far more about religion in Australia than we used to.

The influence of 9/11 and the War on Terrorism is obviously one influence. For example, one comment linked the need to keep church and state separate because of the push for Sharia law in certain countries. A second commentator commented on what the writer saw as an imbalance in reporting on Muslim issues.

Inn my post, I commented on what I saw as an anti-religion tone in some of the commentary. This was really intended to draw a response, and indeed it did. However, it was also meant as a serious point.

There has always been a sceptic theme in Australian thinking. However, the rise of a consciously atheist stream, the argument that the Lord's Prayer should not be used because it might offend atheists, marks a significant change, one that future historians will probably explore.

This change is not unique to Australia. In this context, it is always a difficulty to disentangle Australian features from broader elements, including the conscious use or even misuse of international trends for local purposes. I explored one element of this in Australia's Culture Wars - uniquely Australian?

In the discussion, I was left wondering to what extent the loss of moral authority of Australia's Christian Churches through things such as sexual scandals had opened the way for alternative views. In Australia of the past, the Churches were seen as largely dominant in the general moral sphere. Again, I suspect that this change is potentially measurable.

Liberal Democracy and a Pluralist Australia

There was one reference in the discussion on the separation of church and state suggesting that the continuation of the use of the Lord's Prayer was incompatible with Australia's position as a liberal democracy.

I am not sure when the phrase "liberal democracy" first emerged. Again, and I stand to be corrected, I think that its current usage is quite recent. It has now become a symbol, a set of attributes, used to describe certain western countries.

More broadly, there were a number of comments suggesting that maintenance of the Lord's Prayer was incompatible with Australia's position as a multi-ethnic community. I am not quite sure why this should be so. However, that is beside the point for the purposes of this post.

The real issue is the evolution and application of the concept that Australia's institutions, policies and programs attuned to the majority needed to be adjusted to accommodate the presence of minorities.

This is not an attack on those policies, although I do have reservations about certain aspects. Rather, I am talking just about the history.

The history of technology in Australia

2008-10-09T11:57:00.003+11:00

This blog is about quality, not quantity!

Seeing a comment by my colleague Jim on another site reminded me that there is a fantastic website on the history of technology in Australia which is worth a plug on this blog, even if hardly anyone reads it.

The original post on architecture and beauty came from Nicholas Gruen. This prompted some thoughts on the way that changes in technology and building materials generate new opportunities and challenges for architects and builders.

The site that I want to promote is actually the web version of a book that was produced for the bicentenary.

For a bit more of the same kind of thing you can go here.

There is a question mark in my mind about the history of the CSIRO. What about the story that the CSIRO had to decide circa 1950 whether to put serious resources into rainmaking or computers and they went for rainmaking? The index to the big book does not have rainmaking and I don’t have time to read a lot of text. Anyone out there a full bottle on that bit of history?

What makes a writer - or artist - a local?

2008-03-18T20:43:00.002+11:00

I have just been doing an update on the New England's History blog. This and its companion blog, New England Australia, are my attempt to preserve and present the life and history of a major sub-state area, one that has striven for self-government over a long period.

My updating raised in my mind the question as to when we should classify someone as a local writer or artist.

On New England Australia I put up a post on Australian painter Margaret Olley, Margaret Olley's New England connection.

Margaret Olley was born in Lismore and spent part of her early life on the Tweed. Yet while New England might claim her as its own, she is not (to my current knowledge) a New England artist in that I know of no evidence that her painting was affected by her New England experience.

Compare her to Judith Wright or Alex Buzo.

Judith Wright's work was deeply shaped by her New England Tableland's family and up-bringing. South of my day's circle, part of my blood's country, Judith wrote of her homeland.

Alex Buzo was born in Sydney and came to Armidale with his parents. Alex loved Sydney and returned there after school. His writing was informed by his sense of irony and love of the Australian idiom.

Yet his Armidale experiences - he retained his links to the city and his old school to the end -also informed his writing. One of his plays - I do not remember the name - captured his flight from Armidale back to the big smoke. Alex expected me to identify the characters, and indeed I did.

Coming to a place does not make you a local. Often, as with D H Lawrence's presentation of Australia in Kangaroo (1923), the outsider can write from a sometimes jaundiced perspective.

Robert Barnard's crime novel Death of an Old Goat, drawing from his experiences while an English lecturer at the University of New England can hardly be described as a sympathetic portrayal of Armidale. The blurb reads:

Professor Belville-Smith had bored university audiences in England with the same lecture for fifty years. Now he was crossing the Australian continent, doing precisely the same. Never before had the reaction been so extreme, however, for shortly after an undistinguished appearance at Drummondale University, the doddering old professor is found brutally murdered.

The characters, many instantly recognisable to locals, are presented with a degree of disdain, even contempt.

Patrice Newell is very different.

Born in Adelaide, Patrice (here and here) came to Gundy in the Hunter I do not think that Patrice would even recognise herself as a New England writer, yet her books capture both the local and broader New England linkages and experience.

I am not sure where I go with all this, but I find the ideas interesting.

History of NSW services for the intellectually handicapped

2008-03-16T15:37:00.002+11:00

This is a chapter from a thesis on the flow of funds to services for people with intellectual handicaps in New South Wales. It tells the story of the evolution of services from the beginning of the colony to the eve of the Richmond reforms that emptied the hospitals in order to give the people inside an opportunity for a more normal life. One of the themes woven through this account is the laboured emergence of recognition of the intellectually handicapped as a distinct group with needs that are to a large extent different from other groups, particularly the mentally ill.

As a result of their low status, services for people with intellectual handicaps have tended to lag behind those provided for other disability groups, though in recent decades there are signs of increased efforts being made to rectify this situation [written in 1982]. Some of these efforts have been made by groups of parents to provide services privately that the State either could not or would not render and some of the activities in the public sector are the result of lobbying and agitation by parents. One of the major developments in this area has been the emergence of the parents’ movement since the Second World War and this has been a great help for those professionals who have worked to upgrade government services.

Postscript 2008

25 years later it seems that the asylums were emptied almost completely but there has been no follow-up to this study to assess the new pattern of distribution of resources. Nor has the "normalisation" been subjected to rigorous evaluation. It is widely believed that the people moved out of the hospitals but the resources required for their care in the community did not follow them. Evidence on this matter is only anecdotal and journalistic but it flags an issue that calls for investigation.

Cedric Emanual (1906-1995) Visual Historian

2008-02-27T21:25:00.002+11:00

Cedric Emanuel was one of the most productive and versatile of Australian artists. Born in 1906 his working career stretched from the early 1920s to the 1990s. He has major importance as a visual historian. For almost seventy years he sketched and painted the rapidly changing scenes of Australia from the outback to the inner suburbs of Sydney. This provides a unique historical record that may be equaled by some photographic collections, though not by any single person.

Cedric trained in the 'roaring twenties' and had vivid memories of many legendary figures in the art world such as William Dobell, Elioth Gruner, Sydney Long, Dattilo Rubbo, Julian Ashton and the Lindsays. The twenties were starting to burn out by the time he started work. Despite the adverse economic circumstances he made a highly successful career in commercial art and pursued his serious commitment to sketching, painting and etching in his spare time. His etchings received high critical acclaim at his first exhibition in 1938; the National Gallery of NSW purchased two and another won the etching section of the Sesqui-Centenary Art Awards.

During the war he served in New Guinea as an Air Defence Officer in charge of camouflage and he became an unofficial war artist. This work resulted in his first book and subsequently he has illustrated more than fifty books, some containing sketches from the 1920s. He has collaborated with a number of significant writers, including Bill Beatty (one of the first popularisers of Australiana), Phillip Geeves, Olaf Ruhen, Tess van Summers, Ruth Park and Geoffrey Dutton.

The sportsman

In his youth he was an outstanding all-round sportsman. He won an amateur wrestling championship of NSW defeating the man who later became known as ‘Gelignite Jack’ Murray in the final and he excelled in boxing and football. Discriminating observers suggest that he might have represented Australia in rugby if art had not been his priority. He was heavily involved in the unique beachside culture of the voluntary surf lifesaving clubs, and he was a member of the Bondi team, which won the Australian rescue and resuscitation title in 1929. As a beach patrol captain he was in the thick of the rescue operation on Black Sunday (1938) when scores of swimmers were caught in a deadly rip on Bondi Beach.

Early days

Cedric Emanuel and his elder brother Dudley spent most of their schooldays at Abbotsholme College, an open-air boarding school at Killara on the North Shore of Sydney. This school was an unlikely nursery for artistic talent but it was here that Cedric first recalls the impulse to draw.

'I often stayed in the classroom after school to draw from the comic strips. I remember being dragged out for football practice. Of course art in those days was looked upon as something queer in a boy's make-up and it certainly was not taught.'

Dudley moved on to study pharmacy at Sydney University and Cedric shifted to Bondi Public School, "to await the chance of a job as an artist". His course in life was already set though the source of this inspiration is not clear, with little indication of artistic tendencies in his forebears or friends of the family, and certainly no encouragement at boarding school. His new school served him better. He became the Art Editor for the school magazine. The art teacher, Mr Singleton, was so impressed that he persuaded the headmaster to let Cedric spend two afternoons a week taking lessons at the Royal Art Society.

This opportunity was decisive. Cedric's teacher at the Royal Art Society was the celebrated Italian, Dattilo Rubbo. He became the first of several important guides and influences in Cedric's artistic development. Others included Julian Ashton's school and the great etcher Sydney Long.

Dattilo Rubbo

"You 'ave done nuttink. Rub it all out".

Dattilo Rubbo (1870-1955) was one of the great characters in the Sydney art community. He studied at the Royal Academy in Naples, arrived in Sydney in 1897. According to legend he intended to sail to South Africa but after a night-long farewell party his friends put him on the boat to Sydney for a joke. He set up an art school almost immediately and he continued to teach for 40 years.

He also taught at an exclusive private school. Margaret Coen recalls from her Catholic school days.

'Rubbo swept into Kincoppal every Friday to teach art. Darkly handsome, his brown eyes flashing, and sporting a black goatee beard, a long scarf flung carelessly around his neck, he always wore a dark green Borsalino hat pulled low to one side. Here was an art master who looked every inch an art master.'

Coen described one of Rubbo's more distressing teaching methods, to demolish students' work if it did not meet the required standard. This process could be easily achieved for drawings done in charcoal, with a sweep of thumb, handkerchief or feather duster.

'Rub it out, rub it out' Rubbo would whisper furiously.

Cedric tells a similar tale.

'We worked in charcoal. Who could forget the shock one would get after working for hours on a project, and you just about thought you had a marvelous thing done, you were putting your chest out, and he'd come along with his big feather duster and with one swish your masterpiece would flake to the floor. "You 'ave done nuttink, rub it out and do it all over again".'

For all that, Cedric considers that it was a great education for a young man. 'If your heart was going to be broken, he broke it, but he probably put you on the right track.'

Julian Ashton's school

Julian Rossi Ashton (1851-1942) was hailed by Norman Lindsay as the premier art teacher of his generation. He came to Australia from London and in 1896 he started the Academie Julien, named after the famous school in Paris which he attended. When he died in 1942 the name changed to The Julian Ashton Art School. For a long time the dominant influence in the school was exerted by H. C. Gibbons who joined in 1923 from the East Sydney Technical College. When Cedric Emanuel arrived at the school a couple of years later Gibbons had responsibility for most of the teaching and he continued in that role for the best part of four decades.

Ashton's school became a major institution in Sydney artistic life and among the teachers at various times were Thea Proctor (composition) and Norman Lindsay (illustration). Famous pupils included George Lambert, William Dobell and John Passmore who also taught there in the 1950s.

Sydney Long

Sydney Long (1878-1955) was born in the NSW country town of Goulburn. He studied under Julian Ashton in Sydney and continued his studies in London where he achieved a great deal of recognition, especially as an etcher. He was the only Australian at that time to be elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters and Etchers.

Back in Sydney he set up an etching school in his George Street studio where his students included Donald Friend, Cedric Flower, Richard Ashton and Bim Hilder. As we shall see later, another was Cedric Emanuel.

Long had a totally different teaching style from that of Rubbo. According to Margaret Coen he took his teaching less seriously and was less abrasive. 'Small and quiet with grey hair, Syd was a bit grey all over but he had a pleasant, rather inquisitive expression and a gentle smile. He would stroll around the classroom, humming as he looked at our work..."That's nice," Syd would say, then reach into his pocket and hand over a boiled lolly. Syd always had a bag full of lollies in his pocket and he always hummed "In the Good Old Summertime".'

