Research School of Humanities
ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
Collective Biography Conference
National Library of Australia, Canberra
8-10 September
Conveners: Paul Pickering (ANU) and Jane Shaw (Oxford)
Paul Pickering is a Senior Fellow and Convener of Graduate Studies at the Research
School of Humanities, ANU. Prior to taking up this post he was a Queen Elizabeth II
Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre (2000-4). He was the Convener of Graduate
Studies in History at the Australian National University (2002-6). Paul has published
extensively on Australian, British and Irish social, political and cultural history. His
publications include Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (MacMillan
1995); The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (Leicester 2000) (with
Alex Tyrrell); and Friends of the People: Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists
(Merlin 2003) (with Owen Ashton); Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and
Popular Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Ashgate 2004) (co-editor with Alex Tyrell).
His latest book is Feargus O’Connor: A Political Life (Merlin 2008).
Jane Shaw is Dean of Divinity and Fellow of New College, Oxford, and Reader in Church
History, teaching in both the history and theology faculties in the University, and was
Director of Graduate Studies for the Theology Faculty (2006 – 2008). She was educated
at Oxford, Harvard and U. C. Berkeley. She is currently completing a collective biography
of an early twentieth-century, heterodox religious community, based in Bedford in
England, which she discovered (along with its remarkable archive) in 2001. She co-directs
a research project at Oxford on modern prophecy movements, and her publications
include Miracles in Enlightenment England (Yale UP 2006) and Culture and the
Nonconformist Tradition (co-edited with Alan Kreider, University of Wales Press, 1999).
She was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at ANU in 2006, when she
and Paul had the idea for this conference. She has also held visiting appointments at the
Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University,
Trinity College at the University of Melbourne, and next year she will be Visiting Professor
in History at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Monday 8 September 2008
Session 1: Plenary Opening
Andrew Sayers and Sarah Engledow (National Portrait Gallery, Canberra)
The National Portrait Gallery
A feature of collective biographies – such as our own magnificent Australian Dictionary of
Biography – is that the lives therein are outlined in relatively homogeneous fashion. First
will come the place of birth; near the end will come the death; the entry will close with an
indication of where portraits and papers of the person described are held. All subjects who
fit the criteria for inclusion can be included, providing researchers can be dragooned to
write their entries. The person consulting the Australian Dictionary of Biography typically
pulls the book down with a pointed purpose: to find out, in the first instance, about the life
of one specific individual.
The visitor to the National Portrait Gallery stands in the midst of a collective biography
whose ‘entries’ are anything but homogeneous, and whose subjects are included partly by
strategy and partly through contingency: they are only there if there is a good portrait
available to the Gallery. Let her turn full circle and our visitor will be presented with lives in
the form of paintings, photographs, sculptures, holograms, tapestries and films. Research
has shown that people who do not usually visit art galleries will instinctively search out, in
a gallery, a work that they have seen before. This is, in itself, a matter of biography; it is
dependent on the life the visitor has lived. In a portrait gallery, people will search out a
sitter they can identify, and here, the first step is made toward incorporation of the visitor
herself into the collective biography on offer.
The visitor will experience the satisfaction of correct identification, the pleasure of
elucidation, the shock of recognition, or the rueful obligation to acknowledge her own
inattentiveness at school. In these accreting biographical exchanges, which will chock into
the visitor’s own life story at different points, the meaning of the portraits is conceived only
in part through a series of intellectual operations; it is relived, taken up again, as a
message that is at once old and forever renewed (to paraphrase Genette). The Portrait
Gallery visitor’s life is reviewed, assessed and transformed in the viewing; she becomes,
for the duration of the visit, the pivotal entry in the biographical collective displayed. The
life disclosed, in no prescribed sequence, is her own.
Andrew Sayers is Director of the National Portrait Gallery, a post he has held since
April 1998. Before that, he worked at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the
Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Australia. He has
published in: Drawing in Australia, 1989, Sidney Nolan: The Ned Kelly Story, 1994,
Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century and the Australian Art volume in the
Oxford History of Art. His principal exhibitions include New Worlds from Old: 19th
Century Australian and American Landscapes, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth
Century, Sidney Nolan: The Ned Kelly Story and (with Dr Sarah Engledow) The
World of Thea Proctor.
Sarah Engledow has been the historian at the National Portrait Gallery since 1999.
Over that period she has written the text that accompanies works on display in the
gallery, and the proposals for acquisition of works for the consideration of the
Gallery's Board of Directors. She curated the exhibitions Australia and the Nobel
Prize and The World of Thea Proctor and is curating the inaugural exhibition at the
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new Gallery, Open Air: Portraits and landscapes with Andrew Sayers. She has
recently written the long-awaited Companion to the collection of the National Portrait
Gallery, a selection of 187 of its portraits accompanied by stories of the people and
artists involved.
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Session 2: Collective Biographies of Institutions
Megan Martin (Caroline Simpson Library and Research Collection, Historic Trust Houses
of New South Wales)
The Sydney Mint Circle 1854-1870
This paper will present a collective biography of the founding establishment of the Sydney
Branch of the Royal Mint, the group of fifteen or so civilian employees and the detachment
of fifteen or so Royal Snappers and Miners, who arrived in Sydney in 1854, to build and
operate this first branch of the Royal Mint to be established outside England. This paper
will argue that the lens of collective biography enables us to understand that in the 1850s
and 1860s the Sydney Mint, through the training and talents of particular members of its
staff and through the spirit of experimentation and enquiry cultivated within the Mint
establishment, made a significant contribution to the strengthening of the status of science
in colonial society through its greater institutionalization. In exploring this idea the paper
will also suggest that a collective biography of the Sydney Mint establishment offers some
balance to past historiographical treatments of William Stanley Jevons (1835 – 1882),
perhaps the single most famous individual associated with the Mint in the 19th century. In
part this balance is achieved through an exploration of the achievements of some other
bright young men who formed part of Jevons’s circle at the Mint: the senior assayer
Frances Bowyer Miller (1828 – 1887), the chemist Robert Hunt (1830 – 1892), and the
clerk turned assayer and popular science lecturer Henry Augustus Severn (1833 – 1883).
In part it is achieved through a critical re-reading of some of Jevons’ own letters and
diaries, usually taken at face value by Jevons’ scholars, including a critical re-assessment
of his judgment and characterization of Captain Edward Wolstenholme Ward (1823 –
1890), first Deputy Master of the Sydney Mint. At the very least, a collective biography,
including reference to the wives and families of the Mint men, enables us to understand
how Jevons, famously dubbed the “unsociable sociologist” by Graeme Davison, was able
to describe himself as “passably social” by the time he left Sydney in 1859. This paper will
make some reference to the evidence of the social life of the Mint circle provided in the
remarkable Jevons’ photograph albums held in the John Rylands University Library of
Manchester.
Megan Martin is Head of the Caroline Simpson Library and Research Collection at
the Historic Houses Trust of NSW, the head office of which is located in the former
Sydney Branch of the Royal Mint in Macquarie Street Sydney. She has been a
member of the Management Committee of the History Council of NSW since its
formation in 1996 and is an external member of the Faculty Advisory Committee of
the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology
Sydney. She has worked as a consultant historian in the heritage field and co-curated
an exhibition, Augusto Lorenzini: Italian Artist Decorator in Victorian Sydney at
Elizabeth Bay House in 2001. She has contributed to the Australian Dictionary of
Biography and other publications include Settlers and Convicts of the Bellona 1793: a
biographical dictionary (1992) and short lives for Australian Art Pottery 1900 - 1950
(2004).
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Juliet Flesch (University of Melbourne)
Spanning the Centuries: a history of AE Smith & Son Pty Ltd
For over a hundred years, the firm of AE Smith & Son was in the hands of a single
person, passing from father to son for three generations. From its beginnings as a oneman plumbing business in 1898, it grew to become one of the largest privately-owned
building and mechanical services contractors in Australia with construction, maintenance
and engineering facilities across Australia and New Zealand. The history of this firm
provides insights into the changing built environment of Australia as AE Smith & Son put
their mark on stately homes and gardens, modest suburban houses, towering City
apartment blocks, prisons, shopping centres, hospitals, hotels and many other buildings
across the country.
The industrial environment within which AE Smith worked changed beyond recognition in
a century. Albert (1871-1923), Bert (1900-1964) and Barry Smith (1934-2006) were men
of strong and different personalities and training, who prided themselves on maintaining a
family tradition of decent employment and intense loyalty to the company, in an industrial
climate which saw the establishment of the Plumbers’ Union, the rise and fall of the
Builders’ Labourers’ Federation, and several booms and slumps.
Writing Spanning the Centuries involved telling the story of several families, including, as
well as the three men who owned the company, some of the other men and women, who
stayed with them for anything up to fifty years. The Smith men were involved in trade
teaching as well as the establishment of employer organisations. Their role in the teaching
of plumbing at Swinburne Technical School and the establishment of the Master
Plumbers’ Association was critical to the development of the building trades in Victoria.
My paper will examine some of the challenges of writing a commissioned history of this
firm – from problems of lack of archival evidence to problems of personal, industrial and
commercial sensitivities.
Juliet Flesch, formerly a librarian, is a Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at
the University of Melbourne, where she has worked as a librarian and Research
Assistant. From Australia with Love is based on her 2002 PhD thesis. Her other
publications include: Love Brought to Book (1995); 150 Years/150 Stories: Brief
Biographies of One Hundred and Fifty Remarkable People Associated with The
University of Melbourne, with Peter McPhee (2003); Minding the Shop: People and
Events That Shaped the Department of Property & Buildings1853-2003 at the
University of Melbourne (2005). Spanning the Centuries: a History of AE Smith & Son
Pty Ltd, with Rosemary Francis, was launched on 29 August 2008.
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Mia Stephens and Roy Neill (University of South Australia)
Voices in the Vines
The suburb of Magill grew around the Penfolds vineyards which produce one of South
Australia's favourite wines, Grange Hermitage. Oenologists and viticulturalists, tasters and
wine-marketers live next door to newcomers, the university people and city commuters.
