RESEARCH NOTE

How to Select a ‘Proper’ Official Historian

Duncan Waterson

When researching the life of Senator Joseph Silver Collings (1865-1955), Minister for the Interior in the wartime Curtin administration, the diaries of Gavin Long, Bean’s successor as Official Historian of Australia at War, and the minutes of the Australian War Memorial (AWM) Committee for which Collings, as Minister, was responsible, were examined. They reveal an odd episode which throws light on patronage, conservative assumptions and power.	1
The travails of Dr Gregory Pemberton and Ms Ann-Mari Jordens over the Official History of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war (for which no State-sponsored domestic social history yet exists), the acerbic yet penetrating work of Denis Winter, as well as the whole problem of researching, writing and producing ‘official history’ are well known to scholars. Yet often these issues are frequently ignored by those seeking and granting official largesse and approval.1 Even less well known is the selection process whereby editors and authors are placed on the public payroll. In Long’s case, he had C.E.W. Bean, an insuperable mentor to guide and emulate. Nevertheless, it should be noted that his predecessor’s monumental history of the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF) gathered dust in libraries and Returned Services League (RSL) clubs until the late 1960s.2	2
Two days before Pearl Harbour, the War Cabinet considered proposals for an Official History of Australia’s role in World War II. The submission of 14 November 1941 was completed by a Committee chaired by Collings, and included the Navy Minister, Drakeford, the Minister for the Army, Forde, the Postmaster-General, Ashley and the ‘about to retire’ Charles Bean. After consultation with General Blamey, the committee recommended that materials should immediately be collected, that there should only be one series, that collectors and historians might confer, and that Bean be replaced as soon as possible.3	3
The Japanese onslaught naturally delayed matters. History was all very well but others rather than White Australians might well have written it. Yet, on 4 August 1942, after the battles of Coral Sea and Midway, but before Buna and Kokoda, Cabinet approved the proposition that the Australian War Memorial, not the Departments of Defence or the Prime Minister, should be the home of the ‘new history’, that the Committee could nominate the editor of the series, prepare the scheme and spend up to £2,000 per annum.4	4
On 25 November 1942, the Committee unanimously recommended the appointment of war correspondent and journalist, Gavin Long, son of the Bishop of Newcastle, who had close family and religious ties to Charles Bean. Long became General Editor on 30 January 1943 at a salary of £1,500 per annum.5 Considering the somewhat chaotic and difficult chronicling of Australia’s participation in World War II, and with Australian service personnel spread from Murmansk to Moresby, from Hobart to Melville Island, Long did his job well.6 Yet there is one episode that does not rebound to either Collings or Long’s credit. The question of selecting writers for the military volumes of the Official History was largely a non-controversial one. The two domestic volumes, The Australian People at War, were not allowed to be contentious although the political, economic and social ramifications were, while lacking the destructive fissures of the Great War, both profound and complex.7 After all, New Zealand took 40 years after the end of World War II to produce the massive two volume ‘social’ history to chronicle the Kiwi home front.8 Australia has yet to deliver the ‘missing on duty’ aspects of the society between 1939 and 1946, if it indeed can or will. Others have taken up the creative challenge and a 57 year delay may well be useful for governments which increasingly seek rapid, short term solutions to massive problems. Perhaps, as in the case of the Great War historiographical explosion, the task is best left to those historians untrammelled by the necessities of the State although even this autonomy is under threat. Hasluck himself defended his exclusion of alternative analyses:	5
arguments about the social system tend to throw into discord all the other qualities that bind people in community and tend to set up an idea that unless society has the approved shape (whatever that may be) society is bad and not worth serving.9
Yet Hasluck’s philosophy had, unbeknown to him, already been accepted by Long and Bean. After discussions with the Vice-Chancellors of the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney, and a range of consultants including Douglas Copland, Max Crawford, Hasluck himself, the powerful Sir Frederick Shedden, Nugget Coombs, Ben Chifley and Fred Alexander, Long and Bean drew up certain criteria for eliminating names from this list.
(a) left wingers who appeared to be so doctrinaire that they would be inclined to use the history to prove a political or historical theory (b) men who had been so closely associated with wartime administration that they would be asked to tell a story in which they found themselves to be leading actors (c) men inclined to be inoffensive, even where criticism was demanded.10
Paul Hasluck’s strengths and career are admirably chronicled by McIntyre and Saunders, but it is worth returning to the scenario which resulted in his appointment as the writer of the domestic history. On 13 September 1944, Long was briefed by Robert Menzies, failed former Prime Minister and current Leader of the Opposition, before seeing Collings with his recommendations.