Richard Ashton (grandson of Julian and later director of the school) remembers Long as a great friend and supporter of young artists whom he entertained at his boatshed on the Narrabeen Lakes on the northern beaches of Sydney. On one occasion of floods and high tides, Ashton remembers a vivid scene of boats, oars, bedding and Syd's paintings floating in dirty water knee-deep in the boatshed.

The State Studios

In 1922 Cedric left school and moved into the commercial art world as an unpaid assistant at a commercial art firm called the State Studios. He obtained this position through his father's acquaintance with the resident fashion artist.

In the normal course of events a payment or "premium" would have been paid to the Studio for granting Cedric the privilege of learning the craft on their premises. However, in view of the chronic financial problems, which dogged his father, it was agreed that no premium would be charged. Instead, Cedric could work for a year unpaid, going on to receive five shillings a week in the second year if all went well.

Each member of the staff in the State Studio had special skills. The boys, Cedric, Brian Weekes and Harold Abbott ran messages, did small drawings and filled in the flat colour background. Cedric recalls the fashion artist, the resident expert in rendering cars and other mechanical subjects by means of the airbrush and the man who did still life. Paul Fullerton headed the group, with responsibility for lettering and overall design.

Some of Cedric's messenger duties took him to Grace Brothers. Always gregarious, he was inclined to amuse the girls with an occasional playful kiss or cuddle and many jokes. For an extra bit of fun he gave his name as Paul Fullerton. One of the ladies happened to know Paul's wife, though she did not know Paul on sight. She reported to Mrs Fullerton that her husband was carrying on with the girls in a shameless and disgusting manner. 'She almost divorced him,' Cedric relates, (one hopes with an element of exaggeration).

During his time at the State Studios, Cedric began to attend Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School at night. The school was located in the handsome complex of the Queen Victoria Markets, now restored to its former glory. On Friday evenings the ground floor became a real market, illuminated by flares, with live chickens and ducks on sale, along with the other items of the marketplace.

By the time Cedric attended the school, Julian Ashton had stopped teaching and so Cedric cannot provide a useful comparison or contrast between Ashton and Rubbo. Gibbons was the main teacher and Cedric found his time at the school to be useful but not inspiring. Certainly it paled in comparison with its primogenitor in Paris, as Cedric was to discover many years later when he visited the Continent. He recalls that

' The particular thing I liked was outdoor work, although the art school was important for figure studies and for quick sketching'.

After a year at the State Studios without pay Cedric began to earn five shillings a week, which increased to 2 pounds five shillings a week. He supplemented his wages with some work on tickets and signs on his own account for a few shillings each. He realised that a few of these jobs would exceed the value of his weekly pay. Besides, he wanted to have time for his own work. Above all he wanted to study in Paris.

'I decided that if I was ever going to be an artist, I'd best leave and start freelancing. One Friday I said to Mr Foster, my boss, "I'm leaving today sir."

"Why?"

"I want to earn some money. I can't even afford to take my girl to the pictures."

With a loan of five pounds from his father, he installed a phone in a room in Callaghan House, 391 George Street. Ten shillings of his own furnished the artist's essentials of table and chair. He was launched.

Freelance

Cedric's commercial life was busy and financially rewarding. His father scouted for custom through the commercial art studios and the advertising departments of retail firms in the city. Without knowing good work from bad he carried samples of Cedric's output, confidently proclaiming, "My son is the best artist in Sydney" and offering "A Jardine's quality but not a Jardine's price". Walter Jardine was then the leading commercial artist in the country.

With his father's energy and his own application Cedric was flush with work from the time he put up his own shingle. "I didn't have time even to write the invoices." His father took care of that side of the business as well. One of the reasons for this hectic effort was Cedric's desire to go to Paris to become a real artist. This was his main ambition in life and this resolution carried through to his beloved sporting activities at Bondi Surf Club. Wrestling was one of his great talents and hopes were high that he would go far in the sport. He warned his devoted coach that wrestling would have to take second place to his desire to be an artist, though he promised to continue until he won a major championship. In due course he defeated Jack Murray to win the amateur wrestling title of NSW and he made good his promise to quit the sport. "They never forgave me!" he laughs. Jack Murray later became famous as 'Gelignite Jack', a leading contestant in many Redex Round- Australia car trials of the 1950s. His trademark was exploding sticks of gelignite, thrown from the speeding car. "Jack was a hard man," Cedric recalls, "but in those days so was I."

His efforts in the Callaghan House studio were so well rewarded that he accumulated enough cash to make his dream a reality in 1928 at the age of 22.

'After a few years of working commercially during the week with only the weekends for the out-of-doors sketching that I loved, I decided to go to Paris to art school. My dear old friend Vic Bulteau, also a Bondi surfer, who was on the Art Gallery staff met me at lunch times for conversation French lessons and I booked to travel on a French liner.'

He went out and had a look at the cabin, but then he had to break the news to his father. Reggie must have been aware that something like this was likely to happen and when the blow came he pleaded with Cedric to reconsider. He was afraid that he would never see his son again. "You will never come back."

"Probably not."

No doubt in the back of Reggie's mind was the matter of his own means of support. Cedric stayed. He cancelled the venture and it was to be many years before he reached the Academie Julien.

The magician’s chamber

Cedric's studio was located on the fourth floor of Callaghan House, 391 George Street, now the General Pants building. One day in the rickety lift Cedric found himself in the company of a group of "odd bods".

"You fellows look like artists. What are you doing here?"

"We are going to an etching class."

By a stroke of good fortune, Sydney Long had his studio in the attic of Callaghan House. Cedric went along to see what was going on and soon was a member of the class.

Among these "odd bods" who went to Long's classes was young Richard Ashton, grandson of Julian, later an official war artist in New Guinea and principal of the Julian Ashton School. He recalls Cedric as a friendly and very busy fellow who occasionally joined the crowd at the nearby Penfolds wine bar. His studio door was usually open and he always had a cheery word but his business was brisk and he did not join the ranks of the artists in their leisure pursuits. His spare time activities centred on the Bondi Surf Lifesaving Club.

Etching is an art form with a large component of craft and an element of mystery. It combines elaborate, almost ritualistic preparations with a hint of alchemy and the esoteric. Consistent with this image, Sydney Long's studio has been described by one of his biographers as "something of a magician's chamber."

'Large glass jars of acid, greener than emerald or chrysoprase, copper plates shining and as yet untouched, glowing with comfortable awareness of their superior destinies. Heaters and gas jets and curious steel implements with which truth will be forced from the metal plates with the rigorous perseverance of a Spanish inquisition'.

Light-hearted moments intruded. One day Syd Long was very upset to find that a stack of laboriously prepared copper plates had been partly bitten. Inquiries revealed that the culprit was Syd's cat, which had wet on them!

For a while the "bitten line" of etching became the medium that Cedric liked best. The etching is made by drawing the outline of the proposed picture in the wax 'ground' over a copper surface. When the plate is immersed in acid the unprotected lines of copper are "bitten", making grooves which hold ink when the copper plate is used as a printing block. A series of immersions may be made to progressively build up the number and depth of lines on the plate. Printing is also a very elaborate process because the plate is heated and cooled between successive applications of ink. Excess ink is rubbed off using a coarse cloth and a special circular motion. In the meantime the paper has been prepared by damping and allowing to dry overnight. As Cedric described it

'The paper is put on top of the plate on the bed of the etching press. With a quick motion it is rolled through the rollers and your finished result, when you lift the paper from the plate, is either very pleasing or very distressing. If you have over-bitten, there is nothing you can do about it but start the whole process all over again. This is why there are not a tremendous number of successful etchings because it is a heartbreaking medium to work in.'

Cedric remembers Sydney Long as a very helpful man who provided a wonderful introduction to the art and craft of etching. There was a strong Painter-Etchers Society which included the Lindsays, Squire Morgan and Will Ashton. The latter sold Cedric his excellent geared English press. This replaced an old mangle press, which required a lot of effort. "Just as well I was a wrestler!" Cedric recalls, describing himself swinging on the handles of the unwieldy old machine.

Another helpful influence at this stage was Dave (D.H.) Souter, a friend of the family and president of Bondi Surf Life Saving Club. He was a cartoonist on The Bulletin, well known for the Souter cat, which was his signature. One day he took Cedric to the Bondi home of Elioth Gruner, an outstanding artist, and the great man provided some comments on Cedric's outdoor sketches.

'This was tremendously encouraging for a young artist...I think the little touches of encouragement from senior artists are a wonderful thing for a younger man struggling'.

Cedric's Salesmen

One of Cedric's great mates was a writer named Arthur Burke, who spent a good deal of time in the Callaghan House studio. "Burkie never really worked," Cedric recalls, "Though he wrote stories for our children and composed a verse for my birthday for many years". When Burkie's cupboard became bare he would offer to sell an etching or two "to help Cedric out." The Macquarie Street medicos were his marks, two guineas being the going rate, proceeds shared between the two of them. Cedric never found out if there was a genuine market or whether they were bought to get Burkie off the premises.

'Back Burkie would come with the two guineas. Then he'd be off to buy some tucker for the house with his guinea but before he went we had to go and drink my share at Penfolds wine bar.'

This does not appear to be a very attractive proposition from Cedric's point of view but he was happy to be rewarded with introductions to Burkie's innumerable friends and neighbours in the Rocks. They gave him access to many back yards, out-of-the-way corners and interesting parts of the Rocks, which he was delighted to sketch. He also had the privilege of visiting some old houses with quaint features of design such as dual stairways to the sleeping quarters so that shift-working men would not wake the women and girls as they went off to the wharves in the small hours of the morning.

A tailor with rooms above Cedric in Callaghan House provided another outlet for etchings. Cedric reasoned that anyone who was doing well enough to have tailored suits could afford to buy an etching. He arranged a display of works around the walls on the agreement that Harry the tailor could have one etching for every two that his clients ordered. This system worked well, giving much satisfaction to Cedric and to many people who wore Harry's suits. Years later Cedric met Harry's widow and inquired whether she still had the etchings, which would have appreciated very much in value. She sadly replied that the whole lot had gone off when a suitcase of their possessions was stolen. Tragically, this fate duplicated that of the plates themselves.

A high point in Cedric's artistic career occurred in 1938 at the exhibition of the Painter-Etchers Society in David Jones. He submitted four of his best etchings, one of them an ambitious scene of Queens Square. This was a large work made from four plates, a process fraught with hazard due to the element of "feel" in biting the plates and the different performance of the acid according to temperature and other factors beyond the control of the artist.

The Sydney Morning Herald of Nov 3, 1938 recorded the event under the headline 'Young Etcher's Work Praised'. In the opening address, Mr Ifould, the Public Librarian, launched some scathing comments at young painters and etchers who make the mistake of wasting copper and canvas before they learn the basic skills of drawing. "Australia had too many artists and too many etchers, although there were some who were capable of taking their places in the best exhibitions in the world". He noted that the etchings submitted by Mr Emanuel were "of extraordinary quality, and it seemed that he had a considerable future.

Another report spoke in glowing terms of the life and movement in the shadows in Queens Square, the sun and air in "Halvorsens" boatsheds, and the command of detail in "On the Slips". Among the other exhibitors was his old teacher Dattilo Rubbo with an "Old Man" in charcoal priced at 15 guineas. The National Gallery of NSW purchased Rubbo's charcoal along with two of Cedric's etchings for their permanent collection, a huge display of confidence in a young artist at his first show.

Cedric wrote many years later 'Probably the greatest thrill any young artist can have is to see this plaque on his exhibit at an art show - "Purchased by the trustees of the National Art Gallery". This was my first art exhibition. Somehow I was not at the opening. Guess I was at the races, down at the beach or meeting a deadline.'

Ludwig Mises, the Australian connection

2008-02-23T17:26:00.002+11:00

Ludwig Mises (1881-1973) is likely to be revealed as one of the sleeping giants of the 20th century. Unlike his Austrian colleague Karl Popper he never touched down on the sacred shores of Australia or any of the outlying islands in the vicinity, not even Tasmania, but there is a strange and fortuitous involvement of an Australian in the translation of his book On Socialism.

The Australian connection is Brian Penton, whose life gives some credence to the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction. Patrick Buckridge wrote a biography of Penton and this is a freestanding piece that gives a fine flavour of the man and his work.

Brian Penton (1904-1951) would surely have achieved the status of the most memorable journalist and commentator in postwar Australia but he died in his prime and left too many enemies to achieve the reputation that he deserved. He was born in Brisbane and left school at the age of fourteen to make an early start in journalism with the Brisbane Courier. At nineteen he travelled to England and worked as a freelance journalist for eighteen months before returning to Australia to join the Sydney Morning Herald.