When one long-term resident tells stories about his life, it is not only one life of oenology
which emerges, but the lives of all the other oenologists, then life of the location, and the
life of the wine itself. Linguistic ethnography [LE] is the method chosen to capture a range
of stories from four generations of winemakers. The method, developed from varied
scholarship investigating language in context, incorporating tools such as Halliday's
concepts of field, tenor and mode (1985) and Scollon's (2000) Hymesian seven point
grammar of context, permits flexibility to focus on meanings, on making sense of the place
and of how the people fit into it. LE provides the range of tools to enable glimpses as an
older layer slides out from beneath the modern Magill. The centre of the project is a house
in the neighbourhood where the winemaking began, with the house-owner as the
participant observer. A palette of small stories, suffused in the colours and seasons of
wines and vines and vintages will use the language of generations whose voices the
modern suburb no longer hears.
Mia Stephens is Lecturer in the School of Communication at the University of South
Australia.
Roy Neill is at the School of Communication at the University of South Australia.
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Session 3: Transnational Family Networks
Janet Doust (ANU)
Family, Community and Networks in Colonial Australia
I am writing a collective biography of two generations of a family in colonial Victoria and
New South Wales. I am working on developing a technique and format in which to write a
book which deals with a core of thirteen family members over two generations, their close
links with their extended family in Australia and England and their active local community
networks in Victoria and New South Wales. The parents migrated from England to Victoria
in the 1840s and 1850s; the children were all born in Victoria between the late 1850s and
the 1870s.
The Booths were a large family whose lives and activities contributed to respectable
middle class life in colonial Victoria and New South Wales. A family biography of the
Booths is interesting as a human story of a rising middle class family and will add to our
knowledge of the society and culture of colonial Australia. In 1840 Abraham Booth arrived
in the infant town of Melbourne from Derbyshire, England, as a young single man. During
the 1840s he built a butchery business in Melbourne and from 1850 was a squatter in
northern Victoria. Hannah Holloway migrated to Victoria from Warwickshire, England, with
her parents in 1853. Abraham Booth and Hannah’s father, John Holloway, were business
partners in their Australian pastoral ventures from 1853 to Holloway’s death in the 1870s,
first in northern Victoria and then on the Murrumbidgee River near Wagga Wagga.
Hannah and Abraham married in 1856 and raised a family of eleven children, all of whom
grew up to contribute to communities in Victoria and southern New South Wales.
Abraham and his wife, Hannah, enjoyed a companionate marriage. In 1863 the Booths
settled in Melbourne, which became their main base of operations. From that time he lived
as a gentleman on his pastoral investments, which were managed by others for him under
his supervision. Abraham did not work again at manual tasks. Their pastoral property near
Wagga became an important second site of family activity from the 1880s onwards.
I envisage the major themes will be family formation and relationships, the raising,
socialisation and education of the children, the young adults and their activities, the family
economy, social activities among a wide circle of kin and friends, the family members’
active involvement in the Methodist Church and other voluntary associations, their
responses to public developments and the importance of place and home in their family
culture. I have a great deal of evidence from family diaries for the periods 1856-1861 and
1884-1898 and some evidence of the intervening years from family papers and family
memory. I will need to fill out from other sources their English background and their
Australian colonial activities not covered by the available family papers. This is one
challenge. The other is the structure of the book as a collective biography. How much
weight should be given to the various members of the family and their activities? My paper
will explore these issues and invite advice from the audience.
Janet Doust is a long-term visiting fellow in the History Program, Research School of
Social Sciences, ANU. Her PhD research on English immigrants in colonial eastern
Australia has broadened into investigating transnational movements of people, trade,
and ideas in the long nineteenth century, with a focus on Anglo-British settler
societies (including the United States).
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Stephen Foster (ANU)
A transgenerational approach to the British Empire
One of the many benefits of biography for the historian is that it takes you places you do
not expect to go and introduces you to themes you were not aware of or did not intend to
pursue. How much more is this the case when more than one subject drives the research
and guides the narrative?
My subjects are six generations of the one Scottish family, the Macphersons of
Blairgowrie (and latterly of Cluny), whose lives are documented in an extensive collection
of privately held papers. The story begins in the aftermath of Culloden in 1746 and ends
with a seminal inquiry into the racist murder of a young black Londoner in the 1990s.
Between these times, successive generations of the Macpherson family traversed much
of the British empire. Their experiences reflect, often from new angles, many imperial
themes, especially relationships between family, race and empire: the winning and losing
of fortunes, war and peace in India during the time of Warren Hastings, the lives of
children of white masters and black slaves, the experiences of returning soldiers around
the time of Jane Austen, frontier conflict in New South Wales in the 1840s, contrasting
imperial and colonial moralities, the long term effects of different experiences of
education, the relationship of the written record to other forms of remembering, and so on.
My story is not so much a family history as a history of the empire (or a transnational
history) as revealed through members of one (sometimes extended) family. How much
were they steered and buffeted by the dynamics of empire? How much control did
individuals have over their own lives and the lives of others? What does the empire look
like when viewed through the eyes of a single family and traced through their collective
lives?
In this paper I will draw on a few parts of the story to reflect broadly on transgenerational
history as a subset of collective biography and ask whether the whole offers more than
the sum of its parts.
Stephen Foster is an adjunct professor in the Research School of Humanities, ANU.
In past lives he has been executive editor of the eleven volume series Australian: a
historical library, managing director of a small heritage company, a general manager
at the National Museum of Australia and professor of Museum Studies, Heritage and
Collections at the ANU. His publications include a large scale collective biography
The Making of The Australian National University (1996).
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Douglas Craig (ANU)
Meet the McAdoo-Wilsons: Political History and
a Blended Family of the Early Twentieth Century
This paper arises from my current research project, a double biography of Newton D.
Baker, United States Secretary of War 1916-1921 and William Gibbs McAdoo, United
States Secretary of the Treasury, 1913-1918. Both Baker and McAdoo were prominent in
the political life of their day, and their combined careers spanned more than forty years
from the height of the progressive era to the peak of the New Deal. Although I originally
conceived of my project as primarily a work of political history, my subjects have led me
further afield. My analysis of McAdoo, in particular, has forced me to deal with the
interaction between his personal life and political career, and it is that interaction that
forms the heart of my proposed paper.
McAdoo's family life was complicated. His first wife Sarah, with whom he had six children,
died in 1912. In the following year McAdoo joined Woodrow Wilson's cabinet as Secretary
of the Treasury, and then in 1914 married Wilson's youngest daughter Eleanor. McAdoo
then combined his cabinet position with that of presidential son in law until his resignation
from cabinet in 1918. McAdoo and Eleanor had two children, but their marriage ended in
divorce in 1934. In 1935 McAdoo married for a third time, this time to a woman more than
forty years his junior, but they did not have children.
All but one of the eight McAdoo-Wilson children all found it difficult to make independent
lives outside their privileged and prominent childhoods. One of McAdoo's children became
an alcoholic depressive, two predeceased their father, two became pregnant before
marriage, five suffered marital breakdowns, and only one found it possible to earn an
independent living. Because of their parents' prominence, the ups and downs of the
McAdoo-Wilson children were reported in the national press and were subject to
Washington gossip. William McAdoo's position as a well-known entrepreneur, cabinet
member, presidential son in law, presidential candidate and finally United States Senator
meant that his personal and political careers were played out in public over four decades.
Not surprisingly his three wives and eight children paid a heavy price for the privileges
that their parents' prominence accorded them.
My paper will explore some of the public-private intersections arising from William
McAdoo's life. It will also discuss some of the pleasures and pitfalls that I have
encountered in writing a biography of a very public figure who had a very tangled private
life. As a political historian confronted with a complicated personal story I have been
forced to think hard about ways in which to integrate my analysis of McAdoo's political
career with its concomitant sagas of marital breakdown, sole parenthood, blended
families, troubled children and media attention.
Douglas Craig is Reader in history at the School of Social Sciences, ANU, where he
teaches modern American history. His publications include: Fireside Politics: Radio
and Political Culture, 1920-1940; and After Wilson: The Struggle for the Democratic
Party 1920-1934.
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Session 4: Artistic and Literary Networks
S. Hollis Clayson (Northwestern University)
United States Artists in Paris, 1870-1914: Language, Space, Time, Community
During the first era of mass transatlantic travel to Europe by voyagers from the United
States (years of prosperity and stability between the American Civil War and the outbreak
of World War I), visual artists crossed the Atlantic in droves to study art in the City of
Light. The thousands of voluntarily uprooted artists have been discussed in five primary
ways: 1. against the backdrop of sometimes vexed U.S.-France political and economic
relations (thus foregrounding their national identity), 2. as aesthetically conservative
practitioners of an art medium (thus accentuating aesthetic singularities largely as national
tradition or proclivity), 3. as voluntary exiles and expatriates (thereby foregrounding their
structural dislocation, resentment, and hybridity), 4. as tourists (emphasizing elements of
social class and cultural identity), and 5. as men and women (stressing the determining
force of gender).
While not denying the crucial importance of the above, this paper will focus instead on
hitherto under-investigated matters vital to sketching a collective biography of this
generation of Francophile traveling artists: language, space, and time. The social and
personal effects of (in)competency in the French language will emerge though an
interrogation of a signature U.S.-artist-in-Paris strategy of affiliation and self-styling:
declaring oneself a bohemian and ipso facto fully transnational. It appears that
bohemianism was explicitly engaged to erase difference (especially at the level of
language) and thus preemptively to advance claims and dreams of unproblematic
cosmopolitanism, acceptance, and assimilation. That this stance conflicted with, and
could not conceal, uneven linguistic competencies is the key point. A second matter of
interest is the geographic basis of ostensible American artist communities. By looking
closely at spaces of work, dwelling, instruction, entertainment and vacation, I seek to
advance an awareness of the complex relationship between the spaces of the everyday
lives of these voluntary exiles, and the imagined spaces of mastery that appear in their
paintings of Paris. A French proverb brings in the category of time (of day). “Dans la nuit
tous les chats sont gris,” or rather American difference melted away in the dark. The
paper will argue that the will to erase difference in a polyglot and competitive art world
motivated many United States painters in the French capital to represent the (benign) city
at night. Links and mismatches between the nocturnal ville lumière of their art and their
social lives in the darkened French capital will be considered within this framework.
Hollis Clayson (Professor of Art History and Bergen Evans Professor in the
Humanities) is a historian of modern art at Northwestern University (Evanston IL,
USA) who specializes in 19th-century Europe, especially France, and transatlantic
exchanges between France and the U.S. Her first book, Painted Love: Prostitution in
French Art of the Impressionist Era appeared in 1991 (reprinted by the Getty in
2003). A co-edited thematic study of painting in the Western tradition, Understanding
Paintings: Themes in Art Explored and Explained, came out in 2000, and has since
been translated into 6 other languages. Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under
Siege (1870-71) was published in 2002 (paperback 2005). She has recently written
about the arts of privacy in 19th-century Paris, and is also researching the City of
Light in the transatlantic imaginary (1870-1914). She has received many research
awards and prizes for distinguished teaching. In 2006, she was named Director of the
Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.