Brian Fitzpatrick, the Melbourne radical, civil libertarian, friend of Dr Evatt and author of the seminal British Imperialism in Australia (1939); A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement (1940); and The British Empire (1941), was rejected out of hand.	6
He would be most unsuitable. He was a tendentious writer. I said that I would not be willing to propose Fitzpatrick. In my opinion anything he wrote in the field (economics and political history) would be designed to prove a political theory or theories.11
Long then saw Collings, repeated his arguments against Fitzpatrick, and suggested that young contemporary writers without personal political involvements were needed. The History Committee met and accepted Long’s recommendations that Hasluck be appointed to write the domestic, and S.J. Butlin, the economic volumes.12	7
Obviously Fitzpatrick (and others?) did not get fair treatment. Evatt had written the introduction to Fitzpatrick’s British Imperialism in Australia and ‘evidently a strong rapport was subsequently established between Evatt and Fitzpatrick, although there were some differences of viewpoint’.13 Hasluck’s volumes were judicious, sound, scholarly, conservative and socially somewhat imperceptive. Certainly, as his United Nations and subsequent political career proves, he was a ferocious Cold War and Vietnam war warrior. Hasluck was no ideological neuter. Quite the contrary. Yet he was a superior historian – a somewhat rare Antipodean ‘sport’ of a practising conservative who was also a fine historian in his own right.14	8
Perhaps if Evatt had been in Australia, things might have turned out differently in spite of Collings’ supine acquiescence, or possible ignorance. Not for the first time has Labor in office been unable to exercise state patronage when and where it really mattered.	9
The radical fires in Collings had well burnt out by 1945. Ironically, in that year he asked Long to trumpet the history, and, in view of press denunciations, produce a series of justifications to manipulate public opinion. At Collings’ farewell, Chifley had observed that ‘if he (Collings) had not been such a fanatical Labor man he would have made a splendid conservative’.15	10
Certainly this episode demonstrates the truth of that observation.	11
Endnotes 1 John Murphy, ‘The New Official History’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 102, April 1994, pp. 119-124; Denis Winter, Making the Legend: the War Writings of C.E.W. Bean, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1992. 2. The most informative discussion of Bean’s contribution is Alistair Thomson’s, ‘“Steadfast until death?” C.E.W. Bean and the Representation of Australian Military Manhood’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 23, no. 93, October 1989, pp. 462-478. 3. War Cabinet Decision, 5 December 1941, Australian War Memorial (AWM), Mss. 67, 10/24, Canberra. For Collings, see J. Guyatt, ‘Collings, Joseph Silver ’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 8, 1891-1939, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1981, pp. 73-77; D.B. Waterson, ‘Joseph Silver Collings’, Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate, vol. 2, forthcoming. 4. 4 August 1942, AWM Mss. 67, 10/24. 5. 25 November 1942, AWM Mss. 67, 10/25. 6. A.J. Sweeting, ‘Long, Gavin Merrick’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 15, 1940-1980, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 19-21. 7. Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 2 vols, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1952 & 1970. 8. Nancy W. Taylor, The Home Front, vols 1 & 2, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1986. 9. Quoted in Don Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick: a Radical Life, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, pp. 95-96. 10. Daryl McIntyre and Kay Saunders, ‘Official Historian’, in Tom Stannage, Kay Saunders and Richard Nile (eds), Paul Hasluck in Australian History, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1998. I have not attempted to duplicate this excellent chapter which adds, rather than detracts from, the central theme of this note. 11. Long Diary, 6, 13 September 1944, AWM Mss. 67, 1/6, Canberra. 12. Ibid. 13 K. Buckley, B. Dale and W. Reynolds, Doc Evatt: Patriot, Internationalist, Fighter and Scholar, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1994, p. 172. For Fitzpatrick’s ‘close liaison’ with Evatt and work for the Labor government before being expelled from the ALP, see Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, p. 137. 14. See Robert Porter, Paul Hasluck: a Political Biography, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1993; Stannage, Saunders and Nile (eds), Paul Hasluck in Australian History; Paul Hasluck, Mucking About: an Autobiography, University of Western Australia, Nedlands, 1994. For a radical view of Hasluck’s 1964-69 role in foreign policy during the Vietnam war, see G.J. Munster and Richard Walsh, Secrets of State, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1982; M. Sexton, War for the Asking, Penguin Australia, Ringwood, 1981 and Gregory Pemberton, All the Way: Australia’s Road to Vietnam, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1987. 15. Gil Duthie, I had 50,000 Bosses: Memoirs of a Labor Backbencher, 1946-1975, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1984. Diary entry for 26 October 1949.

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