In 1929 he returned to England, acting as business manager for Jack Lindsay’s Franfolico Press. That episode ended, typically, in prolonged litigation with one of the business partners.
Walking in a London park he met a Hungarian refugee, an economist named Jacques Kahane. They became friends and collaborators in the English translation of a book written in German (1922) on (against) socialism by Ludwig Mises. Kahane was recruited for the task by Professor Lionel Robbins after they became friends while they were students at the London School of Economics.

This brush with the cutting edge of anti-socialist thought served Penton well in later years when he challenged the pillars of the “Australian Settlement” (White Australia, tariffs and central wage fixing) long before they came under widespread attack.

Kahane became a close friend and occasional house guest of Olga and Brian Penton. Each of them dedicated their first books to Kahane, in the case of Brian this was his novel The Landtakers. For Olga it was A Rapid Latin Course with the inscription that she had “hoped that her first book would be a different one”. She was writing a novel while she worked as a Latin teacher to pay the rent.

Karl Popper in the Antipodes

2008-02-09T23:42:00.000+11:00

Australia and New Zealand can claim to punch above our weight in many areas of human endeavour, including some sports and some contributions to the life of the mind as well. Often in the past our thinkers found it necessary to leave home to seek fame and fortune in distant lands, but in some cases things worked the other way and we became the site of great work by visitors. Such was the case when New Zealand provided refuge for Karl Popper from 1937 to 1945.

During that time he wrote The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism which appeared as journal articles in 1944 and in book form in 1957. Also during that time 14 of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. I have often thought that The Open Soceity was a bit on the long side, running to some 800 pages, many consisting of notes in smaller print. So recently I realised a longtime ambition to produce a condensed version.

One of his colleagues was a young economist named Colin Simkin, 26 at the time he met Popper in 1937. He became a lifelong friend of Popper and a regular visitor to the Popper residence in Britain. He was also allowed to smoke while he walked with Popper in the garden, a privilege indeed in view of the way that Popper banned cigarette smoking in his vicinity at the London School of Economics.

Simkin came to the University of Sydney and in retirement he lived within a mile of our place in Cremorne. We became friends and this revived his interest in some aspects of Popper's philosophy that he felt were not adequatelyappreciated in the social sciences. He wrote a fine book to rectify the situation, unfortunately costing an arm and a leg.

"This book offers a straightforward account of Sir Karl Popper's views on scientific methodology ranging from Logik der Forschung in 1934 to A World of Propensities in 1990. Part I covers his treatment of the interrelations between metaphysics and science, the fallacies of induction, the method of conjectures and refutations, evolutionary epistemology, the propensity theory of probability, and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Part II considers the problems of the social sciences, his critiques of historicism and holistic planning, his defence of piecemeal planning on both scientific and humanist grounds, his method of situational logic based on models that use a `rationality principle', and the roles of institutions, traditions and history. The book is addressed to those who are interested in general problems of scientific method but find it difficult to get a clear or connected view of Popper's important contributions because these have been published over long intervals and have been subject to misinterpretations."

He also wrote a touching memoire of the time while Popper was writing The Open Society.

"Early in the following year I came to Christchurch as the only lecturer in economics, and very soon was visited by Karl Popper who charmingly introduced himself and asked for help such as Larsen had given him. As he put it, his English was bad and he was ignorant of the social sciences, so that he needed help from someone like me. I felt confident about assisting him with the English language but less confident that a twenty-four-year-old lecturer of quite limited experience could render the same service with the social sciences.
As it quickly turned out, my confidence in regard to English was misplaced. Karl’s command of the language was, naturally, then imperfect so that my pencil made many rapid changes to what he put before me. But his first book had been most critically read by Robert Lammer who had insisted that everything be made crystal clear, a lesson which Karl took permanently to heart and which he applied to my corrections. I had to justify all of them and was often in difficulty when confronted by Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which was then Karl’s main recreational reading – along with stories about Dr Doolittle. Karl had a strong sympathy with children and liked good stories for them. I don’t think he missed, during his time in Christchurch, any talkie of Deanna Durbin, an appealing child star who appeared in singing roles."

During 1945 Professor Anderson offered Popper a position at Sydney but he delayed his decision in the hope of making a move to London. In the event he went to the London School of Economics.

Ross Parish - a note

2008-01-30T08:32:00.000+11:00

Some time ago I began a series looking at the University of New England's contribution to Australia's intellectual tradition. I thought that this might be interesting and helpful because the University occupies a special place as the first university in regional Australia.

I have so far had to put the development of the series on hold because of other pressures. However, in researching a story on David Asimus I came across an obituary of Professor Ross Parish. This post is simply intended to record the link so that I do not lose it.

Project Gutenberg

2008-01-24T21:59:00.000+11:00

Making use of the National Dictionary of Biography for the post on the Tasmanian economists has reminded me of the wealth of information in the Dictionary and in other souces that can be tapped via the portal of Project Gutenberg Australia. Among many other things there are several of Australia's "greatest books" on line, from a list compiled by Geoffrey Dutton in 1985.

Even more amazing in some ways is Google Books which provides access to the whole text of a massive number of old books and to significant chunks of recently published books.

Some Tasmanian economists

2008-01-22T17:56:00.000+11:00

Peter Boettke, at the George Mason University in the US is a member of the Austrian school of economics and social thought. He speculated that people who grew up with some experience of manual work might make better economists than others, or at least they might have a more practical take on the issues that ecomomists are supposed to understand and illuminate by their their research and writing.

I tested out that idea by checking the careers of a number of prominent Australian (not Austrian) economists who had some association with Tasmania (my home state). The results of this study can be found at this link, and I will say up front that the Boettke's idea was strongly supported! Giblin is the outstanding supporter of the thesis, but they are all good.

This is a taste of the Giblin story, the rest is here, with a portrait by Dobell as a bonus!

"GIBLIN, LYNDHURST FALKINER (1872-1951), political economist, was born on 29 November 1872 in Hobart, son of William Robert Giblin, barrister, and his wife Emmely Jean, née Perkins. Educated at The Hutchins School, Hobart, and University College, London, he entered King's College, Cambridge, in 1893, graduating senior optime (mathematics and science) in 1896 (M.A., 1928). He rowed for King's but excelled at Rugby Union, representing not only his college and university but England too. Revisiting King's in 1938, an extraordinary career behind him, he was elected to an honorary fellowship and given the use of Keynes's rooms. When Giblin died the college established a studentship in his name.
After coming down from Cambridge he and a fellow Kingsman joined to prospect for gold in the Cassiar-Stickine district of North British Columbia. The isolated life, if at times adventurous, was always harsh and ultimately meagre of reward; it was essential to work as lumberman, teamster or boatman to help pay one's way. Giblin's correspondence from this period conveys the deprivation, the routine and the eccentric acquaintance of his mining existence. In 1904 he joined the crew of a schooner bound for Australia, but the same year found him once again in London, where inter alia, he helped to teach ju-jitsu. After visiting a Solomon Islands plantation in 1905 he returned to Hobart and set about establishing an orchard. He also taught mathematics and explored Tasmania's high country, measuring more precisely certain peaks. In April 1909, bristling with criticism of his State's recent financial past, Giblin unsuccessfully contested the seat of Franklin as a Liberal Democrat. He then joined the Labor Party, gave elementary lectures to branches on economic subjects, and made his way to the State and Federal executives. In 1913 he won the State seat of Denison. When Labor took office Giblin gained a reputation for independence. He became unofficial adviser to the treasurer J. A. Lyons, persuading him of the need for an inquiry into the public debt. Upon the dissolution of the assembly in 1916 he did not seek re-election.
From March 1909, when he had been commissioned a lieutenant of the Intelligence Corps, Giblin had been active in the citizen forces. In January 1914 he became captain and during 1916 transferred to the 40th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force. He was wounded at Armentières and Messines, and won the Military Cross in August 1917. Recovered, and promoted major, he fought in the third battle of Ypres, Passchendaele and on the Somme. He received the Distinguished Service Order on 3 June 1918, but a third wounding on 24 August at Bapaume removed him from the war."

History of Australian and New Zealand Thought - 2008 directions

2008-01-06T19:27:00.000+11:00

I actually did begin this post at the publication date. Then I got sidetracked. I have decided to bring it up at its original planned date even though the real time is somewhat later.

Back in December 07 I said that Rafe and I were still feeling our way with this blog. I thought therefore at the start of o8 I should set out what I hoped that we would be able to achieve this year.

When we set this blog up, we hoped that it would evolve into a platform for a worthwhile discussion of the evolution of Australian and New Zealand thought. This remains our hope. To achieve it, we need a couple of things.

A blog like this reaches for two very different audiences.

The first is those who find us through search engines. Some, we hope, will come back. But whether they do or not, we hope that they will find information of use.

To achieve this objective, we need to build a solid volume of content. This requires far more posts than we have so far been able to put up.

The second audience is regular visitors. To gain and hold these we really need regular posts, desirably a minimum of three a week. Then we can get them to comment, thus building involvement.

Both Rafe and I are, to use Rafe's phrase, busy bloggers. On our own, it will take a long time to grow the blog. Further, we also represent a necessarily limited range of views. A blog like this grows with a diversity of views.

This brings me to my core hope for 2008, that between us we can build a solid team of contributors better representative of the many streams in the thought of our two countries.

Season's Greetings

2007-12-24T08:05:00.000+11:00

Christmas tomorrow, marking four months exactly since the first post on this blog. Now, 25 posts later, Rafe and I are still feeling our way.

This is quite a complicated blog to develop simply because of the combination of a vast canvas with limited time. In 2008 I hope that we will be able to add further contributors, thus speeding the content creation process.

To our still very small number of visitors, season's greetings from Rafe and I. We hope that you have a peaceful and happy Christmas and a great new year.

History of the NSW HSC English syllabus

2007-12-21T10:30:00.000+11:00

In November I mentioned a post that Neil Whitfield had written on Professor Sam Goldberg and the Leavisite tradition. Now Neil has written another interesting post looking at the history of the HSC English syllabus in NSW.

Don't be put off by the title - Right wing education critique is historically inaccurate and perpetuates myths. While Neil has put this post in his rants' category, the historical material is interesting.

Rural Research in Australia - a note

2007-12-19T10:33:00.000+11:00

Another short companion piece, this time to Rafe's story on Jim Vincent. I found the story interesting for a number of reasons.

To begin with, it illustrated how much science has changed.

Our previous scientists lived in a constrained world, one in which scientific endeavour had to be restricted to very limited budgets. The total Australian university spend on scientific research at the time that Jim Vincent began his work was probably less in real terms than the spend today at a single Australian university.

Is this significant? I don't know. I only know that it has struck me a number of times when I read material on Australia's earlier academics and research scientists.

I was also struck, again, by the scale of Australia's success in early applied science.

At national level, the need for an Australian national research institute was first raised in debates about nationhood in the late 1890s. However, the first serious attempt to create a national research institute began in 1916, when Prime Minister Billy Hughes’ Government established an Advisory Council of Science and Industry to advise on the establishment of an Institute of Science and Industry.

The Institute was launched in 1921 to undertake scientific research, review existing research and disseminate scientific information. The Institute had limited funds and failed to develop.

In 1925, under the influence of Deputy PM and Country Party Leader Earle Page, Prime Minister Bruce convened a conference. He invited Sir Frank Heath, head of the British Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, to advise on the reorganisation of the Institute. Their reports led to the passing of new legislation in 1926 to establish the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

With an Executive Committee of George Julius, David Rivett and Arnold Richardson at the helm, CSIR was to become one of the most comprehensive scientific organisations in the world.

Many Australians forget just how much Australia has contributed to scientific research. The national payback and especially in agriculture has been huge.

Modern Australians also forget that debate about environmental issues, about land degradation and improvement, is not new. Wadham and Wood's pioneering study on land utilisation was in fact published first in 1939. Today's debate replicates many elements of the earlier debate.

The description of pasture improvement struck a chord, too. In 1950 in New England the carrying capacity on native pastures was one sheep per acre. Fifteen years later it was three sheep per acre.

We can debate issues associated with the replacement of native pasture. The reality is that in 1950 you could make a decent living off 1,000 merino sheep. Twenty years later you needed three times that number just to survive.

Science allowed Australia to grow so that we continued to feed and cloth more than seventy million people world-wide. Today we debate whether or not this can continue.

