STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

OH 646/2

Full transcript of an interview with

BRIAN DICKEY

on 15 May 2002

By Karen George

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study

Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library

2

OH 646/2 BRIAN DICKEY

NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT

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J.D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION, STATE

LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA: INTERVIEW NO. OH 646/2

Interview with Mr Brian Dickey recorded by Karen George at Blackwood on the

15th

May 2002 for the State Library of South Australia Professional Historians

Association Oral History Project.

TAPE 1 SIDE A

This is an interview with Brian Dickey being recorded by Karen George for the

Professional Historians Association Oral History Project. The interview is taking

place on the 15th

May 2002 at Blackwood in South Australia.

So first of all, Brian, I’d like to thank you for agreeing to an interview and

becoming involved in this project.

My pleasure.

Can you start, perhaps, by telling me your full name and whereabouts you were

born?

Full name Brian Kenneth Dickey. Born in Sydney on the 1st March 1939.

Can you perhaps briefly give me a little bit of background about your parents,

and I guess your education, to just see how you got into the field of history?

My father ran a butcher’s shop – he didn’t own it – and my mother worked in a

variety of clerical employments. I was picked up in the fast track primary school

program, and in the final year of that we were all trained like racehorses and put up

for scholarships. This was at Hurstville in the southern suburbs of Sydney. That

yielded a scholarship to Sydney Grammar School and I therefore went to that fee-

paying school on full scholarship for six years and then proceeded to the University

of Sydney in 1957 and did an Arts degree. I’d gained an Arts-Law scholarship, but I

kept on doing very well in History – I’d been well-taught at school and enjoyed it,

and I did well at the university and stayed with it, and of course, as you probably

know, graduated with the university medal in History from the University of Sydney.

That then led to more scholarships – Cambridge, ’61-’63, ANU, ’64-’66, yielding

the MA and the PhD, and then straight to Flinders.

Can you tell me what it was about History that interested you, that attracted you,

then?

There was a combination of telling a story and analysing issues, and that’s what I

seemed to be good at at school. Some of the others were far, far better than I was at

4

mathematics or languages, but I seemed to be able to handle words and tell stories

and plan out – I think it was – it’s the combination, this business of story plus

analysis. And once I found – it took me about six months to find my feet at the

university, but then again I started to get good grades. I was probably working my

butt off, and some of the others clearly didn’t. I mean, Clive James was enjoying

himself in other ways, as we all know. And a number of other great ones, whom I

won’t name.

So was the logical place for you to pursue history at universities, then? Was that

the only way you could see that – – –?

Yes. And when I went to Cambridge there were opportunities to stay in England,

but I was very firm that I had a commitment to serve the Australian community in an

Australian university.

Why was that?

Well, I’d been funded and looked after by Australians, so I believed I had an

obligation to the Australian community. It’s always been a commitment to Australia

and Australian scholarship.

So you came to Adelaide to Flinders University – what year was that again?

’67.

’67. Were you aware of people working outside of universities in the field of

history then, when you arrived?

No. Looking back, I could probably identify – well, hang on. Malcolm Ellis clearly

was, now I come to think of it, and there must have been one or two others. One was

aware that Ellis was a sort of journalist-cum-historian. But doing history earning a

living meant working in a university. And I’d had some teaching experience while a

schoolboy working with the army cadets so I knew about teaching, that was part of

the package.

So how did your awareness develop that there were historians working outside of

university?

Oh, okay. It’s a hard one to answer. I suspect Peter Donovan’s behaviour was the

most explicit case. Now, he was a man who didn’t get the PhD he was hoping for,

5

disappeared off the scene and the next thing I knew he was in the marketplace

putting his name up for jobs.

Perhaps you could explain how you met Peter. Was he – – –.

Well, Peter came to Flinders as a graduate student. I wasn’t directly involved in his

supervision, although very much just towards the end of his project Jim Main went

on leave, if I recall correctly – Jim Main was supervising Peter on his project on the

Northern Territory – and for some reason I had a bit of a hand in Peter’s project right

at the end, and then I was aware, just as a member of the Department, of the

chequered process by which it went through examination and re-examination and so

on and so forth. And so I got to know Peter in that context. But because he was

working on the Northern Territory he wasn’t on campus very much that I can recall.

Were there others who were doing history outside the academy? There must have

been. I mean, at some point in there the Constitutional History Museum emerged,

and there were conversations about historians in general, and we were all conscious

between ’72 and ’77, over those five years, of the contraction in job opportunities,

there’s no question. That’s the other factor that’s very important.

Why was that happening at that time?

The Federal Government was no longer funding the universities adequately, and the

rate of growth had slowed down in terms of the creation of either new universities or

more staff posts in universities. I only thought I would be here at Flinders for five

years, and I stayed for thirty-three. So that’s the – what do you say? – that’s one

side, whether it’s supply or demand, it’s one side of the equation, jobs drying up. I

mean, Peter realised that there was no opportunity for employment in the university,

and he will do representatively of a range of people who just had to go elsewhere.

Yes. I was also aware – and I can remember reading a piece by Geoffrey Elton, the

Cambridge historian, who made the point that when he briefed graduate students he

would say something along the lines of, ‘You’re going to become the world’s expert

on a very narrow piece of information, but don’t expect to get a job in a university as

a result.’ In other words, the university job opportunities had already closed down.

And I knew that people were getting Cambridge PhDs and then proceeding to

business and so on. I’d always accepted, therefore, that people with good degrees

had to go out in the world other than university to earn a living.

6

Was that an unusual acceptance amongst other academics?

I think there were some of my colleagues who simply assumed the university would

just keep on growing. But most of them just took the view that they would teach

whoever turned up, and that it wasn’t their problem, they weren’t responsible for

getting people jobs. They weren’t interested in what happened once people got their

results. And I suppose I’m implying a criticism that they should have been, but on

the other hand most of my colleagues were not interested in Australian history so

they had little interaction professionally with the Australian scene. While the people

who studied under them might graduate with a fine knowledge of American political

history or the rise of Nazi Germany, the fact that the student would then go out into

the world was just – you know, you’d just go and get a job, and there were always

jobs, weren’t there? I think that’s where they were at.

Why do you think you thought differently at that time?

Well, first of all, I was about Australian history, which might have had the most

direct application, and I was keen to see the growth of the opportunities for the

teaching of Australian history in schools, which of course was the biggest single

employer of our graduates, school teaching. And I was also always conscious that

school teachers were likely to do history in schools, with the rising number of

anniversaries of various sorts and sizes – I guess I became aware that they needed to

be taught adequately to be able to cope even with a pass degree. It became apparent

that there would be others like them who would have to be able to do history. I

know that Peter Donovan started to help me think through what are the minimum

qualifications that we want people to be able to undertake this freestanding, as it

were. I argued, actually, that we ought to take the view that a major in History

meant that a school teacher, come what may, was going to be doing history. He’d be

writing – or she – writing essays and guiding people in the history of their school,

and I think that was one of the points of departure for me.

So do you recollect at all your first discussions with Peter on the idea of an

Association, where the inspiration came from?

Yes, well, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Peter put the idea to me, and I have

this memory of having been at a meeting with Peter that I think must have been one

of the consultations that Peter Cahalan convened at the Constitutional History

7

Museum, and I have this notion that it might have been in the late 1970s. I’d been

on study leave in the latter half of ’77 and early ’78, so I think it must have been

after that. But I have this memory of Peter driving me home in I think at that point

his VW, the grumpy beetle, coming up the Old Belair Road. I can actually take you

to the point on the road where I said, ‘This is a good idea.’ Peter sketched the idea

of a professional historians’ association of some sort. He’d clearly been in touch

with his contacts in the archaeology profession and he’d done some work, and

clearly he’d done all the thinking. He was asking me whether I thought it was a

good idea, and I said I think it was excellent. And I was feeding him, I think, the

judgment that employment opportunities had contracted even more by the late ’70s

than they had by the early ’70s, and I was saying things like, ‘There’s not going to be

much more tutoring money for full-time tutorships, we’re losing tutorships, we’re

going to get less money, there’s less opportunity,’ and I was saying, ‘Look, we have

a responsibility,’ and so on, ‘and I’m happy to join with you in this.’ And so I said,

‘Well, Peter, you make the lead and I’ll do the administration, and I can probably get

a bit of administrative support out of the Department without their knowing,’ that

sort of thing. You know, all that typing and so on, circulars and suchlike. So I don’t

think there’s any doubt that, in my mind, that conversation as Peter drove me home –

from the top of Old Belair Road by the BP petrol station down to my house is about

three kilometres, and we’d sketched out what we wanted to do in that period of time.

Do you remember what you talked about, or remember what you were going to

do?

Well, I can’t say, other than, ‘Yes, we will go ahead, how do we get people together?

We will have to define minimum standards of entry and therefore of membership.

We will need to be able to meet in a place that’s accessible.’ I think that probably

was the immediate. Yes. And so we convened a meeting, as the records show, and

I’ve already described that meeting in the little note I wrote in the APH newsletter.

Would you like to just describe it for the tape?