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Evelyn Juers (Independent Scholar and critic)
Trouble in the House
I recently completed a collective biography, House of Exile (Giramondo, forthcoming),
which is subtitled The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann, among
others. It is in the form of a long essay – 19 chapters, 120,000 words – and it portrays the
world of the group of intellectuals and writers who fled Germany in the 1930s, first for
other European countries, and then for the USA. It does so by focussing primarily on the
writer and anti-fascist activist Heinrich Mann and his second wife Nelly Kroeger: they left
Germany in 1933 and lived in France and then from 1940, in great despair, in Los
Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950. Their story of
displacement is crossed at many points by other narratives of exile. The lives of Heinrich’s
brother Thomas Mann, their mother Julia and their sister Carla – and those of other
important writers of the period – Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Robert Musil, Bertolt
Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, Kurt Tucholsky, Joseph Roth, Kurt
Schwitters, Nettie Palmer – as well as historical figures, are integral to the book’s rich
weave of connections and contiguities.
House of Exile is not a conventional biography, nor a conventional collective biography. It
was conceived as a biographical study of the relatively unknown Nelly Kroeger, who has
always occupied the place of an outsider in writings about the Mann brothers. From this
starting point, my interest doubled, to include a portrait of Heinrich Mann, and then spread
outward, to other members of the Mann family, their circle and finally, their generation.
The result of 10 years of research and writing, archival work in Lübeck, Berlin and Los
Angeles, and interviews with surviving family members, the book offers new findings
about some of its subjects and, in its juxtapositions, a new approach to biographical
writing. There are allegorical and fictional elements, as well as a slim autobiographical
frame. While I’ve included an extensive bibliography, there are no footnotes. The book’s
pluralism – its montage of private lives and public events, of scholarship, diary voices and
hearsay, its reciprocity of form and content – challenges the boundaries between fiction
and non-fiction.
My paper documents these different aspects of collective biography and the forms they
took in the process of writing House of Exile.
Evelyn Juers has a PhD from the University of Essex on the Brontës and the
practice of biography. Her essays on art and literature have appeared in a wide range
of Australian and international publications. She lives in Sydney and is co-publisher
of the literary magazine HEAT and Giramondo books. Her new book House of Exile The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann is a collective
biography about the experience of displacement.
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Harry Ricketts (Victoria University of Wellington)
Strange Meetings: Challenges, Problems and Rewards of Collective Biography
Writing
I am currently writing a full-length composite biographical-critical study of a dozen British
World War 1 poets, entitled Strange Meetings. These include the usual suspects (Rupert
Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edward Thomas, Isaac
Rosenberg) but also lesser-known and forgotten figures, such as Ivor Gurney, Charles
Sorley and Robert Nichols. As the title suggests, the book is arranged around meetings.
While many of these are literal encounters (Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon having
breakfast in 1914, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart in 1917), some
are metaphorical or imaginative (Edward Thomas reviewing Rupert Brooke’s 1914 &
Other Poems in 1915, Ivor Gurney being visited by Edward Thomas’ widow, Helen, in the
Deptford mental asylum in the early 1930s).
This paper draws on these ‘strange meetings’ to explore and reflect on the opportunities
opened up by collective biography. What are the particular challenges, problems and
rewards? What happens when you place Brooke alongside Sassoon? Is the result limited
or enabling? Or Thomas alongside Owen? Or David Jones alongside Sassoon?
Harry Ricketts is Associate Professor in the English Programme at Victoria
University of Wellington, New Zealand. His publications include: (Ed with Paul Morris
and Mike Grimshaw) Spirit Abroad: A Second Selection of New Zealand Spiritual
Verse (Auckland: Godwit, 2004); (Ed) Rudyard Kipling: The Long Trail (Selected
Poems) (Manchester: Fyfield Books, Carcanet, 2004); How to live elsewhere
(Wellington: Four Winds Press, 2004); (Ed with Paul Morris and Mike Grimshaw)
Spirit in a Strange Land: A Selection of New Zealand Spiritual Verse (Auckland:
Godwit, 2002); and The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1999; US edition Carrol & Graf, 2000).
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Tuesday 9 September 2008
Session 5: Indigenous Collective Biographies
Peter Read (University of Sydney)
Indigenous Biography: setting up ‘family wikis’
One of the oldest issues between Indigenous people and researchers in the social
sciences is the return of materials - the intellectual property of individuals - back to the
community. From at least the 1950s many Aboriginal subjects have complained
vehemently that their contribution to a research project has not been acknowledged.
Sometimes the individuals were not aware that material about them had even been
published.
Based on models of student participation current in many teaching universities, I have
been developing a system of 'family wikis' to be shared by the relevant family themselves.
Video and sound taped recordings, genealogies, family documents, photographs and
book manuscripts can be uploaded (via the Sydney University Digital Humanities unit) into
individual websites containing this information and materials, but accessible only those
members of the family who have the password.
Though the project is still in early stages, I will illustrate the capacities of the program, and
the ways in which communities might be able to benefit from these 'family biographies'.
Peter Read is a research professorial fellow in the Department of History, University
of Sydney. He is also chairperson of the journal, Aboriginal History, and Public Officer
for ‘Stolen Generations Link Up’ in New South Wales. His publications include:
Haunted Earth (2003); Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership
(2000); A Rape of the Soul So Profound: The Return of the Stolen Generation (1999);
Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places (1996); Long Time Olden Time:
Aboriginal Accounts of Northern Territory History (1992);
Charles Perkins: A
biography (1990). He is currently working on a history of Aboriginal Sydney. Thus the
return of materials to individuals and families is highly relevant to his own researches.
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Helene Connor (School of Community Development, Unitec, New Zealand)
Collective Biography - A Maori Perspective
Auto/biographical texts of Maori represent both the individual and the group and are sites
for politicizing the collective self. For Maori it could not be otherwise. Maori are a
communal people and auto/biographical texts offer the possibility of articulating notions of
our collective selves which include cultural, socio-political and historical memories.
Auto/biographical writing by or about Maori aimed at raising the visibility of the lives and
work of Maori can also be viewed as a project of collective identities in resistance to
Western ethnocentrism.
The literary genres of biography and autobiography are appropriate and fitting methods
for Maori to utilise as both the individual and collective experiences of Maori can be
researched and written about within whakapapa (genealogy), tribal and social histories.
The importance of whakapapa as a source of connection for Maori and as a distinguishing
feature of Maori culture can be explored within auto/biographical texts, and such texts can
be viewed as a literary extension of whakapapa, providing an ideal method for writing
about the collective life histories and cultural experiences of Maori.
Helene Connor is of Maori, English and Irish descent. She completed her PhD,
Writing Ourselves 'Home', Biographical Texts; a Method for Contextualizing the Lives
of Wahine Maori, Locating the Story of Betty Wark, in 2006. Helene is the
Programme Director of the Master of Social Practice at Unitec, Auckland.
15
Leah Lui-Chivizhe (University of Sydney) and Shino Konishi (National Museum of
Australia)
Who laid the tracks? The challenges of writing an Indigenous collective biography
In the 1960s and 70s hundreds of young Torres Strait Islander men migrated from to the
mainland to work in the northern Australian railway industries. Their labour was crucial to
the development of the mining industries in western Queensland and the Pilbara,
establishing the necessary transport infrastructure which serviced the mines. They worked
in harsh desert environments, away from their islands and seas, creating new lives for
themselves. Their motivation was to escape the draconian surveillance of the Protection
Board, and to forge independent futures for their families. Accustomed to the
governmental and Church discipline and intervention on the islands, the men quickly
adapted to arduous manual labour, and Islander teams even broke two world records in
track laying. They were the vanguard for the creation of the numerous Torres Strait
Islander communities throughout northern Australia, which now outnumber those on the
islands.
Our project, Laying the Tracks: Torres Strait Islanders in the Northern Australian
Railways, is a collective biography of these men who transformed their lives and
contributed greatly to the economic development and multicultural mosaic of Australia’s
north. This project was inspired by our own subjectivities, as Indigenous researchers from
northern Australia, and Lui-Chivizhe’s experiences as the child of a Torres Strait Islander
railway worker. Yet, writing the Islander railway workers’ biography is no easy task. This
paper will discuss the challenges of writing an Indigenous collective biography from an
Indigenous researcher perspective. We will discuss pragmatic issues such as negotiating
institutional ethics procedures as well as Torres Strait Islander cultural protocols, and
locating and interviewing former Railway workers, many of whom lead busy lives as
respected elders in their communities. We will also explore the unanticipated challenges
we face, such as the continual slippage between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ status in our role
as Indigenous researchers writing a Torres Strait Islander collective biography.
Leah Lui-Chivizhe is a Lecturer at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney, and
Shino Konishi is an indigenous research fellow at the Centre for Historical
Research, National Museum of Australia. This project is partially funded by an
AIATSIS research grant.
16
Session 6: Prosopography and Database Technologies
Peter Dennis (UNSW@ADFA)
The possibilities and perils of military prosopography:
the 1st Australian Imperial Force database
The First World War was a major ‘mass event’ in Australia’s history. More than 300,000
men and women embarked from Australia to serve overseas. The AIF database records
details of those in the Australian Imperial Force, 1914-18. Much of the material on which it
draws is publicly available on websites such as the Australian War Memorial and the
National Archives of Australia; what makes the AIF database unique is the ability to
search across multiple fields.
In my paper I propose to discuss the construction of the AIF database, which is now
publicly accessible on the web (www.aif.adfa.edu.au), to comment on the variety of
sources used, and to suggest how the advanced search engine (which is not accessible
to the public) can be employed to analyse various aspects of the AIF’s composition and
experience. Apart from its value and appeal to family historians and genealogists the
database is a valuable tool for local and regional historians, and also – perhaps
surprisingly – for those engaged in current medical research.
The construction and publication via the web of such an extensive database has not been
without its problems and perils. I will comment on public reactions, on the issue of privacy
versus public access, and on attempted institutional blackmail. The Duke of Wellington’s
‘publish and be damned’ has a certain appeal, but it is not without its risks, as I hope to
demonstrate.