My personal view is that we have barely scratched the productive land-mass of the Australian continent. At this point I do not want to debate this, beyond saying that the continued work of scientists such as Jim Vincent are central to our future.

Jim Vincent, one of our quiet achievers

2007-12-14T23:19:00.000+11:00

Dr Jim Vincent made a fleeting appearance in Australian literature as the model for the schoolteacher 'Bill Sinclair' in Kylie Tennant's prize winning 1935 novel “Tiburon”. This was set in a small country town where the P&C of the school wanted more emphasis on cultural studies rather than the practical arts championed by 'Bill Sinclair'. In real life Jim Vincent's first job after graduating from Sydney University in 1933 was to teach Agriculture at Canowindra in the central west of NSW.

In 1986 Vincent's colleagues honoured his 75th birthday with a conference and the papers were collected in a memorial volume. This is a testament to the world-class achievements of Australian research in microbiology, and also to the impact of a fine teacher and researcher who provided inspiration and guidance for much of the local work in this field.

In soil-plant relations and agricultural science generally Australian researchers have a wonderful record. Their efforts have fed through into practical developments and farming practice has been transformed by successful research and development, with massive implications for the economy and thus for the welfare of all Australians. It is widely known that the Australian economy rode on the sheep's back (and lately on the backs of wheat farmers and miners as well) but it is not equally well known how much this ride depends on applied scientific research by Vincent and others like him.

Those who think that Australian farming is based on soils of great natural fertility need to think again. Much of the continent can be described in the terms applied to the site of the first farm in the colony "the bulk of the soil is shallow and sandy with outcrops of rock at too frequent intervals". Almost all the soils in Australia are low in natural fertility, lacking nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, the three major nutrients needed for plant growth. Many also lack one or more 'trace elements', which, like vitamins, are required in minute quantities for healthy plant and animal growth.

Phosphorus in the form of 'super' (superphosphate) is provided out of a sack but nitrogen has so far been too expensive to supply in this manner over large areas. The answer has been provided by special strains of bacteria which colonise the roots of legumes such as subterranean ('sub') clover and extract nitrogen from the air for the use of the plant. This 'fixed' nitrogen then builds up the fertility of the soil when the clover dies or is eaten by animals.

Some decades elapsed between the discovery of the potential benefits of sub clover and its widespread use in improved pasture because the performance of the clover was at first highly unreliable. This is where Vincent and his colleagues came in. The situation improved dramatically when the role of the bacteria in the root nodules came to light, followed by techniques to inoculate the seed with compatible varieties of bacteria.

A 1990 interview with Jim

Jim, the purpose of this interview is to draw attention to some of the outstanding Australian work in rural research and to some of the distinguished agricultural researchers who are only known to the narrow circle of their associates.

Well I don't regard myself as especially distinguished, just a good middle of the road scientist.

In any case, the work of "good middle of the road" biological scientists does not get the public recognition it deserves.

Yes, and this lack of recognition is reflected in recruitment. Agriculture just does not have the financial pull of accounting and law. This is shown in the cut-off mark for entering schools of Agriculture and the situation with Science is worse. Vetinerary science is not so bad because people expect to make a good living in private practice.

How did you come to be recruited into agriculture? Did you come off the land like so many of our rural researchers?

I didn't actually come off the land, though I was born at Narrabri [a small country town]in 1911. My parents had a small shop that was burnt out in a big fire and they came to Sydney when I was a few months old. Some of my mother's relatives share-farmed and we stayed with them sometimes so I got to know about the hard lot of the share farmer.

I went through Parramatta High School and I don't recall having any special interest in agriculture. Late in my final year Waterhouse (Professor of Agriculture) sent out letters to all the high schools to tell prospective university students about his department. This letter was posted on the board at school and it took my fancy. So along with three other students on teachers scholarships I went off to study Agriculture at the University of Sydney.

Most successful people can look back and identify a "significant teacher" early in their career.

At Sydney University it was Waterhouse. He was not only a very good teacher but he was very good at research on the applied side.

And in due course you became a school teacher.

After graduation I was posted to teach Agriculture at Canowindra District Rural School. This was a lower level high school which did not take people through to matriculation, though they may have taken a certificate at the end of year 9.

Your career as a school teacher did not last very long.

In a little under 2 years I was back to fill a vacancy for a lecturer in Biology at the Teachers College. This was just one of the many fortunate events in my life. At the time I was the youngest lecturer ever appointed.

Two years later Waterhouse had another hand in my career. He recommended me for one of the Pawlett Scholarships that were awarded for studies overseas.

I was supposed to do a post-graduate diploma course in Soil Microbiology at Kensington but when I arrived the course was no longer running. They sent me on to the School of Hygeine and Tropical Medicine where I took on a new and demanding discipline of semi-micro analytical work.

In the second year I did the Postgraduate Diploma in Bacteriology. This was a very prestigious school with two world leaders, Topley and Wilson on staff. At the time they were developing serological techniques to classify the various strains of Salmonella. (Salmonella was a big public health problem at that time).

When did you start work on root nodule bacteria?

My interest in Rhizobium firmed when I went from London to spend a semester at the University of Wisconsin which was then a leading area for the study of root nodule bacteria. Two of the staff, Baldwin and McKay, wrote the standard text for the area and some good early work on the biology of nitrogen fixation was done in the department.

How did you find Sydney when you came home?

Back in Sydney in January of 1939 there was a heatwave. The roads were melting when I reported in to Sydney University and nobody much was there. I had a small financial problem, with no pay until the end of the month and daily expenses to meet. Waterhouse lent me some money to tide me over.

The question was, what sort of work to get on with? It had to be simple because the universities had next to no research money in those days, just a lot of manpower (your own). Waterhouse helped out, yet again, by giving me a small centrifuge, not a very sophisticated machine but it was my pride and joy.

For teaching purposes I wanted to demonstrate various serological tests that I learned in London and but I didn't want students playing about with Salmonella so we moved over to Rhizobium.

What was the focus of this work?

I concentrated on root nodulation work, improvising a greenhouse by stacking tubes by the window and so on. I grew Rhizobium on slopes during the day, harvested in the afternoon, took the material home and did tests in the evening. This involved carting tubes and serum around, and an agglutination bath borrowed from the medical school (it never went back). My mother was staying with us at the time and she helped by washing out the tubes during the day so they were dry for the evening.

What was the purpose of the tests?

To rapidly establish the compatibility of various strains of clover with different strains of Rhizobium.

Can you explain a little more about the importance of compatibility between the plants and the bugs?

To obtain nitrogen fixation in the field the clover plants must first of all be infected (invaded) by Rhizobium bacteria. Then these have to form active colonies in nodules on the roots. This is where the actual nitrogen fixation occurs. A natural soil may contain up to twenty varieties of Rhizobium and only a few may be compatible with a particular species of legume. In addition to the matter of compatibility, infection depends on adequate numbers of Rhizobia and on various characteristics of the soil, especially on its degree of acidity, which must not be too high.

The immunological techniques that I learned in London were important to rapidly establish which strains of Rhizobium were compatible with various plants such as white clover or sub clover.

I understand that you had to stop this line of research during the war.

Early in the war there was a certain amount of agitation especially among young scientists to be put to work more effectively in the war effort. This intensified after the bombing of Darwin as the Japanese seeemed to be coming rapidly closer on all fronts and Australia suddenly became very civil defence minded.

Eric Ashby, later Sir Eric, was then Professor of Botany at Sydney. He egged on the Government to do something and one of the results was that I went to the Research and Experiment section of the Commonwealth Department of Home Security.

My job was to go around and talk to scientists and get them involved in various committees where their expert advice could be useful. A great deal of material was coming from the UK on civil defence precautions but a lot of it had to be modified for local conditions.

For example you wanted engineers, physicists and human physiologists to work on slit trenches. The thermal and ventilation requirements for trenches here are quite different from Britain. It was very hard to work out the heating-up characteristics of air-raid shelters because the temperature gradients in the vicinity of shelters are described by very complex mathematical equations. Fortunately we found a man in Tasmania called Jager who knew all about these things.

I gather from your Noel Foldsworthy Memorial lecture "Lab Coat and Gum Boots" that not all scientists are equally at home with the "gum boots" of applied research.

The lab. coat is often the more favoured attire. It was interesting to see the differences between scientists in their capacity to grasp the essence of practical problems that required quick and simple solutions. Some had a quick practical focus, others just wanted to do esoteric research on what they regarded as the fundamentals. Of course what is required is a balanced dual contribution between fundamental investigation and application. These two sides of our science are needed, like the head and the tail of a coin, for it to have value.

You also moved into other areas, like the milk supply.

Milk and also the microbiology of food preservation. One of the senior men in London had worked on the quality of British milk. Back in Sydney I inquired about the local situation and I was horrified to learn that they only tested an occasional sample using methods that were many years out of date. I wrote to the Milk Board and at first received no response but I kept at them and a couple of years later they helped to set up a Milk Board Research Scholarship. The first incumbent was Bob Morton, just back from the Navy and one of the most brilliant students we ever had.

You mentioned that Waterhouse obtained research money from the millers and the wheat growers. It seems that the rural industries have been quite good at supporting R&D in contrast with the general failure of business to back these things.

The Commonwealth Bank had a section to foster rural research. When there was not enough money in the wheat pool to be worth distributing to farmers they would allocate the interest and some of the capital to research, some of which came to our projects at Sydney University. Other funds came more directly from the various industry levies - wool, wheat, meat, dairy. I managed to obtain grants from most of these.

You were good at writing grant applications?

Maybe. More to the point, I was fortunate in being able to show a striking response to innoculation of legume seed on the North Coast and the North-west area. After that my work was not limited by funds. It was small budget work and at that stage in the 1950s it was possible to do a lot of work with simple equipment.

What was the nature of your work on the North Coast?

In the Lismore area they were introducing sub clover by seeding directly into the established Paspalum grass. If the sub did not form effective nodules to fix nitrogen from the air then it had no chance in competition for soil nitrogen against the grass. It was quite easy to pick the plants that did not have nodules because they turned red or yellow with the classical nitrogen deficiency symptoms.

Where did this lead?

It led to the major innovation of innoculating clover seed with a suspension of the appropriate Rhizobium. Then the seedlings did not have to depend on bugs from the soil.

Innoculation of clover seed with Rhizobium was a step in the right direction but it did not always work?

I was called in to help with a problem where supposedly inoculated clover seed failed to form nodules. Nobody had checked the quality of the inoculum. The strain in use by the Dept tended to mutate to a non-nodulating strain and over a period of time the cultures became practically useless.

The valuable lesson that emerged from this was the need for continuous quality control on the inoculum. This recognition led to the establishment of an agency to regularly test the inoculum being provided by commercial firms to the farming community. Some of the standards devised in the course of this work became accepted world wide.

Three commercial seed firms provided funds, the State Department did the field testing and obtained material. The University of Sydney housed the facilities and one or two people were employed to work in the agency. After ten years or so the whole unit moved to the Department and assumed Australia-wide responsibilities for testing and quality control on Rhizobium.

You worked in an area where Australia had a high international profile.

There was a time in the 1960s when Rhizobium work in Australia was leading the world. The monographs produced during this period were dominated by Australians.

The US pioneered much of this work but they did not need to set the same standards because their soils are naturally richer in Rhizobia and there is less need for inoculation. During the time of "the great antibiotics hunt" the American micribiologists all went looking for new antibiotics and the area of nitrogen fixation fell into a rather sad state. Since then the US has caught up due to weight of numbers and funding.

The Rhizobium Newsletter was a significant innovation, first edited by Kevin Marshall in 1956. He is at present in the Chair of Microbiology at the University of NSW. This was a vehicle for informal communication of preliminary findings and work in progress. At first it circulated locally and later it went world wide. The last edition was in 1981 when cost increases, especially in postage, helped to kill it.

You and your colleagues had a hand in the International Biological Programme.

This was the biological counterpart of the International Geophysical Year, except that it ran for more than a year. The subject was defined as 'The Biological Basis of Productivity and Human Welfare' and a major aim was to lift agriculture in the countries of the Third World.

Biological nitrogen fixation had a good representation in the programme with two major volumes of papers. I also wrote a little book (IBP Handbook No 16, A Manual for the Practical Study of Root-Nodule Bacteria). This was published in 1970 and was later translated into Spanish and Chinese.

All of this is a fair record of achievement. Do you have any general thoughts on the attitudes and habits required?

I suggest that young graduates need to be prepared to adapt and develop into areas of responsibility quite different from those envisaged during their time at university.

When I went into teaching I had no idea that I would do anything different. And I threw myself into it. When I went back to the Teachers College that was tremendous and things just fell out of that.

