OBITUARY

Robin Gollan (1917–2007)

Stuart Macintyre

The Depression was a formative experience for many Australians who came of age in the 1930s and never forgot the hardship and humiliation it inflicted. World War II was their time of sacrifice but also a time of hope for a better world. Post-war reconstruction implemented plans to banish unemployment, poverty and insecurity, including the Reconstruction Training Scheme that enabled these ex-servicemen and women from humble origins to pursue their studies and fulfil their talents. The Cold War dashed the earlier hope, and also exposed those on the left to intense suspicion.	1
Robin Allenby (Bob) Gollan (08.12.1917 – 15.10.2007) Photo: Sydney, late 1930s, Courtesy Kathy Gollan
In his book Revolutionaries and Reformists (1975) Bob Gollan gave the best account of this era of intense ideological conflict and rapidly changing political fortunes. Like all of his writing, it is marked by a breadth of perspective and clarity of exposition. His empathy for the subject is clear and so too is his objectivity. He does not evade the errors and excesses of the left-wing activists, for he seeks to learn from the past. Furthermore, it is his own past. Bob was born just a few years before the narrative begins in the 1920s; his youthful experience of the 1930s led him to the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the book ends in 1955, just as he was about to leave it. He was a beneficiary of the post-war expansion of Australian universities and he was the senior member of the generation of radical historians which included Russel Ward, Ian Turner, Miriam Dixson and Eric Fry. These scholars broadened Australian history to incorporate the experience and aspirations of the labour movement.	2
Robin Allenby Gollan was born on 8 December 1917, the day news reached Australia that Jerusalem had fallen to the Australian Light Horse under the command of General Allenby. His father William's family came from north-east Scotland and settled in Woodburn, on the Richmond River, following the Selection Act of 1861. His mother, originally Jeannie Maclean, was also of Scottish descent. Both were members of the Salvation Army and Jeannie worked for it on the Western Australian goldfields before marriage.	3
The family moved during Bob's childhood, first to a dairy farm at Dorrigo, later to a mixed farm on Cambewarra Mountain, inland from Nowra, though there were spells shopkeeping unsuccessfully in Sydney. Bob was the last of five surviving children: one brother, Ernie, was a radio technician; his sister Myra became a Salvation Army officer; and the other brothers, Bill and Ken, schoolteachers. Their success – Bill became a high school principal despite his notoriety as a leading member of the CPA – helped Bob to pursue his own career.	4
Bob's primary education began at a single-teacher bush school, and to get there he shared the back of a horse with Ken until his brother went to high school in Sydney. Bob began his secondary education at Wollongong and completed the final three years at Fort Street when the family moved back to Sydney. From 1936 he undertook an honours degree in Arts at Sydney University, where he helped form a branch of the CPA. An early recruit was Daphne Morris who was studying part-time while working in the Mitchell Library; they would marry in 1941. Bob shared the history medal with his academic and political antithesis, John Manning Ward. He undertook teacher training in 1939 and taught in schools in New South Wales for the next three years.	5
At the end of 1941 Bob Gollan was elected a delegate to a youth conference in Mexico organised – following the invasion of the Soviet Union – to rally support for the war against fascism. However, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour shortly after he landed in San Francisco, and he returned home immediately to enlist. After three years of service in the Royal Australian Air Force he became a lecturer at the Sydney Teachers College, meanwhile completing a Masters thesis. Encouraged by Daphne, he chose to work on Australian history and trace the development of class relations. He then won a scholarship to the London School of Economics (LSE) where Harold Laski supervised a doctoral thesis that extended this research, which would form the basis of his first book, Radical and Working Class Politics (1960). The stimulus of the LSE, participation in the Communist Party History Group and extensive travel sharpened his perspective on Australia.	6
What next? One possibility was a career in the labour movement: Daphne had worked for the Ironworkers Association and Bob was prominent in the NSW Teachers Federation, and its president, Sam Lewis, wanted him to accept a full-time union post. Bob's preference was further research. This would have been difficult to combine with his duties at the Teachers College, where he resumed teaching in 1951. Towards the end of 1952 the new Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra offered him a research fellowship. The position was untenured and paid less – a risky step to take since he and Daphne now had two children, Klim and Kathy. However, in 1953 they moved into a modest home in the new suburb of O'Connor.	7
The ANU made scant provision for wives, no matter how well qualified, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) devoted considerable attention to vetting its academic appointments. To its credit, the university resisted pressure to block Bob's appointment and eventually found a place for Daphne to teach. Bob flourished in the Research School of Social Sciences, especially after Keith Hancock returned from London to direct it. The two men differed in their politics but shared a common enjoyment of bushwalking and fishing; Hancock valued the younger man as a historian of 'great integrity' and arranged for him to write a history of the Commonwealth Bank.	8