Well, I haven’t got the details in front of me. But what evidence I have is the memo

I put out the next day to my colleagues at Flinders, saying that a group of – and the

names are in the memo – met the previous night at the, I think it must have been at

the History Trust, to discuss the creation of an association of professional historians,

8

and a range of people gathered. And I was impressed by the range of the folk, some

who were working on contract with Peter Cahalan and so on, and one or two others

who’d come out of the Adelaide University woodwork as well. And the general

feeling was yes, there was enough enthusiasm, yes, we ought to be able to define

minimum standards of entry, yes, we ought to be able to pay an annual subscription

and develop professional historians and help one another with training and with

bush-beating to find job opportunities. That was in November, and by early the next

year we’d done enough work on the draft constitution – we’d had another working

party meeting in December – and early in the next year we had the, quote, first

annual meeting or some such, and Peter was elected President by a group of people

and I was elected Secretary, and we put together a small committee at the same time

and we must have gained their agreement to stand – Treasurer, newsletter,

membership. So that initial burst of effort, November through February-March, and

was convenient for me because it was the university vacation and possibly also Peter

wasn’t all that overwhelmed with work in terms of contracts, so we got the work –

we got it together over those three months. And the records will tell you of the

people who came to the annual meeting and the sorts of things they wanted us to talk

about.

Is there anyone that stands out that you recollect, just from memory?

Oh, Peter Donovan was firing the bullets. People whom one might have thought

would have made a bigger contribution – Peter Cahalan, Sandy Marsden, Sue

Marsden – were all so deeply involved in earning a living that they were unwilling to

engage in much detail. And I think to some extent the Association missed out a bit.

I mean, Peter Cahalan in particular was very generous with making available space

in his offices. By then they were in – at first they were in Old Parliament House, and

then they moved up to the Institute Building, and I’m not quite sure at what point

that occurred – but most of the early meetings were held in the Institute Building

board room and the Institute Building central lobby area. But Peter never engaged

energetically in the Association, Peter Cahalan. His wife Penny did, no doubt about

that. She and I worked together on the newsletter, and on – and she, I think, was the

first Membership Secretary, I think, but that could be checked. And of course Sandy

Marsden moved interstate fairly soon so we lost her, and Sue Marsden I think had

9

some interesting ideas, but I think I would be right in saying that she was out in the

field doing the big Regional Heritage Surveys, and I think she did two or three of

those over the next period of time. She was earning a living, it was a bit of a

struggle, but I think we could have benefited from more of her work. So in a sense

they left Peter and me to do the energetic thing. And two or three others who were

willing to do the legwork and committee effort.

You mentioned that circular that you sent out, which was the 30th

November 1980,

to academics.

Yes.

What sort of response did you receive from that?

Oh, they just received it and nothing was said, I think it would be fair to say. There

was a certain ‘ho-humness’ about what I circulated, I mean, they ‘Ho-hum, that’s

interesting for you people.’ I always sensed that they felt that the people who

became professional historians were the people who’d failed to get university jobs

and that was the top dog and so these were second or third order people and they

weren’t interested in second or third order people. Now, that’s a little bit harsh, but

it also reflects the particular style of the department I was in, that very much

encouraged people to do their own individual academic activity, and there was not

great collegiality, and there was no sense of the department seeking as a department

to exercise a ministry. That’s a general comment I have about the History

Department at Flinders that I don’t want to pursue now, but I don’t think there’s any

doubt – ‘Well, that’s Brian’s thing. That’s fine.’ And he just got on with it, you see,

‘He’s wasting his time,’ they might have implied. I don’t know. ‘Why mix with

these has-beens and also-rans,’ and so on. I don’t know.

Was that different from Adelaide University ….. ….. or was it – – –?

I had no knowledge of what was going on at Adelaide. There was a general feeling

that the great days of Adelaide’s interest in Australian History had long passed and

that we’d taken over, and that they were even less interested in these matters than

Flinders. We felt – I felt, and one or two others amongst the Department probably

were offering some sympathy – but we felt that we were the place for Australian

History and therefore the encouragement of field work was going to happen.

10

So in those early days, were you literally the only university-employed academic

that was involved?

At some point John Tregenza indicated support, but I can’t recall when. And John

had a complicated and chequered career and I’m not sure when he left the

university’s employment and worked in the Art Gallery on the big pictures project

and then after that became involved with the History Trust as the State Historian. So

John was in an ambiguous position, and Bill Gammage must have joined the

Adelaide department somewhere in there, but he was never interested in the

Professional Historians Association as far as I can recall. And of course remember

that Bill also had research interests in New Guinea as well as Australia.

So if we talk, perhaps, a little bit about this minimum standard membership thing,

can you talk about how you came to an idea of who would join?

Oh, well, I suppose in the end we simply said, ‘Well, you’d better have an Honours

degree in History,’ because that was regarded – we all quickly realised that’s the

training level, which included the research project, the thesis project, and certainly at

Flinders we all recognized that Eric Richards’ History of the Development of Social

History, was a superb introductory program. We weren’t sure what was going on at

Adelaide. At that point there were more students at Flinders doing Australian

Honours topics. And I suspect there was a general feeling that the Honours degree

was likely to be the point of entry for most professional associations. We were all –

I guess the psychologists would admit people to the Psychology Association, four

year training looked like the minimum standard. And the teacher would be admitted

by the three years plus the Dip Ed1, you see. So four years’ training was the normal

thought. And we were – given that there was, at the beginning, no alternative

diploma program, it had to be the Honours degree.

Was there a distinction made between, then, trained historians who’d done the

Honours degree and the sort of amateur local historian at that time?

Yes, we were aware of that distinction, and we were about – and that’s why the word

‘professional’ was always in our title. And to that extent we’re wanting to say,

‘Professional historians can do local history better than local historians,’ and that we

1 Diploma of Education.

11

were wanting to say to local councils and the like, ‘You don’t have to always take

the local just because the local’s obsessed and knows a lot. The evidence suggests

that that sort of person’s output is a disaster and that professional historians are

better, and are able to get up the local stuff often with the help of the locals.’ We

had some significant success in that area, in convincing local councils, and have

continued to do so.

Do you have an example of that?

Well, very recently I was – and this is a sort of second order story, but it’s the most

satisfying and most recent one that I can think of – the ’phone rang a couple of years

ago and Val Pylypenko introduced himself as the Community Officer from Marion

Council. Now, Val was a student at Flinders in the middle-1970s and I remembered

Val and we all remembered Val – great big bushy beard, full of enthusiasm. He’d

gone off, so he was in local government. ‘Brian, look, we’re in the process of

advertising to have the next volume of the history of Marion written. Could you

help us in the selection committee?’ And I agreed to sit on the committee with Val

and the acting CEO. And the people who had tendered included a trained historian

whom I knew and someone who had no historical training whatsoever, although had

begun to become involved in the production of books. I’m not saying history books,

but books. I said, ‘Look, you need to have a professional historian, someone who’s

trained in the competence and has got a proven track record and so on,’ and then I

was able to go on to say, ‘This particular person would probably benefit from some

encouragement.’ And they said, ‘Well, would you like to give him encouragement?’

And I was able, as a second order, to draw down from the way we’d developed over

those years, over the twenty years, the notion of a series of layers of levels of skills

within the professional historians. And there’s the sort of front line trench worker,

as it were, but some of us were unable to do front line trench work but we had

enough skills and had already exercised advisory skills and supervisory skills. And

Marion Council hired me, so they hired two people. And Bob Donnelly got the

contract for the history of Marion – he was a Councillor on the Council but he had an

MA in History and had significant experience and publication, and they hired me as

his consultant or supervisor. So that was a, you know, that’s a late example, but I

think there would be a number of previous examples where – Pauline Payne, for

12

example, did Thebarton; Sue Marsden and Peter Donovan both did local histories.

And so – yes, Sue’s book on Burnside or wherever, Kensington, Peter’s book on

West Adelaide and then Pauline – there was a series of benchmark achievements,

one after another, that I think have convinced local government leaders that they can

do a lot better than they used to. And the previous history of Marion by [Alison]

Dolling, I think the lady’s name is, everyone realised how inadequate it was. And I

said, ‘We can do a lot better than that,’ and I was able to say, you know, ‘This is

what Donovan did, and he’s a member of the APH, and this is what Marsden did,

and so on.’ ‘Oh yes, yes, we can do better, let’s go for it,’ you see. So that’s an

example through the local government stream. And if you poke around I think you’d

find quite a number of local government histories that have been written by members

of the Association.

Do you want to talk a little bit about coming up with that name? Was the word

‘professional historian’ in existence then, or was that something that – – –?

Well, Peter, I think, must have been the one who said, ‘We’ve got to have the word

“professional” in the title,’ and I think we all agreed with that. There was another

idea floating around, the notion of the ‘public historian’. I explored that – I’d been

in the US, although I went to the US on study leave in ’81, I think. When was that

memo?

That was 1980, 13th

November 1980.

All right. Well, I must have been on leave in the US the next year. And I explored

what the meaning of public history was, but Peter had already said – and I think

we’d all agreed – that the word ‘professional’ was the key way, because we were

about a skills base and about distinction and separation, product differentiation. And

the alternative of public history – and once I got back from the US, which is twelve

months later or eighteen months later, I would have had a clearer view – but public

history was about presenting history to the public in a variety of ways, and writing

the history of public institutions, and a lot of that was being done by universities,

which was not what we were about. So that confirmed the previous judgment which

we’d made that we’re not talking about ‘public’ meaning in the marketplace; we

were talking about ‘professional’ meaning level of skill. So that we were

consciously differentiating ourselves from the local person who picked up the

13

opportunity, or the graduate in Science who ran with it, and so on. That was so –

that’s the key word: historians who are professionals, as an association.

