Fay Anderson - An Historian's Life: Max Crawford and the Politics of Academic Freedom

Fay Anderson

An Historian’s Life: Max Crawford and the Politics of Academic Freedom

Melbourne, Melbourne University Press

Paperback  Pp. xi + 398  0 522 85153 3

I found this a compelling book, and this review is offered as a critique to help place it within the intellectual history of modern Australia, where it deserves a place. We need to recreate two aspects of the academic world in which Crawford became a professor at thirty. It was very hierarchical. Within minutes of welcoming me to ANU in 1972, the great J.A. La Nauze deftly made it clear that he expected to be addressed as ‘Professor’. Anderson prefers the informal use of first names, but it was an era when respectable Australian males had two initials. (Brian Fitzpatrick and Russel Ward did not so aspire.) Of course A.G. Serle, J.A. La Nauze and L.F. Fitzhardinge were Geoff and John and Laurie within their select circles, but there was shock when C.M.H. Clark naughtily referred to Fitzpatrick as ‘Aunty Katie’ in public. Crawford was pitchforked into a world where responsibility sometimes demanded that he defend positions on issues he might not have chosen to fight. Worse still, universities were massively under-resourced, and it is hard now to grasp the grinding experience of his massive workload, most of it non-negotiable drudgery imposed by others. Humanly, it is not surprising that Crawford did not always rush into other people’s battles.            

Anderson planned to write a purely intellectual biography of Crawford, but gradually became aware of the importance of his personal life. The founder of the Melbourne History School was himself a Sydneysider, and Anderson identifies personal re-invention as a persistent theme in the Crawford story. She explores Crawford’s relationship with his working-class family, but the book perhaps needed deeper examination of those early years. Crawford’s schooling is merely mentioned – but Fort Street High injected a meritocratic element into Sydney society (a slightly later product was a Balmain boilermaker’s son called John Kerr) – something not easily paralleled in the stratified world of Melbourne. Crawford’s makeover started early: on the ship to England he was patronisingly congratulated on the absence of an Australian accent. Yet there was an obstacle to the imposition of any personal caesura. Her name was Dorothy Cheetham and we learn, almost in passing, that she was the fiancée that he left behind to go to Oxford. Although they married three years later, pregnant Dorothy was soon left for another overseas venture. The first Mrs Crawford avoided academe, and at times the marriage was strained. Crawford had an intense relationship with a colleague, Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Without enquiring into the nature of their relationship – why should we? – Anderson terms her Crawford’s ‘intellectual wife’. Later, Crawford had to define emotional limits in his relationship with a younger colleague, Margaret Kiddle. In 1958, by then a widower, he married Ruth Hoban, head of Melbourne’s Social Studies department. He left La Nauze to break the news to Fitzpatrick, who condemned him as a ‘stinker’. Hoban’s department was riven by conflicts not unknown among sociologists. In 1961, through the Bulletin, Crawford denounced a campaign of leftist intimidation against his wife. The chosen forum was a mistake, and Anderson stresses Crawford’s inconsistency, since he had himself been a target for ASIO McCarthyism. The episode is viewed through the filter of the Blainey affair, but perhaps continuity can be discerned with Crawford’s earlier campaigns for closer links with the Soviet Union. He resisted authoritarianism from both within and without the institution. Certainly, his emotional life cannot be overlooked in assessing successive intellectual stances. It might have been useful, too, to have had a follow-through to an early allusion to his religious beliefs.

Crawford never wrote his projected books on the Italian Renaissance or modern Spain or early settlement in Western Australia. Why, then, was his only substantial work a biography of his Sydney University professor, G. Arnold Wood? Critics like McQueen saw it as vicarious autobiography, a defence of a doppelganger who wrote little and whose claim to be ‘A Bit of A Rebel’ (Crawford’s title) seemed at odds with his conventional lifestyle. Anderson identifies the importance of this late work, but maybe it should be explored more deeply in an intellectual biography. In a moving account of Wood’s death, the word ‘suicide’ does not appear, but Crawford blamed the tragedy on the ‘trivial embarrassments or failures which everybody carries hidden in his mind from the early years of learning to live’. Crawford lived An Historian’s Life, but the obstacles to self-expression stemmed as much from internal guilt and inadequacy as from external censorship. I salute Fay Anderson’s book, even in disagreeing with some of her approach.