A Note on the Orr Case

2007-12-11T06:34:00.000+11:00

In my short post on Philosophy at Melbourne University I mentioned the Orr case.

By way of background, Sydney Sparkes Orr was appointed as professor of philosophy at the University of Tasmania in 1952. In 1956 he was summarily dismissed on the grounds of misconduct, including allegations of sexual misconduct. From then until near his death in 1966, Professor Orr campaigned for reinstatement.

The Orr case raised great passion because of its linkages to academic freedom. However, I was not aware of the complex institutional background, including Professor Orr's immediately preceding agitation for a Royal Commission into the governance and management of the University of Tasmania.

Those who are interested can find information about the history of the University here written from a perspective sympathetic to Professor Orr. W D Joske's ADB entry on Professor Orr provides a harsher perspective.

Australian Legend - a personal note

2007-12-08T19:00:00.000+11:00

Rafe's post looking at some writing on the Australian Legend raised some interesting issues. I thought that I should write a short companion piece, adding context especially for readers not familiar with Australian historiography.

Published in 1958, Russel Ward's Australian Legend remains one of Australia's best known history books and was republished back in 2003. The SMH article in the cited link provides an interesting context to the book, while the Australian Government's Cultural Portal provides a short if incomplete and partial introduction to the bush legend.

I have a direct interest in Russel's work at several levels.

He was one of my teachers at the University of New England and in fact forms one element of the New England intellectual tradition that I started to explore in a yet to be completed series. I was also fascinated then and now by the Australian character, although my interpretation was a little different from Russel's.

I do not have time in this short post to write a detailed historical analysis. Instead, I just wanted to point to a few threads that interest me.

All groups, nations included, have their own legends, constructs that they use to interpret the past.

In recent years I have worked mainly as a management consultant. Part of my work has focused on understanding the nature of organisational change and renewal. Central to this has been the nature of organisational cultures, the way in which this impedes or facilitates change.

I make this point because I sometimes feel that in this post-modern world in which the study of history has fragmented and lost a degree of relevance as a consequence, historians have become very uncomfortable in dealing with legends. They want to critique the legend itself, rather than looking at what is.

Take, as an example, the Turner frontier thesis, a thesis that formed a building block in Russel's thinking. In simple terms, Turner argued that the American culture and character had been formed in a positive way by the moving frontier. Russel adopted this concept to some degree and applied it to Australia.

Today, at least in Australia, this type of thinking makes us very uncomfortable because we see the moving frontier through a prism set by indigenous-non-indigenous relations. How can we attribute positive attributes to something so maligned? Yet the frontier thesis has an existence at several levels independent of any questions of Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations.

To say that something - the moving frontier - has negative elements, should not deny its broader features, including its role in influencing and supporting intellectual ideas.

Then, too, Russel was writing from and influenced by a particular tradition, one that still retains some mythic powers.

In an earlier work that I have not been able to check so am writing from memory, Professor Moses suggested that there had been three main schools in Australian historiography, old left, new left and imperial.

Russel belonged firmly to the old left stream. Influenced by Irish Catholicism as well as ideas coming out of England, this school saw the creation of a new Australian identity as a central issue. This is the world of Eureka, of trade unions and the 189os strikes, of sometimes rampant Australian nationalism.

Russel's emphasis on mateship, on egalitarianism, comes in part from this world. This is also the world of Bernard Smith, whose pioneering work on the history of Australian art argued that the history of Australian art lay in part in the creation of a distinctive Australian identity.

The position was always far more complicated than Russel allowed. The books that Rafe referred to in his post draw some of this out, including the influence of city based intellectuals and writers. Many of these in fact came from the country, but they formed a distinctive radical group. Much more was involved than just the itinerant bush worker.

Russel also ignored what Moses called the imperial stream in Australian historiography, although Russel himself with his Adelaide connections, with his moustache and formal manners, really came from part of the Australian establishment.

The imperial stream saw Australia and the evolution of the Australian character in the broader context of the history of Great Britain and the Empire. This is the world of Mary Grant Bruce in children's writing, of Charles Chauvel in film.

The imperial stream was just as Australian as the old left tradition. Whereas the old left tradition saw Australian identity evolving in some ways in opposition to the mother country, the imperial tradition saw the Australian identity as part of but better than that holding in England. A selection of the best from home plus Australia's own unique elements.

This view was in fact mirrored in the UK in both official and popular writing where the tall, lean, laconic competent colonial became a popular figure.

There is a strange analogy here to the Australian Aborigines.

All groups measure themselves to some degree by the way they are perceived by those around them.

The constant negative presentation of indigenous problems, as was pointed out in an Oceania article back in the 1960s, affects Aboriginal perceptions of themselves. Australians as a whole were far more lucky, because their presentation in the broader Imperial environment was largely positive from the very beginning. This fed back into Australian perceptions of themselves.

In all, Rafe's post opens up some very major topics!

Checking out the Australian Legend

2007-12-02T10:17:00.000+11:00

For a lot of the 20th century the image of the Australian bushman exerted a deal of fascination in some intellectual circles and it certainly resonated with me, growing up on a farm and thinking of myself as a bushman and a pioneer. This is a review of three books that look critically at the Australian legend from different angles.

John Docker's book on the 1890s is a revelation. Those who think that the bushmen, pioneers, radical nationalists and male chauvinists of “the legend” dominated the scene will be amazed at the picture that emerges. Feminism, anarchism, socialism, republicanism, and anti-religious free thought in various forms were running strongly, with other more esoteric currents of orientalism and mysticism. One of these was the myth of Lemuria created by Madame Blavatsky of the theosophists. This was a theory of a Golden Age on a lost Southern continent where the spiritually elevated Lemurians created the wisdom that pervaded the ancient cultures of India and the Levant. According to Docker’s account these ideas spawned a batch of Australian novels and joined with the works of Rider Haggard and Bram Stoker to inform much early Australian science fiction writing.

John Carroll and others also demolish quite a few myths about the national identity and especially the legend of the Bushman. A paper on the nomadic tribes of urban Britain identifies the pathological roots of some bushman characteristics such as restlessness and irresponsibility which were modified or idealised for the purpose of the legend. A chapter argues that some superficially attractive features of the semi-nomadic bachelor existence ascribed to the bushmen were projections by alienated urban intellectuals who occupied a “sleazy urban frontier” of boarding houses, pubs and radical meeting places. Maps indicate the concentrations of boarding houses in central Sydney of 1890 and the close proximity of the premises of various socialist, republican, land-reform, freethought and literary organisations.

Boris Frankel was trying to reshape the political culture. That was a few years ago and I am not sure where his project got to after this book, published in 1992. Frankel was brought up on a radical nationalist version of the Australian legend and his concern was to find a more up-to-date vehicle for the radical reforms that he desires. He ssw himself as a custodian of the Enlightenment project of emancipation and this book sets out to defend humanist values from a number of deadly enemies - cultural relativists, cynical postmodernists, economic rationalists and the Old Right.

Philosophy at Melbourne University

2007-11-16T20:13:00.001+11:00

When it come to philosophy in Australia, Sydney had often made a lot of noise (think of John Anderson, Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University for some thirty years, and, it's said, the inspiration behind the Sydney Push): Adelaide has been a site of innovation (birthplace of a view of the nature of the mind that came to be known internationally as Australian materialism) and Canberra has been a centre of solid, analytical professionalism. But what about Melbourne? Alan Saunders, The
Philosopher's Zone, ABC Radio National.

This quote comes from the introduction by Alan Saunders to a talk by Tony Coady from the University of Melbourne on the history of philosophy in Australia with a special focus on Melbourne. You will find the transcript plus audio here.

Tony's talk provides an interesting introduction to another thread in the evolution of Australian thought.

Postscript

In a comment, Rafe noted that Jim Franklin had published a remarkably researched history of philosophy in Australia. You will find Rafe's earlier review of the book here.

I have not read this book, but the reference made we wonder how all this compared with philosophy at New England. Here I did Philosophy 1 in 1963 and then, later, Ted Tapp's Philosophy of History course. Both had a major influence on my thinking.

Looking back, Philosophy 1 was quite rigorous. From the mists of the past, it also seems to have had a different flavour certainly from that holding at Sydney, UNE's previous parent, and perhaps from that holding elsewhere in Australia.

The course included an introduction to philosophy that started with the Greeks and worked forward. There were also distinct ethics and logic sections. In logic, we looked at both Aristotle and symbolic logic. I found the symbolic logic very useful later in understanding computers and computing.

I found the references in Tony and Rafe's material to Professor Orr interesting because of what it says about shifts in Australian attitudes. My perceptions of the Orr matter were formed growing up in an academic household at a time when the imbroglio was still current. The central issue as seen then was one of academic freedom.

I mention this because I found the comments on Professor Orr jarring.

I had not thought about this case for a long time, so my own core views on it are really as previously formed. There appears to be a clear gap between those views and current perceptions.

Now that the Orr case is vanishing in the mists of time, it might be interesting to look at it at some point simply because of the way in which it might highlight changing perceptions.

The University of New England's contribution to Australia's intellectual tradition - early threads 1

2007-11-11T22:07:00.001+11:00

Your primary purpose, of course, is to study for a degree, otherwise you will waste a great valuable time, your own and your lecturers, much public money, and in these days of restricted entry deprive some other student of a coveted place. University study does not consist in the passive absorption of information but in the dynamic pursuit of knowledge which arises from the clash of informed minds and the unrelenting refusal to accept first appearances as final truths.. You are entering a community of scholars where your own contributions will be accepted. It is surprising how often your teachers can be stimulated by a brilliant idea or an illuminating phrase from a first year student. Ean M Fraser, Orientation Week Handbook, University of New England, 1963.

The establishment of a university college in Armidale in 1938 did not just happen. This was not just the first regional university college, but the first new university institution established in Australia for a long while.

Once established, it provided the precedent for the establishment of new institutions. But New England itself owed its own creation to a very particular juxtaposition of circumstances.

The early history of the Country Party has been well outlined by writers including Ulrich Ellis, Bruce Graham and Don Aitken.

Ellis himself was unique at the time he wrote and indeed is still unusual. A journalist, political agitator and propagandist and a long standing staffer to Earle Page, Ellis used his pen as a weapon. One output was his histories of the of the NSW and Federal Country Parties. As a player, Ellis's works were partisan, but his writings were also informed by direct knowledge and experience.

Don Aitken himself forms part of the New England intellectual tradition, a tradition set somewhat outside the bounds set by what I, as someone who also belongs to the New England intellectual tradition, would call the metro conventions.

Don's early writings explored the way in which the NSW Country Party formed.

Central to Don's analysis was the emergence of the idea of countrymindedness, the way in which local needs such as education, the idea of city oppression, long held ideas about the virtues of country life, all combined to create a political mix of sufficient strength to overcome (to some degree at least) deeply held local rivalries.

Bruce looked more broadly, at the early history of the Australian country parties. His writing brought out a different point, the differences between the parties. The Victorian party with its radical populist small farm base, its requirement that parliamentarians sign a pledge of compliance with party policy similar to that required in the Labor Party, was a very different beast from the NSW party.

Like Victoria, the new country party movement in NSW appealed to and drew support from small farmers. However, in NSW the party also attracted support from the more conservative grazing interests. Further, in Northern New South Wales and in Northern NSW alone, the movement managed to combine not just rural but also town interests, in so doing becoming the dominant political force outside Newcastle and the lower Hunter where the Labor tradition remained dominant.

The distinguishing feature in Northern NSW was the parallel rise of a movement dedicated to the achievement of self government, statehood, for Northern NSW. While drawing from many of the same well springs as the country party movement, new statism appealed especially to town dwellers and the town elites. The two movements were different. However, the Progressive Party as the NSW Country Party was then called, was able to capture the new state feeling, giving it a base that extended across geographical and economic divides.

References

I want to get this up. I will add references later.

Return to introductory post.

University of Newcastle, Cyril Renwick and the Hunter Valley Research Foundation

2007-11-09T04:52:00.001+11:00

Musing, I was preparing some very basic historical material on Newcastle University, just a few dates really. However, this got me thinking on some broader issues.

I have begun a series on the University of New England and its contribution to Australia's intellectual tradition. But what about Newcastle?

The roots of this university date back into Australian industrialisation during and after the First World War. This is a university established in a truly industrial centre. How did this affect it?

Like New England, it had an extension and development role in its immediate environment. Professor Renwick and the Hunter Valley Research Foundation are the classic example. But beyond this?