Peter Dennis is Emeritus Professor in military history at the University of New South
Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, in Canberra. He is the author of
three books on aspects of defence and foreign policy in British history: Decision by
Default: Peacetime Conscription and British Defence, 1919-1939; The Territorial
Army 1906-1940; and Troubled Days of Peace: Mountbatten and South East Asia
Command, 1945-46. In Australian military history he jointly wrote and edited The
Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, and co-authored a volume in the
official history of Australia’s involvements in Southeast Asian conflicts 1948-1975,
Emergency and Confrontation: Australian military operations in Malaya and Borneo
1950-1966. He was the founding editor of the journal, War and Society.
17
Rachel Morley (University of Western Sydney), Hart Cohen (University of
Western Sydney) and Steven Hayes (University of Sydney)
Database biographies in TGH Strehlow's memoir ‘Journey to Horseshoe Bend’
Journey to Horseshoe Bend is a biographical memoir authored by TGH Strehlow about
his father’s journey in Central Australia in 1922 and his own coming of age as a 14 –year
old. The text engages with collective biography through accounts by the author of himself
as narrator (and self-identified in the third person), of his father and of several other
people who are treated as important characters in the story. This paper is based on a
project that has compiled a range of related resources into a digital repository or database
biography and (hyper) linked to relevant points in Journey to Horseshoe Bend. These
resources are explicitly mapped onto a range of visual representations and then
supplemented with (hyper) links to relevant images, documents, media resources, and
other online collections. The adaptation of embodied experience inherent in all biography,
but especially poignant in this text, becomes an issue for moral evaluation. The
formulation of identities mediated through a database biography adds many further layers
of replication to the biographical complexity of the text and opens up a space for multiple
reader-led interpretations of its biographical content.
Hart Cohen is Associate Professor in Media Arts in the School of Communication
Arts at UWS. He is the chief investigator of the ARC-funded project, ‘The Visual
Mediation of a Complex Narrative: TGH Strehlow’s Journey to Horseshoe Bend’. Hart
has directed two films based on the Strehlow story: “Mr. Strehlow’s Films” (SBSI
2001) and “Cantata Journey” (ABC TV 2006).
Steven Hayes is the principal designer and architect of the Journey to Horseshoe
Bend database. He is also the ACL’s Business and Project Manager. The ACL
develops information management tools for the Humanities with a particular
emphasis on the utilisation of spatial and temporal dimensions as they apply to
academic knowledge management systems, online databases and web mapping.
Rachel Morley is a research assistant on the Journey to Horseshoe Bend project.
She has published papers on a range of topics including biography and
autobiography, the Helen Demidenko controversy, Michael Field, and Australian
women's boxing. She is currently completing her PhD at Macquarie University on the
affective relationship between biographical research and textual production.
18
Georgina Fitzpatrick (ANU)
From Arnold to Woodfield: a prosopographical A-Z of
‘British-born’ internees in Australian internment camps, 1939-45
Comprising three women and forty-eight men, these ‘British-born’ were not of enemy alien
background. However, they joined over 7000 people of predominantly German, Italian and
Japanese background who were interned by successive Australian wartime governments
between 1939 and 1945. ‘British-born’ was a contemporary legal term used to denote
those born with British nationality and it applied to all people born in Australia before the
Second World War because a separate Australian nationality did not then exist. The fiftyone in this study were either born in Australia of parents of British descent or were born in
Britain (including Southern Ireland) subsequently migrating to Australia. My study
excludes the ‘British-born’ of enemy alien background, of whom a considerable number
were also interned. The group of fifty-one ‘British-born’ of British background is, I believe,
the full set of those who constitute this specific category of internees.
My paper will tease out the main characteristics of this collection of disparate people,
using prosopographical techniques. It will offer an overview of the behaviours and
opinions that brought these people to the attention of military and civilian intelligence
officers. They were not necessarily typical of the total set of all internees but their
experiences have provided a window into the world of the internee. They were in the
same camps as those interned on ethnicity grounds but their voices have been lost in the
existing studies of the internment experience in Australia. To some extent, they suffered
the same human emotions and situations created by internment. But, as I argue in my
thesis, the peculiarity of their ethnicity stigmatized them as ‘traitors’ resulting in a possibly
harsher post-release experience than those of enemy alien background. Their experience
was different because they did not have the excuse of ethnicity or ‘otherness’ to fall back
upon as an explanation for internment and those missing years of the war.
The main source for the prosopographical reconstruction comes from the MP1103/1 and
MP1103/2 forms collected by the interning authorities for every internee. From these
forms, supplemented with biographical details from security files and with memoirs and
collections of letters, I have been able to establish the characteristics of the set. In the
light of the lack of prosopographical studies for the main body of internees, it may be
possible only to hazard the extent to which the ‘British-born’ differ from or mirror the
general group of internees. But this examination may provide markers for similar studies
of other groups interned in Australia.
Georgina Fitzpatrick is a doctoral student in the History program, Research School
of Social Sciences, Australian National University. The current title of her thesis is
‘The Impact of Internment: Experiences of Those of British Background Interned in
Australia, 1939-45.’ Two publications from the thesis are: (1) ‘Inky Stephensen’s
internment experience in Australia (1942-45): letters to his wife’ published in Eras,
No.
9
(November
2007)
an
online
journal,
at
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/publications/eras/edition-9/ and (2) ‘“A Fellow of
Slogans and Attitudes”: Leslie Cahill, National Socialism and the Australia First
Movement’ to be published in a collection of papers, National Socialism in Oceania: A
Critical Evaluation of Its Effect and Aftermath, eds Christine Winter and Emily TurnerGraham (Frankfurt: Peter Lange Verlag) (forthcoming)
19
Session 7: Community and Collective Biography
Sue Taffe (Monash University)
Fighting Friendships cross-cultural activism for Indigenous Rights
Overview of Fighting Friendships Project
This project focuses directly on friendships that were central to some of the successful
post-war campaigns for Aboriginal rights. They were built on shared visions of an
Australian society which recognised that Indigenous people should have both the civil
rights enjoyed by others as well as status as the original custodians of the land which
became Australia
This project investigates the possibility of understanding the past through key
relationships between activists which influenced understandings and strategies for social
change.Some of the key questions underlying this analysis are:

What were the factors which led to these friendships being forged, and lasting,
sometimes beyond the years of working together?

Given that there was much in their experiences of life which divided these pairs of
friends did a shared world view, or ideology, provide a necessary bridge over these
vastly differing life experiences?

How did the personal relationship affect the political alliance in each case?
The project analyses five friendships from the period.
Mary Bennett, the Wongi people of Kalgoorlie and Shirley Andrews’
Mary Bennett realised how the international conventions being drawn up in the postHolocaust world to press governments to recognise their responsibilities to Indigenous
Australians could become a political weapon. She assisted elderly Wongi people, who
were outside the industrial relations and social security systems to apply for welfare
benefits. She persuaded Shirley Andrews, secretary of the Council for Aboriginal Rights to
advocate on their behalf.
Jessie Street and Faith Bandler
Jessie Street, a co-opted member of the London Anti-Slavery Society, recognised 'the
psychological moment' for awakening a community conscience about Aboriginal suffering
and disadvantage. She persuaded Faith Bandler of the need to campaign for
Constitutional change so that the Commonwealth could pass specific laws to assist
Aboriginal people. Faith devoted a decade to the realisation of this goal and was the
public face of the New South Wales campaign for a 'yes' vote in the 1967 referendum.
Doug Nicholls and Stan Davey
Doug Nicholls and Stan Davey, both Church of Christ pastors when they met in the early
1950s, worked closely together in the Victorian Aborigines’ Advancement League. Both
worked for land and cultural rights before such ideas were widespread.
Pauline Pickford and Gladys O’Shane
In 1960 the Cairns Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advancement League (CATSIAL)
was formed with Gladys O’Shane as president. Unlike other similar organisations this one
was run by Aboriginal and Islander people from the start. Two years later Gladys met
Pauline Pickford, secretary of the Melbourne-based Council for Aboriginal Rights and over
the next few years the two women became close friends. They were both members of the
20
Union of Australian Women and of the Communist Party of Australia. Although this
friendship was cut short by Gladys’ untimely death, her spirit continued to inspire.
21
Joe McGinness and Barry Christophers
Joe McGinness was both secretary of CATSIAL and president of the Federal Council for
the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) from 1961 to 1978.
From 1961 when Barry Christophers nominated Joe McGinness to this position the two
men campaigned effectively, Joe in Cairns and Barry in Melbourne. One successful
campaign was to remove a racially discriminatory clause from the Federal Tuberculosis
Act .
Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Judith Wright
Kath Walker, as she was known when she was FCAATSI Queensland state secretary,
and Judith Wright mey after Judith was asked by Jacaranda Press to assess Kath's poetry
for publication. Their 'fighting friendship' included Oodgeroo's struggle to develop
Moongalba, her Aboriginal cultural and educational centre on north Stradbroke Island,
work for a treaty between black and white Australians and their ongoing poetic
endeavours to awaken white Australians to a story of Australia's past which was an
alternative to the one of colonists populating a conveniently ‘empty’ land.
Sue Taffe is currently a Harold White Fellow at the Australian National Library where
she is researching cross-cultural friendship and its importance in the Aboriginal rights
movement from 1950s to 1970s. This work has grown out of her earlier history of the
Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders,
'Black and White Together' and a website
www.nma.gov.au/collaborating for Indigenous Rights, hosted by the National
Museum.
22
Mary Hutchison (ANU)
Personal histories/collective biography: reflections on two local exhibitions of
personal migration histories
‘It’s like I think you have walked into a huge living room and there are all these people
who have all known each other and who thought they knew each other. But you
[exhibition curator] actually connected some of them more to each other by reintroducing
them to each other… Even though one has known them, but never actually known what
their connection to something else was - to the bigger picture - was.’ [Nezaket Schulz,
Lightning Ridge visitor response interview, 4/9/06]
This paper reflects on local readings of exhibitions of personal migration histories in two
very different regional Australian localities. Lightning Ridge is an opal mining town in the
central north of New South Wales and Robinvale is a horticultural centre on the River
Murray in north west Victoria. Both have populations of around 8,000 people with
residents from over 40 different countries of origin. The histories, told from the
perspectives and experience of local individuals, presented a slice of local immigration
from colonisation to the present and included Indigenous perspectives on migration. An
important strand in local audience responses concerned the way the exhibition, as a
collection of individual stories, informed perceptions of the collective story of ‘us’ in this
place.
