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NLA News - home November 2005 Volume XVI Number 2

Scholars’ Voices

Ann Moyal samples an array of interviews from the Library’s Oral History Collection

click to enlarge
James Nomarhas (b.1951)
Portrait of David M. Armstrong, November 2001
b&w negative; 5.5 x 5.5 cm
Collection of Portraits of David Armstrong
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23378746
 
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Professor Rhys Jones
Reproduced from cover of Histories of Old Ages: Essays in Honour of Rhys Jones, edited by Atholl Anderson, Ian Lilley and Sue O’Connor. Canberra: Pandanus Books, c.2001.
Courtesy of Pandanus Books
Photograph first published in Mungo’s Modern Man, by Terry Brandson. Australia 2(4): 2–7.
(AIS/Australian Government Printing Service: Canberra, 1974)

Oral histories can be full of surprises. In the case of our most eminent scholars they can also offer rare insights into how these men and women came about the seminal concepts, the books and articles that made them famous, and the trajectories that shaped their creative ideas.

Among the abundant resources of the National Library’s Oral History Collection are the personal stories of historians, social scientists, economists, anthropologists, scientists, archaeologists, linguists, technologists, political scientists, sociologists, Orientalists, internationalists, writers, poets, jurists—name them, and they are there. Individually and collectively they shed a brilliant light on aspects of Australia’s rich intellectual and social history, for, as historian Ken Inglis has observed: ‘a lot of history is concealed biography’.

Reading the transcripts of some recordings made in five different disciplines within the Oral History Collection offers a taste of the creativity and diversity to be found within.

Professor David Armstrong, who held the Challis Chair at Sydney University, 1964–1991, was one of the first Australian philosophers to build a significant international reputation. A former student of the famed John Anderson, he in time diverged from and repudiated the basic tenets of Andersonian philosophy. The author of a swag of books—ranging across perception and the physical world, ‘bodily sensations’ and an analysis of pain, the laws of nature, theories of possibility, and a materialist theory of the mind, to cite a few—Armstrong’s interview takes the scholar on a journey around the philosophical choices and intellectual concerns that have engaged him in his long career. Anderson, he notes, was wont to say that ‘a civilisation which puts its strength into philosophy is past its full creative power’. But he himself, interviewed in 1986, considered that philosophy as a subject ‘has never been in a more burgeoning state than it is in this century’. Australian philosophy, he asserted, ‘has been good. The Australian temperament, which is obviously antiphilosophical for a start—if you break through and continue, for those who are interested in philosophy … is actually rather good because it’s an anti-bullshit sort of temperament and Australians have made, and are recognised to have made, considerable philosophical contributions, especially to analytical philosophy.’ Yet he also believes that philosophy in Australia has been greatly strengthened by the input of philosophers coming from overseas. [Oral History TRC 2157]

Overseas influence is evident in another discipline in the Oral History recordings: the fertile reaches of archaeology, where Rhys Jones—arriving in Sydney in 1963, at the age of 23—brought valuable new perceptions to Australia. An articulate Welshman who had studied science and archaeology at Cambridge, Jones carried ‘a global view of the global history of humankind’ in his intellectual baggage. With this he made deep inroads into Australia’s scientific past. Soon after arrival, he was taken to see a shell midden in the Royal National Park, south of Sydney. ‘It showed me something I’d never seen before’, he recalled:

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Professor Henry Reynolds speaking at the conference, Challenging Australian History: Discovering New Narratives, held at the National Library in 2000
Pictures Collection NL38654/1

 

there was just something fascinating about it. Here was a deposit which was laid down by hunters, but unlike every other deposit I’d seen which was back forty thousand years, where always you had to make this world picture of what the landscape of hunters looked like, this was something that looked as if it had been left yesterday, it was totally intact. The top layers were two or three hundred years old … So there was in a sense the ethnographic, the vividness of an ethnographic relationship with the archaeology; it really hit me.

Rhys Jones quickly flung himself into fieldwork among shell midden sites in Tasmania, in a long engagement that brought British eyes to the ancient world of Pleistocene Australia. Working at Sister’s Creek, Rocky Cape, on the West Point Expedition and other places, he plumbed Tasmania’s prehistory and, pursuing an exciting trail, confirmed that ‘everything was pointing to the fact that Australia indeed had been colonised by people walking across Bass Strait during the last ice age’.