Still on Professor Renwick, school text books can tell us a lot about thought at the time the book was published. Books are linked to curriculum determined by education authorities as well as the author's own views.

Professor Renwick's 1958 book The Economic Pattern An Elementary Text-book for Australian Readers (Longmans Green and Co) was the NSW economics text book for a number of years.

I remember this book. Modern readers would, for example, find its discussion on the institutional role of the union movement strange. It is a snapshot into a different, more polite, Australia.

None of this is very profound. But I would be interested in hearing from readers who can extend the Newcastle story.

The University of New England's contribution to Australia's intellectual tradition - introduction

2007-11-05T20:40:00.000+11:00

Our society is unique among Australian universities in the residential system, and only though your full participation in college, social, club and other activities will you realise completely your part in it.
By all means work - you have enrolled principally for academic reasons, but a university is not merely a degree factory - academic success is not synonymous with education in the fullest sense of the word. We hope you will keep this in mind and join wholeheartedly in extracurricular as well as in academic aspects of university life. Orientation Week Handbook, University of New England, 1963.

Each Australian or New Zealand university has a different tradition. Each has been formed in part through interaction with its immediate world, as well as the broader academic world. Each has contributed in different ways to community life, as well as the development of thought in the two countries.

You can see hints of this on this blog even at this early stage in its evolution. One example is the series on the transmission of ideas and the New Zealand Worker's Educational Association. Part of this story lay in the influence of Canterbury College. Then again, why were the followers of Leavis more successful at Melbourne than in Sydney?

The University of New England has its own particular place in this mix.

At the time of the Orientation Handbook from which this quote was drawn, New England was still the only fully autonomous Australian university outside a capital city. While the University had already pioneered distance education, it was also almost entirely a residential university so far as its full time students were concerned.

The student mix itself was very different. Apart from the relatively large Colombo Plan cohort, nearly all the students were drawn from farms, villages and towns across Northern NSW. For many, this was the first ever family contact with university life. To the University, a core part of its role lay in giving these students access to the academic, intellectual and cultural traditions of the University world.

This was the only University in the country where the majority of students and staff voted Country Party. The students were, by Australian standards, unusually religious - the various Christian groups on campus collectively formed a very major presence.

Yet it was also a very tolerant University with close integration between overseas and local students. With a brief exception when the University of New England New State Society became the largest society in membership terms, the Overseas Students Association with its local affiliate members was the largest student society on campus.

When Russell Ward's appointment to a post at the University of New South Wales was vetoed by its VC on the grounds of his perceived Communist Party affiliations, New England's Council with its strong Country Party connections approved his appointment to a post in history at New England, an irony not lost on Professor Ward.

The University was both international and intensely regional.

International, because many of its staff had overseas qualifications; because they and the University saw the University as part of an international academic tradition; because New England people could already be found in dozens of countries round the world; because the University was already involved in a range of international activities. Intensely regional because the University had been established to serve the people of Northern New South Wales and saw this as a living mission.

In 1963, the University was just entering a period of major change, although this was not recognised at a the time.

Within fifteen years, the emergence of mass University education together with the Vietnam War and the social and economic changes of the 1960s and 1970s, would sweep away some of its special features, including the green gowns that all undergraduates had to wear to lectures and formal functions. Today UNE is very different, but despite all the changes it does still retain some of the special features and traditions of its past.

Against this background, I thought that it might be interesting to explore some of the University's history and traditions. In doing so, I do not intend to write a history of the University. Rather, I want to provide a snap shot of another part of the Australian and New Zealand intellectual tradition.

Posts in this series

11 November 2007, The University of New England's contribution to Australia's intellectual tradition - early threads 1

Sam Goldberg, F R Leavis and English at Sydney University

2007-11-02T19:16:00.000+11:00

Interesting post on Neil Whitfield's blog, Old teachers never die, on Sam Goldberg, Challis Professor of English at Sydney University. The post has links to other posts Neil has written about Professor Goldberg.

An inspiring teacher, Professor Goldberg was part of the Leavisite wave. Whereas this group established a strong base at Melbourne University, Sydney proved more resistant. Neil's post provides an insight into the story.

Anthropology and the Freeman - Mead Controversy

2007-10-24T20:57:00.001+10:00

Photo: Derek Freeman. New Zealand anthropologist. Born August 15, 1916 Wellington New Zealand, died Canberra July 6,2001.

In some of my first posts on this blog I spoke of the influence of New Zealand economists on the global stage. The first post in this series can be found here. In this post I want to look in an initial way at another thread in New Zealand and Australian thought, the role of the anthropologist.

My entry point here is the Freeman/Mead controversy.

By way of background to readers who may not be aware of this, Margaret Mead became perhaps the most famous anthropologist of the twentieth century because of her writings on sexuality among young women in Samoa. Dr Derek Freeman later challenged her conclusions, igniting a global controversy that spread well beyond the discipline of anthropology itself.

Nothing like sex to spark interest!

Without debating the rights or wrongs of the case, the controversy centred on the the relations in anthropology between the observer and the observed in interpreting cultural matters.

Did Mead's informants lie to her? Did she allow her own perceptions and values to affect not just the questions she asked, but the way in which she interpreted the answers? And, in any case, how does the very presence of the anthropologist distort cultural patterns?

Conversely, to what degree were Dr Freeman's observations affected by his own close relations with Samoans now aware of Mead's writings? Did the adoption of Christianity itself lead to another distortion?

These questions are all relevant in an Australian context. As I outlined in a post on the Australian anthropologist Malcolm Calley, Australian anthropologists have been very important in raising interest in indigenous issues when the matter was still being largely ignored by other professions, including historians. This remains true today.

In later posts, I will explore in a little more detail the history of anthropology in both countries.

Our Modern obsession with measurement - the case of publish or perish

2007-10-20T05:40:00.000+10:00

Preamble

I wrote the following post last November (2006) on my personal blog. I am repeating it here because the rise of citation indexes and of the term "publish or perish" is an example of a broader trend in Australian and New Zealand thought, our obsession with measurement.

We can see this obsession across all aspects of life. It appears in public policy in the input/output/outcome model. It appears in terms such as key performance indicators. We can see it in concepts such as performance pay. Then there is our obsession with rankings from school exam results to the BRW top lists.

Now my personal view is that this obsession has become quite pernicious. So how did it arise and spread?

Publish or perish and the rise of the citation index is an interesting case study - another modern term - because it shows the process at work in one area.

The Post

This post was meant to continues my notes to myself on changes in public administration since the war (previous post). However, I have been on some weird and wonderful web searches since then giving me enough material for multiple posts.

I have felt for a long time that the seventies were the tip decade marking the break between the previous long continuity of Australian history and the Australia of the present day. Much of my writing on this blog including the earlier migration and current current confessions of a policy adviser series is concerned in one way or another with tracing this process of change.

While all the evidence so far supports my 7os tip hypothesis, to really make my case I need to trace the pattern of change across different dimensions including changes in the use and meaning of words.

In my last post I spoke of the rise of measurement as an all pervasive mechanism. In this context, one of the things that I was musing about was the changing position of academia, an area that I have known very well over a long period starting as a child in an academic household. This is an area where measurement has become pervasive and indeed arguably even perverse.

To try to provide a measure of this (I, too, like measurement!), one of the first things that I thought of were citation indexes.

In the words of the University of Southern Queensland Library (I do like quoting Australia's universities headquartered in regional areas!):

Citation Indexes are compilations of all the cited references from particular groups of journal articles published during a particular year or group of years. In a citation index, you look up a reference to a work that you know to find journal articles that have cited it, although you can also search by concepts and authors. Cited reference searching is a fast and efficient way of finding journal articles that relate to your research.

Citation indexes can be useful. Again to quote the USQ Library:

While most users think of indexes as merely a means of recovering information, index compilers have long been aware that indexes--especially those for scientific literature--serve a vastly more important and often unstated purpose. That is, they reveal connections between ideas or concepts that were not considered before.

That is true, but as anybody in management knows, what you measure is what you get. So treating citations as a performance measure means that those being measured have an incentive to maximise citation performance. Here I was interested in the history of citation indexes as a way of assessing impact. To quote Thompson Scientific:

While the first proposal for the SCI (Science Citation Index) was made in 1955, it was in the 1960s that ISI (Institute For Scientific Information) applied for and received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a Genetics Citation Index. As a result of this multidisciplinary project, we published the first SCI covering the 1961 literature) in 1963. We then went on to launch a quarterly service that eventually proved successful. Since then we have indexed the literature back to 1945 and now the CD-ROM version of SCI is updated monthly and the online and magnetic tape versions are updated weekly.
In 1973, we made SSCIÂ® available. It now covers the social sciences literature back to 1956. The index deals with topics such as anthropology, economics, sociology, educational research, and information sciences among other fields. A&HCIÂ® was introduced in 1978. A&HCI provides access to disciplines as varied as archaeology, linguistics, philosophy, musicology, literature, and others in the arts and humanities.
Advances in modes of access have also been made over the years. In 1974, the SCI became one of the first large-scale databases available online via DIALOG. Other ISI databases followed. In 1988, SCI (and later SSCI and A&HCI) became available on CD-ROM. This new technology and increased data storage capabilities enabled us to implement a variety of access and browse features unique to our citation-based searching. Enhancing the power of citation searching through bibliographic coupling, you can navigate the literature by exploring papers that share one or more references.

If we look at this history, we can see that the rise of the citation index paralleled the rise of interest in measurement, going on-line in the seventies as the new computing and communications technologies became available.

By the time I became CEO of the Royal Australian (now Australian and New Zealand) College of Ophthalmologists (RANZCO) at the end of 1997 the citation system was very well entrenched.

At the time we were worried that the College's scientific journal, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Ophthalmology, was dropping down the citation list. The journal really needed to be in the top ten globally to attract the required level of scientific and clinical articles, so under the leadership of the editorial team the journal was renamed Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology and effectively relaunched to achieve the required citation level.

This material does provide a guide as to the history of citation indexes and some indication as to their impact, but more is required. So I decided to look at the term publish or perish, now a very common term in academia.

While I found many references, it proved very hard to trace the origin of the term. The only on-line dictionary reference I could find (Source) suggested a mid nineties date. I knew that this could not be right because I was using the term in the eighties, so I continued searching. Finally I found an article by Eugene Garfield, What Is The Primordial Reference For The Phrase' Publish Or Perish'? (The Scientist, Vol:10, #12, p.11 , June 10, 1996.)

Eugene's work traced the term to at least a 1942 book by Logan Wilson with the same connotations as today. So the term has been around for a while at least in the US. But we can also be reasonably sure of is that the term was not common in the sixties since I did not hear reference to it, but was being referred to in the eighties. So like citation indexes, its rise does parallel the rise of the measurement movement.

Andrew Carnegie, Autodidacts and Australia's public library system - yet another peg in the sand

2007-10-18T17:32:00.001+10:00

Yet another peg in the sand.

In an earlier short post Rafe referred to the Mechanics Institutes. Today we take our public library system for granted. Yet their existence owes much to two autodidacts, self taught men.

One made his money from the establishment of US Steel. The second was a farm labourer turned who became arguably the most influential Australian education minister of the twentieth century. Both were obsessed with the importance of education. In combination, they played a major role in the creation of Australia's public libraries.

More later.

From deserts the prophets come - another peg in the sand

2007-10-13T19:13:00.001+10:00

This line from A D Hope is also the title of a 1972 book by Professor Geoffrey Searle.

I have a strong feeling at the moment that we (in this case Australia) is in the process of creating another and in this case very English myth, the influence of the desert. Not the outback, the desert.

I have no problems with myths, but in this case I thought that it might be interesting to explore the real role of the desert as such in the evolution of Australian thought. Hence this peg in the sand for later use.

History of Science and Technology in Australia - a note

2007-10-10T05:18:00.000+10:00

As a thought break after writing the posts on the New Zealand WEA and the transmission of ideas (here 1, here 2, here 3), I was musing over some of the ideas raised in Rafe's post on science in Australia and the supporting links.

First, a resource. As part of the burst of historical writing associated with the Bicentenary, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering produced a very useful condensed history of technology in Australia. I mention this because I find this type of general history very useful in providing background on particular topics in Australian history.

Take transport as an example.

Subtitled "How distance shaped Australia's history", Geoffrey Blainey's The Tyranny of Distance (21st century edition, Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney 2001) explores the ways in which Australia's vast distances have shaped our history and thought.

We all live in a prison whose walls are set by our experience and the time in which we live. These walls stand between us and an effective understanding of past times. We know this, but we do not always understand it. Checking basic facts about things such as technological change in particular areas can be critical.

