Interview with Emeritus Professor Wilfred David Borrie

From the ANU Oral History Archive
Interview conducted 5 November 1982
Interviewed by Robin Golan
Edited and transferred to web media by Nik Fominas and Peter Stewart

Biographical introduction: Professor Mick Borrie was born in Waimate, New Zealand on 2 September 1913. He was educated at Waitaki Boys' High School and the Universities of Otago (New Zealand) and Cambridge.

Professor Borrie has been connected with the Australian National University since its earliest years. In 1947 he accepted one of the first four Social Science Research Fellowships to undertake research into population trends at the London School of Economics.

While at LSE he was invited by Keith Hancock to take up a position as a demographer in the about-to-be-formed Research School of Social Sciences. He became Reader and head of the Department of Demography after its establishment in 1952. In 1957 he became Professor. From 1965 to 1968 he was also Acting Head of the Department of Sociology.

From 1968 to 1973 Professor Borrie was Director of the Research School of Social Sciences. He retired from the university in 1978 and was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor.

Professor Borrie served on a number of national and international commissions, including Chairman of the United Nations Population Commission 1965-68, Director of the Australian Population Inquiry 1970-78, Member of the Australian Population and Immigration Planning Council 1974-81 and Executive Director of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia 1979-85.

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Transcript: Recording duration: 50 mins (1 tape) Transcriber: Diana Nelson

BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A

          Identification: This is an interview with Professor W.D. (Mick) Borrie, conducted by Robin Gollan, 5 November 1982.

          Well Mick, we might start where we were talking over lunch the other day about how you came to be appointed to the ANU as one of the very first appointees, in the Research School of Social Sciences anyway, and in the social sciences generally.

Well, I was at the University of Sydney as a senior lecturer, in the School of Social Work actually, and I was helping to train social workers. I was teaching social history and I had to teach some social economics which also caused me to do some quick study because I was not trained as an economist; but Hicks' Social Framework was my salvation, I think. I'd become interested in population studies before I left New Zealand and I had written a book which was published in 1948 on population trends and policies. And had also begun quite a considerable amount of analysis of Australian population data, both with regard to fertility and migration, and had managed to publish a few articles in various journals.

When the ANU was starting the first thing they did to work up the university identity was to award four scholarships for post-doctoral research. They were looking, I think, for staff in existing universities who might take a year to two years off to undertake full-time research. I applied for one of these and was lucky enough to get one. The topic I wanted to examine was the development of social policy measures arising essentially out of the decline of the birth rate in the 1930s and the problems arising of reconstruction after the war with regard to population and the family, and also migration. There'd been a lot of work done in this area in Sweden, in Denmark, and one major scholar was at that time working in London at the London School of Economics. So I went off there to pursue my studies.

It was then that I was asked by Keith Hancock if I would take a position in the new national university as a research fellow. The university got to the point then of setting up the advisory body of academic directors for four schools and they had decided that there should be a relatively senior post in the field of population studies. They actually called it demography. Someone foolishly thought that I might be a suitable person and I was invited to apply.

Well, the short answer is that after a lot of consideration because it meant throwing up a tenure position at the level of senior lecturer to take something called a research fellowship with no tenure but a guarantee of, I think, two years at that stage to start population studies. I had to make the choice between security and a bit of adventure, as it were, and I ultimately chose the latter.

That was fine because then I thought Hancock was coming to head the school and so did he. About a week later he had his discussions with the Vice-Chancellor, Sir Douglas Copland, and they agreed to differ, and he informed me that he was now not coming to the university so I was left as the only appointment, and the first appointment, in the School of Social Sciences. I returned in early 1950 and there was no place in Canberra for me so I worked back in the University of Sydney for a period - did some teaching there - but I was employed by the ANU. And then my wife and daughter and myself moved to Canberra in 1950 and that was the beginning of it. And I was the first appointment in the Social Sciences.

          You were appointed before Swan?

Yes.

          I didn't realise you were the absolute first.

Yes, I was the first. That's been challenged by a number of people but I've beaten down all the challengers.

          I'm sure you don't regard that as the greatest credible [inaudible] first.

Well, it was very exciting to have been the first and it was a challenge. It was also rather uncomfortable for a while because it was not really until about 1951 that one had any assurance that the whole field of population studies was going to succeed in being structured into the school because the school didn't necessarily, at that time, take the view of the initial advisory council - but we made it.

