Geoffrey Blainey: Writer, Historian, Controversialist by Richard Allsop (review)

Geoffrey Blainey remains at the top of his game, even as he turns 90 this year, and continues to find new readers. Why is he so popular in a country that is notoriously so disdainful of its intellectuals? Richard Allsop has read pretty much every book and significant article written by Blainey, or written about Blainey, and his biography can be read with pleasure, especially if it is read alongside the first of Blainey's autobiographies, Before I Forget: An Early Memoir (Hamish Hamilton, 2019). (This autobiography takes him to the 1970s; Blainey plans a second volume of autobiography.)

Why read both Allsop and Blainey? While it is useful – and interesting – to chart an intellectual's life in the history of ideas genre, which is Allsop's method, putting each of their works in the context of the big debates going on around them, this approach is less useful when the subject of the study is as self-contained as Blainey. Blainey resists easy categorisation. Indeed, when I first wrote about him in 1979, I discussed his shift from a narrative ("formist") style to a more analytical ("mechanist") one. To complicate matters, Blainey does not regard himself primarily as a "controversialist," one of the descriptive words from Allsop's book title.

If he is not really a "controversialist," in the sense of stirring up mischief, what is he? And how does that self-description explain his success? Because Blainey would describe himself as a time-travelling storyteller, a better approach to understanding his work would be one borrowed from the field of linguistics. As he puts it in the first volume of his autobiography, he worries down the detail of language. Each of his books typically began life as an after-dinner talk or a public speech or a university lecture. And the raw materials that he mines for these talks derive from identifiable sources: from conversations with people, from printed recollections, or from stories passed down from others.

Here is an example of Blainey's prose in a recent text: "the Englishman George Robinson had been travelling with Tasmanian Aborigines for almost two years before he saw them tap a cider tree in the early summer of 1831" (The Story of the Australian People: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia, 2015, 163–64).

Robinson's observation of Indigenous alcoholic consumption, in a culture innocent of fermented spirits, becomes part of a broader argument about the use of narcotics in traditional Aboriginal life. This then gets attached to a hypothesis about the cruel effect of alcohol introduced by the invaders. The chapter entitled "Medicines and Drugs, Liquids and Cosmetics" was originally published 40 years earlier as part of Triumph of the Nomads. If we undertake a genealogical study of that sentence, we can understand why it works so well. Blainey wrote Triumph of the Nomads based on lectures he was giving to staid Commerce students, buttoned up in their suits, at the University of Melbourne, over several years in the early 1970s. He challenged these young non-Indigenous Australians, hoping for careers in Collins Street, to speculate on how pre-invasion Aborigines might have found intoxicants in the Australian Bush, and then held these undergraduates spellbound with the stories that would become part of this chapter.

This is the formula. Ask people (including undergraduates) what they do, and what interests them. Listen carefully to their use of language. Fossick in the primary sources for insights and stories that should interest them and the general reader. Try out these stories on audiences. Pay attention to the small and telling details of each story. Arrange the stories by means of careful planning, down to the level of every paragraph (using the so-called "Indian-file" writing technique). Eschew footnotes in favour of unnumbered endnotes linked to topics or page numbers.

Here's that quote again, now linguistically annotated:

the Englishman [our informant is from outside Aboriginal Australia] George Robinson [a person reasonably well-known for most readers, even...