Was there any debate about having South Australia an issue? It seemed to have

South Australia in the title and then it dropped.

Yes. Well – ah, it’s only been dropped recently. ‘South Australia’ was essential, we

thought, partly – Peter was able to see that there would be other associations around

Australia, so this was the South Australian one. I think that’s the basic point. And it

was also a signal that we were especially interested in people who were going to be

able to do work of a South Australian base. So there were two signals. And of

course other associations like ours emerged over the next few years all round

Australia, partly at Peter’s prompting as he moved around Australia with his

contracts.

Do you want to say something about South Australia being the first to come up

with the idea?

Well, there was a slightly different model emerging in Melbourne of the History

Institute, I think they called it – I think that’s the correct name – which was a sort of

coalition of university and community historians, which was subject-focused, the

importance of the subject of history outside the academy. And in a sense it was a bit

like your Workers’ Education, your community education program from the

university into the community at large, convening meetings when you might have a

discussion on Manning Clark or something. That tended to get in the way of the

notion of the emergence of professionals who were historians gathering together, and

we vigorously debated that with them in Melbourne over a number of years. Peter

and I and others would go to meetings of the History Institute in Melbourne, and a

sub-group emerged and said, ‘Yes, we’re like you.’ And they were originally

sponsored as the professional historians’ unit within this other Monash-La Trobe-

Melbourne-Deakin-sponsored operation. Then to some extent separately in Sydney,

but very much sharing the same ethos a group emerged, to some extent a product of

the work [of] – Macquarie University historian of the urban Sydney environment.

He has since died, but he’d developed an urban history group, and out of that

emerged the group that became the Professional Historians’ Association in Sydney.

That’s their story.

14

I’ll just have to stop you there to turn the tape over. (break in recording)

TAPE 1 SIDE B

Yes. Kelly’s group clustered uni and non-uni people in much the same way as ours

had, and I’m sure Peter was consulted. I had nothing to do with the emergence of

the Sydney group, and Peter may be able to tell you about that. Oh, and they, of

course, have had a vigorous history of [publication]. They were able to launch the

Public History Journal, as you probably know.

Peter talked a little bit in a – actually in a letter that he’d written earlier, but we

also talked in the interview about how in other fields, other professional fields,

there wasn’t that distinction between a public person and an academic. Do you

want to talk about that in terms of history, where there seems to be that – – –?

Yes, well, I think that in the Australian scene in the ’60s and ’70s the only

opportunities for employment full-time, paid, for historians were in the universities.

So the notion of a professional historian was largely, but not exclusively, identified

as someone who taught for a living in a university and did research on the side as

part of their job. Now, by contrast, already it was apparent, for example, that the

psychologists at Flinders were training people for employment as psychologists in

the workforce. Now, that was partly reinforced by high level accreditation rules that

that involved, and of course along the corridor was the Social Work Department – or

the Department of Social Administration, later the Department of Social Work – and

they had a national organisation and they were producing social workers. Now,

psychologists and social workers were readily employed by major government

agencies like the Repatriation Department and the hospitals and so on. There was no

such external employment opportunity for historians. If historians got jobs they got

jobs as school teachers, and they didn’t get jobs as historians, they got jobs as

schoolies. So what they had to have was a Dip Ed. What training program they had

behind the Dip Ed varied a bit – increasingly the state department got tighter and

tighter and tighter about that. And opportunities for historian teachers contracted,

and the State Government-funded History Advisory Team led by Ron Gibbs was

gradually disbanded over the years, and its disappearance was a major

disappointment to a lot of people. And it may well be that the disappearance of that

unit created space for the Professional Historians’ Association, in the sense that Ron

Gibbs may have been providing de facto the sort of encouragement to field non-

15

academic history writing by school teachers that we eventually took over. It would

be interesting to explore that some day, I just don’t know. Ron, of course, still

attends our Flinders History weekly Friday morning seminars. I mean, he’s one –

and John Tregenza was involved in that community – sorry, in that training of

teachers in the presentation of history in schools, and that was a – its disappearance

was the University of Adelaide debate, I think, not a Flinders debate.

On that note it just occurred to me, were history teachers early members of the

Association at all? Didn’t you attract – – –?

No, no, because, you see, they didn’t – we’re a professional organisation, so we were

expecting and seeking to encourage people to join who were being paid money for

doing history. And that tended to mean people who were on contract with heritage

projects – that was the biggest single source of employment – or secondly, some of

those who were on contract as research assistants, and thirdly, the growing number

of individuals like Peter Cahalan and Sue Marsden who were earning enough money

to live off a variety of project activities, and then those who had some other income

or their husband was the principal earner, but they had the training and they wanted

Association membership and professional development as they presented themselves

for such projects as they could grab. Alison Painter comes to mind, for example.

Okay. Well, perhaps we could talk a little bit about the initial aims of the

Association. In that first – I think there was the minutes of the first meeting there

was a list of four different aims –

Yes.

– and I thought we could perhaps talk about each of those.

You remind me what they are.

Yes. The first was the promotion of professional standards and conditions of

employment.

Yes.

Do you want to talk a bit about that?

Yes. Well, that’s – we thought about minimum standards, Honours degree in

History. We always kept a sort of weasel clause out insofar as we were going to be

acting as gatekeepers, because we recognized that eventually people could achieve

16

the same standard through other routes. There was the related question of a fee

schedule and opportunities for staff – what we now would call staff development,

training activities. So we put a lot of effort into identifying issues that we could

convene meetings on that would be helpful for members in their professional

performance, and the early records would list the sorts of meetings we [held] – the

subject [of standards] we explored, but that2 was something we could do

immediately. Peter and Sue, I suppose, had links with people who could come and

talk about what was in the Archives, or someone – I’m sure we had more than one

meeting where we had lawyer-type people talking about legal issues. We spent a lot

of time on defining the membership clause. I think there were some folk who

wanted to have a very loose membership, and I think those of us who argued for

minimum Honours degree in the end won out. And that would probably have got up

one or two people’s noses, I suspect. I was never made privy to any of this

disappointment, but I suspect it was there. But anyway, go back to the list.

Yes. The second one was providing a forum for critical discussion.

Yes. We wondered whether people would want to read papers about their current

projects. A little bit of that occurred early on, but not much. Partly, I think, people

just had to get on with it and they couldn’t afford to go slowly, and it may have been

that they were getting enough exposure if they wanted it in the Flinders department

and possibly at Adelaide and elsewhere, I don’t know.

The provision of a mechanism for disseminating information among members?

Yes, well, that meant, that essentially meant the newsletter – and I did the first

couple, and I’m not very good, I wasn’t very good at typing and other people took it

up – but we realised it was very important to get information about jobs out to

people, suggestions for fee structures, issues that they might like to think about.

Anything we thought – anything and everything that we could pump into the piece of

paper and send out to members we thought was very important. And I don’t think

there’s any doubt that the arrival of the newsletter was a major encouragement to

members.

2 i.e. meetings – BD.

17

Did that encourage new membership, the newsletter?

Well, what encouraged new membership? Well, we certainly recruited at end of

Honours year in the unis, we recruited by word of mouth. I’ve got no direct

experience of the newsletter recruiting people, but it was certainly the most obvious

thing – well, one of the obvious things we could offer people for their subscription.

That plus the syllabus of meetings were the two immediate things that we could offer

them. We put a lot of early effort into standards of behaviour. Is that on your list

there? The code of ethics?

The code of ethics, yes. I’ve got that to talk about, yes. Do you want to talk about

that now?

Yes. Yes, well, I mean that was probably the thing that involved the committee in

the larges amount of work over a number of months, years. Peter Donovan brought

in a document from, I think, the archaeologists, and we worked at the [drafting]. I

must have been involved closely with that, a lot of us were, but I’d done a lot of

drafting and this was another exercise in constitutional drafting. We gradually

hammered it out and talked around it and so on. And it was a major baby for the

first two or three [years]. It took up a lot of committee time the first couple of years,

and the document as developed will be in the records. And in a sense, like all public

statements of this order, once you’ve done it it’s never looked at, but it’s a point of

reference. And it’s very important that it be done and the development, the work of

doing it, was important, and the availability of it was important. And Peter certainly

told me, and others who were in the field certainly said that, it was very important to

be able to put that on the table when discussing with potential employers. ‘These are

the standards we operate by,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh yes, I’ve met this with the so-and-

so organisations. I know about similar with psychologists or whoever. Oh yes,

you’re historians, and the architects have got one and so on.’ So it identified us in

the marketplace as having professional integrity alongside other professional groups

of people. And I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone be accused of not abiding by it.

We’ve never had a sort of Star Chamber court case, as it were. But everyone knows

that the work’s there and it’s a point of reference.

So it was effectively for both sides –

Oh yes.

18

– both the historians themselves and the employer?