          The initial view, Hancock's view, of the way the school should be structured was not to have it departmentalised but rather to have a number of leading academic workers working across a range of disciplines, and these would constitute, as it were, the permanent structure. And then there'd be a moveable population of people who came in for a few years and a few post-graduate students and so on. I think that was the idea. And, for example, they didn't think of appointing anyone in history initially. History was to be a part of the whole complex but it was rather specialisations within history and other social sciences. Now, that's not the way the school developed, I think.

No. Although Hancock did not come immediately the school did, I think, under the direction of, as it were, ad hoc arrangements - Ken Wheare for example, came out to help to get things going in the school and held several seminars with the group of us. At that time Geoff Sawer was here, and Swan and others. Then Geoff Sawer was appointed Dean. I think we did work somewhat along the lines you mentioned at that stage. We were professionally an historian, an economist, demographer and so on, but we were engaged in essentially work relating to Australia and there was a lot of cross fertilisation in a sense. There had to be because we were a very small group and we either got our ideas from talking with people in other disciplines or virtually talked to ourselves.

Some of those early discussions and seminars were indeed very much worthwhile. I think of one study, for example, that came out of that era which was the book on wool which Alan Barnard finally edited. And a lot of the seminars that went into that were very much of the interdisciplinary type. And I remember also that Carr-Saunders came out as a visiting fellow at one stage and we had a series of extremely interesting seminars in which he participated, which batted around things between economists and historians and myself.

          This was after Hancock came out?

Well, that was after Hancock came, yes, but also we used to meet quite a bit jointly with the members of the School of Pacific Studies which was then a small group - Spate, Nadel. In that sense those were very interdisciplinary years, but perhaps small was beautiful in this regard. Once we tried to grow to have a greater representation within particular disciplines then they tended to become more and more exclusive in their own rights.

There was another problem I think because when you ran into the '50s you were beginning to approach the period of very rapid extension of students in universities with the subsequent demand for expanding staff and you were operating in a very limited pool of trained people because the growth in student numbers was running ahead of the number of trained staff who had been really the generation of the Depression and they were quite few in numbers. The problem was they were all being offered tenure very quickly and it was extremely difficult to capture really intelligent young people to a non-tenured job. The attraction of doing research was certainly a pulling factor but against that these young people were pretty reluctant to come to an insecure job when they could get quite a number of other offers probably which offered full tenure status. And I think got worse and worse through the '50s and '60s.

          This is going ahead a bit, but talking the other day you made the remark, while you were Director of the research school in 1968 to '73, your battle, or one of your battles, was to fill available posts. Now, looked at from 1982 this seems to be quite extraordinary because the problem of the university at the moment is that you've got highly qualified people occupying all sorts of inferior jobs and so on. It's a different world from what it was then in terms of availability of people and jobs and so on.

Well that is true and the lag of inadequate staff in terms of the number of students to be taught and so on did continue right up to the '70s. In fact it was perhaps in its most acute form when I took up the directorship of the school, partly because Australia had then also begun not only the development of new universities but the expansion of tertiary education into all sorts of other areas through the new colleges of advanced education. And this created a tremendous demand for staff throughout Australia, quite in excess of the numbers of highly talented people that could be secured. The consequence was that filling posts was an extremely difficult task and secondly, the heads of departments in the school, quite rightly, were extremely reluctant to appoint people unless they got really first-class quality.

There was also another factor and that is that some heads of the staff had then developed their departments to approximately the size and shape they wanted and they were not particularly anxious to grow more or to be disrupted, as it were, and trying to break down that exclusiveness was a definite problem. The way I saw it was that if the school did not get up to its establishment quota, if they lagged behind, they would be overrun by the position in some other schools which were getting up to their quotas and were looking for more than their quotas. And so I used to bet the staff that we could recruit constantly at a level of one non-tenure staff over and above the establishment each year in each department.

          Yes, this problem of filling posts, and as you say, great demands in all the universities for staff, the fact that non-tenured positions were less attractive in some ways and the third point you were making that you wanted high quality. Well, I don't think it's too much to say that of course that that great turning out, in my opinion, of people with post-graduate degrees in that period, there were a very large number that weren't anything like the top of the tree, the top drawer, and I think this is one of the problems in universities at the moment [inaudible] ... so many of the forty-five, fifty-year olds were people who got permanent jobs and now occupy senior positions and are virtually irremovable. This is one of the problems of the young people at the moment.