The quote from Nezaket Schulz’s response to the Lightning Ridge exhibition, exemplifies
this strand of responses and the renewed sense of community or connection with others
that is part of it. I discuss responses to the exhibitions in Lightning Ridge and Robinvale to
tease out these perceptions and to think about the relationship between personal histories
and collective biography. I also discuss the strong element of place that frames the
‘collective’ in this instance. On this basis I offer some thoughts about including place as a
distinct character in the collective story.
My discussion draws particularly on research that was part of the ARC linkage project:
Migration Memories: creating and analysing collaborative museum representations of
Australian migration histories. One of the intentions of the research was to explore ways
of exhibiting diversity so that diversity is not ‘other’ but a collective characteristic. This
research interest along with material from the Migration Memories exhibitions provides a
starting point for my discussion. Theoretically it is informed by discursive understandings
of memory and history, narrative and identity (eg Perks and Thomson, 2006; Brockmeier
and Carbaugh, 2001) and by museological interest in exhibiting collective historical
experience through the lens of a specific locale (Trinca and Wehner, 2006). I am
particularly interested in the materiality of place in relation to both these areas and my
discussion is further informed by writing that brings the materiality of place to bear on
personal and collective histories and senses of identity (eg Mark McKenna, 2002; Peter
Read, 1996, 2000; Margaret Somerville, 1999).
Mary Hutchison is a Research Associate at the Research School of Humanities,
ANU, working on an ARC Linkage project with the National Museum of Australia. The
project, Migration Memories, investigates ways of representing Australian migration
histories, ranging from 1788 to the present, in museum settings. The research
focuses on how individuals remember personally significant migration experiences
and the material culture that embodies these memories. She competed her PhD at
the University of New England in 1999.
23
24
Phoenix de Carteret (Monash University)
Peripheral Vision: doing collective biography with women in Gippsland
This presentation will outline workshops I have developed from collective biography and
memory work, and have now used in two research projects. I will discuss the most recent
small project with women in Gippsland. One outcome of the research was the publication
of a small book, Peripheral Vision: a kaleidoscope of women’s stories of home in
Gippsland. The collaborative story telling process in the recent workshops involved a
place-conscious framework to elicit embodied stories peripheral to dominant narratives of
Gippsland. The creative process of working together opened the participants to nuances
of their local history and stimulated interest in diverse experiences.
Gippsland is a large regional area in the southeast of Victoria, Australia, adjacent to the
metropolitan sprawl of Melbourne. It is known to be productively diverse with an economic
base in dairy, logging, tourism, gourmet food and wine, and most significantly the
generation of 85% of the state’s electricity. This diversity reflects the variations in the
physical environment with massive tracts of wilderness and grazing land, forestry and an
extensive ocean frontage. People’s association with, and use of the land has been
somewhat vexed since colonisation due initially to impenetrable terrains, conflict with the
Indigenous people and with the elements of nature including flood, fire and drought. This
complexity is generally represented by public narratives of the heroic male settler or
immigrant. In recent times storylines of disempowerment and dysfunction associated with
deindustrialisation have created bleak narratives further marked by representation of the
region as an environmental black spot.
The collective biography project sought women’s experiences of living in Gippsland. By
creating stories from conversations that flesh out collective experience and invite further
stories, Peripheral Vision decentres the authorial subject. Using examples from Peripheral
Vision in the presentation I will show that this use of collective biography promotes the
value of diversity in communities, as well as being a useful research method.
Phoenix de Carteret is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at Monash
University
25
Session 8: Relationships and Collective Biography
Patrick Buckridge (Griffith University)
An Experiment in Serial Biography: R.G. Moulton, W.H. Hudson, F.H. Pritchard and
the Appreciation of Literature
This paper proposes a model of ‘serial group biography’ as a way of capturing the interest
and importance of a particular formation of thought and practice that was applied to the
study of literature during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The putative
group comprises three individuals, all of them Englishmen, with somewhat less than a
generation separating them from one another: they are Richard Green Moulton (18491924), William Henry Hudson (1862-1918), and Francis Henry Pritchard (1884-1942). All
of these men, now largely forgotten, were highly regarded in their own time as
educationists and literary scholars; and for the first two of them, at least, a case could be
made for revisiting some of their work on its own merits. Yet even though it is possible
that none of the three ever actually met in person, it was (I argue) as a serial collectivity –
a kind of intellectual relay in which the second in line (Hudson) recommended, cited,
engaged with and built upon the first (Moulton), with both of them then receiving similar
attention from the third (Pritchard) – that they made their distinctive mark on literary
education in English-speaking countries over many years.
R.G. Moulton, the oldest, was born in Preston, graduated in Classics from Cambridge,
and went to work for the new Cambridge University Extension Program in 1876. In 1890
he took University Extension to America, and two years later was appointed Head of the
School of General Literature, at the University of Chicago. W.H. Hudson (not the
naturalist) was born in London, grew up in Bristol, probably never took a degree, but
worked as Professor of English at Stanford for nine years, and Chicago for one, before
returning to England to work for the London University Extension until his death. F.H.
Pritchard was born in Plymouth, and taught English at the Devonport Boys’ High School
before going to work for the publisher Harrap in 1925 as their Literature Editor. Between
the 1880s and the 1930s the three of them wrote over fifty books of literary history,
biography, theory, and criticism, and at least as many more edited anthologies and
textbooks.
The three men’s careers, considered in combination, constitute the theoretical and
practical core of an educational project – so pervasive as to be almost invisible – which I
call the project of ‘universal literary appreciation.’ It was grounded, I believe, in their
progressive analysis of the needs and opportunities of ‘English Extension’ in Britain, and
in a developing articulation and application of their educational responses to these.
Situated as they were in various strategic positions, places and moments in the university
extension systems in Britain and the United States, in the British secondary school
system, and in educational and general publishing in Britain, the Empire and North
America – Moulton, Hudson and Pritchard had a strong influence on the extramural study
of literature, and perhaps also on certain directions in school and university English
studies in Britain, the United States and Australia in the interwar period.
Patrick Buckridge teaches literature at Griffith University. He is the author of The
Scandalous Penton (1994), a biography of Brian Penton, and his most recent book is
a literary history of Queensland, By the Book (2007), co-edited with Belinda McKay.
He is the Queensland Section Editor for the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
26
Desley Deacon (ANU)
Four Husbands, A Lover and a Friend: Mary McCarthy and Her Intimates
The novelist and public intellectual Mary McCarthy is as well-known for her marriages
(four), love affairs (many) and her close friendship with one of the twentieth century’s
leading political philosophers, Hannah Arendt.
This paper examines what these four marriages – from the famous critic Edmund Wilson
to the obscure aspiring writer Bowden Broadwater, one love affair – with Partisan Review
founder Philip Rahv, and her friendship with Arendt tell us about Mary McCarthy, the
person of her time, Mary McCarthy the writer, and ideas about love, marriage and
friendship In America between the late 1920s and the 1960s.
Desley Deacon is Professor and Head of the History Program in the Research
School of Social Sciences at ANU. She is also immediate Past President of the
Australian Historical Association. Her publications include: Elsie Clews Parsons:
Inventing Modern Life (University of Chicago Press 1997) and Managing Gender:
The State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers 1830-1930 (Melbourne:
Oxford University Press 1989) and (with J. Higley and D. Smart), Elites in Australia
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
27
Sharon Bickle (Monash University)
Intersubjective Collaboration in the Correspondence of 'Michael Field' and John
Gray
The pursuit of the self remains the defining attribute of modern biography; although the
self at the centre of the genre is distinctly different now than in its traditional Johnsonian
form. While there have been substantial moves in biographical theory, particularly feminist
biographical theory, toward recognizing that conceptualizing a life and its works is a
dialogic process—between the subject and the people in his/her life and between the
subject and biographer—nevertheless, the primacy of the self as individual still dominates
the genre.
In this paper, I examine Jessica Benjamin's notions of intersubjectivity as a means of
developing a notion of collaborative biography. Benjamin argues that conventional
psychoanalytic theory's emphasis on subject-object oppositions is not the only model of
intrapsychic relations. She asserts, following Habermas and Fichte, that a subject-subject
model whereby the "felt experience of the Other as a separate yet connected being with
whom we are acting reciprocally" ("Two-Way Streets," 118) is possible. In this paper, I
apply Benjamin's theory of intersubjectivity to the correspondence of 'Michael Field'—the
collaborative partnership of Katharine Bradley (1848-1914) and Edith Cooper (18621913)—with the poet, John Gray (1866-1934).
In 1908, Bradley and Cooper converted to Roman Catholicism. Gray, himself a decadent
poet in the 1890s, had given up poetry to become a Catholic priest—literally turning the
spines of his volume, Silverpoints, to the wall—although he continued his relationship with
Andre Raffalovich with whom he shared a house in Edinburgh. In contrast, Bradley and
Cooper used their newfound spirituality to reinvigorate their poetry, producing several
volumes of devotional verse. In this paper, I suggest that through their letters these two
groups of writers, intersubjectively discuss and develop notions of the artist.
Sharon Bickle is a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Women's Studies and
Gender Research at Monash University. Her book The Fowl and The Pussycat: Love
Letters of Michael Field, 1876-1909, will be published in December by University of
Virginia Press. She has written articles for Lifewriting Annual and Nineteenth Century
Theatre and Film. Her current project is an edition of the Michael Field-John Gray
letters.
28
Wednesday 10 September 2008
Session 9: Female Cohorts
Susan Sheridan (Flinders University)
Australian Women Writers and Post-war Modernity
The research project I am currently engaged in is a study of women writing in Australia in
the postwar decades, 1945-65. Although it was a period of intense literary activity, with
unprecedented expansion in book and magazine publishing, only a few women, like poet
Judith Wright and novelist Thea Astley, readily achieved recognition when they began to
publish. Others of their generation (born between 1912 and 1925), like Dorothy Hewett,
published very little until the late 60s, and some (like Elizabeth Jolley) not at all until the
1970s. Why did their literary fortunes vary so widely? In an attempt to answer this
question, I plan to write a group literary biography -- a biography of their professional
lives. Since their writing lives cannot be divorced from their personal circumstances,
however, I will also consider those in order to compare the way the writers responded to
the material and psychological circumstances of their lives - the historical specificity of
gendered postwar modernity, in both its domestic and its public cultural dimensions. This
paper is an opportunity to reflect on the possibilities and problems of a group biography,
something of a contradiction in terms when one is considering artists. No writer sees her
self as simply one of a 'generation', and I'm aware of a tension between the necessarily
individualist cast of mind of the writers and my feminist and socio-historical interest in
what they had in common, how they dealt differently with similar circumstances.
