Don Aitkin's What was it all for?

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.    

Follow The Sun - Aussie travel posters from 1930 - 1950

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

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

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

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

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.

What makes a writer - or artist - a local?

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 Australian and New Zealand Thought - 2008 directions

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

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

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

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.

A Note on the Orr Case

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

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!

Philosophy at Melbourne University

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.

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

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

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

Anthropology and the Freeman - Mead Controversy

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

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 SSCI® 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&HCI® 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

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

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.