Peter Beilharz - The Work of History: Writing for Stuart Macintyre

The Work of History

Peter Beilharz is Professor of Critical Theory at Sichuan University. He is founding editor of Thesis Eleven.

Sian Supski is a freelance researcher, and Adjunct Research Fellow in Sociology at La Trobe University. She is an editor of Thesis Eleven.

Writing for Stuart Macintyre

Edited by Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

www.mup.com.au

First published 2022

Text Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2022

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design by J & M Typesetting

Cover image: Stuart Macintyre, in his office at Melbourne University, 28 September 2004. Picture by Cathryn Tremain, Fairfax images.

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

9780522878608 (paperback)

9780522878615 (ebook)

Picture Acknowledgements

Burke and Wills photo: The Australian newspaper, photographer Simon Schluter Martha Macintyre and Jessie Macintyre: family photos Marcus Clarke Annual Lecture, Athenaeum Library: Athenaeum Library, photographer Janine Eastgate

Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski

Geoff Eley

Kevin Morgan

Terry Irving

Bobbie Oliver

Ann Curthoys

Peter Love

Marilyn Lake

Frank Bongiorno

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Stephen Knight

Joy Damousi

Sean Scalmer

Diane Kirkby

Nicholas Brown

Rob Watts

Tim Rowse

Phillip Deery and Julie Kimber

Alison Bashford

Kate Darian-Smith

Graeme Davison

Len Richardson

Philippa Mein Smith

Carolyn Holbrook

Anna Clark

Simon Marginson

Patricia Grimshaw

Liam Byrne

Stuart Macintyre

Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski

The idea for this book has been circling for a while. As one of us wrote in opening a book of essays collected in 2014, Stuart Macintyre had, along with Bernard Smith, left footprints in the sand for many of us. What is striking about this kind of claim is the extent of its applicability. So many of us are in debt to Stuart Macintyre, intellectually and personally. Yet his personal modesty has meant that while the works are standard references, there has hitherto been little public discussion of what might be called the Macintyre Effect.

We floated the idea with Nathan Hollier, who was enthusiastic. Then we tried it out on Stuart, who was more reluctant. He was the rarest of academic creatures, the scholar indifferent to the cult of self-promotion. His engagement with this project was warm but detached. The editors and contributors take sole responsibility for its contents.

We asked Frank Bongiorno and Joy Damousi to act as project advisers, and thank them for their wholehearted efforts to make it work, both as tribute and as innovation. We sincerely thank our authors, who got it. They understood the need both to appraise and to add, to give this book its value in recognition of Stuart and to offer a contribution to Australian historiography in its own right. We thank Martha Macintyre, not least for help with photographs. We thank the MUP crew, Nathan Hollier, publisher and CEO, our editor Catherine McInnis, Duncan Fardon, publishing assistant, and Karen Gillen, indexer. We also thank our fastidious copy-editor Cathryn Game.

Finally, we thank Stuart Macintyre, for a life of inspiration and support, for good spirit and example. We thank him for leading us in the work of history.

Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski
Melbourne, 2021

Stuart Macintyre died on 22 November 2021, while this book was in production. He was able to read the materials in manuscript and to write a modest response. We deeply regret missing the opportunity to hand him the finished volume and to say thank you, one last time.

PB & SS
Melbourne, 2022

Alison Bashford is Director of the Laureate Centre for the History of Population at the University of New South Wales. She co-edited The Cambridge History of Australia with Stuart Macintyre, and her most recent book is The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (with J.E. Chaplin; 2016).

Peter Beilharz is Professor of Critical Theory at Sichuan University, and is affiliated with Yale, Leeds, La Trobe and Curtin universities. He founded Thesis Eleven in 1980. He has published thirty books, most recently Circling Marx (2020) and Intimacy in Postmodern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman (2020).

Frank Bongiorno studied under Stuart Macintyre at the University of Melbourne in 1989 and 1990. Stuart supervised his Honours thesis, and they have subsequently collaborated on other projects. Frank is Professor of History at the Australian National University. His books include The Eighties (2015).

Nicholas Brown is one of the many who have benefited from Stuart Macintyres generous, tolerant and wise PhD thesis examination. A Professor of History at the Australian National University, he was working with Stuart and others on a study of J.G. Crawford. His works include Governing Prosperity (1995).

Liam Byrne is the author of Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin (Melbourne University Press, 2020). In 2018 he began work with the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and in 2019 was appointed its historian. He writes here in a personal capacity.

Anna Clark is a historian at the University of Technology Sydney. Stuart Macintyre supervised her PhD thesis, which looked at contests over Australian History education, and invited her to contribute some of that research to his book, The History Wars. Her most recent book, Making Australian History (2022), is a study of Australian historiography.

Ann Curthoys is a historian. She is Professor Emerita at the Australian National University and Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney and the University of Western Australia. Her most recent book is Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial Australia, 18301890 (with Jessie Mitchell; 2018).

Joy Damousi is Professor of History and Director of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent publication (as General Editor with Phillip Dwyer) is The Cambridge World History of Violence (four volumes, 2020).