Stephen Foster

OBITUARY

Bruce Mitchell (1935–2009)

MITCHELL, BRUCE ARTHUR (1935–2009), teacher, historian and raconteur, was born on 3 October 1935 at Newcastle, New South Wales, the eldest child of Arthur Mitchell, engineering draftsman and factory owner, and his wife Min, née Collister.

Bruce Mitchell (1935–2009)
Family photo, Walcha, NSW, 2007

I fancy that Bruce, the author of 28 entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), would have liked his obituary to begin in the standard ADB format. He would have paused, though, over the 'occupational description'. Should 'teacher' come before 'historian'? Are historians by definition teachers? Bruce believed in precision. Surely 'raconteur' cannot be classified as an occupation. But then he might remember that Don Baker in his ADB entry categorised John Dunmore Lang, among other things, as a 'gaol-bird'. This would lead Bruce to a story about the ADB, and then to several other loosely-connected stories, before he returned to the matter at hand. No doubt about it: Bruce was as much a raconteur as Lang was a gaol-bird.

Bruce's parents placed a premium on education, ensuring that their four children, all boys, attended university. Three of the four, including Bruce, later became academics. In a family history, which he published in 2008, he attributed his love of story-telling and enthusiasm for speech-making to his mother, 'extraordinarily ignorant in many things and full of ancient prejudices', but 'very intelligent' and 'a great talker'. He grew up at Lane Cove, on Sydney's lower North Shore, attended North Sydney Technical College and the University of Sydney, and served as a soldier in Menzies' National Service Training Scheme. At University he met a fellow history student Jean Bull, whom he married in 1958. In that year he began teaching history at high schools in Sydney's west, including Richmond and the predominantly working-class suburb of Blacktown where they lived. Appointed to a lectureship at Sydney Teachers' College, he published in 1965 The Australian Story and its Background, a text book for secondary students.

Bruce had a talent for taking on simultaneously the roles of eager participant and detached observer. As a teacher and lecturer, he was active in the New South Wales Teachers Federation at a time of increasing militancy. Recognising that the Federation did not fall comfortably into union stereotypes, and wanting to know more, he enrolled for a PhD in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. There he was influenced by two outstanding teachers, Bob Gollan and Barry Smith, as well as the lively band of researchers who inhabited the Coombs Building, many of them absorbed in some aspect of labour history. He was an enthusiastic member of the youthful Australian Society for the Study of Labour History and a sharp-eyed observer of campus politics, including the frosty relations between the Research School and the School of General Studies. His thesis, completed in 1969, was later published as Teachers, Education and Politics: A History of Organizations of Public School Teachers in New South Wales (1975). He concluded that the Teachers Federation was 'generally conservative in professional matters although politically radical in the industrial field; and political in almost every sense except being committed to a political party'.

His own political sympathies were unambiguously with the left. As he told the story, this helped win him a job as Lecturer at the University of New England where the Head of Department, Russel Ward, was keen to maintain political balance in new appointments. Bruce was to balance Bob Howard, a student of politics and international relations (and brother of a future Prime Minister). But, much to Bruce's amusement, Russel had got it wrong: the new appointee turned out to be as much a Labor supporter as Bruce was, and was soon engaged in electioneering on behalf of the ALP. Perhaps Bruce was exaggerating Russel's intentions: he was not above embellishing a good story. What is certain, though, is that Russel Ward was determined to appoint good teachers; and in both these appointments he succeeded brilliantly.

Arriving at Armidale early in 1970, Bruce threw himself into teaching the first year course in Australian history, with Sandy (A.T.) Yarwood, Miriam Dixson and a small team of eager young tutors, including myself. Student numbers were high and class sizes low, with an optimum of eight students in each tutorial. The University specialised in External Studies, later referred to as 'distance education', and the academic year was punctuated by the arrival of hefty bundles of external essays in yellow cover sheets, dubbed 'yellow perils'. Bruce was a diligent marker, and his comments on external essays were often elegant essays in themselves. We introduced 'special topics', a rare innovation at that time, giving students an element of choice in a previously fixed curriculum. There was a steady flow of departmental visitors, including historians and historical figures (Jack Lang, balanced a year or so later by Artie Fadden). Bruce also embraced life in Armidale. With Jean, teacher and later deputy principal at a local secondary school, he served for many years as an office-bearer and then patron of the local historical society. They were generous hosts, with Bruce always ready to engage in uproarious debate or encourage a sing-along around his piano.

These were exciting times: Whitlam was in the ascendant, people who had never before protested against anything were marching in opposition to the Vietnam War, women were demanding to be heard, and rebellious students were insisting on a say in how they were taught. Russel Ward, like many of his generation, had difficulty coping with the student troubles, as well as the rebellious voice of New Left historiography. Bruce, more receptive (or tolerant) of new ideas and more accommodating of rebellious youth, adopted the role of peace-maker, helping on more than one occasion avert potential crises.

Bruce was an animated lecturer, a stimulating tutor and a diligent supervisor, always alert to flaws in logic and errors of fact, pernickety about grammatical errors and solecisms, and ruthless in expunging long sentences. He was a great encourager, invariably interested in his students' discoveries, whatever the subject matter, and always willing to conduct some aspect of research on their behalf. He delighted in historical controversy – the Botany Bay debate, Manning Clark and his critics, working-class politics, and so on. As with his flow of stories, everything was connected, and every topic, however arcane, needed to be placed in a larger context. The subjects of his ADB articles suggested the breadth of his interests: from William Henry Gocher, artist, bimetallist and pioneer daylight surfer, to Edward Hammond Hargraves, gold rush publicist. Hargraves was grist to Bruce's mill: he loved debunking historical myths, and Hargraves, in the 1970s, was still widely accepted as the discoverer of gold in Australia. Bruce seized the opportunity to set the record straight. He remained committed to the teaching of History in schools, as a long-term member of the History Teachers Association of New South Wales and as chair of the New South Wales Modern History Syllabus Committee from 1979 to 1984. Like many of his colleagues, he saw sport as a way of understanding the Australian psyche and its regional variations. He puzzled about why his own game, baseball, was not more popular in Australia, and wrote about it in an article for the International Journal for the History of Sport.

Bruce and Jean separated in 1982. Two years later he married Jillian Oppenheimer, a well-known and highly respected New England pastoralist, who had completed a Master's degree in History at University of New England many years earlier. Together they restored Ohio at Walcha, a two-storey stone homestead dating back to Jillian's great-grandfather, Abraham Nivison, in the 1840s. Bruce, with characteristic zest and humour, assumed the improbable role of country squire, acquired a baby grand, and joined Jillian in researching her Scottish forbears. Together they co-authored two family histories, An Australian Clan: The Nivisons of New England, and Abraham's Tribe: The Descendants of Abraham and Mary Nivison, both published in 1989. These were models of their kind, pursuing through the experiences of a single family the grand themes of migration, pastoralism, continuity and change.

Bruce remained at the University of New England for 24 years. Between 1976 and 1978 he served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He planned to write a history of the University, but other projects got in the way. He did however publish in 1988 The House on the Hill: Booloominbah, Home and University, 1888–1988, an elegant and wide-ranging study of the grand homestead around which the University was built. Booloominbah, he wrote, 'remains a comforting reminder of a more relaxed world, far from the challenges and demands of university life.'

Those wistful words hint at a growing sense of disillusionment about where the University was headed. He retired in 1994, keen to devote more time to family and regional history. He and Jillian travelled widely, always as diligent researchers rather than casual tourists. Both were exhilarated by the thrill of the chase, the prospect of locating a lost headstone, or the archival document through which everything becomes clear.

Retirement gave him more time to devote to his two families: his own three children and grandchildren, his three stepchildren and their children. All were present to celebrate his seventy-fourth birthday, all knowing that it would be his last. He died of bowel cancer a few days later, on 12 October 2009, having that morning finished work on the layout of Jillian's latest book.

Most of those who knew him will remember him in expansive mode, railing at the follies of government, arguing about the correct origins of this or that, scratching his head as he expounded some complicated theory, or protesting with good-humoured exasperation, 'Will you let me finish my story?' Bespectacled, with wispy ginger hair and a florid complexion, he was averse to the sun, but otherwise emphatically Australian, equally at home in the city and the bush. He will be remembered affectionately by the many who benefited from his wisdom and infectious love of life.

Stephen Foster is an Adjunct Professor in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University. Bruce Mitchell supervised his PhD, published in 1978, and with Jillian Oppenheimer, gave him the idea for his latest book, to be published in 2010.
<stephen.foster@anu.edu.au>

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.