It was very important that we had it on the [record]. We were always aware that

probably it was more important for the potential hirers to know that we were an

agency, an organisation with integrity, and that we believed that no organisation

could call itself a professional organisation without a code of ethics. We believed

that that was essential to its claim to exist.

Well, that probably ties in to the fourth of those things, which was marketing the

skills of professional historians.

Yes, well, certainly the preparation of that, and then the development of simple

things like an appropriate letterhead and so on, and the newsletter. And we prepared

a series of flyers and handouts in various [formats] – and there are examples of them

in the files – and these were circulated to appropriate agencies. And they would

have gone in and – you never know how these things operate, but we were vigorous,

I think, in developing a range of publicity literature. One of them was the sort of

short statement and the second one was the suggested rate of fees, and when it

became apparent that we might be running into legal difficulties by prescribing fees

we backed off from that and we said, ‘Well, if you want advice we’ll give you

advice about the sorts of models you can use,’ and so on. But we always kept an eye

on fee rates, going rates, and so on. And we made it plain that we were able to offer

advice at the design of project stage, and Peter and I would have been consulted by

various organisations informally or formally, as the case may be, of which the

Marion case is one more recently. And I think, broadly speaking, we must have let

the community know we existed.

Now, I’m not claiming ever that the APH became the sole accreditation that

meant that all history written outside the university was written by APH

members. Far from it. We never ever claimed to have that sort of monopoly, and

we always claimed to operate by consensus and by selling the product and

saying, ‘We’re doing a better product now.’ And I think it would be fair to say

that, while people continue to write history, there’s a recognition of standards

right through the South Australian arena to which we’ve been a major

contributor.

19

There have been other strands. The emergence of the Christina Stead Award

for Local History developed by the South-Eastern Book Production Team that’s

been in place for some years has been another element, and I’ve actually sat on

the prize panel and argued from the point of view of saying, you know, ‘This is

not good enough as history,’ and the other members of the panel who might have

interests of a literary or other nature have sort of sat up and sat back and said,

‘Oh. Oh, I see,’ you know. And I was able to talk to them about the APH and its

standards. ‘Oh, yes, okay.’ But they were also interested in communication and

presentation and so on, but I was able to say, ‘But it’s got to have footnotes, it’s

got to have a proper bibliography, it’s got to be able to relate to the evidence in a

way that other people can check it, and got to be responsible for the quality and

standards that applied, and if it’s undertaken oral interviews and so on it’s got to

be appropriate ethical standards and protocols and documents have got to be

signed, and so on,’ you know. So we were interacting with other people like that.

Talking about that fee structure, was it difficult – how did you establish a fee

structure in those early days? What was it based on?

Oh, well, I think we took an eye to obviously what the market would bear, but the

market seemed to be responsive – we had several levels. We had to deal with the

full-time thing, and I suspect we tended to say the university salary for someone with

an MA plus the on-costs – the on-costs would be the equivalent of superannuation

and all that stuff. Later on, we were able to point to the research fellowship

remuneration structure in universities, and I know that when Pauline Payne was

recently hired by Helping Hand to do their history – the one she’s currently doing –

she consulted me, and I said, ‘Look, just take to them the University of Adelaide’s

research fellowship and senior research fellowship scale, and suggest where you

think you fit in with that,’ and they bought that immediately. Trickier was how

much did you charge for hourly and weekly rates. We also there had an eye to what

the universities were paying their casual tutors, and again tried to say, ‘Well, there’s

got to be some on-costs and some increment factor in there.’ And then there was the

question of people like myself being called in to give expert advice in law cases.

I’ve appeared in court several times. And I talked around, and Peter talked around. I

talked to a good friend of mine who’s a psychologist, who was often called in on

20

Workers’ Comp cases, and he mentioned the sorts of rates that he charged, and we

were not unaware of what lawyers were getting. Well, we knew we’d never get what

lawyers got, but we reckoned that we ought to get what architects and psychologists

got, and we tended to use those figures. And again, I can remember then, after my

first experience in that context, I said to Peter, ‘We need to suggest to people that if

they appear in court and are cross-examined they charge an extra fee for discomfort,’

which we did. (laughs) I did, I mean. I didn’t enjoy for one moment being cross-

examined by rude QCs who took an adversarial view in what’s a civil issue, but they

adopted the criminal [case style] and treated one as a hostile witness, actually. Very

unpleasant. And I wanted to ask the presiding officer, ‘Tell this twit to – – –’, but I

wasn’t game. (laughter)

Do you feel that’s always been an issue, the problem of what people are willing to

pay for history in terms of being a professional historian?

It’s hard to know. I suspect there’s less of it now. I think that it is more realistically

recognized by agencies that are likely to employ full-time people that they’ve got to

pay a professional rate, and that to ask for fifty grand per annum for a full-time year

is quite comfortable. And I think that on the whole, because of the great range of

consultancies that have been undertaken in a wide variety of fields across the

community in the 1980s and ’90s, I think a large number of agencies are well now

understanding of the fact that if you hire an outside expert, full-time or part-time,

there’s x plus y, where y is a whole raft of on-costs, and they’re well aware of the

fact that those on-costs are part of the deal, even though the final number looks

awful. And I always feel that historians have never had a strong bargaining position

and we’ve always got a poorer rate than many of the other professionals, and I’ve

always encouraged people to ask for more. And I haven’t ever heard of people being

told, ‘That’s too much.’ (laughs) There are the occasional compensations. I

appeared for the Penfold’s people in the sub-division of the winery up at Magill and

I got paid, but also a box, a mixed box, of Penfold’s wines arrived on the front door

later. There wasn’t a bottle of Grange in it, though!

Bad luck! (laughter) Do you think – what role do you think the Professional

Historians’ Association has played in establishing that fee, that expectation?

21

Oh, I think we have. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the constant emphasis has

set standards: (a) it’s given us courage, and (b) it’s meant that there’s a piece of

paper to lay on the table. ‘Oh, okay.’ And (c) ‘Here’s a pile of books,’ you know,

‘Donovan’s done these and so-and-so, and this is the way it’s done.’ And there’s a

regular set of procedures for not only fees, but also the expectation that an advisory

committee be put in place, that a contract be drawn up, and we’ve spent some time

with model contracts, although we quickly realised that they would have to be

developed. We couldn’t have our own model contract. We thought we could, but

we realised it had to be worked out properly. But the important point was to

encourage people to have conflict resolution procedures, a whole range of structures,

and I can recall one particular case where Peter Donovan and Bernie O’Neil were

doing a history and the advisory committee was set up and the contract provided the

advisory committee would be the agency which managed the project, and Peter and

Bernie produced drafts of some chapters and it quickly became apparent that

members of the organisation were directly approaching Peter and Bernie and

pressuring them to change the texts and saying, ‘this is wrong’ or ‘this is right’ or

‘you can’t say that’ or ‘you must say this’. And I know that in this case – and I’m

not naming the case but you can ask Peter what it was – that – because one of my

colleagues was on the advisory committee as one of the external assessors, I actually

saw one day the letter that he wrote to the organisation saying, ‘Tell your people to

lay off. The contract provides the following. You are in breach of the contract.’

Now, the critical point from the APH point of view was that we had taught people to

have strong, clear contracts, and that we’d taught people to realise that a contract is

essential because it headed off difficulties before they occurred. And so that, I think,

was another achievement. And we weren’t alone in that, for heaven’s sake, but we

educated our own people to go to the trouble of getting a contract up. And there was

a certain sort of black market underground in ‘This is the contract that I have and,

you know, you could copy it,’ sort of thing and so on and so forth.

So these things that came up, these sort of ideas of having workshops on these

things and developing a contract, where did those ideas come from? Was it

discussion within the executive –

Oh yes, yes.

– or how did they – – –?

22

People like Peter and the others were saying, you know – Peter was the most

experienced by the early ’80s, and he was saying, ‘Well, we’ve got to have a

contract, we’ve got to have a code of ethics, we’ve got to have a newsletter, we’ve

got to have,’ you know, the things we’ve talked about. And others would be aware

of that as well. And yes, you know, I’m trying to think of others who might have

been firing bullets, and I suspect Sue Marsden must have fired the odd – made the

odd suggestion as well. But, you know, most of the issues were being raised by the

people who were actually doing it.

Well, perhaps we could talk about that initial committee. I mean, the President

was Peter Donovan who you’ve talked about quite a bit. The Assistant Secretary

was Pam Carlton. Do you want to talk about her contribution?

I can’t remember Pam very well, I’m sorry to say. She disappeared. And then

Penny Baker –

Yes, Penny Baker was the Membership Secretary, yes.

– that’s Peter Cahalan’s wife, of course. Yes, and she worked with me on the

newsletter and was working hard, but of course she was producing a family. And, as

you know, that’s very distracting3. And then – so she then decided – I mean, she’d

been earning money. I’d actually used her as a research assistant on a project I had

at Flinders, and then she must have withdrawn from the field because she was

responsible for a family.

And the Treasurer’s Paul Stark.

Yes, now, where was Paul? He had background in architecture, that’s right, I think.

And he pulled his weight and did his work, as far as I can recall, and then moved on.

