Stuart Rosewarne

OBITUARY

Vale Ken Buckley, 1922–2006

The passing of the noted economic historian Ken Buckley at the age of 83 coincides with what appears to be the drawing to a close of several important chapters in the development of Australian academia. Indeed these had been pivotal elements framing Ken's intellectual work as well as his longstanding commitment to and active engagement in politically progressive causes both within and beyond the academy. But, while Ken is no longer with us, the legacy of his work will live on.

Ken Buckley

Photo courtesy of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties

Buckley's appointment to the University of Sydney in 1953 was part of the post-World War II expansion of the university sector in Australia. Ken had graduated with first-class honours in economics from Queen Mary College, University of London, and lectured at Aberdeen University, and thus seemed to be a perfect fit into the mould of the classic British academic transplant upon which the Australian university system was largely being built. A few radicals like Buckley were not filtered out, although in Buckley's case, the efforts of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) to block his appointment was successfully challenged.

The focus of his intellectual interests became well established during these formative years. Buckley had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain while at Queen Mary, and his war-time experiences — he had been co-opted into the British intelligence and became a supporter of the Greek resistance, which then led to into his ongoing backing for the Cypriot struggle against British colonial rule — consolidated this commitment to a leftist politics that was to colour nearly all of his academic labours.

In some respects, the decision to pursue a position at Sydney University might seem to have been somewhat unusual for the self-proclaimed 'unregenerate Marxist'. The University of Sydney was a very much a bastion of class privilege. With the benefit of hindsight, there were some understandable reasons that even though this entailed a step into the antipodes, the institution provided a springboard from which Buckley could play a leading role in promoting the academic discipline of economic history and consolidating the radical tradition that focused on labour history and the history of capital. This British émigré was anything but a prisoner of the 'cultural cringe' phenomenon that defined much of Australian academia in the post-war period as it sought to reproduce the Oxbridge mould.

Buckley's contribution to Australian historiography proved to be significant. His history of the Amalgamated Engineers was among the first serious studies of an Australian union. The series edited with Ted Wheelwright Essays In The Political Economy Of Australian Capitalism, the first volume of which was published in 1975, provided an important forum for research by a generation of younger mostly Marxists. Buckley and Wheelwright set about the task of rewriting the history of Australian capitalism 'from below', with the publication of No Paradise for Workers: Capitalism and the Common People in Australia 1788–1914 and False Paradise: Australian Capitalism Revisited, 1915–1955. The commissioned two-volume history of the Pacific Islands trading and plantation company, Burns Philp, highlighted Buckley's endeavours to interrogate the place of business in the making of Australian capitalism.

For Buckley, academia offered the opportunity to inject some progressive elements into collegial relations, and he joined others in challenging the reified construct of the academic rooted in (mostly) an ivory tower. In concert with Wheelwright and like-minded individuals, he formed an academic staff association at the University of Sydney, and then proceeded to organise a national federation, establishing the Federal Council of University Staff, of which he was honorary secretary for a number of years, and which would become the Federated Australian University Staff Association and, with coverage extended to all university staff, the National Tertiary Education Union.

This resoluteness in giving voice to the place of the academic as an active subject in his own making was of course consistent with the socialist humanist foundations of Buckley's Marxism. He refused to be intimidated by his political opponents. The unsuccessful ASIO bid to block his appointment to the University of Sydney more or less set Buckley on the path of a much-celebrated position as a public intellectual in the fight for civil rights. He played a leading role in the establishment of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties (CCL).

The CCL assumed a pivotal place in Ken's personal, intellectual and political life. He remarried, marrying his then associate-in-arms, Berenice, and theirs remained a rich and supportive relationship. In the spirit of many historians, and in contrast with some of the blind ideologues who populated the Communist Party of Australia at the time (Buckley resigned his membership in the face of the leadership's efforts to cover up the abuses of the Soviet leadership), he and Berry were assiduous in building the civil liberties project by engaging individuals from across the political spectrum. Through his research he exposed the abuse of civil rights by police and the bureaucracy (Offensive and Obscene in 1970), and published a manual on citizens' rights (All About Citizens' Rights in 1976). Throughout his life he had no hesitation in speaking out in the fight against a whole gamut of abuses of office by members of the NSW police force.

Within the academy, Ken remained committed to the intellectual ambitions of the socialist humanist tradition that he had first become acquainted with as a member of the Marxist Historians Group in London in which Eric Hobsbawm had participated. He was a keen editorial supporter of Labour History, and, while perhaps somewhat suspicious of the political direction of a generation of students swept up in the New Left, he remained committed to supporting their endeavours to engage in research on the history of Australian capitalism.

Ken retired from the University of Sydney in 1988. The institution in which he had been employed for 40 years — and more notably the Faculty and the Dean who was also head of Economic History and, irony upon ironies, a former US Naval Intelligence Officer — remained resolutely opposed to acknowledging his many contributions by refusing to promote him to the position of professor. Within a short time of his departure, the Department of Economic History was disbanded. Ken, however, continued to pursue his intellectual interests. With Barbara Dale and Wayne Reynolds, his research on Labor Party leader H.V. Evatt, Doc Evatt: Patriot, Internationalist, Fighter and Scholar, was published in 1994. He continued working with Labour History.

After his retirement, Ken displayed comparatively little interest in the affairs of the University. He was no doubt very uncomfortable with the radical changes that were being imposed upon the public institution that had been so dear to his heart. He could not countenance the government's agenda forcing universities to become more and more self-financing, let alone the associated metamorphous of vice chancellors, from academically-oriented leaders into chief executive officers preoccupied with commercial imperatives. Ken was acutely uncomfortable with the increasing subordination of intellectual endeavours and teaching programs to the dictates of the dollar. Similarly, he was decidedly uncomfortable with the University pressuring staff to engage with the entrepreneurial mission, by focusing energies on revenue raising and servicing students now defined as 'clients', and to the manoeuvres of the new guard of CEOs to block the right of staff to speak out on matters of public importance.

Ken was happy to leave to others the struggles against the intensification of academic work and to defend the principle of independent and critical academic inquiry, of academic freedom. Likewise he did not participate in the student campaigns against the introduction of fees and the conservative government's moves, through 'Voluntary Student Unionism', to frustrate political expression and thereby recreate many of the insidious class barriers reminiscent of the Menzies era.

This was not at all a sign that Ken had abandoned his politics. On the contrary, he remained absorbed in the defence of civil liberties. He remained committed to the future of progressive politics, holding out some hope in the Greens as an alternative political party. Many of these commitments were aired by Ken in the Hummer in 2004. ('From Communism to Civil Liberties: Autobiographical and Political Reflections', available at: <http://www.asslh.org.au/sydney/hummer/vol4no2/buckley.htm>). It is the sustained nature of this commitment to progressive causes that will be his long-lasting legacy, a legacy that can be found in his writings, and in particular his persistent critiques of Australian capitalism and its conservative champions and their exploitative and oppressive nature and marginalising effects, and it endures in the organisations that he helped to form and which continue to bring people together in the struggle to build a better world for all.

Stuart Rosewarne did his PhD under Ken Buckley's supervision at the University of Sydney where he teaches and researches in Political Economy. He has served in various capacities of the National Tertiary Education Union and is presently President of its NSW Division.
<s.rosewarne@econ.usyd.edu.au>

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