Well I think that's true. I think that the Institute's problem was rather different at that stage. My own view was that we had to keep up recruitment or we got left behind when the crunch came and the turn-around towards stability occurred - and it had to occur, there were signs by 1970 that the era of expansion was getting towards the end - and when the crunch came and we were left in the school with a lot of vacant positions we just wouldn't have a chance of picking them up, and that's why we were recruiting so hard to get up to say about eighty-five per cent, I think, of the establishment by the time I finished my term, compared with, I think, it was sixty-five per cent of establishment when I began. And I think that did help to save quite a lot of positions in the school.

But on the question of whether tenure produced an input of people of inferior quality, I think there is something in that in the teaching universities. On the other hand, the problems I felt that we had were not with the younger chap who was given a tenure post but the chap who was not good enough to get a tenure post and took a non-tenure post and then frequently could not get a tenure post elsewhere. I think we had more trouble with that sort of person than the really bright chap who said, 'I'll only come if you give me tenure', and my goodness, some of them bargained pretty hard for this I remember. Now very few of those very bright generation who bargained that way are now in the university. They were good enough to go on to get the plum jobs in other universities. And that was one of our problems, I think, that there were so many opportunities occurring that the really bright people tended to move out pretty quickly, and if we didn't look out we'd be trying to get second-rate people into non-tenure positions.

Now, I think this is a view that I held at the time and which affected my actions in this recruitment matter. I don't think that it was a view that was necessarily generally widely accepted but I think they were probably relevant to the times. I don't say they're relevant today when the situation is really the absolute reverse of what we had then but you've got now a flood of highly qualified people coming out of all our institutions but numbers stationary or students stationary or even declining.

I think we are back in the position now rather like the 1930s and '40s where you've got a flood of talent but it's not quite got used to the idea yet that it was to go into all sorts of occupations that it was able to avoid all through the period of expansion. In other words the highly qualified first-class doctoral student finding that he has to go school teaching for example. The opportunity of improving the talent in many of those levels of education, I think, are with us again as they were in the 1940s.

          Well, the long boom - if we can call it that - from 1950 obviously over, and in many ways one sees similarities with the '30s. I mean, when I was an undergraduate one didn't assume there was a university job going because there were only two people in the history department. The high schools of New South Wales were full of first-class honours graduates as teachers and so on. Well, one of the effects of the long boom was of course to reduce the academic standards of high schools by people going into universities.

I think there's no question about that. What you described is exactly the position that occurred in New Zealand and where I was when I graduated. And as you say, you looked around and you ... it was perfectly clear there was not going to be any opening in those small departments for years and years to come so .... Well, that's basically the reason why I felt I had to leave New Zealand to gain any academic advancement. But at the same time I can think of some teachers when I was at school that I'm quite convinced were of very high academic calibre. They were really very scholarly people, extremely well-trained, and you may be getting some of them going back into teaching now, but these people escaped the teaching net I know for forty years.

          Well, my experience was the same. I went to Fort Street and that was people with double honours and triple first-class honours and so on, and all the rest of it.

          

          Mick, demography - something I said before - you're virtually the parent of demography in Australia, to be non-sexist, father or mother, or whatever you like. I think you indicated earlier on in this - what we're recording - that Hancock was talking about demography. You hadn't really conceptualised it as demography at that stage in, say, 1948, is that the case?

Yes, I came to this interest in population matters as an historian, basically a social historian. My degrees were in history in New Zealand. Then through a study of the development of what we called the New Commonwealth then, I got interested in Commonwealth migration to the United Kingdom, the Dominions, and from that into the study of some of the reasons given for encouraging Commonwealth migration, particularly the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 which talked glibly about redistributing the population of the Commonwealth. This led to a close study of the trends of fertility which had in the 1930s brought total fertility to levels which like today were below replacement level intrinsically.

And so one grew into these studies really as part of the field of social history. And no, I hadn't conceptualised my interest as professional demography at that stage, but I think what Hancock had in mind and maybe what his council had in mind was also rather a conceptualisation of this as a social science study, a social history study, a sociological study. But he came up with the term 'a research fellowship in demography', and that was a pretty new word then. And in fact when the department was established in 1952 it was the first department of demography, I think, pretty well in the world; and when I assumed the chair of demography in 1957 it was true that I was the first Professor of Demography in the world. Now, that was only because a number of people who were much older than I was and who had been at the job for a long time then before I joined the ranks were holding chairs of sociology or of economics in major American universities in particular and also at LSE in England where demography was really growing out of the fields of genetics and human geography, although they did have a Reader in Demography at that stage, that was R.R.˙Kuczynski. He was the first British appointment to carry that title.