Was it hard to get people to serve in executive positions in –

Oh, I think so, I think so. We had to scratch around. Alison Painter is the most

honourable example of someone who’s served for many, many years on a variety of

tasks within the committee structure, and she’s been comfortable with that. She did

her degree with us at Flinders, became involved, and because her husband was

comfortably able to provide for their necessary income, her activities were satisfying

3 The interviewer, Karen George, was heavily pregnant on 15th May 2002 – BD.

23

to her and she earned some money, but she also had time and that was important,

too.

Do you want to talk a little bit about your role as Secretary, how demanding that

was and why you took on that role?

Oh, well, why did I do it? Because (a) I’m good at it, but (b) because I thought that

this was something I could contribute. I felt that we in the academic world had a

responsibility to the people out there who were doing the hard yards, and whose

opportunities for university employment had disappeared and one felt guilty about

that, could we help them. So to some extent I was involved in post-training support,

you see. Could I help? But at the same time being involved in an agency which had

professional integrity through standard setting. And so I was happy to go to

committees and write the minutes and participate in some of the other activities, and

go to the discussion meetings, and threw my weight around because I’ve got a loud

voice and I’ve always got an opinion on things, you know, that sort of thing. I need

a cup of coffee.

I’ll just stop the tape. (break in recording)

We’re back on air.

It’s important to remember that I had to continue taking study leave, so Janet and I

went off to the US on study leave in mid, must have been mid-’81.

Yes. I noted that you dropped from the role of Secretary in September.

And that’s why, yes, you see. And then I was back again the next year, and I

probably came back on the committee at some point. I suppose I always took the

view that the committee couldn’t rely on me as a crutch, that the people who were

earning their living had to do the work. I was willing to participate, but I wasn’t

willing to be relied on completely. And I’m pretty sure I must have rejoined the

committee at some point.

Yes, you rejoined in May –

The next year?

– yes, I think it was – – –.

That’s when I got back from leave.

24

Yes. Oh no, sorry, autumn of ’83, the actual committee, yes.

Okay, well yes, okay. Well, there’s got to be an election and so on. And then I did

various stints. I next left town in 1990, so I think I was on the committee right

through that period of time.

Well, perhaps to finish up with that first year and that first period that you were

Secretary, what do you think was achieved in that first – – –?

Oh, code of ethics was the critical thing. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.

And that, as I said before, represented what we could fling on the table: ‘This is us,

here’s our code of ethics, we’re organised, we’re respectable.’ I think that’s the

main achievement. Yes.

And you mentioned – we had a bit of a list here of some of the seminars, the early

seminars, and one of the ones that I had was probably a fairly early one in August

1981, the Local Government seminar, and you said you recollected that.

Yes, I do recollect. We met in the Local Government Association rooms which were

at that point – I don’t know whether they still are – on Hutt Street, corner of Hutt and

whatever it is where the big electricity sub-station’s on the other side. And very

crowded, but these – two sorts of people: reps from local government, must have

been associated with their annual meeting, where they come from all around. And

consequently also some people from out in the traps who were involved in doing

local history in association with local government arenas, and it was the first time the

APH was able to link up effectively both with a range of potential employer-hirers,

and some of the performers who were out there in the field. And we made contact

that has continued in some cases with people. And we were talking about minimum

standards and so on. And I thought that was a terrific gathering because we were

articulating standards and really having the chance to talk to links with local

government about how poor some local government history work is and how much

better it could be.

What sort of attendances did you get for those early seminars?

Well, that particular one had a special character because it was linked up with their

annual gathering, the Association’s annual gathering, so that one was a monster. I

mean, there were fifty or sixty people in the room, I think, from memory. Some of

the others would have been for ourselves, and we would have had twenty or thirty, I

25

imagine, and one might look at the sort of immediate records of minutes to get some

feel for that. Because some of the seminars were for us. That one was for another

group, in a sense. You’ve got the list there.

Yes, yes. The other one that you said was very successful, and you mentioned the

first time I was here, was obviously when you came back from your study leave in

October 1983, the ‘Turning a Manuscript into a Book’.

Yes. I suppose it was successful in part because I was involved, because I’d done it.

By then I’d published two, and I was working on two more books or three more

books at that point. And the sequence of events was something that required careful

planning – and Peter Donovan and Sue Marsden also knew about these things too.

But we were able to help people, and I think significantly help people, in orderly

planning and make them realise that a book wasn’t the same as just writing a story

and getting it on paper. There were a whole series of things. And we introduced

people to the concept of a thing called ‘prelims’, the stuff up the front end, and when

you did the index and so on and so forth. I won’t go into the detail. But I thought

that was very educative and enlightening.

I’ll just stop you there and change the tape. (break in recording)

END OF TAPE 1 SIDE B: TAPE 2 SIDE A

This is the second tape of an interview being recorded by Karen George with

Brian Dickey. The interview’s taking place on the 15th

May 2002 at Blackwood in

South Australia. So did you want to say anything more about that particular

seminar?

Oh no, I think what you do in turning a manuscript into a book is well-known, but I

just felt that it was very enlightening to a range of people who gained confidence in

that context. At some point – I’ve forgotten the date of the publication of the

William Shakespeare collection4, but it’s not all that far down the track.

About ’88, I think.

Oh, as late as that, okay.

But it started in ’88 and came out in the early ’90s, I think.

Oh, okay, it’s later than I thought, okay. Well, we’ll leave it out for the minute.

26

One of the things I wondered with these professional development-type seminars,

was that related to the fact that there was no course at that time in public history

in Australia?

Oh yes, there’s no doubt that we felt that we were providing professional

development for our members. At various points we closely explored the possibility

of mounting such programs at either Flinders or Adelaide, and I had long

conversations with Bill Gamidge and we developed a program and put it, certainly

we put it to Eric Richards as head of the History Department at Flinders – and failed,

because we couldn’t guarantee enrolments. There’s no question of that. And there

were probably other issues like there’s not enough in this that’s university-based, as

it were. I think Eric had a high view of what was university-based. So leaving that

aside we pressed on with professional development activities, and I think it’s

appropriate, and it’s still appropriate, to continue professional development as part of

what a professional association does. And that line of thought continues to sustain, I

think, here.

I noted actually, as you say in minutes in 1982 and 1983, that you had got together

a group of people, convened a group of Adelaide and Flinders History

Departments, to discuss the role of the Association both in generating employment

for History graduates, but also to try to lobby for a public history course. Can

you talk a bit about – – –?

Yes. Well, we developed – Bill Gammage and I – developed a syllabus and so on,

and it was partly in response to the experience I had in the US. So at this point I

thought we might be able to sell a Public History Diploma, public being larger than

professional, but that professional would be a component of public, and that it could

have involved Museum Study people and the like. But it was judged that there just

wasn’t enough enrolments, and that it would be a diversion of resources from the

lives of already busy people like Gammage and Dickey. At Flinders, at the later

development of the Cultural Tourism Department, had it been in existence there

would have been a stronger resource base, but that was just different, bad timing, not

feasible. Adelaide later went ahead for a while with a diploma, and I don’t know

what the state of the play with that one is.

Why did you think there wouldn’t be enough enrolments in a course like that?

4 Brian Dickey (ed), William Shakespeare’s Adelaide 1860-1930, Adelaide, 1992.

27

Oh, because there weren’t enough people able to get full-time employment as a

result, so they weren’t willing to take the time and effort and pay the whatever fees

might have been. I’m not saying that we would have been charging full fees, but

there was just this recognition there were just not enough of these sorts of people. I

mean, previously, Robin Moore, as Professor of History at Flinders, and I had

mounted a proposal and got approved. We developed an MA [by course work] in

the 1970s hoping that school teachers would come and re-tread, and we offered them

everything in coursework options, but they never came. So in a sense I’d already

discovered that there was very little community interest in further education at

university level. And so we pressed on at the APH level with professional

development activities. Peter and Sue probably were the best at tapping people from

other organisations to come and speak to us over the years. There was the very

successful seminar not so many years back when – it was about the business of

delivering professional expertise comments in court, and Peter and others lined up

two very able people from the legal profession to speak to us, and we had an

excellent turnout of people. That was a splendid example of professional

development activities.

The other thing you mentioned when I was first here, that you thought was very

important, was the social aspect of the Association.

Oh yes, yes.

Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yes, well, by whatever means – and there were the seminars or the professional

development things, and there was the annual meal associated with the annual

meeting, and the annual sort of barbecue thing, and later on the Tuesday luncheons,

monthly. I couldn’t go to those because Tuesday was my heavy teaching day. But

the point is it became apparent that people valued the social networking that was

possible by getting together, and whether it was in the evening or in the day, whether

it was the annual or the half-yearly [occasion], these were ways in which people

were encouraging one another and swapping notes about what was going on, they

were gossiping, they were networking, all of that sort of thing, and ‘how you’re

going, what are you doing, gee, that’s a good idea, isn’t it great that So-and-so got

the such-and-such a job?’ I just think that that was part of the nature of the

28

Association’s contribution to people’s survival kit, as it were, and continues to be the

case. The current best example is the Tuesday monthly lunch. There would be

previous examples of where that best occurred. And there’s a cluster of us who’ve

got to know one another over a long period of time now, and we enjoy one another’s

company and we can rejoice in one another’s successes, and we can quietly ask,

‘What do you do about – – –?’ and solve problems.

Why do you think it’s been so important?