Susan Sheridan is Adjunct Professor of English and Women's Studies at Flinders
University. She has published widely on women's writing, feminist cultural studies,
Australian cultural history and women's studies. Her books include Christina Stead
(Harvester (1988), Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women's
Writing 1880s to 1930s (Allen & Unwin, 1995), and Who Was That Woman? The
Australian Women's Weekly in the Postwar Years (UNSW Press, 2002); as editor,
Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (Verso, 1988), Debutante Nation: Feminism
Contests the 1890s (Allen & Unwin 1993, with Sue Rowley and Susan Magarey) and
Thea Astley's Fictional Worlds (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006, with Paul Genoni).
Her current research project is an ARC-funded study of women writers and modernity
in mid twentieth century Australia.
29
Katie Holmes (La Trobe University)
Fertile Ground: women writing the garden
This paper looks at a group of about ten women, some well known (Judith Wright,
Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Jean Galbraith), others not, who collectively shared a
passion for writing about their gardens. They wrote in different periods and for different
purposes, but shared a desire to translate their love of gardening into a literary form. Their
letters and diaries are rich and diverse, eloquent and awkward, and deal with themes that
touch us all: grief, hope, friendship, family, ageing, creativity, identity, and the now
consuming question of how we live, and garden, in a changing climate. The writings all
convey a powerful sense of the importance of the garden in their writers’ lives, and
equally, how important became the writing of it.
One of the questions this paper addresses is how do we write about a group of people
who did not know each other, but who shared a common passion. How do we make a
‘collective biography’ of such a group? I will be drawing upon life-writing literature and
autobiography to explore women’s writings about their garden, asking questions about the
relationship between gardening and writing, and the ways women used their writings
about the gardens to also tell stories of themselves.
Katie Holmes is Associate Professor and Reader in History at LaTrobe University
where she teaches History and Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies. Her most
recent book, Reading the Garden: The Settlement of Australia’ (Melbourne UP 2008),
co-authored with Susan K. Martin & Kylie Mirmohamadi, explores the centrality of
gardens and gardening to the settlement of Australia and the establishment of a
sense of place.
30
Alison Mackinnon (University of South Australia)
‘Our personal foundations so thoroughly jolted’: Australian and
US women in universities in the 1950s and early 60s
I am currently writing about women who graduated from universities and colleges in
Australia and the US in the 1950s and early 1960s, precursors and proponents of
feminism. . They are in many ways a neglected group – wedged between the war and the
later era of the women’s movement and civil rights.
Can we see this group as a cohort, to use a demographer’s word? ‘Every birth cohort
faces its own historical conditions, alternatives, opportunities, norms with regard to the
timing and sequence of demographic events’, some claim. ‘Each birth cohort will thus go
through life with the contemporary social heritage with which it grew up’ (Kuijsten et al). In
this sense I am talking about a cohort, a specific group, whose heritage was different from
those who came before and after. They faced greater transformations in their lives than
the generations before, although they were spared world wars or the depression. ‘No
other single generation of women had its personal foundation so thoroughly jolted’,
claimed Shelby Moorman Howatt, class of ‘56. And their life choices in relation to work
and family were very different from the cohorts to follow.
There is also considerable debate about the term prosopography, the notion of collective
but individual biography. One definition speaks of a history which ‘permits the political
history of men [sic] and events to be combined with the hidden social history of long-term
evolutionary processes’. It speaks of ‘the person, his environment and his social status’.
Laurence Stone also claims that prosopography can establish the roots of political action.
By these criteria my book might be seen as an example of the genre. Certainly it is ‘the
study of biographical detail about individuals in aggregate’. It seeks to establish not a
series of individual biographies (although they are in themselves fascinating) but an
aggregate about the era – one which can illuminate political action, in this case feminism,
the women’s movement of the 1970s. Were the women I write about the forerunners of
today’s young professionals? Were they feminists without ‘feminism’? Were they the
cohort who prefigured the women’s movement? Anthropologist Sherry Ortner claims that
‘the feminist movement’… represented ‘a codification and intensification of ideas and
practices that were already happening out there in the lives of real women, including the
Class of ’58’.
I believe that this group was part of an evolutionary process of change – one which has
often been attributed to a few key individuals – Simone de Beauvior, Betty Friedan,
Germaine Greer, for example. Thus it situates those well-known women within a wider
process of historical change – one which was already underway when their famous books
caught the imagination of many women. Rather than use the term prosopography I would
prefer to describe my work as a collective biography. Within such work how much
emphasis can be given to individual life stories?. How does one strike a balance? This
paper grapples with such issues while telling some of the life stories of ‘a cohort’.
Alison Mackinnon is emeritus professor at the University of South Australia. She
has published widely on education and, specifically, on the lives of highly educated
women in both historical and demographic contexts. Her 1997 book Love and
Freedom: professional women and the reshaping of personal life won a NSW
Premier's literary award. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in
Australia.
31
32
Session 10: Money and War
John Hawkins (ANU and Department of the Senate, Australian Parliament)
The Australian Treasurers
There have been 36 federal 'treasurers' (ie economics ministers) in Australia. There are
published biographies of almost all those who also served as prime minister. But these
tend to pay relatively little attention to their role as treasurer. For the other treasurers, only
7 have been the subject of biographies and these have generally concentrated on other
aspects of their careers, such as Forrest's exploits as an explorer. There is no collective
biography of them, such as the volume edited by Michelle Grattan on Australian prime
ministers or that by Roy Jenkins on British chancellors of the exchequer (the equivalent
position in the UK).
The role of the treasurer has evolved considerably. Initially he (they have all been men)
essentially supervised a small team of accountants. Gradually the job took on greater
responsibilities and by the 1950s the treasurer was regarded as an activist manager of the
macroeconomy in a Keynesian framework. By the 1990s, the role had arguably shrunk
again to being the provider of a stable economic background. The role of guardian of the
public purse was hived off to a separate department of finance and the prime minister's
department challenged for the economic coordination role. The central bank was given
more independence to run monetary policy and activist countercyclical fiscal policy was
eschewed in favour of aiming at a fairly steady fiscal surplus. But some latter treasurers
carved out an additional role of advocate of microeconomic reform. As the role of the
treasurer expanded, so did the status of the job. Some early prime ministers were
simultaneously treasurer, which would be unthinkable today. Traditionally, deputy leaders
choose their portfolio and many chose to be treasurer. Treasurers have generally first
taken the job in their forties or fifties. Only six brought down more than five budgets. The
treasurer's job was often seen as a stepping stone to the top job.
Many treasurers were largely content to preside over the running of their department. But
a handful were paradigm changers. Fisher was the first to move away from laissez-faire
economics and set up a government bank, which Page and Chifley turned into a central
bank. Theodore was a frustrated proto-Keynesian. Chifley committed the government to
full employment, tried to nationalise the banks and introduced a permanent income tax.
Fadden was the first to use fiscal policy to halt inflation. Keating opened up the economy
to the world, deregulated the financial system and reformed the tax system. Others would
have liked to make more changes, but either did not last long enough in the job or failed to
overcome cautious prime ministers. Most activist treasurers transferred power from the
states to the federal government. While the attorney-general is always a lawyer, the
treasurer has only occasionally been an economist. There is no tradition of academic
economists serving as treasurer as happens in continental Europe. Some treasurers
acted as advocates for ideas already developed within Treasury, and some others
implemented ideas that others had inserted into party platforms.
John Hawkins works for the Department of the Senate in Australia. He has also
worked for the departments of the House of Representatives and the Treasury, the
Bank for International Settlements and the Reserve Bank of Australia. He has
Masters degrees from the London School of Economics and Macquarie University,
and is currently enrolled in the PhD program at ANU.
33
34
Peter Stanley (Centre for Historical Research, National Museum of Australia)
Nine Platoon, 1918-1980
The fighting on the Western Front in the summer of 1918 left the infantry units of the
Australian Imperial Force with fewer and fewer fighting men. Platoons nominally of thirty
men often numbered half that many. Nine Platoon, part of C Company of the 21st
Battalion, entered the battle of Mont St Quentin just twelve strong.
Of the twelve, four were to die in the battle. One of them was Frank Roberts, a 30-yearold orchardist from Victoria. Frank’s father, Garry, was so grieved by his son’s death that
he devoted himself over the next decade to compiling a series of massive scrapbooks
documenting Frank’s life, his service in the AIF and the battle in which he died. Garry’s
response has been analysed by several historians, including Tanja Luckins, Joy Damousi,
Pat Jalland and Bart Ziino. They have all looked at the Robertses primarily as a bereaved
family. I will too. But I’m also interested in what Garry Roberts’s massive private archive
reveals of the little group of twelve men who fought in that battle, and what their lives
might suggest of both the experience of the Great War and its effects on Australia.
As the survivors of Nine Platoon returned to Australia, Garry persuaded most of them to
write accounts of Frank’s last days. They enable us to reconstruct in extraordinary detail
the movements, interactions and actions of a small sub-unit in one short, intense, costly
action. They enable us to write the biography of one Australian platoon not just in one
battle, but to trace the rest of their members’ lives.
Using military and recently-released Repat files, family papers and memories, I have been
able to trace their lives from 1918 to the death of its last member, in 1980. The book,
provisionally entitled Between Victory and Death: Men of Mont St Quentin, is due to be
published by Scribe in late 2009.
Nine Platoon’s story resembles Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis
Ray. In it, five travellers’ lives converge seemingly by chance at a rope bridge in Spanish
Peru in 1714. The bridge breaks and the travellers die. A priest who witnesses the
accident investigates the travellers and discovers what connects their lives.
This book likewise tells the story of a group of men who came together for just a short
time in 1918 and never met again. Three were wounded in the battle and two more before
the war’s end. The eight survivors lived in four different states at various times, and only
two or three ever attended reunions or marches. They were together for a few weeks in
1918, and never again.
And yet something connects them, something profound. They were all volunteers for the
Great War, and victims of it. Their service marked all of them in one way or another for the
rest of their lives. I will discuss both how I’ve explored their lives and what they can tell us.
