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Book Review
| Christopher Cunneen (ed.),Australian Dictionary of Biography: Supplement 1580–1980, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria, 2005. pp. xxii + 520. $74.95 cloth
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| History is full of forgetfulness; there is no reason why even the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in all its vast and preceding 16 volumes since 1962, should have escaped the tendency to overlook some valuable lives, or felt compelled to leave them behind in the crush for scarce space, until a trace of a life snags at the memory, a protest is lodged on behalf of the neglected, and four good minds — amongst many others — are brought to bear on the unenviable task of summoning another tribe of the dead, from the many who might be recalled in the span of 400 years of human experience of this continent from 1580. |
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Supplementing the story of Australian lives starts with a resonant and disturbing echo: Mullah Abdullah, camel driver and Islamic priest, whose faith and its practices jarred with the narrow mining community of Broken Hill, and who was by January 1915, 'a grey-bearded zealot, fiery when insulted', as he joined with a former Turkish Army soldier, Gool Badsha Mahomed, to bring the Great War and simmering religious grievance to a train load of citizens bound for the Manchester Unity Order of Oddfellows Picnic in Silverton. Equipped with a rifle-laden ice cream cart, they died for their cause in a 'terrorist-suicide mission' that left four intending picnickers dead. |
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The necessary economy of the ADB entry often produces a terse elegance. Michael Roe's entry on the Tasmanian Aboriginal leader Eumarrah captures in a few hundred well chosen words the complexity of the frontier confrontation between white and black, illustrating how
British settlement offered indigenes a mix of challenge, opportunity, confusion and disaster ... In mirror image, colonists viewed Eumarrah with mingled hostility, admiration and hope that he would serve their ends.
Working to overcome historical neglect the Supplement contains 49 entries on indigenous lives, 'a far higher proportion than in earlier volumes', according to the Preface, and notably including the early resistance leaders Musquito and Pemulwuy. In 161 entries the Supplement also redresses a neglect of women. |
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Labour historians will find lives to be explored, worked into new contexts or linked with overlooked relationships; the political and religious radical Jane Fryer, who like many dissatisfied and rebellious working-class Australians in the nineteenth century sought a liberated identity, embracing secularism, radical politics and later theosophy; her fellow secularist, feminist and temperance worker Rose Summerfield followed her own quest to the New Australia settlement in Paraguay. Victor Kroemer embraced an idiosyncratic mix of fin de siècle socialism and theosophy. The Supplement also includes entries on the pioneer feminist and anti-conscriptionist Alicia O'Shea Peterson, the World War I Ernest Judd and the Trotskyite Edward Tripp. There are yet other brave dissidents: the transsexual Marion (Bill) Edwards, a woman who decided in 1896 to live and dress as a man; and Harry Foy, homosexual and female impersonator whose uninhibited display cost him his life in a Sydney bar in the Second World War. |
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Which Labor Party identity once worked as a stand-up comedian? Bill Colbourne, long-serving NSW ALP secretary, grouper and fervent anti-Langite, who resisted the divisive Big Fella's rehabilitation by a young Paul Keating in the 1970s. Other Labor Party and union activists include Creo Stanley who, like Rose Summerfield, was a pioneering organiser of women workers in the 1890s; Eva Seery and Edith Bethel, two of the founders of the Women's Central Organising Committee of the NSW Political Labor League, and John Medway Day, the first professional editor of the Sydney Worker. Terry Irving provides a memorable portrait of Fred Wells, the Sydney Morning Herald's industrial reporter for a decade from 1965, former Communist, ASIO informant, and the first honorary secretary of the Sydney Branch of the Labour History Society in 1963. |
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Labour historians also record the enemies of the labour movement: Andrew Moore provides a fascinating entry on premature ribbon cutter and New Guard enthusiast Francis de Groot. Have you heard of the Australian Women's Movement Against Socialisation (1947–60)? Frank Cain reports that Lilla O'Malley Wood, widow of the Sydney banker William O'Malley Wood, was one of its leaders. The brief entry on the South Australian Liberal politician Sir Norman Jude is suggestive of the political and community networks that helped mobilise the anti-Labor political forces in post-World War II Australia. |
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The Supplement includes a complete name index to all 16 volumes of the ADB and the Supplement itself. The ADB is also now online, featuring 'over 10,000 scholarly biographies of significant Australians who died before 1980', including those in this Supplement: it's a practical but misleading sub-title. There is nothing supplementary about the lives described here. I am indebted to the snapshot lives recorded in the ADB; its entries have helped me to sort many context and connections, and sent me off in search of new stories. |
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| University of Sydney |
MARK HEARN | |
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