But the ANU certainly was innovative in the sense that they plumped for a department officially called Demography and a Chair of Demography. I didn't know that I had that privilege until many years later when my old friend Frank Notestein said that he thought I was the first Professor of Demography in the world and they did a very careful research check on this and that hasn't been challenged either. But it didn't last long because it was a very expanding field and other people came along. There were lots of demographers. In fact I think we've turned out about at least seven chairs of demography from our own graduates.

          Now, just pursuing this a bit: Charles Price, I think, was the first one appointed in the field, or that you had appointed, I presume. Of course his background is very similar to yours. He was an historian and got into population studies as an aspect of history. I suppose the next appointment was Norma McArthur, was that correct?

They were almost simultaneous.

          Norma was a geneticist?

Norma had taken a degree in mathematics basically at Melbourne and then went to London and worked, yes, in the field of genetics with I think, at one stage, Lance Hogben, if I remember correctly, and she did her work in England and that's where she was when we were starting up the department here. Now, the department was set up really in the minds of Hancock and, say, Frederick Eggleston who was on the Advisory Council and who I think was probably the initiator of this idea of a departmental section of demography or population studies. Their idea was, I think, essentially to concentrate on Australia and the Pacific area. And this of course was the period when the great boom of migration under Calwell's great scheme of one per cent of the population growth per year in migration and one per cent from natural increase was the theme. And we'd just taken this great flood of about 180,000 refugees, the biggest refugee movement into Australia that had ever occurred, and migrants were pouring into the country and it was clear that migration was going to be a really major issue in the development of Australia for a long time ahead.

So that's what led us into the field of migration. Now that didn't create a problem. There were lots of good younger scholars working in this field and we had quite a lot of applications when we advertised these positions and we chose Charles Price who's given such long and distinguished service ever since and is now internationally very well known.

We did have great problems then of finding qualified people in the field of formal demography, statistical demography, and we thought we'd never find anybody that would have a good combination of that formal mathematical training and also an interest in the Pacific and we were extremely gratified and extremely lucky when Norma McArthur applied and she came primarily to fill that gap in the formal statistical work and also to take over the development of the Pacific part of our studies, which of course she did with great distinction and her name is now irreparably associated with the organisation, the direction, and the analysis of the first really thorough census that was taken in Fiji and Samoa. And Kathleen Jupp, who was here as a research assistant and who was in fact our first graduate with a masters degree, with a thesis on Australian demography, also worked on the Pacific with Norma McArthur. And Kath Jupp was primarily responsible for the first census in Samoa.

          I was just thinking that it was, given your particular academic background and Charles Price, okay, similar, it was a big jump to appoint someone with a very, very different background. As you said, it was was a recognition of a need in the department.

Well, I think I was influenced at that stage by what was happening in the development of demography, particularly in the United States; but I'd also been lucky enough to have a lot of discussions with David Glass, who then held a chair of sociology at London but was Britain's best known demographer for years after that. I quickly realised that these people were developing new methodologies and so on that were dependent very largely upon new statistical techniques and that we just wouldn't be in the race until we filled that gap in our own make-up, because while I can handle most formal demographic analysis I was not really equipped to teach advanced work in demographic statistics, and Charles Price had essentially historical interests. So we just had to fill that gap and they were very rare at that stage for the reasons we were mentioning earlier that very few people had been trained in this and we were just very lucky that we found Norma McArthur at that moment.

That gave the whole department a good deal better balance than we had before. And then of course George Zubrzycki came in with interests primarily in the more contemporary sociological work. He came to us in fact from a post in the British Foreign Office which he had got after the war where he'd been in the war as part of the Polish army. Then we wanted to get another appointment which could give us an association with economic studies.

In a sense we were being interdisciplinary, going back to what you were saying earlier, that we were trying to get people to work in population that brought various backgrounds to their studies through statistics, economics, history, sociology; and we found Reg Appleyard who had been working for his doctoral degree at Duke University and he came to us with good basic training in economics and joined the studies in the migration field but essentially with an economic base. A study of the British migrants in Australia, I think, was one of the first studies of its kind in Australia which was based on that sort of background of economic motivation and the economic factors in the migration movement. He was very much what you might say was the Australian counterpart to Brinley Thomas of Cardiff in England.

          This is a rather unique development, it seems to me, in terms of universities. Demography in most universities grew out of sociology, economics, or something else. Here it seems that demography was the central focus and sociology grew out of it.