Bob's next project was a history of The Coalminers of New South Wales (1963), the first research-based study of an Australian union and one that established a model for the genre. It was written with the co-operation of the union and full access to their records, but did not shrink from censure. It incurred the criticism of Edgar Ross, the communist editor of the union newspaper who produced his own insistently orthodox history of the Miners Federation seven years later. Bob's account is notable also for its attention to the history of the industry and the industrial policies of the employers. While Brian Fitzpatrick had pioneered the study of capital accumulation, he worked primarily from published sources. Bob was a pioneer in the use of company as well as union records, and joined with the economic historian Noel Butlin to establish the archives at the ANU as the major national repository.	9
It was at this time that the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History was formed. It followed a British precedent, and Bob's contacts with the founders in the United Kingdom were important. However, its impetus sprang from the work being done at the ANU by postgraduates such as Miriam Dixson, Jim Hagan, Ian Turner and Edgar Waters. Eric Fry, who was then working in the History Department of the recently amalgamated School of General Studies, made an important contribution, as did Bruce Shields, the director of the archives; but Bob, who had been promoted to Senior Fellow in the Research School in 1960, was a critical figure in an enterprise that received little encouragement from the professoriate. His introductory statement in the first issue of the Society's journal in January 1962 set out a broad and inclusive charter, and he encouraged subsequent editors – especially John Merritt – to develop it further.	10
The establishment of Labour History was assisted by the partial thaw in the Cold War that followed Khrushchev's 1956 speech acknowledging Stalin's atrocities. These revelations and then the Soviet invasion of Hungary brought an exodus of communists from the Communist Party in Australia –and Bob was one of them. He wrote: 'I joined the party in 1936 because it seemed to me the only party fully committed to a struggle for socialism and against fascism. I left it, with regret, in 1957, because this no longer seemed to be the case'. This release from the dogmas of communist orthodoxy made it possible for intellectuals such as Bob to work with others of different ideological temper, and the abandonment of old certainties encouraged them to explore aspects of labour history with a new curiosity.	11
Bob retained respect for left-wing traditions: his first book was dedicated to his brother Bill, and his Revolutionaries and Reformists is a sustained attempt to grasp what was valuable in both streams of the left. He did not abandon his own socialist activism and played an active role in the Vietnam protest movement and subsequent campaigns. But he would never again serve any cause uncritically.	12
Bob's marriage to Daphne ended in the early 1960s and he found the Research School uncongenial after Hancock's retirement in 1967. He was rescued from the personal unhappiness by a relationship with Anne Ayrton whom he subsequently married, and he resolved his professional dissatisfaction by taking up a teaching post in 1975. Unusually among the members of the Research School, he had volunteered for stints of lecturing, at Melbourne, Sydney, the University of Papua New Guinea and even the Soviet Embassy. Now he applied for and was appointed to the chair of history in the Faculty of Arts at ANU.	13
He retired from the chair in 1981 and with Anne moved down to Armands Nook, near Bermagui, where with help from friends they built a house and formed new friends among the locals. They returned to Canberra at the end of the decade, travelled widely by campervan, and remained active in community life. He kept up his friendships and was a generous correspondent. At several moments in my own life when I was under fire, a letter from Bob would bring reassurance. His letters to the Canberra Times on all manner of subjects were briefer but no less effective.	14
Intensely Australian in speech and manner, Bob Gollan was an instinctive internationalist. The doctoral studies in London were followed by periods of overseas sabbatical leave, and wherever he travelled he engaged with the history and politics of his host country. He was always pressing new books onto friend and colleagues. His mind was incisive and cut through cant. He was not impressed by academic preening, but his contributions at seminars and conferences were invariably telling. He was a gifted raconteur, who delighted in telling stories that deflated pomposity, and was a lively drinking companion. His voice was seldom raised, though instances of bullying or humbug roused him. Above all, his patent decency and sincerity made him a bridge for scholars and activists seeking guidance and support; and through his own scholarship he created the bridge that allows us to understand his generation of activists.	15
Bob Gollan died in Canberra 15 October 2007, just eleven days after his friend and colleague, Eric Fry. He is survived by his wife, Anne, his son, Klim, and daughter Kathy.	16
Stuart Macintyre has held appointments at Cambridge, Murdoch, the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne. He is currently chair of Australian Studies at Harvard. He has been a key contributor to many major Australian bodies concerned with the humanities and social sciences including state and national libraries and has published extensively on Australian history. <smacintyre@unimelb.edu.au>

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