Peter Stanley is Director of the Centre for Historical Research at the National
Museum of Australia. He has published widely on Australian military and social
history. His 20th book, Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia 1942,
has just been published by Penguin (2008).
35
Christine Wright (Independent Scholar)
‘we are in sight of each other’: the social networks of Peninsular War
veterans
In this paper, I use the concept of social networks, defined as “a relevant series of
linkages existing between individuals, which may form a basis for the mobilisation of
people for specific purposes under specific conditions”1to investigate the lives of a group
of British army officers, veterans of the Peninsular War fought between 1808-1814, in the
Australian colonies. A particular line of thought within social networks analysis is that
personal social networks form a kind of resource that individuals can mobilise to achieve
their goals, and to better their material conditions in life. Social networks then can be seen
as a form of social capital: they are ‘an entity, consisting of all expected future benefits
derived not from one’s own labour, but from connections with other persons’. 2 Though I
use the term ‘social network’, Peninsular War veterans would have been unfamiliar with
that term. They thought in terms of regimental comrades, connections, patronage, shared
political views, or family obligations. Evidence exists that individuals within the Peninsular
network placed considerable emphasis upon these connections.
An examination of the social networks of Peninsular War veterans illustrates the impact of
these men on the Australian colonies, particularly New South Wales during the 1820s and
1830s. They had an impact on immigration to that colony, on settlement patterns, and on
marriage patterns. Settlement patterns provide a particularly striking example of the
influence of these networks. They also had particular bearing on place naming, as well as
on public and social life in the Australian colonies. The extraordinary influence of the
Peninsular network will be highlighted, and I place emphasis on its usefulness throughout
the whole British empire, particularly between London, the Cape Colony and New South
Wales and, to a lesser extent, Mauritius. At the London end, the Peninsular influence
within the Horse Guards was crucial to its operation. The experiences of Peninsular
veterans within the Cape Colony and New South Wales will also be compared, to note
their similarities; and reference is made particularly to veterans of the 95th Regiment, or
Rifle Brigade, and the Commissariat. A very strong Scots influence was inter-woven within
the Peninsular network; Scots were particularly numerous. They came to New South
Wales mainly in the early 1820s to colonial commissariat or audit positions, and among
them were Thomas Walker, James Laidley, Affleck Moodie, Stewart Ryrie, William
Wemyss and William Lithgow. It was under Wemyss that the Scots element dominated
the commissariat, with ten posts out of twelve being held by this group. Also examined are
the family networks of some of these Peninsular War veterans: those surrounding the
Dumaresq, Ryrie and Snodgrass families.
Christine Wright completed her PhD at the Australian National University, Canberra,
in 2005. Since then, she has been a Visiting Fellow at ANU, lectured in Urban History
and was awarded a Fellowship at the Centre for Historical Research at the National
Museum, Canberra.
1
2
C. Seymour-South, Macmillan Dictionary of Anthropology. London: 1986. p.208.
Ibid.p.136.
36
Session 11: Forms of Literary Biography
Mary Spongberg (Macquarie University)
Mary Hays, Female Biography and Dissenting Feminism
Since the late eighteenth century Mary Hays has occupied an unfortunate critical space,
akin perhaps to the place she must have felt she occupied for sometime in her life,
awkwardly positioned between the rational philosopher William Godwin and the ‘romantic’
feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Known principally for the scandalous ‘novel’ Memoirs of
Emma Courtney (1796), Hays was grouped by contemporaries along with those women
named in Richard Polwhele’s rabidly anti-feminist poem ‘The Unsex’d Females’ (1798) as
‘a Wollstonecraftian’. The idea that Hays was Wollstonecraft’s ‘most fervent disciple’ has
framed much of the critical reception she has received in the twentieth century and
obscured Hays’ originality as a thinker and the considerable philosophical differences
between the pair. Hays’ career following the death of Wollstonecraft has been framed by
the historical accounts that mark the nadir of Enlightenment feminism with her demise.
This trajectory has ensured that Hays’ major work Female Biography (1803) a six-volume
collective biography of scholarly women, has (with rare exceptions such as Gina Walker’s
recent The Growth of A Woman’s Mind) been read as marking a conservative shift in her
politics. In this paper I want to refute the long-standing suggestion that Hays was simply
engaging in ‘hack-work’ when she produced Female Biography, suggesting instead that
her later works reflected a more historical perspective on women’s oppression, and a
conscious shift in genre away from more confessional modes, in order to better advocate
for the rights of woman. While this shift has largely been understood as reactionary, this
paper will argue that it was the inevitable outcome of the long-standing debates Hays
sustained with William Godwin and the need to work through her ideas about the ‘sex of
knowledge’. It will demonstrate that Hays’ recourse to collective biography might be better
understood within the context of her religious identity as a Dissenter. Although Pierre
Bayle’s Dictionaire was the principal source from which Hays drew much of Female
Biography, little critical attention has been paid to the connections between the two texts.
The paper will seek to explore the relation between dissent and biography and its role in
the shaping of feminist scholarship in the early nineteenth century.
Mary Spongberg is associate professor and head of the department of History at
Macquarie University. She is currently editor of Australian Feminist Studies. Her first
book, Feminising Venereal Disease (New York University Press and Macmillan,
1997) was short-listed for the Premier's History Prize in 1998.
37
Daniel Vuillermin (La Trobe University)
Dulce Decus: A Dual Biography of Dr Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds
Much of what is popularly known of Dr Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds's association is
anecdotal, as recounted in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791). However, the pair
shared an intimacy that was unrivalled by Boswell's relationship with Johnson. In the
summer of 1765, Johnson, in a letter to Reynolds, who was suffering from a 'violent
illness', writes: “if I should lose you, I should lose almost the only man whom I call a
friend”; Reynolds similarly conveyed his sentiments to Johnson, describing him as the
only person who he referred to as 'Sir'. Despite Boswell's dedication of the Life to
Reynolds and his reliance upon the painter to establish his biography as the authoritative
text on Johnson, his portrayal of Johnson and Reynolds's relationship is recounted as
noctes cænæque Deûm (nights and suppers of gods), rather than as a fully coherent subnarrative. The primacy that the Life was to have on the posterity of Johnson and
Reynolds's association was endorsed by future biographers of both men who made use of
Boswell as their main source, resulting in an endless recycling of anecdotes and accounts
of events. Thus, Boswell's skill as an anecdotalist effectively controlled the means of
conveying the association between Johnson and Reynolds and has, for the greater part,
stalled further scholarship on the subject.
This paper will make use of Boswell's Life to discuss how single-subject biographies can
inadequately portray the biographee's associations with others. In the case of the Life,
Boswell has been praised for his efficacy in producing a vivid image of Johnson, yet the
deficiency of his biographical methodology results in many aspects of Johnson's life being
omitted or, in the case of his relationship to others in his company, being underdeveloped.
This is evinced by Richard Holmes's Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. This paper will show, by
drawing upon numerous additional biographies of both Johnson and Reynolds, divergent
accounts of their association from Boswell to demonstrate that the pair's association can
be viewed contradistinctively; a dialectic of life narratives. A cursory examination of the
lives of 18th-century England's foremost figures in literature and painting shows that
though the men, in their lifetime, shared an almost equal degree of accomplishment and
fame, Reynolds eclipsed Johnson in terms of wealth and title. In addition, there will be a
brief examination of Reynolds's portraits of Johnson, the parallels between portraiture and
biography and how images of the subject can form an alternative biographical discourse
to textual accounts. This will lead to a discussion of the necessity and proposed plan for a
dual biography of Dr Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Daniel Vuillermin is a PhD candidate in the English Program at La Trobe University
and former editor of Who's Who in Australia (2008). His thesis is a biography of the
New York-born artist, illustrator, cartoonist and author, Herbert Kruckman (1904–
1998). Other current biographical projects include a pathography of his father as well
as the initial stages of researching and writing a dual biography of Dr Samuel
Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds. An excerpt of the latter project is to be published
as a chapter in The Creation of Dr Johnson for Helm Information (UK) in early 2009,
as part of the Icons of Modern Culture series edited by David Ellis.
38
Keith Knapp (The Citadel, South Carolina)
Medieval Chinese Biographies of the Filial and Dutiful: The Case of Guo Yuanping
In pre-modern China, without exception, the officially sanctioned dynastic histories had
chapters dedicated to the collective biographies of various important types of people. For
example, the first of these texts, The History of the Han (first century C.E.), has group
biographies devoted to Confucian scholars, benign and harsh officials, money-makers,
knights-errant, and court favorites. Such biographies continued to be an indispensable
feature of dynastic histories all the way until the twentieth century. These group
biographies displayed the behavior the reigning court desired to encourage and
discourage in its subjects, particularly the educated elite; i.e., those men who were
potential officials.
In China’s medieval period (100-900 CE), one of the most important collective biographies
was that of people who were filial and dutiful; this is reflected in the fact that this chapter
usually came before all of the other group biographies. To discern the behavior that
medieval courts found desirable, as well as the ideological messages that these collective
accounts were meant to convey, this paper concentrates on one particular biography: that
of Guo Yuanping, a virtuous commoner. His biography is featured in the fifth century C.E.
History of the Song that contains the first named chapter devoted to the “Biographies of
the Filial and Dutiful.” Indicative of Guo Yuanping’s noteworthiness within this chapter is
the fact that his biography is longer than any other: it is 1229 Chinese characters long,
whereas the next largest uses only 534. Guo Yuanping probably merited such attention in
part because his father was a renowned filial son and in part because Yuanping’s exploits
captured a famous official’s imagination.
Guo Yuanping’s biography is also significant because his behavior perfectly embodied
both the virtues of filial piety (xiao) and dutifulness (yi). The first third of his biography
establishes his credentials as an outstanding son; the second third consists of anecdotes
that showcase his dutifulness to non-kinsmen: members of his community rather than his
family. The last third describes how officials tried to reward his exemplary conduct with
summons to office and gifts of food, all of which he refused. In his person, then, he
demonstrates that one can be loyal to his family, beneficent to his community, and
incorrupt in his conduct.