Yes, it's true, that's what did happen in a sense here. We were trying to get this, you might almost say the humane interests in demography here rather than make it purely statistical study. That was always my ambition, was to keep that association with historial and economic and sociological study. Now, true, it did happen that the question then came up of developing sociology, which was completely lacking in the school's structure, and also lacking in undergraduate teaching in Australia. Some of us felt that this was an area that should be pushed along. And I think we did something to give it a push with the development of this Sociological Association of Australia and New Zealand, which I happened to become the first president of it.

But to cut a long story short we got a chair in the school here which was filled by a scholar of the department of demography who had come to us through anthropology from Sydney, and that was Frank Jones, F.L.˙Jones. And then another of our people became the foundation professor of the new department of sociology in the School of General Studies - now the Faculties - and that of course was George Zubrzycki. In fact we serviced the teaching program in the School for some time before an appointment was made. So you're quite right, we fathered sociology whereas you might say in America in particular a lot of demography was, as it were, fathered by sociology. In Princeton the fathering was done through economics. The head of population research in Princeton, which was for many years my model of what we were trying to do here, was held by a full professor but he always was a professor in the faculty of economics - Notestein - and then after him Ansley Coale.

But I was very much influenced by the Princeton model and had the opportunity of spending a year there in 1959/60 as a visiting scholar. That was a tremendous help to me in thinking out the way we should develop and what we should be trying to do here.

          I suppose the first professor of sociology, so-called, in Australia was Morven Brown, wasn't he - New South Wales.

Yes, in many ways I think you might be right. I hadn't thought of Morven for the moment, but he had a great influence. He came through education, didn't he? But he did sociology in London, did he not?

          Yes, I think he was in the Education Department. Well, I taught with him at Sydney Teachers' College, but then he went into social work of course - social work training.

That's right, yes. Yes, I knew him in Sydney. I associated with him.

          And he went to New South Wales. Well, his academic course was very much through psychology, education and social work.

That's right. Well, that's what a lot of great people in Australian universities thought was sociology, they equated it with social work. And Sydney, of course, has even now set its face against sociology as such.

          There's no chair of sociology?

No, there's no chair in sociology, as I know of, but they're quite prepared to accept social anthropology and chairs in the field of social administration - social studies - but they shy short of, for some reason, a full department of sociology.

          Is it still thought of by some people as being peculiarly American? You know, it's not proper for us Britishers.

I don't know. There might be something in that. Shall I say, I think there's been a good deal of prejudice over the years against sociology in a fairly strongly organised group that guard their own disciplines rather jealously. I think that's been involved there. But if I say too much about that I might be subject to libel [laughs].

          I don't think you'll find it in headlines. Well, look Mick, I know you're very busy and I'm at the stage now where I'm getting a few of these things together and what I'd like to do would be to come back to you later next year. Unless there are things we'd like to put on the record now, as far as I'm concerned, I'm happy with what we've got.

Well, I appreciate it very much. I have often thought actually of getting down to writing the history of the department. I haven't done it. I seem to have been busy with other things. But I appreciate having a chance to put this on tape because it might record some of the early developments which can be used by posterity or some scholar when he does get down to the nitty-gritty of writing a history of the department.

          Yeah, well, I see one of the possible functions is indeed to stimulate people to write their history of the department of school or their memoirs in some way. This is a short way of getting some of this on the record.

I always felt very guilty whenever I used to meet Manning Clark. He would say to me, 'That's very important work you're doing there'. And what he was referring to of course was the writing of the demographic history of Australia. And I feel this has been my great failure because I've never done it. I've got all these filing cabinets around here half full of records, documents, census material, statistical theories, which I've never succeeded in pulling all the stuff together and writing that big demographic history. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. I have to be sure that it's put in the hands of probably the Department of Demography, which some day a scholar might find these bits and pieces of use. But the real problem was I made this decision very early. I got two early chapters written up on this ....

          When you came here this was sort of long term ...?

Right. This was the long term project, that my own research would be basically on this but I knew that if I did that I would not develop a new department of demography in the way we've talked about it. It began to take hold of me and I'm glad I did it that way. I think that we did get demography started as a discipline in the school and I think we've had an impact on other universities, too. I would have remained essentially a social historian, I suppose. So I have to confess that that's my great failure and my old friend, John La Nauze, used to be terribly upset about this and think that it was a demographic history that mattered. I'd like to have done it. It was a thing that had a very great attraction for me but all these other things intervened and one had to go on building something new and the traditional thing ....

END OF INTERVIEW