OBITUARY

Bede Nairn, 1917–2006: A Memoir

John Merritt

Noel Bede Nairn, who died earlier this year, came to live in Canberra early in 1966 and was immediately invited to join the executive of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH). He had already rendered the Society a great service when he reassured Sydney members that they were not supporting a Communist front. Malicious allegations, first aired early in 1964, had been given publicity in the Bulletin and only someone of known integrity and unimpeachable Australian Labor Party credentials could have put out the fire they threatened to ignite.	1
Bede Nairn 06.08.1917 – 21.04.2006 Photo courtesy of John Nairn
The Executive, struggling to build membership and to find articles for the Labour History journal, faced numerous crises in those early days. Eric Fry and Bede were both calming influences. Bede always seemed to know someone who could help us. For a year or more he, Bob Cooksey and Bruce McFarlane formed the editorial board. Bede, who applied the most exacting standards to his own work, was never a harsh critic, seemingly taking the view that if someone went to the trouble of writing an article the least we could do was to publish it. In particular he was keen to encourage younger historians. The pressure of work at the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) forced him to resign from the Editorial Board, but he continued to serve on the ASSLH executive until he was satisfied that the Society was firmly established.	2
His own contribution to labour history includes numerous biographies for the ADB, several journal articles and two important books, Civilising Capitalism: The Labour Movement in New South Wales 1870–1900 (1973) and The Big Fella (1986), a biography of J.T. Lang. His work for the dictionary, which includes pieces on Watson, Storey, Slattery, Nielsen and Treflé, is a model of the dictionary contributor's art — succinct, informative and evocative of character and personality. 'The 1890 Maritime Strike in New South Wales', published in Historical Studies, vol. 10, no. 37, November 1961, brought new dimensions to analyses of strikes and became essential reading for a generation of labour historians.	3
Civilising Capitalism, the more important of Nairn's books, explained the development of the New South Wales Labor Party in the 1890s in a manner considered very different from that advanced by Bob Gollan in Radical and Working Class Politics. Bob put emphasis on the labour movement's desire for radical social reform; Bede, drawing upon his rural background and perhaps also on the self-improvement instinct needed to take a 15-year-old school leaver to a professorship, stressed the pragmatic reform agendas of men and women seeking independence and security within a capitalist society. Bede admired these advocates of a 'fair go'. Humphrey McQueen, inspired by Marxism, detested them, as he made clear in A New Britannia. Essentially, though, these two very different historians had reached the same conclusion — Gollan was wrong to argue that radicals and socialists had significantly influenced the early New South Wales Labor Party. But the differences between Nairn and Gollan were not as great as some of their contemporaries assumed. If one concedes that Gollan was more concerned with motivation and Nairn with the devising of structure and policy, their respective positions become reconcilable. In the mid-1970s, however, with the New Left rampant, labour historians were not into reconciliation, and the apparent dichotomy between their two leading practitioners stimulated for a time a good deal of impassioned writing and argument. Of more lasting significance is the fact that Bede's arguments gradually led to a more detailed, contextual approach to the political history of Labor in the twentieth century. They also stimulated work on Labor's relationship with small settlers and rural battlers, an electoral asset until the emergence of environmental issues in the 1950s and 1960s.	4
Few people could match Bede's knowledge of the political history of New South Wales. It enabled him to take on that formidable duo, Peter Loveday and Alan Martin, and cast doubt on their account of the development of political parties. And no one I met quite matched his passion for all things New South Welsh. The only time I saw him at all agitated was when I recklessly asserted that two Victorian jockeys (whose names I cannot now recall) might be compared with Sydney's finest. Being a Western Australian I thought I knew about parochialism, until I encountered Queenslanders and Victorians at home, but Bede was their equal. The one Australian Rules game he saw was marked by a superb performance from the marvellously athletic Peter Knights. Bede's only comment was that Knights, in a better world, might have made another Rod Reddy. On such matters, Bede sometimes liked to play to the gallery.	5
As a historian he was in the first rank. Everything he published bore abundant evidence of painstaking research. His arguments were clear and he wrote elegantly. His standing and achievements were fully acknowledged by the time he and Geoffrey Serle took over the editorship of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. But recognition and, in the small world of Australia's historians, what might pass for fame, never affected him. From the time I first met him I was taken by his quiet manner and his capacity to engage in friendly conversations on a wide range of subjects with men and women from all walks of life. And that is how he stayed. While he held strong views on many subjects, and did not hesitate to make them clear, he did so with equanimity and grace. He had no detractors as far as I am aware, a rare thing in the academic world.	6
Bede would have been surprised to learn that all Australian labour historians were in his debt. Yet, undoubtedly, they are. He extricated their Society from a grubby plot brought on by cold war delusions (I was Secretary at the time and no member resigned, not even B.A. Santamaria), he helped to consolidate their journal, and his scholarship enriched their field. The current ASSLH Executive has plans to remember his name. That is entirely appropriate and greatly pleasing to those members of the ASSLH who were fortunate enough to know him.	7
The Sydney Morning Herald, on 15 May 2006, printed an obituary of Bede by Chris Cunneen. Chris has dealt more fully than I have with Bede's life and work. The obituary is available online at <http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/a-big-fella-in-his-field/2006/05/14/1147545204803.html>. There is another obituary by Gerard Walsh at: <http://rsss.anu.edu.au/documents/bede.html>	8
John Merritt is a former editor of Labour History. <jmerritt@bigpond.au> Endnotes

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