Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Country and Kin Calling? Keith Hancock, the National Dictionary Collaboration, and the Promotion of Life Writing in Australia
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In his international comparison of history, historians and autobiography in 2005, Jeremy D. Popkin concluded that Australian historians were early to, and enthusiastic about, the ego-histoiremovement or the ‘setting down [of] one’s own story’. Australians anticipated Pierre Nora’s collection of essays, Essais d’ego-histoire, which was published in 1987. They had already founded ‘a series of autobiographical lectures in 1984’, which resulted in a number of publications, and Australian historians’ memoirs thereafter appeared at a rate of more than one a year. When he considered Australian historians’ memoirs more specifically in 2007, Popkin argued that ‘[o]n a proportional basis, more historians from Australia than from any other country’ have written ego-histoire: he had identified ‘more than three dozen different’ Australian historians who had written her or his memoirs compared to just 200 United States historians’ published memoirs. Popkin also argued that contemporary Australian historians’ memoirs helped to establish ‘a tradition of first-person writing, a relatively recent development in their own culture’ and that they had greater impact in Australia than groups of other historians elsewhere in other countries. Works by both male and female authors such as Keith Hancock, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Bernard Smith, Jill Ker Conway, Manning Clark, Ann Moyal and Inga Clendinnen constituted a distinctive strain of historical life writing generally and had become major contributions to the national literature. This creative non-fiction won major mainstream literary prizes, not simply specialist history ones. Australian historians’ life writing had a greater impact within society than French or US contemporaries had in theirs, according to Popkin, because of the literary quality of the work and the ‘high degree of authorial self-consciousness’ in the context of a relatively new sense of Australian cultural identity.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Clio’s Lives : Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians Doug Munro (editor), John G. Reid (editor), Canberra : Australian National University Press , 2017 12037345 2017 anthology criticism autobiography biography

    'Including contributions from leading scholars in the field from both Australia and North America, this collection explores diverse approaches to writing the lives of historians and ways of assessing the importance of doing so. Beginning with the writing of autobiographies by historians, the volume then turns to biographical studies, both of historians whose writings were in some sense nation-defining and those who may be regarded as having had a major influence on defining the discipline of history. The final section explores elements of collective biography, linking these to the formation of historical networks. A concluding essay by Barbara Caine offers a critical appraisal of the study of historians’ biographies and autobiographies to date, and maps out likely new directions for future work.'  (Publication summary)

    Canberra : Australian National University Press , 2017
    pg. 247-272
Last amended 19 Oct 2017 07:10:55
247-272 Country and Kin Calling? Keith Hancock, the National Dictionary Collaboration, and the Promotion of Life Writing in Australiasmall AustLit logo
X