One key fact linked to the development and spread of knowledge about science and technology in the Australasian colonies is simply transport time and costs.

There is, I think, still a common assumption that this limited transmission of ideas. As we saw in my discussion on the New Zealand WEA, this was far from true. But the transmission mechanisms were different.

Ideas spread throughout the Empire and beyond quite quickly. Mail - books, letters and journals - was central. Yes, there were lags, but these were less critical than we might think today. Further, because the volume of printed material was so much less, that which was produced was read and argued about in a way that rarely happens today.

Here I remember my father towards the end of his academic career saying that in some ways he felt sorry for modern economics students. Compared to his student days including his PhD studies at Manchester, they had far more to read, many more topics to study, less time to think. The position is worse today, leading to a crowding out effect in which ideas and depth can get lost in information static.

There is another factor here, the role of the academic gatekeeper.

In his material Rafe questioned why certain scholars were less influential than they deserved to be. As I see it, the modern academic system has become very rigid. This is of course a statement of opinion. But let me tease it out a little because it bears upon changes in the way Australians and New Zealanders now think.

There have always been intellectual gatekeepers. However, I think that their influence has increased in the sense that it is arguably harder for the outsider to break in.

This influence comes along several dimensions. One is simply influence on what is studied and why, something that has become more important in this crowded, specialised, age. A second lies in the academic selection process itself, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement - number of articles, citations and patents. A third lies in the vocational and the applied.

All this can make it harder for new ideas, the unorthodox, to break in.

Returning to travel and travel times, longer travel times did make certain types of interaction harder. I was reminded of this a while ago when I looking at the history of the Royal Australian (now Australian and New Zealand) College of Ophthalmologists. It took a long time to emerge as a national body, in part because travel time and costs did act as a real impediment. But this travel problem was not all negative.

Today people jet in and out. Then fewer travelled, but those who did travelled for much longer periods. So personal interaction was harder, but also tended to be longer and more intense when it did occur.

We can see this in the case of the global travel patterns of Canterbury College graduates. The global influence of that College especially in economics and anthropology dwarfs, I think, anything that can be offered by today's Gang of Eight.

As I said, musings. A stake in the ground for later discussion.

Transmission of ideas and the New Zealand Workers Educational Association 3

2007-10-04T05:14:00.000+10:00

Photo: Walking on White Hot Stones. New Zealand International Exhibition 1906-1907, Christchurch. This may seem an odd photo to illustrate this article. However, it does link to a theme later in this post, the involvement of New Zealand academics with Pacific issues. From the seventies and especially the eighties, Australia was blinded to the Pacific by our focus on Asia. New Zealand remained a Pacific country.

This post concludes my brief discussion on the transmission of ideas, using the New Zealand WEA and some of those associated with it as an entry point.

In this post I want to extend my analysis, first tracking back into the story to introduce some new people and issues, then tracking forward to look at international issues. To avoid overloading with hyperlinks, references are included at the end of the post.

In the earlier posts I suggested that education at all levels appeared far more advanced and accessible in New Zealand in the early years of the twentieth century than in Australia. I think that this is important because it helps explain why New Zealand with its small population relative to Australia had such a disproportionate influence in areas such as economics.

I made some preliminary comments here in my first post. I now want to amplify these a little.

In 1906 Australia's population was around 4 million, that of NSW around 1.5 million, that of Northern NSW - the area later defined by the Nicholas Royal Commission as suitable for statehood - around 400,000. I have included Northern NSW for comparative purposes because it is a major sub-state area with its own history and is also the location of the first Australian moves into decentralisation of higher education.

In 1906, the total population of New Zealand including the Maori was 936,309. I do not have population figures for Canterbury as a whole. However, in 1906 the population of Christchurch and its immediate environs was 67,878.

Canterbury College was established in 1873, the second university institution in New Zealand. By the end of the First world War Canterbury with its relatively small population was serviced by an extensive school system, a university and a teachers college. Some measure of distance education was already available, with the growing WEA providing an adult education network.

In NSW by contrast, there was one university plus one teachers' college servicing 1.5 million people. Northern NSW with its 400,000 people lacked any higher educational institutions.

The Armidale Teachers College would not be established until 1928, the New England University College in 1938. Both were the first higher educational institutions in New England and the first non-metro institutions in Australia. In adult education, the mechanics institutes and equivalents described by Rafe in his post provided a limited and fragmented service compared to the WEA in New Zealand. There were technical colleges, but their scope was limited, especially outside the capital cities.

This is not a comparative history of education in both countries. My point is that in those days the universities and the cultural institutions that clustered around them were arguably far more important than today in the development and transmission of ideas. We can see this in Christchurch.

In some ways, Christchurch in the first part was a very English and Empire city. Yet according to the Christchurch city library web site, in the 1890s and early 1900s, the city was "buzzing with new ideas, full of radicals, reformers and eccentrics". It became a Liberal stronghold in 1890 and remained so for the next 20 years. Fabian socialist and architect of many of the Liberals’ social reforms, William Pember Reeves was a Christchurch member of parliament.

Christchurch was also been the cradle of the temperance and suffrage movements, the home of leading suffragists Katherine Wilson Sheppard and Ada Wells, as well as their parliamentary advocate, John Hall. It was the home of the trade union movement and of artisan radicalism, led by men like Thomas Edward Taylor, another Christchurch member of parliament who would later become mayor.

In all this mix, Professor James Hight (1870-1958) found a solid and permanent home.

Born at Halswell near Christchurch where his father was a farm labourer who then acquired his own small farm, James Hight completed his teacher training at the teachers' college, then went to Canterbury College on an English Exhibition. Among his fellow students at the time was Ernest Rutherford who would later be described as the father of nuclear physics.

After a period teaching in Auckland, Hight was appointed lecturer in political economy and constitutional history at Canterbury College in 1901 and with the exception of one year on exchange, remained there for the rest of his working life.

In 1908 Hight was appointed to the new chair of history and economics. When the chair was divided in 1919, he became professor of history and political science with John Condliffe taking the new economics chair.

Professor Hight was obviously an influential teacher. I have already mentioned his influence on Professor Condliffe who in turn influenced Horace Belshaw. These were not the only cases.

Sir Douglas Copland was one of the best known and most influential Australian economists of the first half of the twentieth century. While he is best known for his Australian work, he was in fact a New Zealand whose earlylife displayed the pattern we have already seen in Hight, Condliffe and Horace Belshaw.

According to biographical notes prepared by the Australian National Library, Copland was born on 24 February 1894 at Otaio, between Timaru and Waimate in the Canterbury Plains, one of sixteen children of Alexander and Annie Copland, wheat farmers from Scotland.

From 1899 to 1906 Copland attended Esk Valley Primary School and spent the next six years at the Waimate District High School. He then studied teaching at the Christchurch Teachers' College, before gaining Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees at Canterbury College.

By the time he left New Zealand in 1917 to take a position as lecturer in history and economics at the University of Tasmania, Copland had taught at his old high school and at Christchurch Boys' High School. In addition, he also tutored for the Workers' Educational Association and worked as a Compiler in the Census and Statistics Office of the Department of Internal Affairs.

Copland's love of teaching and fascination with economics stems from these years - in particular from his work on his father's wheat farm and the research for his M.A. thesis, 'The progress and importance of wheat production in New Zealand'.

We can see in fact see the same pattern in my own father, Professor James Belshaw, although because he was younger than Horace the institutions were different.

Born in Canterbury in 1908, he too followed a path through teachers' college into university. In his case he was involved with the WEA in Auckland, completed two masters degree in history and economics by distance education while teaching at a small one teacher school outside Auckland, and then followed in the footsteps of Condliffe and brother Horace to England to complete his PHD.

Under the terms of the scholarship, he had his choice of university and could have chose, like Condliffe and Horace Belshaw, to study at Cambridge. However, because Horace had studied at Cambridge, James Belshaw chose Manchester.

After completing his PhD, James Belshaw worked briefly in the League of Nations and with the New Zealand Department of Labour before accepting in 1938 the foundation lectureship in history and economics at the newly established New England University College. There, like Hight, he settled in, later becoming foundation professor of economics when New England gained full autonomy.

Copland's departure for Australia in 1917, my father's in 1938, is a sign of another feature of these earlier New Zealand economists. New Zealand could train them, but was too small to retain them. However, in their moves around the world they carried the New Zealand influence with them, making major contributions to academic and public life.

We can again see this by looking at briefly at the patterns in their later life.

About 1925 Condliffe, still professor of economics at Canterbury college, was a member of the New Zealand delegation to the first conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations. In 1926 he accepted the newly created position of research secretary for the IPR, travelling extensively in Asia. Then in 1931 he was invited to join the economic secretariat of the League of Nations, writing its first World Economic Survey.

Condliffe was now part of an eminent group of economists who were to shape international discussion on trade, monetary order and economic policy in the three decades after 1935, arguing that continued expansion of world trade was a necessary condition for world peace and prosperity.

In 1939 Condliffe accepted a professorship in economics at the University of California, Berkley. While California would now remain his base, he retained his New Zealand connections. His later New Zealand focused publications included The welfare state in New Zealand , a revision of New Zealand in the making, a book on the New Zealand economy and a biography of his friend Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck).

Many of the same patterns can be found in Horace Belshaw's later life, although his New Zealand focus was stronger.

Described by Frank Holmes in his NZDB article as New Zealand's most notable applied economist of his generation, Horace Belshaw was concerned that economics should be used to solve social, economic and public policy problems.

After returning from Cambridge to accept the chair of economics at Auckland in in 1928, and like Hight and Condliffe before him, he encouraged his students to examine current New Zealand issues and their wider social implications. He also remained active in the WEA, organising and directing several of the first WEA summer schools.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Horace Belshaw wrote extensively on the economic position of New Zealand farmers, their increasing indebtedness and possible reforms to the system of land tenure and credit, including the need for a central bank. In 1936 he directed a research project that culminated in what Frank Holmes has described as the encyclopedic publication Agricultural Organisation in New Zealand.

The depression hit New Zealand hard. In 1932 Horace Belshaw, along with professors Copeland, Hight and Albert Tocker, was appointed by the government to an economic committee to advise on measures to deal with the depression. Then in 1934 he accepted a position as economic adviser to the the mister of finance, Gordon Coates. This proved short lived, with the Labour Party winning the 1935 election.

In the late 1930s he became actively involved in moves for Maori improvement. He addition to discussing measures that would allow Maori to be self-supporting on their own lands, he argued for a generous approach to education, health and housing assistance for those forced to move to the cities. In 1939 he organised and chaired a successful conference of young Maori leaders.

In 1944 Horace followed in John Condliffe's footsteps to become research secretary to the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and then in 1946 to California as professor of agricultural economics at the Davis campus of the University of California. His growing interest in rural welfare and agrarian reform in developing countries led to his appointment in 1948 as director of the Agriculture Division of the Rural Welfare Branch of the FAO.

When the headquarters of the shifted to Rome in 1951, he returned to New Zealand as professor of economics at Victoria University College, Wellington, maintaining his interest in Pacific and development issues.

Now here I want to pause in what might otherwise become a boring chronology to draw out a few threads that I found interesting, in so doing bringing this excessively long post to a conclusion.

The first is the interest in and involvement with the Maori and, more broadly, the Pacific among many New Zealand academics. This appears much stronger and more focused than the Australian equivalent. The second is the focus on agricultural and development economics and the role of applied economics in meeting community needs. The third is the way in which ideas and intellectual interests carried across space and time.

A few closing examples to illustrate these threads.

In Horace Belshaw's case, the interests created by his own background combined with the influence of Hight and Condliffe created a thread that ran through the family.

His brother in law, Vic Fisher who met his wife to be through the WEA, became curator of anthropology at the Auckland museum. One son, Cyril, became a world famous anthropologist specialising in the Pacific. A second son, Michael, also became an anthropologist, although he is probably best known in the US because of his work with wolves.

My father carried the interest in adult extension and in economic development through to his work.

There is, for example, a direct connection between the story that began in Canterbury all those years ago and the later establishment of agricultural economics as a major discipline at the University of New England. There is also a direct connection between the extension work and the community involvement that marked the early days of the New England College and the extension work and WEA model developed in Christchurch.

One could even argue that this blog itself is a direct lineal descendent of those early days!

Introductory post in series. Previous post.

References

Belshaw, James. "Decentralisation, Development and Decent Government: the Life and Times of David Henry Drummond, 1890-1941", PhD thesis, University of New England 1983. Material on the history of education in Australia is drawn from here.