Because it has been the venue where the group have in common the fact that they’re

practising professional historians and that they will have issues in common. Partly,

of course, it’ll be committee members exchanging notes about the next meeting or

‘we’ve got to do this’, but leaving that aside, ‘have you heard about the job at – – –?’

or ‘has anyone got a draft contract they could lend me?’ Or, you know, ‘what do I

do?’ or ‘have you heard about – – –?’ It’s just so encouraging to one another. And a

little bit of mutual knowledge about friends and relations and Karen’s pregnant or

somebody, you know, that sort of thing. So there was an element of social

interaction for its own sake.

Do you think it’s important because professional history tends to be working in

isolation?

Oh yes, yes, I think that’s absolutely true. And it’s also important that the sort of

people like Brian Samuels, who is a public servant, is in touch with the field workers

like Peter Donovan, who is in touch with the academics like Brian Dickey and John

Tregenza, you know. There was a sense of willingness to gather and not feeling

superior, and recognizing one another’s talents.

So over – I guess, over the first decade or so, was there a change in academic

attitudes towards the professional historians? Did more academics become

involved, or not?

Well, if you count David Hilliard as one, Brian plus David makes two rather than

one in the Department. But, other than that, very little. Once the business of the

possibility of the Public History Diploma had been considered and dismissed, that

was about it. In many ways I think – well, Eric Richards just wasn’t interested, I

don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Couldn’t see any cash value in it, had a

very high view of the integrity of the academic historian, and also a view that people

29

just did their own thing. He never really succeeded in developing a corporate

identity in the Flinders History Department. That’s the product of a variety of issues

which I shared with Eric, and he knows my views on these matters and he knows

that I’ve always been critical of his performance as Head of Department.

Department headship is now elective and hence he’s no longer Head, but others have

moved on and times have changed. But the willingness of others in the Flinders

Department to participate is not very great. Yes. Yes. And Bill Gammage was

interested in encouraging people, but never thought it appropriate to be a

professional historian, that wasn’t his thing, but Bill put a lot of effort – as did I – in

the development of an Australian Studies Association around the town, and that was

another movement. That was a subject-oriented movement of academics and the like

to promote the creation of Australian Studies. But that interacted with the

Professional Historians, that’s true, as – and as we’ve been reminded, there’s also in

the mid-’80s the rising tide of activity associated with the Jubilee 150 in 1986.

Do you want to talk a bit about that, would be the Jubilee and then the

Bicentenary, I suspect, as well.

I suppose there was a lot of employment made available through contracts associated

with the Jubilee 150. So at that level I think the historians, the freelance historians,

were probably busiest in the mid-’80s. And in addition, a number of members of the

Association – not ex officio, but because of their achievements – were appointed to –

I was appointed, and Peter Donovan I think and others, John Tregenza certainly – to

the History and Conservation Committee of Jubilee 150. Peter Howell from the

History Department at Flinders was on the General Council of the Jubilee 150. And

we felt that we were at centre of stage, it was great. And there was some money. I

took study leave at that point and worked with the original Wakefield Press, the one

that was created by the Jubilee 150 board, to publish work associated with South

Australia, and I worked as a full-time editor with that Wakefield Press, and I read

about a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty manuscripts in the period of time I

was there. And I was consciously applying the sorts of standards that the APH had

developed and offering written critiques that were fed back to the authors. And I

was saying to the managing editor ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘maybe’, and it’s fair to say that a

large number of those manuscripts have appeared in print over the next decade –

30

some of them in the official series, and my own book comes to mind, Rations,

residence, resources5, but also others. And so in a sense that was a major

contribution of a whole study leave of mine. But in the process I was seeing my

colleagues, APH colleagues, doing their bit, and so there were lots of opportunities,

and I think it’s fair to say that the Jubilee 150 created all sorts of ways in which

history was salient. And Professional Historians, we’d been in existence for six or

seven years, we knew who we were, we were promoting one another, and I think in

that sense a number of us had significant confidence to attack jobs and get them

done. It rolled on through to the Bicentennial which was less of a bonanza in a

variety of ways, and the History Conservation Committee didn’t participate. There

was less that was particularly South Australian about that, but I was involved in

writing a book which at this time could be regarded as my own first foray into

professional history in that I committed to writing the history of the church which I

attended, because its foundation stone was dated 26th January 1838, which if you do

your sums is not a bad date for a foundation stone. And so I wrote and published,

with the agreement of the trustees of the Holy Trinity Church, Adelaide, a history of

that congregation which was launched in that year. And so that – I felt as though I

was doing my bit as a professional historian. Of course, I was able to do it with the

support of the Flinders History Department and it was my current research project,

of course, but that was part of the sort of 1988 activity.

That was something you raised when I was here, that there was that little bit of

conflict between professional historians and academics because academics, given

that they had a wage, could do something more cheaply.

There was some sense of undercutting. I actually don’t think it’s much of an issue,

because in a sense in the last resort the agency will be charged what the market will

bear, and there are some activities that if you’re going to live off them you can’t do.

And I think that I have undertaken projects with agencies that clearly couldn’t pay

the full bit. So there’s always been a complicated relationship between potential

author and potential agency. At the fully market end of the business there’s been

advertisements in the paper and people apply and they get the job, and it’s all written

5 Brian Dickey (main author), Rations, residence, resources: a history of social welfare in South

Australia since 1836, Wakefield Press, Netley, 1986.

31

out. You know, the Country Fire Board or the Gas Company or whoever, at the

other end there are much more intimate relationships with – and there’s no way in

the world anyone but a member of the congregation at Trinity would have been

allowed to do the history of Trinity, for example, but I had enough integrity and

tickets hanging off me to be trusted to do it properly, and I did it for free. I wouldn’t

dream of taking – you know, because I put the money in the pot, anyway. And so it

would be wrong of the people in the APH to say that there were academics who were

cheating, because the band of possible options is quite wide. And of course

academics have got to be allowed to get on with their jobs anyway, and I think by

then opportunities for history writing having been enlarged, I was, by doing the

history of Trinity, I was imaging something, I was saying, ‘Look, a good history of a

church can really be done well if it’s done by someone who’s got significant skills

and competencies.’ And people have said to me – the former Archbishop of

Adelaide, Keith Rayner, actually wrote me a letter on one occasion and said it was

the best church history he’d ever read, you know. So one was setting standards, and

that’s another justification.

That period of the Jubilee and the Bicentenary actually coincided with you

becoming President in 1986 through 1989.

Oh, right. Did it?

Yes.

Is that when I was? Okay.

Yes. So do you want to talk a bit about taking on that role, why you – – –?

I’d have to say frankly I can’t remember. I’d have to go back and look at the

minutes and the annual reports and so on, so what I’ve said in those you’ll have to

rely on and read my annual reports as printed in the newsletter. It was just a bit of a

blur, I’m afraid. I did my duty, Peter needed a break – he’d done it and done it and

done it and someone else had to do it, it was time someone else did the job. So it

was Jobbins’6 turn in a way, and the thing – certainly the main project that we

developed within that context was the William Shakespeare project, which was my

6 Slang term – BD.

32

next immediate book, and I’m pretty sure that I sold it to the committee while I was

President. I’d discovered this bloke William Shakespeare when I’d been doing the

Trinity history and the stories in the two books, how I was contacted by a lady who

purported to be the daughter of William Shakespeare whom I knew was well and

truly dead, and she said she had his diaries, and this was in the context of the writing

of the Trinity history. And I went to see her and it turned out that William married a

second time in his seventies and sired this lady, who in turn was in her seventies, and

she’d treasured her father’s diaries. And these diaries were immensely rich and I

used them in the Trinity history, but I realised that he’d been a public servant with

the City Council for fifty years. And I knew that by then there was a cluster of

unpublished or publishable capabilities of our members, and I thought, ‘Here’s

another way we can market ourselves.’ I guess my main contribution as President

was to design and execute and edit William Shakespeare’s Adelaide, which is a book

you can read and read the preface of, and so on. So I exercised my well-honed skills

as a supervisor in reconstructing the prose of some of our colleagues, some of whose

prose was pretty awful, I’d have to say. But that was a process that I think they

accepted, and they accepted – I’m grateful for them to accept the fact that I took to

their prose with a blunt axe. But we produced the book. Alison Painter got some

funds from Cooper’s Brewery where she was writing a history – her husband was a

brewer with the other lot, but they had links with Cooper’s – and we had a wonderful

book launch with the Lord Mayor, [Steve Condous] the Greek man who eventually

became the politician.

Steve Condous?

Steve Condous. And he gave some marvellous reminiscences of his own growing up

in the City of Adelaide as the child of migrants in the 1950s. That was a wonderful

launching speech, it was just the best way, because he could say, ‘I’ve read the book

and here’s my story.’ And I thought in that book we were showcasing people’s

achievements in various aspects of the history of Adelaide. All right, Flinders

contributed because the History Department secretary typed the pages, and what we

did was copy-ready, camera-ready pages. And so another thing I was showing

people was that we can produce books ourselves relatively cheaply, by cutting back

on some of the costs. And in a sense I was saying to them, ‘And here’s a way in

33

which the Department is co-operating with the professional historians,’ because there

was no charge for the typing. And yes, so that was that. And the subsequent volume

I think got out of hand in terms of costs and scale and so on, but I’d done my turn

with one. And the development of that book involved seminar discussions,

interaction – – –.