In the “Biographies of the Filial and Dutiful,” most of the accounts highlight the behavior of
a man who was either known for his filiality or his righteousness, but not usually both. Guo
Yuanping’s biography, on the other hand, shows how the two virtues were not only
compatible, but even complementary to each other: dutifulness to one’s community flowed
from the selfless filiality one displayed at home. If Guo, a mere commoner could act this
way, how much more could the educated readers of this account? In short, Guo
Yuanping’s biography, like the other accounts in the same chapter, are valuable not only
because they reveal details about the everyday life of fifth-century literati and commoners,
but also because they clearly disclose the types of conduct the government desired to
cultivate in its citizens.
Keith N. Knapp received his M.A. and Ph.D. in East Asian History from the
University of California, Berkeley. He is presently Professor of East Asian History and
Chair of the History Department at The Citadel, the Military College of South
Carolina, in Charleston. In 2005, University of Hawai’i Press published his book,
Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China.
39
40
Session 12: Women and the Collective
Joanna Gardner-Huggett (DePaul University)
The Challenge of Collective Histories: Artemisia and A.R.C. Galleries in Chicago
This paper will address both the methodological and practical challenges in writing the
“collective biographies” of two women artists cooperatives in Chicago: Artemisia (19732003) and A.R.C. (1973-present) galleries. Women’s separatist collectives are generally
neglected in art historical literature because they fall outside the discipline’s lingering
commitment to the individual artist and the originality of the art object. Even with the
resurgence of scholarly literature and exhibitions devoted to feminist art and activism,
such as the acclaimed show “WACK!: Feminist Art and Revolution,” they have done little
to illuminate the history of these cooperatives and their critical role in creating visibility for
women artists and disseminating feminist art theory at a moment when this material was
not available in mainstream art institutions. Because they were located in Chicago,
Artemisia and A.R.C. also fall outside the dominant art markets of New York and Los
Angeles, further distancing these two groups from historical consideration.
I am currently engaged with the writing of Artemisia and A.R.C.’s histories and there are
number of challenges that emerge in attempting to construct a collective biography of both
spaces. First, there exists a tension between the group’s desire to be recognized with
each participating member’s wish for their individual history to be acknowledged as well,
particularly since many women joined the cooperative in order to guarantee greater
visibility as an exhibiting artist. This raises the question of who and what is left out of the
narrative. Primary documents from both spaces’ archives, such as meeting minutes,
exhibition documentation, and financial records, are essential to understanding how each
space developed their policies and governance, but they are often not complete nor
accessible since they may reside in the home of a former member who is no longer active
within the community. In addition, Artemisia remained open for thirty years and A.R.C. is
celebrating its thirty-fifth, pointing to significant changes during their tenure. However,
even with the assistance of oral histories and archives, these moments can be difficult to
pinpoint and reconstruct. Overall, the paper wishes to address multiple strategies needed
to write a nuanced collective biography of Artemisia and A.R.C. galleries, which does not
stifle the individual voices of their members.
Joanna Gardner-Huggett is an associate professor of art history at DePaul
University in Chicago (U.S.) where she teaches courses in twentieth-century art, as
well as women’s and gender studies. Her talk derives from research for her current
book project, Subversive Sisterhood: A.R.C. And Artemisia Galleries (1979-2003).
41
Susan Currie (Central Queensland University)
Writing women into the law in Queensland
The major component of my Master of Arts (Research) degree (QUT 2007) consisted of
profiles of seven significant women in the law in Queensland.3 These profiles appear in A
Woman’s Place: 100 years of women lawyers, edited by Susan Purdon and Aladin
Rahemtula and published by the Supreme Court of Queensland Library.
The starting point for the project was political. While an unprecedented number of women
have been appointed to legal positions of power and influence in Queensland in recent
times, the legal profession is still largely a masculinist enterprise. The appointment of
many of these women received a hostile response from within the profession and its
representative organizations. Within that context, a book produced to celebrate the
achievements of women in the legal profession in Queensland was always a political act.
Ironically, in a profession driven by precedent, there was no precedent collection of lives
of lawyers (whether male or female) to provide guidance.
The precedent for the book was the wider phenomenon of the writing of women’s histories
and biographies as political action—that is, as an intervention in the dominant masculinist
accounts of the world—particularly since the early 1970s. There was always the danger,
particularly in the minds of some of the biographical subjects that, unless handled
carefully, the publication of the book would also have a political reaction. That is, while
championing women’s entry into the law and their contribution to it, it could be used to
personally or professionally undermine the women it profiles.
In writing the profiles, the same politics were alive, and I came to the project not as a
disinterested observer but as a woman lawyer myself, a feminist, a friend to some of the
subjects, and as a creative writing student. My views about how the women should be
represented were not always consistent. My approach varied depending on which hat I
had on at the time, and the final narrative was produced out of the tensions between
these various positions. As a creative writing student, I wanted the profiles to be as
complex and contradictory as the subjects themselves. As a feminist, I was not amenable
to whitewashing gender issues in the profession. As a women lawyer, however, I was
aware that “warts” would be magnified and vulnerabilities scorned. And as a friend, I felt
under a subtle pressure to be kind.
The final element in the triangle of forces was the subjects themselves. With living and
deeply invested subjects, it was never just a question of how I thought the women should
be represented. Not only did the subjects have their own views, I was required to obtain
their agreement to the profiles. My subjects did not necessarily wish to acknowledge the
existence of gender barriers, or to see themselves profiled through the prism of those
issues. On the other hand, they were more forthcoming about their private lives than
expected. They were tentative about the idea of being presented to the public as
significant women lawyers, and only one subject had a readily constructed narrative of her
life. The collective nature of the enterprise proved important in that the women discussed
the draft profiles with each other and became emboldened by doing so.
This paper will discuss the way the profiles developed out of these tensions.
3
The profiles are of Leneen Forde, Chancellor of Griffith University and former Governor of Queensland; Justice Kate
Holmes of the Supreme Court; Leanne Clare, the first female Director of Public Prosecutions; Barbara Newton, the first
female Public Defender; Carmel MacDonald, President of the Aboriginal Land Tribunals and the first female law lecturer
in Queensland; Fleur Kingham, Deputy President of the Land and Resources Tribunal; and Catherine Pirie, the first
Magistrate of Torres Strait descent.
42
Susan Currie BA/LLB, MLaws, MA (Research) is currently writing a single biography
towards a PhD at CQU.
Biographies of Chairs that do not appear elsewhere in the Program
Howard Morphy (chairing session 1) is Director of the Research School of Humanities at
ANU, and was formerly Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. He is an
anthropologist and curator. He has published widely in the anthropology of art, aesthetics,
performance, museum anthropology, visual anthropology and religion. He is presently
completing a biography of the Yolngu artist Narritjin Maymuru (1916–1981). His
publications include Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge
(University of Chicago Press), Culture, Landscape and the Environment (OUP, edited with
Kate Flint) and Aboriginal Art (Phaidon).
Caroline Turner (chairing session 3) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Research
School of Humanities, ANU, and was Deputy Director of the Humanities Research
Centre (2000-2006). Prior to that, she spent 20 years as a senior art museum
professional. She has written extensively on contemporary Asian art and her latest book
of essays is Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific (Pandanus
Press 2005) She is currently heading a research project on an ARC Discovery grant
entitled “The Limits of Tolerance” which explores the links between art and human rights
and is also working on several projects related to museums and museology. The
Australian Government appointed her to the Australia-China Council in the 1980s and
the Australia-Indonesia Institute in the 1990's. At the HRC she has organised numerous
conferences and research projects and she has also been editor of the HRC/CCR
Journal Humanities Research since 2000. She has been recently appointed to the Board
of Cultural Facilities Corporation at the ACT Government.
Sarah Ogilvie (chairing session 5) is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National
Dictionary Centre, Research School of Humanities, ANU. She is writing about the Society
for Pure English, a group of intellectuals in the early twentieth century who came together
because of similar beliefs about language. She is a linguist and lexicographer who spent
two years living in the Umagico Aboriginal Community on Cape York and wrote a
dictionary and grammar of Morrobalama, an Aboriginal language traditionally spoken at
Princess Charlotte Bay in northern Queensland. Her recent publications include
Languages of the World (edited with Keith Brown, 2008) and a number of articles on
World English and lexicography.
Melanie Nolan (chairing session 9) is the Director of the National Centre for Biography
and General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography at ANU, where she is also
Professor of History. She was formerly Head of the Department of History at Victoria
University, Wellington. She has a 1990 PhD from the ANU. She is on the editorial boards
of Australia's Labour History and Britain's Labour History Review. She has a particular
interest in collective biography: her Kin: A collective biography of a New Zealand working
class family won the Ian Wards prize in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Ernest Scott
prize in 2007. She is also the author of Breadwinning. New Zealand Women and the
State, (Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2000); editor of Revolution: The 1913
Great Strike in New Zealand (Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2005); and co43
editor with Caroline Daley of Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives
(Auckland University Press/Pluto Press 1994).
44
Cameron Hazlehurst (chairing session 10) is an adjunct professor in the Research
School of Humanities, ANU. Since 1998, he has been Principal of his own public affairs
consulting, media production and communications management company (Flaxton Mill
House). Prior to that he taught at the Queensland University of Technology, Monash
University and Oxford University. He has also served in various Australian government
posts. His publications include Menzies Observed (1979); Gordon Chalk: A Political Life
(1987); Reforming Australian Government (ed. with John Nethercote, 1977) and Gangs
and Youth Subcultures: International Explorations (edited with Kayleen Hazlehurst
1998). In addition to his academic and government appointments, he has been executive
producer or research consultant on several major television series, including the BBC’s
British Empire, Peach’s Australia (ABC), The Last Bastion (Network Ten Australia), and
Mastermind (ABC).
Debjani Ganguly (chairing session 12) is Head of the Humanities Research Centre.
Previously she was Director, Research Development at the Centre for Cross Cultural
Research (CCR). After completing her PhD in postcolonial literary studies at ANU’s
School of Humanities, she was a research fellow at the CCR (2002-2004). Her
publications include: Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, co-edited with Ned
Curthoys, (Melbourne University Press
2007); Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent
Relationality: Global Perspectives, co-edited with John Docker, (London: Routledge, New
Delhi: Orient Longman
2007); Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity: Notes on a
Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste (London: Routledge. 2005); Impossible Selves:
Cultural Readings of Identity, co-edited with J.Lo, D.Beard, R. Cunneen, (Melbourne:
Australian Scholarly Publishing.
1999); Unfinished Journeys: India File from Canberra,
co-edited with Kavita Nandan (Adelaide: Centre for New Literatures in English, Flinders
University, 1998).
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