Christchurch City Libraries, Christchurch 1906-1907

Fleming, Grant. 'Condliffe, John Bell 1891 - 1981'. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007 URL: http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/

National Library of Australia, Guide to the Papers of Sir Douglas Copland, provided biographical material on Sir Douglas Copeland.

Holmes, Frank. 'Belshaw, Horace 1898 - 1962'. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007 URL: http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/

Phillips, N. C. 'Hight, James 1870 - 1958'. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007URL: http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/

Neil Whitfield's Friday Poem - Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells

2007-10-02T05:35:00.000+10:00

I little while back Neil Whitfield and I were having a discussion about the "decline"/decline - the inverted commas are Neil's, the absence of them mine - in Australian literature. For those who are interested, you can find an entry point here.

One great outcome from my perspective was that Neil started a Friday Australian poem series. In response, I started writing a companion piece.

Last Friday, Neil took Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells. This is one of Australia's most famous poems. Do read it out loud.

Now this was actually a slightly difficult poem from my perspective. I first came across it at school and found it difficult. So it was many years since I had actually read it.

What to say that might be helpful?

To answer this, I started digging into the people, and especially the writers, who surrounded Kenneth Slessor, looking at the links and ideas.

I hope to write this up properly. In the meantime, a question.

One of the things that I am interested in is the differences in thought across Australia. Australia has never been a single uniform country.

In this context, why did so many Melbourne writers come (or seem to come) to Sydney in the period before the second world war? What was there about Melbourne life and society that caused this apparent shift?

Science in Australia

2007-09-28T17:17:00.000+10:00

Following the theme of education and learning in the Antipodes, here are some comments on several Australian books about science and scientists. This is a review of a book of essays about the early development of science in Australia. These essays convey the impression of immense energy and industry. Clearly many people were hard at work in the archives preparing the way for future research programmes in the history of local science and technology. The book itself is a handsome and high quality production, combining some of the bulk and sheen of the coffee table volume with the compendious footnotes of the doctoral dissertation. The notes average a hundred per paper, making this book an excellent starting point for further reading.

This review describes a book written by a physicist on the wonders of science and its relevance to culture and religion. As the director of an observatory at Narrabri (NSW), and host at hundreds of half-hour tours, the author wrote:

To me it was profoundly unsatisfactory to send people away from this beautiful, highly sophisticated, and yet apparently useless instrument, surrounded as it was by thousands of sheep and a vast expanse of wheat, without having shown them that it was really part of an even greater world of which most of them were unaware, the ancient and invisible college of science.

This is the third book that he produced to make up for the lack of time on the tours. It is very clearly written and one has the feeling of a truly devoted and humane scholar speaking courteously and unpatronisingly as he presumably did with his visitors at Narrabri.

This book titled Life Among the Scientists is a more ambitious academic undertaking. Four researchers in the history and philosophy of science spent some time (spread over five years) talking to researchers at the Walter and Eliza Hall Research Institute in Melbourne. The idea was to challenge received views about the way science works. I think they did not succeed in their larger purpose but I hope they had a lot of fun.

The main purpose of the enterprise is to challenge received views of philosophy and methodology of science, but the writers have not engaged at all with the most robust and fruitful body of ideas in the field. This is a striking example of the phenomenon they describe as 'socially structured forgetting' or 'structural amnesia' (p 101). They have neatly excised Karl Popper and the whole tradition of evolutionary pistemology from their account of the philosophy and methods of science. But Popper's work surely represents either the orthodox view of scientific method (as accepted by a number of eminent scientists who took their philosophy seriously such as Medawar, Eccles, Monod and Einstein), or a formidable rival to the traditional form of Baconian induction, still championed by David Stove.

Transmission of ideas and the New Zealand Workers Educational Association 2

2007-09-28T14:05:00.000+10:00

Photo: Professor Horace Belshaw.

This short series focuses on the transmission of ideas, using the New Zealand WEA and those associated with it as an entry point.

I left my first post hanging at the point where Professor Condliffe studied in the UK, in so doing coming in contact with John Maynard Keynes, among others. Here I drew out the point made by the NZDB article on Professor Condliffe that contact with leading British economists, especially Keynes, reinforced Professor Hight's early teaching that economics should be used for solving economic and social problems.

This, to my mind, draws out another important thread in the history of thought in both Australia and New Zealand, the changing way in which economists have seen their role. These early economists were influential in a way that their modern colleagues can only marvel at.

In 1920 Condliffe returned to New Zealand as professor of economics at Canterbury College. He initiated research into the New Zealand economy, and in collaboration with several students, notably Horace Belshaw, published seminal work on the agricultural sector and trade cycles.

I mentioned my uncle in my first post.

Horace Belshaw was born in Wigan, Lancashire, England, on 9 February 1898, so he was some seven years younger than Professor Condliffe.

Horace's parents migrated to New Zealand in 1906. He matriculated from Christchurch Boys' High School at 15, and went pupil-teaching at his old primary school until he was old enough, at 17, to go to training college. Brief periods as an agricultural instructor and in military service in New Zealand were followed by secondary school teaching in Ashburton. His university study was all done extramurally through Canterbury College; he focused first on geology, but switched to economics under the influence of James Shelley and J. B. Condliffe.

In 1921 Horace Belshaw was awarded an MA with first-class honours for a thesis on the dairy industry. Canterbury College appointed him a tutorial class lecturer in economics, first on the West Coast and then in Timaru.

Family tradition records this as a WEA tutorship. However, there is probably no conflict here because of the close links between Professor Condliffe and the WEA. I suspect that it was both.

There is a striking difference with Australia of the same period. I know of no Australian university or adult education mechanism mounting the same type of sustained remote area adult education

In 1924 Horace Belshaw received an award to study at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. There J. M. Keynes brought him into the vigorous discussions of the Political Economy Club. Family tradition has it that Keynes described him as the brightest student ever to come to Cambridge from the Dominions!

Linking this to my theme about the transmission of ideas, there is (I think) a modern pre-conception about the remoteness of Australia and New Zealand in this period. By implication, both countries were cut-off from trends in western thought. This is, in fact, far from clear. If we look at Horace Belshaw, we can see how his links with Professor Condliff gave him access to economic thought that was at the leading global edge of the time.

At Cambridge, Horace completed his doctorate on agricultural fluctuations and published an important article based on it in 1926. His ability was recognised by appointment to a temporary lectureship at Cambridge in 1926--27 and then, at the age of 29, to the foundation chair of economics at Auckland University College.

Returning to Professor Condliff, he published A short history of New Zealand in 1925. In addition he completed doctoral research on industrial organisation in the Far East and was awarded his DSc in 1927. He also completed most of his research for New Zealand in the making (1930), one of the first economic histories of the country.

I will return to this story at a later point, tracing out (among other things) some of the contributions that New Zealand academics have made to the development of global studies in development economics.

First post in the series. Next post.

References

Holmes, Frank. 'Belshaw, Horace 1898 - 1962'. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007 URL: http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/

Fleming, Grant. 'Condliffe, John Bell 1891 - 1981'. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007 URL: http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/

The Mechanics Institutes in Australia

2007-09-27T21:43:00.000+10:00

Following Jim's piece on the WEA in New Zealand it might be interesting to check out this post that I wrote a year or two ago on the Mechanics Institutes of Australia, a very similar kind of adult education movement. (A couple of the links are dead).

Possibly the Scottish presence in NZ contributed to the enthusiasm for education!

Transmission of ideas and the New Zealand Workers Educational Association

2007-09-27T18:13:00.000+10:00

Photo: John Bell Condliffe, 1891 - 1981, New Zealand Dictionary of Biography.

I thought it appropriate in this, my first substantive post on this blog, to start with a New Zealand story, one that links two of my interests.

The first is the mechanisms, the channels, through which ideas are transmitted, a process that changes their form.

The second is the reason why such a small country as New Zealand generated so many international academics in fields such as economics and anthropology.

These two are linked. Part of the link lies in the nature of educational development in New Zealand. Part lies in the the New Zealand Branch of the Workers Educational Association.

The comments that follow are personal and do not pretend to be definitive or even rigorous. They are personal impressions, marking a starting point for further discussion.

Growing up in an academic family in New England with New Zealand connections, I knew about the WEA.

My father had been an active member of the WEA. His sister and Vic Fisher, her husband to be, had met at a WEA camp in Auckland. My Uncle Horace had been persuaded by Professor Condliffe to give up a secure position as a school teacher, something that distressed his parents to become a WEA tutor in Westland, the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island.

Professor Condliffe was actually born at Footscray in Melbourne 0n 23 December 1981, moving to New Zealand with his family in 1904. At the age of 16 Condliffe took up a cadetship with the Customs Department in Christchurch, but continued to study part time at Canterbury College.

Now here it is helpful to look at some basic demographics.

In 1907, New Zealand's population was less than a million. New South Wales, by contrast, had a population of between 1.5 and 1.6 million of which something under 39 per cent lived in Sydney.

NSW had just one teacher's college and one university, both located in Sydney. New Zealand, by contrast, already had a number of teacher's colleges and universities spread across the country. It was simply much easier to get educated in New Zealand.

Further, and I am not sure when this began, New Zealand had distance education years before Australia. By the early 1930s, my father as a teacher at a one teacher school did two Master's degrees by distance education, with books coming by train north from Auckland.

During his undergraduate years John Condliffe first met James Hight, the professor of constitutional history and political economy. Hight encouraged Condliffe to study economics, and in 1915 he graduated MA in economics and won a senior university prize. His thesis, published that year in the New Zealand Official Year-book , was the first systematic account of New Zealand's economic history using trade statistics.

The war years were eventful for Condliffe. He was actively involved with Hight in the establishment of the WEA in Christchurch and began the first economics course by lecturing on his thesis topic. During the early years of the WEA in Christchurch and Wellington, he tutored many future Labour leaders: Walter Nash, Peter Fraser, Tim Armstrong, Ted Howard and Harry Holland.

The WEA seems to have filled a real gap in a way not seen in Australia, satisfying a thirst for adult education. So it became a mechanism for the transmission of information and ideas.

In 1915 Condliffe was transferred to the Census and Statistics Office in Wellington as part of an experiment to bring economists into the public service. Now I found this interesting. It would be many years, I think, before Australia had any equivalent.

In 1916 Condliffe was enticed back to Canterbury to a lectureship in economics under Hight, and for the next year he taught a variety of courses: statistics, economic geography, constitutional history, economic theory and economic history, as well as WEA classes.

After a period of war service, in 1919 Condliffe was awarded the Sir Thomas Gresham scholarship at Cambridge University. This was Condliffe's first real taste of university life and it impressed him greatly. Contact with leading British economists, especially J. M. Keynes, reinforced Hight's early teaching that economics should be used for solving economic and social problems.

Here I would add one point to the story drawn from the New Zealand Dictionary of Biography. Scholarships were a key mechanism by which those in the dominions - and they seem to have been especially important in New Zealand - were drawn into broader intellectual life.

At this point I will stop this story and this post, coming back to Professor Condliffe's story in a later post.

Next post in series.

References

Fleming, Grant. 'Condliffe, John Bell 1891 - 1981'. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007 URL: http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/

For a history of the WEA in New Zealand see.

Statistical data is drawn from various web searches.

History of Australian and New Zealand Thought - update

2007-09-26T20:23:00.000+10:00

I have let this blog sit with just an initial post to see if there was any interest in participating. I now have one volunteer, so that makes it worth while proceeding on an experimental basis.

In discussion, Rafe and I have agreed that the blog should be more correctly called the History of Australian and New Zealand Thought because of the linkages between the two countries. Both are also very different, but those differences also help highlight the linkages and similarities between the two.

The next step is to work out a statement of blog directions and policy. Our feeling is that we need an open pluralist blog to allow for different perspectives.

I will post some more ideas later. In the meantime, we are still looking for further volunteer contributors and welcome all ideas and suggestions.

History of Australian Thought - call for volunteers

2007-08-25T20:55:00.000+10:00

I have been writing a number of posts about the development of intellectual life in Australia. Yet when I come to search I find very few entries about the history of Australian thought. One could be forgiven for concluding that Australians do not think!

In this context, I have created this blog and put this entry up as a test. Are there others out there who are interested in the way Australian thought has evolved and who would like to join with me in promoting the topic?

I need another blog like I need a hole in the head. But if I had some co-editors and writers then we might be able to do something.

I do not care what your views are. The only requirements are an interest in the topic together with a willingness to respect alternative views. If you would like to contact me, please do so on ndarala(at)optusnet(dot)com(dot)au.