Can you talk a little bit about the process, I guess, of how the different ideas came

up? Was that – – –?

Yes, well, people – you know, we identified ‘Who’s interested in writing – who’s

got work on the City of Adelaide?’ And people put their hands up, you know, and

the final list is theirs. There was a certain amount of angst. I went out and chased a

few people who weren’t members but who I knew were doing things that could be

put in. So we must have had some discussion group meetings – not very many, but

enough to get the shape of the thing in place – and then I just had to chase people

and chase people to get their work done. And the outcome, I think, was a good

collection and I just hope that people continue to use it. And I was rather proud at

the time. (laughs)

I noted that in the newsletter after the Shakespeare’s Adelaide came out that you

gave some reflections on the project, and there was one comment in there which I

thought I’d ask you about, because you said that you had to frequently restrain

[sic] from your desire to cancel the whole exercise, so I wondered whether there

was some problems along the way.

Oh yes, there must have been people who were just so slow, that’s the problem, they

were just so slow. Because they were doing other things. Helen Northey comes to

mind. With the greatest respect I now realise that Helen Northey was dying of

cancer, and I didn’t know then how ill she was until some years later. But she was

struggling to produce her PhD and her contribution was an off-cut [from the PhD],

but very late. There were others like that that I won’t name, but I think in Helen’s

case I owe her an apology because I had expectations of her, but I was unaware of

her problem.

So what result do you think the Shakespeare’s Adelaide had? Do you think it

was – – –?

Well, clearly it was a significant new achievement and benchmark for the

Association. It signalled that one of the things we could do was to market our own

34

product and to showcase our achievements. And the degree to which the book is

cited in footnotes, you know – certainly in teaching contexts students were able to

cite it and so on. And some of the work has gone on subsequently and has been

worked up, so Pat Sumerling pressed on with her interest in pubs and she’s

published a book, as you know, and Alison Painter finished her project, her related

project, and so on. So to some extent these were by-blows, as it were, that people

pursued in later achievements. So like any book it has its life and then it just quietly

sits.

So why did you not become involved in the next generation with Playford’s South

Australia?

Oh, I was exhausted, I was exhausted. And I didn’t – I mean, someone else came up

with the idea of that and I didn’t have anything specific in terms of any intellectual

proposition to work on. I had another big project on the go, the Australian

dictionary of evangelical biography, and I had a study leave coming up in 1990, so I

was out of action, as it were. And I again took the view I’ve done my turn, it’s

someone else’s turn, and if someone else wants to run with it, well, good luck to

them. We made a profit on William Shakespeare and I offered my comments about

the next project and those comments were not accepted. I said, ‘Keep it modest,

keep it under control and don’t let it get out of hand,’ but in my opinion,

unfortunately, Playford got too big and it’s cost the Association far too much money,

there’s no question of that. And I just think that it was a mistake to let the thing go.

And people got, I think, too ambitious. But I wasn’t involved and it’s not for me to

say more than that because other people accepted responsibility, and you can talk to

people like Bernie O’Neil and Judith Raftery about it.

So do you perhaps want to talk a little bit about that, what the Association could

do and what it perhaps couldn’t do, and were there ideas that didn’t take off?

Oh, were there ideas that didn’t take off? Gosh. Well, some of our seminars got

poor attendances, and we gradually wound back – we certainly stopped doing the

professional, sorry, the content-based seminars, and the number and frequency of

professional development seminars scaled back, but in a sense we felt we’d put that

on the table. Although I mentioned briefly the appearing in court one, the expert

witness one, that was a very successful recent seminar. And there was also a recent

35

seminar we had with respect to legal matters, with respect to – not privacy, but

copyright. That was very successful, too, and that’s written up in the newsletter

about four or five years ago. Fewer, because people were less willing to come to

meetings – I think that’s partly ageing, partly boredom, you know, ‘I’ve done all this

before.’ But we still needed to have some professional development activity. I’m no

longer on the committee so I can’t say what their thinking is about that. The major

effort over the last decade has been to participate in the evolution of the Australia-

wide structure, and that’s been, I think, very important.

What involvement have you had with that idea?

Very little, very little. I mean, I did my turn as President, and then I withdrew – I

was on study leave in 1990, and I haven’t been on the committee during the 1990s,

taking the view that I had other things to do and that I’d done my turn, et cetera.

I’ve said enough about that. So I’ve only been a member over the last decade or so.

Now that I’ve retired it’s conceivable that if I was asked politely I might take on

some task.

Whoops, you’ve said that on tape now! (laughter) That idea about a national

committee seemed to come up quite early in the piece, though. Do you recollect

discussions of that in the early days?

Oh, almost certainly Peter Donovan would have been saying, ‘Look, we’ve got to

keep an eye on this,’ and he was certainly promoting the idea – he was the one who

was moving around in the ’80s on contract work in other places and developed a

whole network of his own, and I’m sure that he was crucial in that. And I’ve already

talked about the way we had to convince the Victorians to allow the emergence of a

specific professional historians’ association as distinct from the academically-based

thing. They were also running a Public History MA in Melbourne at Monash, and

that partly got in the way and was partly a good thing. Talked about Kelly’s group

in Sydney and other groups around Australia, and that that’s, I think, probably been a

very important overall emergence, because it then means that people in regional

groups have something to join confidently that they’re in Wagga in Rockhampton

they can join a professional historians’ association but know they’re in touch

nationally. And of course the national body is trying to do the right thing by a

website, which is of course the modern way forward.

36

So you think there will be advantages that come from having developed a national

presence?

Oh yes, I think so. I think that there’ll be exchange of views about work rates, about

conditions of work, about legal matters like copyright, privacy, about related skills

like interviewing and what we’re doing now – oral and so on, and the emergence of

the oral history associations has been a very significant, another significant support

group – and just the sense of keeping in touch and the ways in which doing things

nationally is the way we’ve got to go in Australia, but on a federal basis.

One of the things you just raised then was privacy, and there were some issues

which it seemed the APH, or PHA as it is now –

Yes, yes.

– got involved with in the early days. One was the Privacy Bill in the early 1990s,

1991. Do you recollect any involvement you had with it?

I personally can’t recall any involvement on that matter. I do recall being involved

in debates which may have been associated with it with respect to the archives

legislation7, State Archives, and being concerned about destruction of archives, and

if privacy was implied that there would be restricted access to records, I think the

Association would have been got involved. But the APH was very concerned about

the way in which the head of archives, Ewan [Miller] – he was regarded as a blow-in

bureaucrat, and his responsibility for the development of the archives legislation was

regarded as disastrous. We probably gained some moderation in that area and there

is now a Public Records Advisory Committee – I think I’ve got the name right –

that’s been in place for some three or four years – – –. And I think the Professional

Historians Association was recognized as a player with a stake, to use the

contemporary terms – not something you eat but something you stick in the ground.

And so not so much the privacy but the archives, I think, we were major players in

influencing the drafting of the legislation. I personally wasn’t involved in talking to

ministers or bureaucrats, but others were.

I’ll just stop you there. (break in recording)

7 State Records Act, 1997.

37

END OF TAPE 2 SIDE A: TAPE 2 SIDE B

Let’s talk a little bit about that. How important do you think the PHA’s role has

been in lobbying for these kinds of issues?

It’s hard to say because, as I say, I have not been much of a lobbyist myself,

although I must have helped to write some of the early letters. And it’s hard to say

that we personally have been able – can put things on the wall, with that one

exception. I think that we were recognized as players in the thing, and certainly June

Donovan was appointed to the Archives Council or whatever it’s correctly called8,

and she was chosen because she was a member of the APH – that was made plain.

And the Act was drafted to ensure that the old notion of the Professor of History at

the The University of Adelaide was automatically ex officio9, that was struck out in

recognition of this much wider range of people who were historians who had an

interest. And indeed that the university historians should lose their special,

privileged place. So I think we clearly influenced that one.

The members of the Association who are in the Heritage Branch – Sue

Marsden on contract, Peter Bell as Head, and then Brian Samuels as Head –

clearly have been influential in ensuring that historians have been recognized by

the Heritage Branch as professional players in the development of heritage views

and the carrying out of heritage surveys. In the ’70s they were being done by

architects who pretended to know about history, and we’ve convinced the

Heritage Branch that we can do better than that, and Sue Marsden and Peter

Donovan did the big surveys and showed the Branch what could be achieved, and

then Peter Bell was appointed and then Brian Samuels, and then are historians

and members of the APH.

Before we reflect back over some of these issues, is there anything else that you

want to raise that you think – – –?

No, I’ll have to rely on you on the headings you’ve got.

Oh okay, yes. Perhaps one thing would be – you’ve mentioned some of the main

players that you’ve seen who had a role in the Association. Is there anyone else

that you’d like to recognize, I guess, in terms of contribution?

8 State Records Council.

9 Automatically ex officio a member of the State Records Council.

38

Oh, right. Oh, gosh. Well, I’ve mentioned Alison Painter because she just worked

so hard for so many years and just doing the ‘housework’, you might say. I’ve

mentioned Sue Marsden because she had contacts – and of course she’s left Adelaide

now10

. I was involved with her as a PhD student as well, but she had superb

networks. Peter – oh, probably – there’s been a new generation of people who’ve

taken up the sort of hard working committee things. Noris Ioannou was President.