Deemed to be one of Australia’s most brilliant archaeologists, Rhys Jones related Tasmanian prehistory to the major cultural chronological developments of the Australian continent and, with his famous ‘Firestick’ papers of 1969, wrote Aboriginal use of fire into our body of knowledge. Jones died in 2000, but the Library’s Oral History record captures his distinctive quality and flair. Excavating, he declared, ‘was a very sensuous feeling—you’ve got this deposit and you’re working through it. It’s like a sculpture, but we do a kind of sculpture in reverse … We take out the inside and we leave the outside, and from a study of the outside we try and work out what the inside was like and try and relate it to the central landscape.’ [Oral History TRC 2677]

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Loui Seselja (b.1948)
Peter Doherty (right) with
interviewer Peter Pockley, in
the National Library’s Oral
History recording studio,
August 2001
b&w negative; 5.5 x 5.5 cm
Collection of Photographs of
Peter Doherty
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23323461

As with all scholars, chance and geography can govern the choices and contribution that a historian makes. Henry Reynolds came to James Cook University in Townsville in the late 1970s after a period of academic work in Britain and was confronted daily by the issue of race relations. Teaching Australian history, he quickly became aware that there was little detailed history, white or black, of North Queensland. With two students as assistants—one of them Eddie Mabo—he began creating his own ‘raw material’, through oral history interviews. ‘We started going out and just talking to people,’ he recounts, ‘and this first research quickly began to unfold a picture that was … violent and … brutal and people openly discussed their dilemmas and their need to use violence, and the necessity to crush opposition … People were open and frank, and there was a serious intellectual and moral debate about these issues … debate about the morality of settlement—the great moral conflict, intellectual conflict, that runs right through Australian history, the way in which the Aborigines came in and adapted to Europeans. All these themes were there in many ways … and it was a very innovative collection of documents.’

By this route Reynolds became the first academic historian to explore the world of Australia’s early Indigenous culture contact and, in a series of widely read books, to look at both sides of the Indigenous-settlers’ frontier and, through his research, to found a study of law for Aboriginal sovereignty and the Mabo case.

‘Ultimately,’ he sums up, ‘I see the land cases as the revenge of the north, because the assumption in 1900 was the blacks would die [out], but they didn’t. And those communities that remained in the remote areas living in their own country—that is, the Yolhgu in Yirrkala who took the first land rights case, the Mirriam in Murray Island, and the Wik—were people who remained … on their own land because the Europeans never really got there in any number. So they struck back by asserting their rights.’ [Oral History TRC 3929]

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Professor Bob Gregory speaking at the National Press Club, Canberra, April 1995
Pictures Collection, NL37706/A

 

Humanists and social scientists consider human circumstances, and explore explanations for them. Is science different? In The Two Cultures, novelist and scientist C.P. Snow famously defined a sharp distinction between what he saw as ‘the polar opposites’ of science and the humanities. For ‘scientists’, he declared, ‘have the future in their bones’. The assertion is aptly confirmed in Professor Peter Doherty’s long oral history made for the Library in 2001, five years after he became a Nobel Laureate. From 1972 to 1975, Doherty, an immunologist, worked collaboratively at the Australian National University’s John Curtin School of Medical Research with a Swiss colleague, Rolf Zinkernagel. In this ‘dynamic’ environment—‘we were all Popperians … setting up ideas and seeing if we could falsify them’, he records, ‘ [and] challenging each other’—these two post-doctoral Research Fellows working on cellular immune responses, made the basic discovery that would win them the Nobel Prize over 20 years later.

‘We started to do these cytotoxic T-cell assays, where you put the T-cells together with virus-infected cells in a tissue culture flask,’ Doherty recounts, ‘and you could actually show that they were killing the virus-infected cells.’ From independent bases, ‘Rolf got this killer T-cell assay working in tissue culture and I had this whole mouse model [of different mouse species] going really well and the two things just complemented each other.’ Immunology at this stage ‘was a very speculative science because we didn’t know much of the molecular basis of what was going on’. But working together for two years on mice of ‘different transplantation types’ to see whether the killer T-cells from one mouse would kill cells from another mouse’, they found that they would not. ‘And we realised that the recognition of the virus-infected cell in some way involved the transplantation molecule.’ Adventurous and persistent, they ‘turned a field of science which was focussed on the rejection of other—that is the graft rejection—to the recognition of self’. From that, said Doherty, ‘we were able to argue what part of the immune system was for, and how it worked and why it was the way it was. And it turns out all the guesses we made at that stage were substantially correct.’ [Oral History TRC 4761]

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Dr Fay Gale (left), when Vice-Chancellor of the University of Western Australia. Shown with then federal Minister for Employment, Education and Training, the Hon. Kim Beasley, and mathematician Cheryl Praeger, at the opening of a computer laboratory at the university in 1992
Photograph courtesy of Cheryl Praeger

 

Clearly, science—with its emphasis on the predictive and the experimental, as well as theory—is different from the humanities, even though other differences also characterise the biological and physical sciences. Yet overall, social, parental, educational, and institutional influences can play a crucial part in shaping the directions taken by the country’s intellectuals, and their story animates the interviews in the Library’s Oral History Collection.

Seldom is the trajectory of a distinguished individual etched so vividly against the social factors that have formed him as in the interview with the eminent Australian economist, Professor Bob Gregory. Against a cluster of mainstream economists in the Oral History Collection (international trade theorists, macro-economists, econometricians and others), Gregory emerges as a man who has made his name as a strikingly diverse, highly visible and articulate social economist.

Coming from a financially straightened background, he was, he records ‘always interested in a peripheral way about the Depression, because of my family; the generation above me lived through the Depression,’ and in an environment ‘where nobody I knew had gone to school beyond the age of 14 except the doctor’, Gregory, struck down by polio at the age of 13, got to Melbourne University on a scholarship by means of hard work and solitary struggle. He ‘was astonished’ to find himself doing well. Stimulated by one or two original teachers, he abandoned his early thought of becoming a schoolteacher in commerce and went on through overseas research to achieve a distinguished name in international trade theory, where the ‘Gregory Effect’ was a pioneering contribution. Later, co-opted as First Commissioner at the Industries Assistance Commission in Canberra at the age of 28, and rising to become head of the Division of Economics in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, he was for 10 years also a member of the Board of the Reserve Bank.

CITATIONS FOR ORAL HISTORY NTERVIEWS EXTRACTED IN THIS STORY:

TRC 2157: Emeritus Professor David Armstrong, interviewed by Edgar Waters, 1986, pp. 16, 40–41

TRC 677: Professor Rhys Jones, interviewed by Mike Smith, 1991, pp. 1/4, 2/2:2, 2/7–9

TRC 3929: Professor Henry Reynolds, interviewed by Diana Giese, 1999, pp. 17–19, 59–60, 62

TRC 4761: Professor Peter Doherty, interviewed by Peter Pockley, 2001, pp. 27–31

TRC 4885: Professor Robert Gregory, interviewed by Ann Moyal, 2002, pp. 25, 43, 63

TRC 3832: Emeritus Professor Fay Gale, interviewed by Ann Moyal, 1999, pp. 17, 92, 95–97

Believing profoundly, however, that economics has a social purpose, Gregory turned his research lens on a raft of social questions relating to the labour market—wages policy and unemployment, equal pay, income distribution, teenage unemployment, Indigenous men and women in the workforce, and women on welfare. ‘I wanted to do research,’ he said, ‘that explained things to people … I wanted to work on things that mattered.’ Differing from colleagues who immerse themselves in the academic journals and the economic literature, Gregory looks to see ‘what the problems are’. His work is data-driven. ‘Data,’ he asserts, ‘is the world in some sense … I can put data together so as it throws light on a problem … I mix up theory and data and work both sides of the street … and all of a sudden I’m on a new path. My work is a sort of detective work,’ and—as in his recent work on women on welfare—in ‘following people across lifetimes’. [Oral History TRC 4885]

Candour remains the central inviting force of oral history—the source of its quality and strength. Professor Fay Gale provides an interview of impressive frankness. A renowned cultural geographer, her career across the last half-century has made radical contributions to social theory, Indigenous and women’s affairs, the environment, and ideas of heritage and cultural conservation. Brought up in a country town in South Australia, the daughter of a Methodist minister, she inherited a missionary zeal from both parents, and from the outset her research reflected her interest in Aboriginal people. As early as 1957 she publicly criticised the policy of taking children from their Aboriginal mothers. As a critic, reformer, and a woman, Gale faced considerable opposition and conflict, but she became the first woman to be appointed a Professor at the University of Adelaide, and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of that university, and the second woman Vice-Chancellor in Australia.

Her account of how she came to accept the post of Vice-Chancellor at the University of Western Australia in 1990, at a time when ministerial changes under John Dawkins were significantly altering the role of Australian universities, is particularly telling. ‘I really believed there was a fight about academic freedom, about equal access to universities, about quality of education, about research funding, about the future of almost everything that I thought was scholarly. And I had that kind of missionary zeal which was inherited.’ She was, nonetheless, sure that ‘a traditional university will never appoint a woman, will never appoint someone interested in Aboriginal stuff … so I didn’t take it seriously. I just went [to the interview] for the ride.’ However, after disastrously losing her voice in the interview and having to whisper into a mike, she found that she was offered the job. ‘I was terrified that I was the successful candidate,’ she recalls. ‘But the appointment committee’s attitude buoyed me up. It buoyed me up during my conflicts in the place, which were huge, absolutely huge, because although [they] clearly wanted to appoint me—they told me it was unanimous—it didn’t seem to reflect the place at all … I kept saying to myself, “Someone here must have wanted me, someone here must want change. Someone here knows I’ve been critical of what’s been happening”. That wasn’t how they treated me when I came.’ [Oral History TRC 3832]

These fragments of interviews from the National Library’s Oral History Collection can do no more than suggest the character and significance of the records of scholars and intellectuals it contains. Yet, in an electronic age when the old documentary materials of history—the letters, diaries and journals of yesteryear—are disappearing in the rush towards speed and transience in communication, these interviews have a unique value. With the many other recordings in the collection, they provide a collective biography of a key period of scholarship and enterprise in Australia, and are an invaluable resource for researchers.

ANN MOYAL, scholar and writer, is the author of the National Library’s recently released Alan Moorehead: A Rediscovery. (See story in September 2005 issue of National Library of Australia News)

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