He was transferred to me as a graduate student at Flinders, and I supervised his PhD

and I think I probably introduced him to the APH and Noris generously engaged,

he’s got his own particular interest in cultural history and I think that was very good

for the Association to have someone who had interests in things like the history of

potters and things like that, that was different. But he also introduced some of us to

the concept of history and tourism, and that was the special contribution of Norris’s.

Norris was very personable. Peter Bell did his turn as President. Peter was good

with networking in the Department and so on – that was when he was Head of the

Heritage Branch or whatever it was called. Yes, those are the sort of people.

There’s been a general sense of doing one’s turn and doing it collegially and co-

operatively and with a consensual model. It’s been great. And there’s women as

well as men, don’t get me wrong just because I mentioned those men. There were

other women as well, you know, did the hard yards. Pat Sumerling’s another.

So to reflect back, what place do you think the Association’s had in your life as a

historian over the last twenty years?

Oh, okay. Well, I think it enriched my life because it encouraged me to realise that

doing community history, local history, South Australian history, was a worthy and

decent endeavour, and that in doing it I was in touch with an interesting range of

people whose company I enjoyed and whom I could work with, and that to some

extent it dealt with the failure of collegiality in the History Department at Flinders,

and that I was able to get significant satisfaction off-campus when I wasn’t getting

satisfaction on-campus. And that’s a very personal and private comment – I mean, I

don’t mind saying it and go on tape, and I think it’s clear – and later on I found I

gradually developed significant collegial experience with David Hilliard at Flinders

10 Subsequently, 2003, has returned to Adelaide – BD.

39

and we began in the 1990s to see that our interests converged, and so I gained

significant interaction with Hilliard at Flinders. And to some extent I developed

project interests in the 1990s which were more oriented back to the academic scene

and perhaps less involving APH-type vision, although I don’t want to press that too

hard. I mean, I’ve done – the last three books have been local, locally-based

projects, that’s to say the Legacy11

and Port Mission12

and Anglicare13

[books], and

in that sense I’m just doing what professional historians do. But it validated those

sorts of engagements. And the fact that I wasn’t producing major volumes published

by Oxford University Press didn’t matter one whit. And others could do that, good

luck to them. And this is my thing. And yes, and so doing local history and

supporting the local historians was of a whole.

What sort of place do you think it’s had in the lives of others that are outside of

the university – – –?

Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt that a lot of them have found the APH as a major

point of social and professional encouragement. More for some than for others, and

for some for a period of time then they’ll move on, and it would be managed,

symbolised, by their membership. When they pay they’re involved, when they’re

not paying [they drop out]. And there are some people that continue to be members

year after year after year, which clearly says they like it and they value it. And I can

think of how that’s influenced various people’s professional activities in a variety of

ways. And we’ve supported one another, it’s great. And we’ve rejoiced – we’ve

begun to be able to rejoice in social events like marriages and babies and things, and

mourn the deaths as well. And so there’s a social dynamism about it as well as a

professional dynamism, and I think that’s wonderful, I really do.

Whether or not we’re continuing to attract younger folk who see the

opportunity for earning money as historians in the twenty-first century is a matter

I’m unaware of. I suspect it’s less true. But that’s not a failure of the

11 Brian Dickey assisted by Pauline Payne, A generation of Legacy service: South Australia and Broken

Hill since 1945, Legacy Club of Adelaide, Adelaide, 1997.

12 Brian Dickey and Elaine Martin, Building community: a history of the Port Adelaide Central Mission,

Port Adelaide Wesley Centre Inc., Adelaide, 1999.

13 Brian Dickey, Giving a hand: a history of Anglicare SA since 1860, Anglicare SA, Adelaide, 2003.

40

Association; that’s a change in the opportunity pattern in the workforce. You

probably know more about that than I do.

So do you think that membership of the APH means something to employers or

potential clients these days?

Well, I think it must mean that they can indicate they’re members of a professional

organisation in the field. What the real, the prior question is, are organisations

interested in the development of historical analysis? That’s the real problem, we’ve

got to keep on pressing to say, ‘Look, it’s important that you analyse your past.

You’re better at it for the future if you’ve analysed your past, and we’re the sort of

people that can do it well for you.’ And, you know, Mark Peel from Monash

University, who used to live in Adelaide, has just reviewed our Port Adelaide

Mission book in the Journal of Religious History, and he’s said some extraordinarily

generous things in saying that this is good history of an agency that the agency can

benefit from, and that it challenges the agency as well as affirms the agency. And

that’s the sort of thing that you can do. So, you know, I rest my case on that review

of that book, if you like. (laughs) I’ll show it to you in a minute.

Do you think the aims and the philosophies of the Association have changed over

the last twenty-one years?

I don’t think so. I’m not privy to the present debates on committee, but my

perception is they may have contracted their vision of what they think they could

achieve, but that’s a function of what people expect of them and membership and so

on, but we’ve got the basic texts on the table, so in a sense the initial shove is rolling.

You know, we’ve gone up the hill and the ball’s rolling down the other side, sort of

thing. We’ve got our ethics and we’ve got our national agency and we’ve got the –

we’ve even got our membership cards. And that sort of process is in place. And we

can encourage one another and we can talk about prices and costs, and there’s

somebody – now people to ask, you know, ‘What do I do if – – –?’ The answers are

available. So I think in that sense the APH exists and is doing a good job, and we

must continue to keep it going because it is essential to have a professional agency,

professional organisation.

Why do you think that is?

41

Well, for the sorts of [reasons] that we validate the achievement of persons who wish

to seek employment in carrying out historical tasks, and that someone who is the

member of a professional organisation of historians is, I think, more likely to be

employed than someone who simply says, ‘I want that job.’ There’ll be other

criteria, but one of the criteria that employers – well, in my opinion – ought to be,

and are aware of, is ‘are they part of a reputable professional organisation?’ Now,

this is not restraint in trade, but it’s certainly a validating concern.

Do you feel that the attitude of academics towards the APH has changed over

time?

It’s hard to know, but I suspect they’re more tolerant because they themselves have

had to be more imaginative where they get their funds and what projects they take on

board. But it would still be true to say that the professional historians are doing

things that the academics don’t know about because they’re active in different

venues. The professionals are so busy getting the job done that they’re not going to

have time to come and read a paper, and these days getting on a seminar list at

Flinders takes something like twelve months, which is a pain in the backside, but

that’s another story.

So do you feel that – I guess when you came to the initial idea sitting in the car or

wherever it was – that those aims have been achieved?

Oh, yes. Oh, I’m confident we’ve done it and we’ve done it well and that it’s been

worthwhile. No question of that. And that if I’ve been able to contribute to the

better performance of a number of people that’s great, and if they feel better about it

that’s even better.

Do you think over that time too the field of public history or professional history

has changed? And how?

Well, it’s certainly grown. It’s clear that more history is being written by people

who are professionally qualified to write it, and the quality of what’s being written is

better, and that agencies are more likely to accept the idea of a professional doing the

job. The volume of contract has ebbed and flowed for external reasons like a Jubilee

or a Bicentennial. When money is short or when business management practices

have a different fashion to them, less is done. But I think we’ve got a sufficient

42

beachhead we’ll never retreat from, and we’ll be able to expand as opportunity

permits.

Are there things you’d like to see the APH do that have not yet been fulfilled, do

you feel?

Hard to say. We’ve got to make sure that we continue the process of professional

education. Now, if that means reinventing the wheel for the next generation, well,

we should be willing to do that even though that might be a bit tiresome for some of

us, ‘been there, done that’. We need to continue to convince people to join and to

support them by whatever means in their participation, in their activities, and that

means in particular recruiting amongst the mature age graduate students, and we may

not be particularly active in that regard at the moment, I just don’t know. And the

way in which the APH has maintained a presence at the National Australian

Historical Association conferences has been very valuable. Every two years the –

and now, with the emergence of the national body – there’ll always be a professional

historian strand at the AHA conferences and that’s very valuable, and we’ve got a

voice there that I think can continue to grow and that’s a plus. And I think – and

again, the diversification and the character of what is now recognized to be historical

undertaking means that professional historical activity will continue to be recognized

significantly. The negative and narrow-minded and snobbish people will eventually

disappear, because they’ve got to retire soon.

That more or less comes to the end of the questions I was going to ask. Is there

anything else you would like to say now you’ve got the opportunity about the

Association?

I think you’ve probably pushed me to orate – I think I’ve orated enough. I can’t

think of anything else. I think I’m concerned about the future in terms of the

willingness of people to join, but that’s a matter that we’ve just got to keep on

working at all the time.

Do you have any ideas for what could be done to encourage them?

No, well, as I say, one of them is to recruit amongst the graduate students,

particularly the part-time, mature age graduate students, and we may not be as active

as we ought to be in that area. Although I gather that there’s been a shift away from

Australian-based research projects at the Honours level, and I guess that’s just a

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trend line that we’ve got to live with. But people will still need to be able to join a

professional association if they’re going to present as historians.

Well, I’d like to thank you very much for your time today and for contributing to

this oral history project.

(laughs) It’s been my pleasure.

Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW.