Interview with Professor Robin Allenby Gollan

From the ANU Oral History Archive
Interviews conducted 18 May and 21 May 1993
Interviewed by Stephen Foster
Edited and transferred to web media by Nik Fominas and Peter Stewart

Biographical introduction: Professor Bob Gollan was born in 1917. He studied at the University of Sydney, completing a B.A. (1st class honours) in 1939 and an M.A. (1st class honours) in 1948. He was awarded University Medals for both degrees.

After war service with the R.A.A.F. he lectured in history at the Sydney Teachers' College. Apart from a period spent at the London School of Economics on an ANU scholarship, he remained with the College until 1952.

In London he was supervised by Professor Laski for his PhD and the degree was awarded in 1951.

In 1953 he began a long and distinguished career in the Department of History in the Research School of Social Sciences. In 1957 he was promoted to Fellow, in 1960 to Senior Fellow and in 1970 to Professorial Fellow.

He left the department at the end of 1975 to take up a Chair in the History Department of the School of General Studies. This chair was subsequently called the Manning Clark Professor of Australian History.

Professor Gollan retired from the university in December 1981 and was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor.

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Transctript: Recording duration: 2" hours (3 tapes) Transcriber: Diana Nelson

TAPE 1, SIDE A

          Identification: This is an interview for the ANU Oral History Project with Emeritus Professor Bob Gollan, taking place on 18 May 1993 at his home in Scullin, and I'm Stephen Foster.

          Bob, can we start in 1948 when you became one of the first ANU Scholars. Can you tell us first how you learnt about the ANU Scholarship scheme and what attracted you to the position?

At the time I was teaching at Sydney Teachers' College to which I'd been appointed immediately after the war, after I'd been discharged from the air force. While there I wrote an M.A. thesis which got me a first class honours and a medal, so I was available for appointment.

How I heard about the ANU, I'm not quite sure. I think I must have been told about it by Gordon Greenwood, who was then Acting Head of the History Department at Sydney and who was a friend of mine. So I applied and was offered the scholarship to go either to work with Brogan at Cambridge, Cole at Oxford or Laski in London. I chose London and Laski mainly because I preferred to live in London rather than in Oxford or Cambridge.

Of course, these scholarships were something new in the Australian scene because until then post-graduate scholarships were very, very rare indeed. The only one available at Sydney in the '30s when I graduated - I graduated in '39 - was the Frazer Scholarship which was normally taken out as a research scholarship in Australia. So these new ANU scholarships were something quite new and unique.

I suppose I must have got the scholarship on the grounds of my academic record which was, I got a medal in my Bachelor's degree and a medal for my Master's. I know there were some other fairly stiff competitors but I was appointed. The other one, in the field of history, of course, was Max Hartwell. And then there was a lawyer and I've forgotten who the others were.

          Frank Crowley, too.

Frank, yes, that's right, so he was.

          And another chap called Haddon somebody? [C.P. Haddon-Cave]

I don't know. The lawyer was named Morison, who later became Professor of Law at Sydney.

          You found yourself in London. Did you see yourself as an ANU scholar?

I saw myself as a free person in London doing research and doing all sorts of other things that I wanted to do, including getting involved in left-wing politics in London. Indeed, my involvement in left-wing politics in London made me an object of the hostility of John Thomas Lang who attacked me, this student at the ANU - and, of course, he was opposed to the ANU anyway - who was politicking in London.

This arose out of an incident actually outside Australia House when a group of Australian 'lefties' were demonstrating against the government in the government's action in the 1949 coal strike. I wasn't actually there but I'd been foolish enough to authorise the leaflet that called the demonstration; in fact I was in Sweden at the time.

          Where did Lang raise this?

In the federal parliament. I've never looked it up actually but it's there in Hansard and it could be dated by the fact that it occurred during the miners' strike which is easily datable; it was one of the great industrial calamities of the post-war years, of course.

          In London were you part of an Australian group - were there any other ANU scholars that you had anything to do with overseas?

I didn't have anything to do with other ANU scholars. The only ANU contact I suppose I had in London was when I first went there I went to see Hancock and told him what I was going to do. At the end of the period, of course, he was one of my examiners for my PhD. This may be worth recording, I'm sorry I don't have the - I'm a very bad keeper of records - I really would like this exchange of letters to still exist but it doesn't as far as I know.

At the time of my viva I got a letter from Hancock about a week before saying, 'We're having a meeting next Wednesday, I'd like to see you afterwards'. So I decided that if he was going to fail me it was unlikely that he'd want to see me so that gave me some confidence. He took me off to lunch after the viva - one of those dreadful lunches at the Senate House in London University - and then we went back to his office.

He said that he'd had an offer to have his book, Australia, brought up to date. What he was doing was offering me co-authorship. What would be in it for me, I can remember him saying, was five hundred pounds and the distinction of being associated with him. These were very appealing things, of course, to someone who'd just got a PhD.

          It would be a lot of money, too, of course.

It was quite a lot of money, too. However, he went on to say, 'I know you're a left-wing socialist from your thesis but if you are a Communist I can't collaborate with you'. I said, 'Well, that finishes the matter. I'm a member of the Communist Party.' About a week later I got a letter from him saying, 'I'd like to talk to you again'. This time we talked a great deal about politics and he said, 'Well, I'm still considering the matter'. I went home and I wrote him a six or eight page letter - quite a long letter - stating my political views as it were.

Next move was he said, 'Well, I said I couldn't collaborate with a Communist but I could collaborate with you'. So it was a few days later that I had to reply saying, 'I'm sorry, I couldn't collaborate with you because your position is so different from mine that it would be quite impossible however attractive your offer is'.

          Hancock appeared to be quite confused on the whole question.

Hancock was basically a small 'l' liberal and a liberal imperialist, of course, as his books about the Empire and Commonwealth make perfectly clear. He was also a fervent patriot and to some extent he shared the attitudes of that generation who were 'big boys' during the first world war and didn't get to it. He felt that he'd somehow missed out by not being involved in the war. His brother was and he was old enough before the war was over to have gone, of course - he was born in 1898 - but the family pressure prevented him enlisting and he felt guilty about this all his life.

So he's a liberal imperialist and also an intense patriot and to a certain extent has great admiration for martial values. The crucial thing that happened to him in 1939 in determining his attitude to communists in general: Birmingham where he was there were quite a lot of communists on the staff - Christopher Hill who was a prot‚g‚ of Hancock's actually; the Professor of Ancient History whose name I've forgotten but a very eminent one was also a communist.

There was a whole group of communists in Birmingham and Hancock had seen eye to eye with them in the period before the war when the policy was collective security against Hitler but, as you probably know, on the outbreak of war on the instigation of the Soviet Union the Communist Party policy was to declare the war an imperialist war and call for peace which was a complete 180o turn around. Hancock saw this as a traitorous act that had been committed by people that he was closely associated with and friendly with. This certainly left a scar on his mind from there on; he just didn't trust communists.

He was also the sort of person, as his wife said to me once, that if he decides you are okay you can commit double murder and rape and he'll still stick with you. I think I was in the position where he decided I was an honest man however misguided my ideas were. Most of my association, of course, with him occurred about the time that I left the Communist Party, as did most intellectuals in 1956-57.

          He does, as it happens, refer in a reference he wrote for you which must have been, I guess, a reference for your appointment as research fellow - your original appointment.

Probably.

          Although I could be wrong there. He refers to the fact that he had asked you to collaborate with him and said there could be no higher testimony from his point of view.

          Still in London, Hancock, I think, gave you the options, didn't he, of going to Laski or the two other people.

Yes, I think it was Hancock's recommendation. He was in Australia, that's right, for the 1948 meeting of the Academic Advisory Board and he was informed of the applications. I guess I was appointed on his recommendation, actually, although I didn't know at the time. I think you are right, I did get the word from somewhere that it would be better for me to go to Cambridge under the guidance of Brogan who - Hancock presumably - had been told about my political leanings. He thought it would be better for me to go to Brogan rather than to two left-wing historian/political scientists. However, I didn't agree with that.

          I'm just trying to get some sort of feeling for what it meant to be an ANU scholar. The impression I gain not just from you but from other people, what they've written and so on, Henry Harris for example, it didn't really mean much at all. It was basically Australian money which had allowed you to do those things and it didn't impose on you a responsibility to come back to ANU specifically. Indeed, you were bonded to the New South Wales Department of Education.

That's right. No, there was no claim on us at all. During my two and a half years in London - about two years and four months - the only contact I had with the university was the money they paid into my bank account. The only ANU person I met during that time, if I remember rightly, was Mick Borrie. I took Mick to my favourite pub; he wasn't very much of a pub man, I was. Of course, I went back to Australia and taught at Sydney Teachers' College for two years before I was appointed research fellow.

          Have you ever reflected on the overall benefits of that scholarship scheme?

Yes, I have. That, of course, was the beginning of what became a very much bigger scheme as the university developed, as you know. I think, quite apart from what was achieved in the university itself, namely an enormous increase in the amount of research done by post-graduate students, it did have a carry-on effect to all of the other Australian universities. Until the ANU was initiated post-graduate work scarcely existed in my field at any rate. The only post-graduate degree at Sydney was an M.A. An M.A. simply consisted of you going away and writing a thesis, handing it in and that was it.

It was a bit different in Melbourne. Max Crawford had developed a post-graduate school there. They had seminars and there was a community of post-graduate students in a way that certainly there wasn't in Sydney. Indeed, just after the war when I decided to do the M.A. I wrote to Max and asked him could I do it with him because I'd known him. He'd lectured to me in my first year at Sydney on the seventeenth century. That was his last year at Sydney before he went to the Chair at Melbourne. He said, yes, he'd be happy to have me but I'd have to come down two or three times a year for seminars. I just couldn't do that so I did the usual thing in Sydney.

So my answer is yes, not only did the post-graduate scholarship scheme result in an enormous increase in the quantity and quality of work by young scholars but it also had an effect right throughout the university system in Australia.

          Let's move forwards to your actually coming as a member of staff. How did that come about? You say you spent two years back at the Teachers' College.

Yes. My first contact with the ANU when I came back to Australia was at an ANZAAS conference in Brisbane, in '51 I think it was, and I met Laurie Fitzhardinge. You know about his appointment. He talked to me and wondered whether I'd be interested in coming as a research fellow. Of course I was even though it meant considerable loss in pay to come to a research fellowship because I was fairly senior in the New South Wales Education Department by this time. However, I didn't have any doubts about that, so I applied for a research fellowship as soon as it became available, if I remember rightly, and was appointed as from the beginning of 1953.

          There was some delay, I think. You had to serve some more time, did you? - under the bonding arrangements.

That may have been the case. I don't really remember, Stephen.

          It doesn't matter particularly.

I do know that my appointment did get to Cabinet. You know about this, do you?

          No.

I only know of it because Les Louis had been going through Cabinet minutes and he sent me a note about a year ago saying do you know that your appointment was considered by Cabinet. According to the minute the Director-General of ASIO, Colonel Spry, reported to Cabinet on the appointment of Lord Lindsay of Birker and Dr Gollan. There's a lot more to that story and I don't know whether anyone will ever find out the details. I gather from, I think it must be from Greg Pemberton, that Menzies didn't accede to the request by Spry to have a veto on appointments to the ANU and indeed, in my view, depended on compliant academics to carry out the job rather than directly veto it from government, as they did in the case of the University of New South Wales; that was the notable case.

          I've come across a letter from Casey, I can't recall who it is to, but it's just faintly ambiguous. It might have been to Copland. It can be read as Casey suggesting that we'll have to look at everybody now.

Can you date that?

          Not from the top of my head, no.

Hancock told me - he met Casey the day he arrived in Melbourne on his way to taking up the chair in 1957. Casey said to him, 'I'm glad you're here, the place is full of communists'. Hancock allegedly replied, 'Not enough'.

          He writes about this in Professing History.

Does he? I'd forgotten that.

          One wonders, too, if that isn't Hancock putting the bright side of the story.

He told me that almost immediately after he arrived in Canberra. I think he was really asking me how many communists are there here but I didn't respond to that. As far as I know the only two who were members of the Party at that time, and I had just left it, were myself and Eric Fry. This talk of a 'nest of communists' was absolute nonsense.

          While we are still on the communism thing, there were questions about - this is a little bit later˙- Gluckman. Do you remember that?

Yes, I was on Council. That was refusal of an entry permit to New Guinea. That must have been 1960, I think.

          '60, that much later, was it?

Yes, because I remember I was on Council and I moved a pretty savage motion of criticism of the government for this refusal which caused great consternation on Council. Sir Kenneth Bailey was a member of Council and I remember Bailey saying, 'I couldn't vote for a motion like that, I'm a public servant'. Mark Oliphant waving his fist at him and saying, 'Here you're a member of the university, you're not a public servant'. I didn't expect to get the motion through. I intentionally made it much more stronger than I expected to get through and it was modified in various ways and passed. It was a very minor criticism of the government.

Gluckman - he was a very eminent anthropologist, of course, he was Head of the Department in Manchester. I went to see him. He said, 'Thank God I've got one friend in the place'. What was held against him is hard to know. He certainly wasn't a member of the Communist Party.

          His wife had been though.

She'd at least been a member of the Friends of the Soviet Union or something like that.

          I think they'd separated anyhow which made it ...

There were all sorts of rumours around because whoever spoke on behalf of the government said he wasn't being excluded for political reasons. There was some - as usually happens in these cases then but, of course, not so much now - was that he was a homosexual and the thought of him invading New Guinea and knocking off however many male homosexuals there were in New Guinea I don't know, was absolutely ludicrous, of course.

          Although that hadn't been deemed to be a problem in relation to other homosexuals on campus.

No, that's true.

          We were talking earlier about ASIO surveillance and so on. How were you aware of that?

I can tell you one example. At the time of the Petrov Commission - this is rather ironical - we happened to be having a party and at that time in Canberra parties were pretty open affairs and anybody who heard about it who had any sort of connection with you turned up, usually with a few bottles of beer under their arm, of course. This was a big, open party and there must have been forty or fifty people there. One of the people who turned up was Fergan O'Sullivan who was Evatt's press secretary and was one of the people under the most suspicion in the Petrov Commission. I'd never met him before but he'd heard there was a party on at the Gollan's so he'd turned up. He was a bit of a centre of attention, naturally. During the evening somebody said, 'Oh look, there's a bloke out there taking down all the car numbers'. We said, 'Ha, ha, ASIO, let him get on with it'.

However, the following morning in Sir Kenneth Bailey's office there was absolute consternation because someone from ASIO - whether it was Spry or not, I don't know - turned up and told Sir Kenneth that he'd been at a party the night before where Fergan O'Sullivan was present. Kenneth Bailey, of course, was the Solicitor-General and head of ASIO in that sense. Of course, the story was that John Bailey, Kenneth Bailey's son, had borrowed his father's car and had come to the party.

          Who was John Bailey besides Bailey's son?

He was a scholar at ANU. He was a student of Noel Butlin's. I think he did his PhD and then he went off to England where he worked for a merchant banker. I met him in London, actually, years later and he said that morning he'd dealt with ten million pounds or something like that. There were two sons. There was John who became a financial wizard and Peter, of course, he's a lecturer in law or reader or something now.

          You joked before you heard about the car numbers - but it was genuinely an ASIO activity - was there a feeling at the time that you were under surveillance all the time?

Yes.

          But it didn't impose a great constraint on what you were doing?

In the pub one afternoon I was introduced to three people that I'd never met before by someone and we were there for some time and one or other of them would go off for a leak or to get a beer and in that group I was told by each of the three of them that one of the others was an ASIO informant. By that time I just didn't give a damn. I knew I wasn't doing anything illegal or unpatriotic. I had views that were not popular but I simply said, yes, they're keeping an eye on me, well, let them. It's a waste of money.

          It didn't have any direct effect on the work that you were doing? You were doing work in what might be regarded as a provocative area. You were saying provocative things about labor history.

No, I don't think so at all.

          So it was just an irrelevant perversion as it were.

During the Vietnam war, of course, I knew I was under close surveillance. This was long after I'd left the Communist Party, of course. I know that my phone was tapped. I learnt that later in fact from somebody who worked for a minister in the Whitlam government. He'd seen the record of˙.... At demonstrations they must have taken hundreds of photographs of me.

END TAPE 1, SIDE A

 

BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE B

          Identification: tape 1, side B of the interview with Bob Gollan on 18 May 1993.

          Can we go back to when you first arrived at the university, Bob, early in 1953? What did you find?

One was struck initially by how small the group was. We were then, of course, housed in the old hospital. We were very much a group without any significant disciplinary barriers. Geoffrey Sawer was over there and so far as there was a history department it consisted of Laurie Fitzhardinge and a secretary, Joan Lynravn, and a research assistant and two scholars, Eric Fry and Allan Martin, who were joined by Russel Ward, who arrived at the same time as I did. He was a scholar, I was a research fellow. It was a small, extremely friendly group.

There wasn't a great deal of formal association between the disciplines even though that was part of the original concept as developed by Hancock and others, particularly of Hancock. Not a great deal of formal association but a great deal of informal association in the tea room and so on. A few of the people carried on an intellectual discourse. For example, the Acton poets were quite a significant cultural group in the town. It was a small community but everybody knew everybody else. We socialised together.

As Bob Brissenden has it, I think, properly in his 'Canberra Blues': 'You meet the same damned people you met the night before'. And what's the other line? - 'If you want to get any lovin', it's with somebody else's wife'. A small tight community with, of course, its frictions within it. I found it a very satisfactory life. I came from the bush as a kid and coming to Canberra meant to a certain extent going back to a life that was a bit less urbanised than the one I'd become used to in Sydney and London. I found it very pleasant. It was also very good for the kids. I had a son and a daughter and Canberra was a healthy and open sort of place.

          You were given a house fairly early on, weren't you?

Yes, we were given a house immediately - one of the prefabs at O'Connor which I guess still belong to the university, Banksia Street, O'Connor - and then later moved to a brick house when I became a permanent fellow which happened in 1957 or '58 - '58, I think, not long after Hancock arrived as Director.

          In the old hospital building at the time you arrived, the physicists had moved out and similarly the John Curtin people had their own temporary laboratories, I think - such of them as were here. So you had direct associations only with the Pacific Studies people.

Pacific Studies and Social Science.

          Was there a feeling then of the separateness of the two schools?

I certainly don't think there was any antagonism on our part towards the science schools. I knew socially quite a few of the physicists. No, I think we all had great expectations that the science schools would make important contributions. We did see them as separate. We didn't associate with the scientists very much but that was from past experience the normal state of affairs in a university. There was nothing unique about it in the ANU. I don't think you find very much across the barriers between the humanities and science in any university.

          You recall in Professing History Hancock spends two or three paragraphs saying that the two cultures doesn't exist or denying the two cultures at any rate, and yet what you get from reading the correspondence of Ennor, for example, is a distinct feeling against the social scientists, particularly when they got up to mischief. So that when Jim Davidson performed at Gungahlin or presumably Bob Hawke cavorted at University House, a feeling is directed against the schools on the hill; Titterton, too, fairly bitter complaints about the social scientists. Was there discussion at the time of the two cultures? Was it something that you were conscious of?

I suppose we'd all read Snow and knew of the concept. In practice we didn't mix much with the scientists but we did mix with them and there was no great hostility. But you've cited two people, whatever field they were in they'd be against someone, wouldn't they? Titterton, of course, was the end and Ennor was very close to it. If you'd turn it off I can tell you a story about Ennor.

          Can't we leave it on?

All right, it involves some bad language.

          I'll watch the machine for each word.

It was in the process that resulted in Jack Crawford being appointed Vice-Chancellor. That was mid-'60s, wasn't it? I've forgotten exactly when.

          Yes.

We heard that the front runner was Ennor. I think it was Noel Butlin who did most of the organising. He organised a petition to get Nugget Coombs to offer himself as Vice-Chancellor. Noel asked me to go over to the medical school and talk to some of them over there and see if we could get some support from the medical school for Coombs. Obviously it was also directed against the appointment of Ennor.

Florey was there overseeing things at that time; he was actually in the building. It was arranged for me to go over and meet Bede Morris, who as you know was the Professor of - he was a vet and he was involved in immunology, Professor of Immunology, later killed, of course, in France; Alan Sargeson whom I knew quite well because I played cricket with him; three or four others - Rosenberg, I think, was another one.

          Hugh McKenzie?

I can't remember all of them. They are the ones I remember. They were having lunch, eating sandwiches in Bede Morris' room, there were about half a dozen of us there altogether. I said, 'Well, what I'm asking for is support to see if we can enlist Coombs as Vice-Chancellor, and as you will understand, of course, this is also directed against the possibility of Ennor becoming Vice-Chancellor. You know him better than I do but we're interested in what your attitudes would be.' There was a long silence and Bede Morris said, 'He's a dead fuckin' cunt.' I said, 'Have you told Florey that?'. He said, 'Yes'. I said, 'In those words'. 'Yes.'

So we circulated the petition and there were twenty-six permanent members of staff in the John Curtin School, twenty-five of them signed it in support of Coombs and against Ennor. One who didn't sign it had only been there a few months and said he didn't really know enough about it to become involved. Ennor is not characteristic of the views, in my opinion, of scientists at that time towards the other disciplines.

          I'm not sure of that. The story you've told in fact gives meaning to something else which is irrelevant for the moment but I'll talk about it after we get to the end of this tape. Ennor was certainly fiercely opposed within JCSMR, going back some period, and Florey's view of him was jaundiced by that unhappy altercation that took place in Oxford - if altercation is the word. Nevertheless I think that Ennor's attitudes in so far as the social scientists were concerned was perhaps reflected - not in somebody like Frank Fenner but certainly I think Eccles would have subscribed to them, for example.

Yes, he probably would have.

          Quite a few of the others and Oliphant, too, so that it is not just Titterton. Okay, Titterton is an extreme but Oliphant can be quite strong about mischievous social scientists. Let's move back, though, to the early '50s again. You found yourself fairly soon involved in university politics at the highest level, by which I mean Council.

I was elected to Council in 1960.

          1960?

Staff representative.

          Let's hold off a bit because I've brought you into it a bit more quickly than I'd intended. During the '50s did you have any interest in the broader running of the university?

I did.

          Particularly, of course, in relation to amalgamation.

I was always a member of the Staff Association and I held various offices in it - I've forgotten now. Within the School there was a faculty and a faculty board. Research fellows - this is how I got first involved, I suppose - were very much secondary characters, very inferior characters in the academic hierarchy. We were members of faculty but not of the faculty board and the faculty had in itself no power. We could decide anything and the faculty board could reverse it completely if they so chose.

There was quite a campaign to have research fellows accepted as full members of the faculty because previously we hadn't been. This came to a head - I don't know that it came to a head - it resulted in some action shortly after Hancock arrived. There were two aspects to this: one was that there was a combined faculty of the Research School of Social Sciences and Pacific Studies and somehow or other fairly early in the piece I became chairman of the combined faculties so I was pretty much involved in a lot that was going on.

I'm not sure whether this happened before or after the abolition of the combined faculties, Hancock set up a number of committees to look into the government of the School and I was chairman of one of these committees. In fact I was coordinator of the committees. They looked at the nature of the government of the School and brought down reports on it. Bob Parker played an important part in this. In effect he proposed that the faculty structure should reflect the values of the Westminster system and that meant, of course, that the full faculty made decisions and they then advised the board. Advice in this sense having the same weight as the advice of ministers to the Crown. It did result in a much more democratic structure for the School and I played a leading part in that, I suppose. I suppose I became known as somebody concerned with the way the university was run.

When I stood for the Council in 1960 I'd become known in that context, I suppose. I stood as a staff representative on Council and one of my opponents in fact was Ennor. I remember at my first Council meeting Eccles saying - I've forgotten the exact words but it meant - this is a pretty bad state of affairs when a man like Ennor gets beaten by a research fellow, a fellow from the other school. Actually I was elected at least in part by medicos who were voting against Ennor.

          The Staff Association, were you in on its foundations or was it up and going when you arrived in '53?

I don't remember, Stephen. I was involved in it from the time I arrived but I suspect we established it after my arrival.

          We haven't looked at all at the Staff Association records yet but we come across it from time to time - papers that were sent to Council or wherever. Who were the leading lights?

It's very hard to get the chronology of these things in my mind. The people I remember who were very active in it were - Cec Gibb was quite important in the early stages. After he arrived Sol Encel was a very active member. I was. I was secretary, chairman, various positions on it. I don't think I remained active on it much after 1960 because, as I remember it, I decided I had better things to do than trying to get more money for professors. I always felt that we needed a Staff Association but I didn't put much effort into it after the first few years. Whether I was involved in the establishment of it or not I don't know.

          Your point about getting more money for professors, the way the system worked, if I understand it correctly, is that everyone was tied to the professorial salary. You basically had to get more money for professors to ensure that everyone else did well, as well.

Of course there were certain embarrassments about it, too. The 'super-profs' at the ANU were on a substantially higher salary than the eminent professors in the School, the College and later the School of General Studies. Of course they overcame that by very quietly - it was given very little publicity - giving outstanding people like Manning [Clark] and Fin Crisp a loading which brought them up to the level of the Institute professors. You would probably have found information about this. I'm not sure when that happened.

          While we are talking about faculty and faculty board. You remember the visitor Carr-Saunders, Alexander Carr-Saunders.

Hancock invited him out shortly after he arrived; it must have been '58 or '9.

          What was the reason for that? Why did Hancock invite Carr-Saunders?

I'm quite sure he wanted someone to say that this was a going institution of high quality. Carr-Saunders had been Director of LSE hadn't he? - and he'd just retired and he was a mate of Hancock's. In other words Hancock wanted an independent opinion of how the School was working. There was a great deal of talk around Australian universities, and no doubt reaching English universities, that the ANU was a flop.

When Hancock arrived he certainly had been told by many people that the thing was a failure and he wanted to make up his own mind. He did make up his own mind and thought it wasn't a failure although there were a lot of things wrong with it. Carr-Saunders I think he saw as someone to either confirm or qualify his view of the way things were going.

          Carr-Saunders didn't do that, did he?

I don't know what he did. I don't think I ever saw the report.

          It suggested in effect that it was inappropriate to have purely research schools in the social sciences and Pacific studies; that while the natural scientists were going to do very well, he didn't hold out much hope, I think.

He spoke very highly of the College, didn't he?

          That I can't recall.

I believe. I seem to remember hearing that he said it was as good as any institution of that size he'd ever seen. Well, of course, it was. There were so many really outstanding people on the staff. In other words his report was part of the ammunition for amalgamation. I don't know whether it got to me because I took a very firm stand on amalgamation in the faculties. When amalgamation first got before the faculty, in our faculty there were three people who voted in favour of amalgamation. They were Trevor Swan, myself and somebody else. I've forgotten who the other one was.

After the shotgun marriage we must have met as a combined faculty and Derek Freeman made an impassioned defence of retaining the Institute as separate. That was a major factor in the final vote which was almost unanimously in favour of amalgamation. I always reckoned if Freeman was against you it was at least ten votes for you.

          This is comparable with Titterton's opposition to earth sciences where I gather the Council came around almost entirely in response to his objections to it.

Freeman and Titterton both had a great capacity for building opposition to themselves. I can tell you a story about that that might be relevant, too. Hancock was quite big on close association with the College before we even amalgamated but it continued afterwards. We had a consortium in the department with representatives from our department and the College school and it discussed and allocated things like scholarships, for example; that was a good working relationship.

I went on to a committee somewhere around the early '60s to consider closer association of post-graduate student supervision and so on between the School and the Institute. I was on it, Titterton was on it, I can't remember who the others were. What I do remember is Titterton's remark, he said, 'In our place there is no problem at all. We get a student, if they are any good we let them go on to a PhD, if they are no good we send them down to the School to do an MSc.' That was his attitude.

          That must have been about mid-'60s, presumably.

It must have been around about there, yes.

          There's a nice line, I think it's of Jaeger, 'the difference between the School and the Institute is the policy of excellence in the latter', which sums it up. Leading up to amalgamation, there's various debates that took place. What was your motivation? Was it the quality of the people in the School or was it more a theoretical notion that association with a teaching institute would be good for what became the Institute?

Yes, it was certainly that. I felt that the isolation of the social sciences at any rate from the teaching function would mean that people would dry up. They wouldn't be getting the stimulus that teaching does give. I not only thought that but I did quite a lot of teaching when I was - teaching at the undergraduate school - when I was in the Institute.

I did various stretches of teaching. I did a term in Melbourne. Later, of course I did a semester in New Guinea. This is because I wanted to do it. I personally felt that I would dry up if I didn't have that sort of contact and I think it has happened to a very large number of the people in the Institute.

          When did you first have that view?

I had it from the beginning.

          From the very outset?

Yes.

          How did you see the teaching experiences that you had in Melbourne and - New Guinea is rather later - having an impact on your work?

I suppose the impact was that I got a closer knowledge of what appeared to be relevant to undergraduate students. Since I was supposed to be doing research and writing books that were for the academic community it seemed to me to be important to have some contact with the market, as it were. It was also a relief from .... Being a research worker, as you probably know, in the social sciences is a very lonely occupation. You're talking to yourself all the time, aren't you? I personally need to talk to other people.

          Are you saying then that really the whole notion of ANU was misguided from the outset? - insofar as the social science schools were concerned.

I think it was to a degree misguided, to the extent of thinking of it simply as a research institute. It varied as between areas of specialisation, I'd say. I think the great achiever in the Institute was Noel Butlin. Butlin in effect ran a research institute within an institute and to the extent that there were people like him doing projects of the kind that he did then the Institute lent itself to that.

Most of us weren't doing that sort of major project using lots of research assistants and so on, accumulating figures. Most of us were sitting on our backsides trying to think great thoughts. We were the ones who I think needed that association. As it worked out I think the concept of the ANU, particularly when it did become associated with an undergraduate part of a university, turned out to be okay. In a sense that association has saved those schools. If it had been left separate I think it would have dried up and would have become a failure.

END TAPE 1, SIDE B

 

BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A

          Identification: this is tape 2, side A of the interview with Bob Gollan, taking place on 21 May 1993.

          Bob, you had a couple of points that you want to elaborate on.

The two points that I've been thinking over since our last interview I thought I might add something to, one was your question to me following my expression of views about the way in which our School operated. Your question to me was along the lines: you don't really think that the original concept of the university was a sustainable one, or something along those lines.

The things I'd like to add are this, that I think that the original concept of the School as expounded particularly by Hancock was a viable one. It was based on the notion of a very small number of permanent staff and a moveable feast of people who had work that they wanted to do who'd come for a year or two to do it. The other thing that he had in mind was certainly members of the permanent staff going to other universities to teach for periods. That scheme simply didn't work with some minor exceptions. What happened in fact was that the permanent members of staff tended to build their little empires and that meant much more appointment of permanent staff than was contained in the original concept. It was they who, over a period, in my view were threatened by or in fact became stale and confined too much to the affairs, the politics and so on, of the institution. That's the addition I wanted to make to what I'd said earlier.

          The argument was, of course, that you just couldn't get good people unless you offered them permanency.

Yes, that may have been a factor, too. Maybe that was something that wasn't sufficiently considered. That did involve, of course, if it was going to be successful, the active cooperation of other universities giving people leave and so on. I don't think that was forthcoming in most cases. The attitude of other universities, with notable exceptions of individuals and perhaps institutions, was one of, I suppose, envy mainly of the marvellous conditions that the ANU offered and I think there was a lack of cooperation in this respect.

There was jealousy of the ANU, a jealous attitude very widely held in the other universities, for good reasons - the sort of conditions that we had, there was no comparison in other universities.

          Copland made a very determined effort to win over the other universities. Can you recall if that had any impact? Was there perhaps a decline in relations with other universities under Melville and his successors?

I really couldn't comment on that, Stephen, I don't know. Copland had gone before I came to the university. Melville was a very narrow-minded administrator, I think. Hancock called him the 'head clerk' but, of course, they were in conflict over a whole range of things, including me. I don't know. I really don't have an opinion on any change there.

I think the big change that came in the outlook of senior administration came with the appointment of Jack Crawford who was the most creative vice-chancellor, I think, that the university had.

          Let's move on to him in a little while because that's leaping ahead a bit. Can you talk a little bit about Melville and Hancock because Melville was the one who eventually got Hancock here? He made a very determined effort to win Hancock over and, of course, he knew Hancock from decades before but there was something of a falling out, at least on Hancock's side and you mentioned that you were involved in it. Can you elaborate on that?

Yes. I didn't know that I was involved. I knew that shortly after Hancock arrived there was a ding dong battle going on between them. Hancock told me years later - but this may not have been the only thing - indeed, he told me every time I saw him in the year or so before he died, that the first thing that Melville said to him - have I told you this before?

          You have but not on tape.

The first thing that Melville said to him, in spite of the fact that they had been colleagues together in Adelaide, was 'I'm glad you're here, you can get rid of Gollan'. Hancock's response to that, of course, was to set in process my appointment to a permanent position as permanent fellow. That was only thing that I know about but I'm sure there were other issues because Hancock frequently would refer to Melville as the head clerk which I presume meant that he felt that Melville didn't have any really broad view of the university but saw his job as purely an administrative one.

The only time that I had any close dealings with Melville was over the Michael Lindsay, Lord Lindsay's manuscript that he sent to the university when I was on Council in 1960, I guess it was.

          Perhaps you can tell us that whole story. Can we move on to that now then because I wanted to ask you to take us through that.

This must have been 1960 but you can check that. Lindsay had been appointed very early in the piece as a reader ...

          Can I interrupt and just ask you if you know why, how he came to be appointed?

I've no idea how he came to be appointed, no. I know that when he was appointed there was a report on his appointment by ASIO to the Federal Cabinet. He and I were reported at the same time. I don't know. You do, do you?

          If I remember correctly what Walter Crocker told me, Lindsay, who of course was the son of the Master of Balliol and couldn't get a job in Britain, and the master who was Lord Lindsay then I guess asked Crocker if he could find a job for him at ANU. But I'd have to check that against records.

That sounds likely. The original Lord Lindsay was a very eminent figure in British academe and if he requested something it's likely that he'd get it. When Crocker resigned - he went as High Commissioner to India, I think that was the job immediately - the chair was vacant. When Hancock arrived in '57 Lindsay began putting pressure on Hancock to see that Lindsay was appointed to the chair. I wasn't privy to all of these discussions initially but many times I saw Lindsay going into Hancock's study and staying there for a long time.

In summary, Lindsay argued that Crocker had promised him that if he, Crocker, left then the chair would go to Lindsay. Hancock tried diplomacy with him but at the same time Hancock was negotiating with other people to get them to agree to be put forward for the chair. One of them was Martin Wight, I'm not sure that there were others. In the end Lindsay decided that Hancock had played the dirty on him and he left the university and got a job at the Methodist university in Washington.

He left in great anger and everything seemed to go wrong, including the fact that he was walking across the campus just before he left and fell in a hole and either broke his leg or sprained his ankle or something. All of which he attributed to the conspiracy in the university against him. All of this was set out in a 300-page manuscript which arrived some time in 1960 with accompanying threat: answer this or I publish. What it contained was essentially the argument that he'd been duped and the main offender in this was the one he called 'the fox', namely Hancock.

          Was he the only one to call Hancock 'the fox', do you know?

The only one that I know.

          I'm just thinking of the reference in Professing History.

Oh, I see. Hancock was interested in the notion of fox because Smuts had been called the fox. I've forgotten what his reference in Professing History is.

          I think it is just to the effect that 'some people call me the fox'.

I don't know of anyone else but certainly Lindsay did. What the university did, I think it was a work of subrogation really; they should have said publish if you like. What they were concerned about was, amongst others, the Orr case had been on - I've forgotten exactly when but it was not long before this - and so it was decided that we really must examine this in detail. They appointed a committee with Nugget Coombs as chairman, Trevor Swan was on it, Hohnen was on it and I must have been secretary; at any rate I did the work.

The problem that we were given was to find if there was any evidence in the university records that would support the proposition that Lindsay had been promised the chair. It was a fairly limited term of reference but that was it. We went through everything that was available including all of Hancock's correspondence which presumably still exists somewhere; I don't know whether you've got it.

We went through all of that and I wrote a draft report which Trevor Swan and I then worked on which was presented to Council. Each copy of it was numbered. It was printed by the Commonwealth Printer if I remember rightly because it was thought that was a bit safer than having it done within the university. I think before it was presented to Council Hohnen, Melville and I went to Melbourne. First of all to see the university lawyer whose name I've forgotten but he was a really Dickensian little character: chubby faced and cheerful lawyer. I've forgotten exactly why we went to see him.

The other one we went to see was Pansy Wright and we'd sent a copy of the thing to Pansy before that. We arrived and Pansy said, 'I suppose what the reason for visiting me is if I say it's okay then there's unlikely to be any trouble about it'. This is a bit ironical in view of the recent, I suppose they're revelations, on Pansy's role in the Orr case although I'm not entirely convinced by what I've read about the argument in that. Pansy said he thought it was okay.

It was presented to Council and they approved of it. The finding, of course, was that there was no evidence whatsoever of any promise to Lindsay that he would get the chair. I think we added there was no way in which such a promise could have been made since appointments are made by committees and so on.

There was one other step that I forgot to mention. Because of the Orr case and the general atmosphere of the time it was decided that we should have an independent 'auditor' was the term used. The independent auditor, everybody scratched their head and said who is likely to be the most critical - of course, John Anderson. Since John had just retired it seemed quite appropriate to ask him and indeed he thought it was a great idea.

He came to Canberra and we gave him all the material that we'd looked at and set him up in University House where he stayed for a month and went through this stuff. Then he said he'd made up his mind about it - have I told you this bit of story? He said he'd made up his mind - I think it was probably Swan's idea - Coombs, Trevor Swan and I had dinner with him in the Scarth Room at University House, a very intimate affair.

The three of us were sitting there and John came in and .... Do you remember John? He was a tall, looming figure with hunched shoulders and a pipe. He came in and he loomed around the room for a while and finally, I suppose it was Nugget said to him - this is before we started dinner, I think we were probably having a drink - 'Professor Anderson have you come to any conclusions?'. Anderson said, 'The university has made a terrible mistake. It should never have given the man an M.A.' which wasn't the question at issue at all. We then understood that he was going to approve of our report.

          The Lindsay affair is very interesting in the context of Orr and the whole question of academic freedom at that time and I think this is where Cassandra Pybus doesn't show a sufficient understanding of just how large such questions were at that time. You can, if not forgive Pansy, at least understand better his role in the Orr case and various other activities if you appreciate that.

Yes, the total situation was very different from what it is now. As you say quite rightly, that's got to be taken into account, I think.

          Concerns about sexual harassment have displaced academic freedom as the issue of the times within universities.

The other thing that I'd like to put a footnote on is what I said about La Nauze and this, I think, goes to the importance one attaches to his opinions about the university. He, of course, was one of the first senior research fellows appointed. He and Borrie, I think, I can't remember whether there were any others who had a year on the payroll of the ANU and whose ideas, I think, were considered, certainly by Hancock and others.

From then on it seemed to me at any rate that La Nauze was far from being a friend of the ANU and he, for example - I think it's true - that he quite positively discouraged good students from Melbourne applying for scholarships at ANU. I wouldn't speculate on the reasons for this but it was rather ironical that when he did accept the chair he was always complaining that good students from Melbourne weren't applying to ANU. We all thought that this was in fact a case of the biter bit.

I should add to that that La Nauze, I think, was a disastrous appointment to ANU. He was very unhelpful to students, always carpingly critical. Other members of staff literally had to fight to get students appointed because he didn't want many students around; he wanted a quiet life.

I have always thought that the strength of the Institute, the parts of it that I know about, has always been a healthy group of post-graduate students. Under his reign - I haven't looked at the figures - my feeling, at any rate, is that the number of students certainly went down and students weren't encouraged to anything like the extent that they had been before. Personally I found myself giving less and less of my time to students because I found the atmosphere so oppressive.

I may be prejudiced here because I began to feel, not long after his appointment, that it was a disaster and his cynical and unsupportive attitude was permeating the whole department. You'd get a different impression from Barry Smith, for example.

          Yes. Can I just clarify my own understanding of where La Nauze was? He was Professor of Economic History at Melbourne immediately before he came here, was he not?

No, he'd gone over to Ernest Scott Professor, I think. He had been Professor of Economic History. When Crawford retired he became the Ernest Scott which was the senior professor of history at Melbourne.

          Yes. Obviously I can check the timing very easily, but Crawford must have retired around about 1960, I suppose.

La Nauze came to ANU in '66.

          So he was there as Head of the Department of History in Melbourne for quite some time.

          Do you know any other cases where there was that antipathy to ANU, led to outright discouragement? If I can give you a prompt, I think, for example, that Fred Alexander had misgivings about the place. Do you know if there were indications that people weren't coming from Western Australia? Brian de Garis came, of course.

We weren't getting many students from there. I didn't know that Fred had that attitude. Frank Crowley was always very critical of ANU, of course, and he was Fred's offsider until I don't know when.

          '65.

Yes, something like that. I think any anti-ANU attitudes from Western Australia would be more likely to have come from Crowley than Fred Alexander who was an old mate of Hancock's, of course.

          My only evidence is that Alexander wrote to Hancock in 1949 after the breach saying you had a lucky escape. But who knows what his views were after that.

The only contact I ever had with him was we co-examined a thesis once but this was after he retired and he was a very incompetent examiner I found.

          As for Crowley, he of course was an ANU scholar. Whence did his antipathy originate? I remember him referring to the place, of course, as the Institute of Advanced Salaries, although I think Paddy McGuinness was probably the first person to express that view.

I think Frank wanted the job that Laurie Fitzhardinge had and wasn't doing, namely, Laurie was appointed as Reader in the Sources of Australian History and he didn't do much about the sources. He was a marvellous character to have around, of course, and did produce one very important book in the end. Frank wanted that job. I don't know whether he ever applied for it but certainly he was scathing about what was not being done and the sort of job that he'd do. He would have done a very good job, too, a sort of librarian cum historian job which Laurie wasn't fitted to do at all. Laurie was a gentleman scholar. So that was one thing.

Crowley was always a bitter sort of person, found it difficult to see any good in anyone other than himself as far as I can see. He was the sort of person, he went to Western Australia, the only job in history worth doing was the history of Western Australia because that's what he was doing. That's not unique in academia. A lot of people think that what they are doing is the only thing worth doing and say so. Frank said so more frankly than anybody else, I think. Most of us didn't take him very seriously, of course.

          I think he later applied for a job, didn't he, that he missed out on.

I think he might have.

          I think it might have been the A.D.B. - something to do with the A.D.B., maybe not at the time of the original appointment of Douglas Pike but later in the piece, but I'm not at all sure but anyhow Frank is by the way.

          Just a few of the other people in that early period. We were talking the other day about Trevor Swan and you had some very interesting comments about him after we finished the interview.

I think that Trevor Swan was one of the great tragedies of the ANU. He was obviously a brilliant economist and at the age of twenty-two/twenty-three he was a senior member of Post-War Reconstruction under Nugget Coombs and earned himself a reputation as an outstanding solver of economic problems. When he went to ANU I think what happened was that he didn't have problems being thrown at him and for whatever reason he didn't seem to be able to pursue, at least to the point of publication, problems and ideas.

He worked but nothing ever seemed to get onto paper and I don't really know the answer to that. There was an extraordinarily capable mind working. I think in a conversation earlier I mentioned a seminar - I think it was a combined schools seminar with the Pacific Studies - on a book by Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth, and a number of us did papers for it on the angle of the law, history, economics and so on. I remember I did a paper for it.

Trevor did one and I couldn't follow the argument after the first five or ten minutes. It was chaired by Geoff Sawer and at the end of Trevor's exposition Sawer said, 'Yes, that was very good, Trevor, but a couple of points I didn't understand'. At which point a visiting Oxford professor, very distinguished but I can't remember his name at the moment, said, 'Well, Professor Sawer you've got an advantage on me, I lost him after ten minutes'.

He then proceeded to put questions to Trevor about it which showed that in fact he'd exaggerated his own incapacity to follow it and Trevor in simpler language brought out what he was saying, even to the point that I could understand what he was talking about. At the end of which Trevor sat down and said, 'It's all there in the book, it's all there in the argument. There's nothing new about what I've said.' To which the visiting professor said, 'Yes, in the same way that all of Marshall's [Plan] in Ricardo' which is an extraordinary ....

END TAPE 2, SIDE A

 

BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE B

          Identification: tape 2, side B

I think the point is that Trevor was the sort of person who needed to have problems put to him for solution and that wasn't the situation he found himself in at the university. He was not good in the sense of attracting students. He had very, very few students in the whole of his thirty-five or forty years or whatever it was in the chair. They were never good enough.

There were only one or two students that I remember him ever saying were good enough to be worthwhile working with; one of whom was Ron Hieser who is a notorious character in the history of the university but was a very able economist until the grog got the better of him.

          Some of the other people who were around at the time - did you have a lot to do with Geoff Sawer, Oskar Spate, Jim Davidson?

More with Jim Davidson probably than anyone but that was only on a social basis, of course. Sawer, yes, in the school particularly while he was dean, we saw a lot of him. He was dean until Hancock arrived as director. Mick Borrie, yes. We were a pretty small group, you know, and I suppose the morning and afternoon tea table was where we talked to each other most.

          Was there much conversation about inter-disciplinary matters? Inter-disciplinary wasn't the sort of term that was thrown around the way it was more in the '70s, now we all take it for granted, I suppose. Did you see yourselves as having inter-disciplinary exchanges, the demographer with the historian and so on?

I think we did, yes. There was practical consequences for this. For example, Lloyd Robson, whose work you know on the convicts. He was supervised by Manning Clark and Mick Borrie, well, that's an example of it but I just can't think of other .... There was sometimes co-supervision between economic history and history even though Noel Butlin's type of economics was a long way from the sort of things that most other historians did. Political science, yes, some cooperation between history and political science, and history and law.

Bob Hawke was doing his PhD in law under Sawer's supervision but he did have contact with other departments including ours. There was certainly a recognition of the desirability of it which sometimes had practical consequences.

          We talked a few days ago about the build up to amalgamation and some of the feeling that was around in 1960. Can we just go on a bit through the '60s and talk a little bit about the relationship between what was now the Institute and the School? - certainly in relation to history but more broadly across the university so far as you can remember it.

I think that where you could expect cooperation you'd have to have matching departments. History obviously there was a department in the Institute and a department in the School but there weren't very many matching departments where you could get active cooperation. In the case of history Hancock was very concerned to achieve the maximum cooperation between the two departments. Initially Manning Clark wasn't interested. He tended to snipe at the Institute.

          From when? From the very outset?

I think from the outset and for some time after Hancock arrived because Manning could not abide rivals and Hancock was a very big rival obviously. He was the biggest thing in Australian history when he came, there was no question about that. I'm not sure how long it lasted but they became very close friends within a year or so but there was an initial hostility to be overcome.

In an organisational sense Hancock suggested we set up what he called a consortium - he was given to names of this kind - which meant we had a number of representatives from each department which met irregularly but always when applications for scholarships were being considered. Decisions were made as to where they'd be placed in the School or in the Institute basically on where they could get the best supervision, so that was a good working relationship in those terms.

We were encouraged to do teaching or do short periods of teaching in the School. For example, I taught American History for a term so that Ken Inglis could be released to .... He mentions it in fact in acknowledgments in The Australian Colonists probably, I think it is. I relieved him for a term and did seminars and so on there.

That was the other area in which there was continuing cooperation - in seminars. They went to ours and we went to theirs. What other departments were there, you see? I think the lawyers got on pretty well with each other. There's no demography in the School. There was in the early days no sociology in the School. The philosophers, I think, cooperated fairly amicably but to what practical extent I really don't know.

          Presumably the arrival of La Nauze disrupted the happy relationship between the two history departments.

It did, it certainly did.

          Was that manifest from the outset because of the previous relationship between La Nauze and others in the School?

I can't really remember the sequence of events but those forms of cooperation that I've mentioned fell into disuse fairly soon, not with any great acrimony, they just died because no-one was pressing them. There was really a lack of good will between the two heads of departments, I think - personal associations and, indeed, cooperation between other members of the department continued on a good basis.

          Before we leave Hancock, can we talk just about a few things that were going on at the time in which you were involved? One was the Phyllis Mander-Jones exercise, or what became the Phyllis Mander-Jones exercise, could you describe how that got up and going and your role in it?1

I'd known Phyllis Mander-Jones from the time I was an undergraduate when I worked in the Mitchell Library but the other association was that my first wife, Daphne, worked in the Mitchell Library and she was a close colleague of Phyllis Mander-Jones. Indeed, I think, Phyllis Mander-Jones saw her as possibly her successor and was very keen to develop her. In other words, I had known her for quite a long time.

I think I met her in London when I was there on leave and she was already starting on this project so when I came back I wrote a paper proposing that we involve ourselves in it. Of course, Hancock agreed with this. How much money we put into it I can't remember but we did invite Phyllis Mander-Jones to come and be a visiting fellow at the university for however long it was, for a period, to discuss this and to work out a program of work and so on. Who was the other one involved? - a bloke in Pacific Studies, the expert on the Gilbert Islands - what was his name?

          Harry Maude?

Harry Maude was much involved in it. Neither of us did very much. It was just a matter of getting the university to become part patron of the job, that's really what it was.

          You became involved in the A.D.B., of course, from the outset.

Yes, I was involved in the A.D.B. from the outset. What existed, of course, was Laurie Fitzhardinge had been, with the assistance of various research assistants, Pat Wardle, I suppose, would be one of the main ones, had been getting this card index going as a preliminary to what he saw as a dictionary of Australian biography. It was in a very undeveloped stage when Hancock arrived.

Quite early in the piece Hancock diplomatically - he was very well aware of the problem of being seen as trying to take over history in Australia - got together a conference of Australian historians in 1957. You've probably seen the report of that in historical studies, have you? I wrote the report.

          What I did see many years ago was the actual verbatim transcript of discussions.

Did you? That would be good.

          You don't happen to have a copy of that?

No, I don't.

          I think Bruce Mitchell showed it to me around about 1970-71 but he hasn't got it.

I don't know about that. What happened at that conference you probably know. There were papers given by Manning Clark on the teaching of Australian history; Ken Inglis on religious history; me on labour history; and Noel Butlin on economic history in which he anticipated the general line of the conclusions he would later draw, with massive support of figures, about the nature of Australia's economic development in the second half of the nineteenth century.

One of the invited was Brian Fitzpatrick and one still remembers Brian saying he was in the unenviable position of the man who'd just heard his obituary read. He hadn't, of course, Fitzpatrick's work is still highly relevant in my view.

Another highlight was Tim Suttor who asked Archbishop O'Brien whether he could cite God as a cause in history. La Nauze circulated a piece of paper with a line at the bottom: 1. God.

However, apart from the papers that I've mentioned - there may have been others - there was a long discussion of whether the historical profession in Australia was mature enough to produce a dictionary of Australian biography. There was great enthusiasm for this and so that was a go ahead from, I think - all heads of history departments in Australian universities were there and they all agreed that we ought to do it. So that was the beginning.

Then there was the question of the structure and here again I can't remember in detail what happened. We drew up a constitution for a national committee which had representatives from all Australian universities and various other places and which also provided for the setting up of working parties in all of the states to produce lists of people and perhaps contributors and so on, and also an editorial board. Hancock, of course, was chairman of the original editorial board, Manning was on it, I was on it, Hohnen was on it and I'm pretty sure Cowper, a Sydney lawyer who was a fairly active member of Council, and who access to money, was on it.

The thorn in the flesh was Malcolm Ellis - Sydney journalist, extreme right-winger, but a much published biographer. He was very actively involved in the early stages but then came a great crisis because Ellis was, apart from anything else, not used to working with anyone. He was an individualist of individualists.

But then he discovered that Manning Clark had dedicated his second volume of documents, I think it is, to Noel Ebbels who was one of his Melbourne students and who was a well known communist student leader. This created a crisis. Ellis declared that he was certainly going to resign from the committee and it was quite clear that he was going to do everything in his power to destroy the whole enterprise. This is where I had a great deal to do with trying to keep him on the committee.

I remember many afternoons taking him down to Hancock's house and drinking whisky with him and calming him down. I can't remember how long he stayed with the dictionary but he was finally persuaded not to sabotage it at any rate.

However, I suppose the important thing to remember about those early stages was how all these people from universities where they were 'god professors' and so on were got into an enterprise of this kind which had the potential of being seen as another case of Canberra taking over something from the states which was always there as a danger. It happened very much in the case of the Bicentennial which you were involved with, of course. That was there.

I think the great achievement was that the thing was got going without too much of states'-rightist thinking and acceptance of the Canberra lead. The outcome is, of course, I think one of the great successes of the ANU. It certainly is one of the great successes.

          Hancock really was the driving force in that exercise?

Yes, no question about that. Spent an enormous amount of time on it - conciliating and encouraging and so on.

          He apologises in Professing History for problems relating to Pacific Studies. I'm just going back a little bit and wondering if he's referring to Lindsay there. I'd have to look again at Professing History but there's more than a hint - it's a statement that things could have been handled better. Did he mean the Lindsay affair or was it the relationship between the two schools or his own relationship with Davidson?

I'd think probably the last. I don't remember the sequence of events again but it was Hancock's initiative which - as we know Hancock had originally thought of himself as director of both schools, hadn't he?

          He would argue with that - as a temporary measure and so on with all sorts of riders.

It was Hancock's initiative that caused us to abolish the Combined Schools Committee. Was it called the Combined Schools Committee? - whatever it was called, I've forgotten exactly.

          Joint Schools ...

Joint Schools Committee. The only major conflict that I recall between him and Davidson although I think it was always potential was over the decision on the building for the joint schools. Do you know about this? You must do.

          I've heard bits and pieces but I'd like your account of it.

It was one of those limited competitions. There were three companies, I suppose, it was who were invited to put in proposals for the building which later became the H.C.˙Coombs Building. One was from the Melbourne architect, Roy Grounds, I've forgotten who the other two were. Roy Grounds was a friend of Jim Davidson, in fact he'd designed Jim's house.

Jim being an advanced thinker in matters artistic and sexual and so on had a high admiration for Grounds. Grounds produced a proposal which became known ironically as the 'tea house at the something moon' - it was a sort of Chinese job; a whole series of buildings with courts and palms and things like that. Jim was sold on that.

          With an emphasis on the Pacific.

I suppose so, yes. Hancock was against it. I'm not quite sure on all of the grounds. One of the grounds was that it would occupy the total area that had been set aside for the two schools and there would no possibility of expansion. Secondly, it was more expensive than what became the H.C.˙Coombs Building. I don't know what the other grounds for disagreement were.

Any rate, there was a complete disagreement on it and when it first came before Council Jim and Hancock appeared before Council, neither of them were on it, to argue the relative merits of the Grounds' proposal and one of the others, namely what became the Coombs Building. On the first occasion apparently Jim's argument was much more persuasive than Hancock's and Hancock who wasn't given to being beaten was very bitter indeed about the fact that he'd been done over before the Council. However, the matter was deferred to a further meeting and Hancock had prepared himself very carefully for this one.

He spoke first and did the oldest trick in the book, namely, he stated Jim's case and then proceeded to demolish it. When it came to Jim's time to have his say he had nothing to say, which is a very old meeting tactic. Really bad feeling was generated over that but that's the only event that I can think of that he might have been referring to other than the fact that he was responsible for eliminating the only existing institution of cooperation between the two schools, namely, the joint faculties.

END TAPE 2, SIDE B

 

BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE A

          Identification: tape 3, side A of the interview with Bob Gollan, still taking place on 21st May 1993.

          Can we leap forward to Crawford's time? You mentioned Crawford briefly earlier and I cut you off. Crawford made a determined effort, I think, to bring about a closer relationship between the two sides of the university. What was your perception of his role as Vice-Chancellor specifically in that regard?

I've forgotten the details now but I saw him certainly as the first vice-chancellor who'd seriously attempted to try to make a single institution out of the university and certainly that was something that I agreed with. I didn't have a great deal to do with him and in a sense it's retrospective for me that I realise the extent to which he did attempt to do this. That was when I went through Council minutes some years ago and I realised the enormous number of initiatives that he took and which I can't now remember.

It was then I realised that he really was the one who made the most profound changes in the university of any senior administrator. I'm afraid you'd have to go to the documents for the confirmation of this.

          One of the initiatives was the Humanities Research Centre. Was that regarded by people in RSSS as something of 'a slap in the face' perhaps isn't the term but a recognition that there were certain areas that weren't being adequately treated or that there was a need to build bridges between the two parts of the university?

There was an on-going discussion about, for example, whether there should be a Department of Literature in the Institute. I suppose that really did get broadened out into the notion of a Department of Humanities. I suppose although I personally don't remember any feeling of resentment about it, that it was to a certain extent a slap in the face for the Institute when that was set up.

In other words it did what had been talked about in the Institute for a long time but on which no action had been taken so some people probably did see it as a slap in the face. Personally, I didn't, I thought it was a good idea.

          Just going off on a different tack, did you see yourself as social scientists? Were there questions at various stages about what are we doing here in the Social Science School and so on?

As long as I've lived, of course, there's the argument as to whether social science is a science. I got very tired of the argument very early on and thought that instead of discussing whether there is a science or not a science we ought to get on with it. I've never personally had any problems about it.

I know Hancock talked about Social Studies because he did see it as a science. I certainly have never seen any of history or political science as sciences although there are elements of scientific method in all of them but I've never seen them as sciences in the way that, I'd suppose you'd call them the 'pure' sciences are, like particularly physics.

Many of the areas of science don't conform with the ways in which physicists operate. For example, astronomy is an historical subject as well as being a mathematical one. There was some debate in the early days in the Research School of Social Sciences as whether you could talk about science in connection with the sort of work we do. I think most people got tired of that debate. That was a 1930s' debate rather than a '50s', I think, because the subjects had more or less settled down and you didn't have to argue about what their limits should be; that was my attitude to it anyway.

          You were on Council from around about 1960 to˙...

I think I was on Council from 1960 and '61, I think. I went on leave, I think, in '62; it might have been '63, I'm not sure which.

          Your later links with the university at large, I'm talking about administrative links, were through the Staff Association, presumably, on which you continued to play a significant part.

I've forgotten how long I stayed on the Staff Association.

          And then through the normal mechanisms, faculty and so on. Were you much aware of what was going on elsewhere in the university? - the big issues that came up. For example, the creation of new schools - chemistry and biological sciences and so on.

Not after I was off Council, no, I wasn't.

          In relation to your own work, were there areas where you had anything specifically to do with other areas of the university?

No.

          It's not that your own work is the sort of area where you would be led to the medicos, for example.

No, I suppose the only other section of the university which was in the School that I had much to do with was with Economic History and Political Science, I suppose. I did share supervision of students with Economic History. For example, I shared the supervision of Tom Sheridan. Do you know Tom?

          I know his work, but not him personally.

With Noel Butlin. He sent me a copy of his last book on the study of industrial relations in the Chifley period and he accompanied it with a note saying 'you started me on this'. He was initially very much in Butlin's camp, well, in doing Butlin sort of work and he was not at all happy there. When I became his co-supervisor I think I encouraged him to treat the subject more as a normal historian rather than as a statistical economic historian which was Butlin's emphasis.

This is not meant to in any way denigrate the Butlin work; I think it was, like the dictionary, one of the great achievements of the School. It was in many ways a limited type of economic history which has put its mark on all economic history in Australia for the last thirty years; very different from the economic history in Britain, for example, which merged into social history and has been very productive, too, in an entirely different way from Butlin's.

          You talk about getting started on things. What started you on various things? Is there a continual line in your research or did every so often something come up that led you in a different direction?

All of my work has been about trade unions and radical political movements. I have no doubt that they come out of my early experience of politics as a student and as a child. I was aged twelve in 1930. At the most impressionable age I went through the experience of the Great Depression and I was looking for answers - how could this possibly happen. I suppose by the time I was fifteen I was a convinced socialist because that seemed to be the only theoretical position that could give any sort of rational explanation of the situation we were in and, of course, I became an active radical at university, studied Marx very closely as an undergraduate.

But until after the war I wasn't much interested in Australia. History was European history and that was where it was all happening and that was what I was interested in. Although I must say I thought it rather ironical the other day, I did my honours thesis on pan-Mohammedanism under Stephen Roberts which is a bit more relevant now than it was then. My interests in history came out of my political concerns and a desire to understand how Australia had developed from that point of view.

The first book was Radical and Working Class Politics which was my PhD but which had a lot of other work done on it later. By the time I'd finished that I wanted to do something that was more firmly empirically based. That book has a very wide spread, as you know, even though it is a small book. I was a bit dissatisfied with it when I'd finished it and thought I'll do something now that's more like what most historians do, in other words very deep into fairly limited documents and that's how I happened to write the thing about the miners, but it was still in the same general area.

          You had in mind volume two, as it were, of Radical and Working Class Politics as you finished it.

I did but I never actually wrote it.

          But you went on to revolutionary reforms.

Yes, that was more or less it.

          What about the bank? How did you get into that?

It was a most uncharacteristic thing for me to do. Coombs asked Swan to find someone to write a history of the bank that would include whatever socialist elements were involved in the idea in the setting up of the bank, so Swan asked me to do it. I wish to God I'd never tried it because when I got into it I realised that if I were going to do any sort of a worthwhile job I would have to understand banking and I spent, I suppose, a year studying banking in general before I could even get on with the job.

You could have done that job without really understanding banking but I've always felt that if you're going to interpret and implicitly or explicitly make judgments you really need to understand the whole field. So I spent a year reading Bagehot and the nineteenth century economists which was good for my self education but it meant it took me a hell of a long time to write a little book. That's how I got into it.

I was asked to do it and to discover any socialist elements that there might be and there weren't very many, of course. I had been interested a bit in the populist ideas in the 1890s about which John Docker has written much more extensively since then. He got his original impetus, I think, from reading things I'd written and also Peter Love who has written about Frank Anstey and all that.

          You were teaching PhD students right through this period and then taking the occasional series of lectures in faculties as they became. In 1970, I think, you spent a year - a full year? - in New Guinea.

A semester, half a year.

          How did that come about?

Ken Inglis invited me to come up there and teach a course on Australian history. I think the way it happened actually, I was coming back from England in 1967 and I came via New Guinea and I found it an exciting sort of place. Ken said, 'Why don't you come up for a term?' and that's how it happened. I had the support of the university. Crawford, I think, was in favour of it because he was much involved in New Guinea.

          That was another of Crawford's initiatives, wasn't it? - the New Guinea research unit.

That's right.

          I was just wondering the extent to which your going up there could be seen as part of the university's activities in New Guinea.

I think it probably could, yes. Then, of course, Bill Gammage followed me, didn't he? Hank Nelson had already been there but I think he'd been at the administrative college before he went to the university. He was teaching New Guinea history, anyway.

The big time in the post-graduate work for me was the early '60s when we had six or seven people working on labour history and that was a very exciting time. There were people like Tom Sheridan, John Merritt, Bruce Mitchell, six or seven of them altogether; not all in our department, a couple of them were in Economic History. They constituted an on-going seminar which is, of course, the atmosphere in which you really want to work. That was the atmosphere that I suppose was conceived of as the one that should prevail in the Institute as a whole but it only ever prevailed to my opinion with small groups.

The other group was what we called the Sepoy seminar in the History Department which was presided over by Tony Low when he had four or five post-graduate students, including Ravinder Kumar, a very brilliant historian who .... Do you know of Ravinder?

          I've never met him but he's written a massive history of India.

That's right. He left to go to the University of New South Wales as Professor of Asian History. I remember writing him a reference saying - I'm told it got him the job - 'that he was the only Asian I'd ever known, and I knew him very well, who in fact bestrode both cultures, Asian and European'. He felt the call of patriotism and went back to India.

We called on him, he was at Allahabad, when we were coming back from England in '79. He was a marvellous guy. I shared a house with him for about a year at one stage. He got married and he had a couple of kids. He was on a salary there more or less equivalent to the Australian dole but he'd gone back because he felt it was his duty to India.

Shortly after that he became Head of the Nehru Institute in Delhi. I haven't seen him since then. He described it as a small ANU, it's a research institute - a brilliant scholar. They were a marvellous group, the Sepoy Seminar; there was him, a bloke who became - I think they all became professors in one place or another.

          One of them, it might well have been Kumar, wrote I think to Tony Low for information about the origins of ANU ...

That would be him.

          ... seeking specific inspiration. I'd forgotten that entirely, it's just something I saw ages ago and I must pursue that.

That would be when he was going to the Nehru Institute. He was talking about it when we saw him.

          I've pursued with great frustration ANU's origins or ANU's pro-genesis or whatever the term is; people talk about Princeton and the Johns Hopkin School and so on but I've never really though about what ANU might have inspired in terms of models ...

I think that would be a case, yes - be interesting. I have lost contact with Ravinder, simply that one loses contact if you don't have a regular correspondence.

          That notion, you used the term 'group' fairly casually, because the natural scientists spent a great deal of time - at least some of them did, the biological scientists in particular - talking about groups and departments and various sorts of structures. Now, of course, RSSS has a divisional structure. To what extent do you think the departmental structure militated against the development of these natural groupings?

I think it probably did militate against it to a certain extent but the moving spirits really in the formation of these informal groups were the students themselves. As we all know research is a terribly lonely occupation and if you find other people are interested in the same things as you are, whatever the structures may be, you are going to get together, you're going to discuss your problems. The only level at which there is a formal organisation is the level of departmental seminars; you could go to each others' if you are interested in the subject.

          Let's move on to teaching. You moved across to the chair which was at the time of your moving called the Manning Clark Chair, wasn't it?

Yes, well, it became that after I was appointed. I didn't know it was going to be called that, I might have resisted it otherwise (laughs).

          Really?

I didn't use it.

          There was no money attached to it.

No. I moved there because I felt that I'd had long enough at the Institute and I had about seven or eight years still to go and I thought I could more usefully spend my time teaching rather than doing what I had been doing.

          The structural differences are obvious in the sorts of people that you were coming into contact with would be rather different I guess on a day to day basis. Was there a different ambience?

Yes, there was and particularly by this time. You see I think I've told you that I'd become rather dissatisfied with the Department under La Nauze's leadership.

          And yet La Nauze's departure was imminent.

He had a few more years to go. I was rather glad to get out of the Department and I was very warmly encouraged from the School to be in it. I remember Maloney ringing me up and saying, 'For God's sake, come down here, we have seasons here'; that rather appealed to me. They also had in mind the fact that another potential - certainly someone who'd applied for the job was someone they didn't want or two people they didn't want - and I was the lesser of three evils apparently. So that was encouraging also. No, I was very happy to leave because I'd been there twenty years. I was out of sympathy with the state of the Department.

          You developed courses. You immediately became head of department?

No, I didn't. I was never head of department; I avoided it. John Maloney was Head of Department, I think, for all the time I was there. No, Mick Williams, of course - there were three professors in that Department, you see; there's none now. I managed not to get it. I developed a course in twentieth century Australian history. It hadn't been taught.

The main problem with it was that the literature, as you know, is very thin, so I put a lot of emphasis on essay work, including a 6000 word, I think it was, essay based on primary sources and that meant that you overcame the problem of .... Supposing you are studying the French Revolution, there's 10˙000 sources and you can do it as an intellectual exercise whereas there was very little that was substantial about twentieth century Australian history.

So I felt that my job was to encourage students to understand that history was a process rather than something you learnt. That's how I structured it.

          I'm just looking at my crib to remind myself of when you retired which, I think, was '81.

Yes.

          Which meant that you were associated with the university for thirty-three years?

I was associated with it from '48.

          With a little gap in the early '50s. On reflection and now after twelve years of retirement, how do you regard the institution? A broad open-ended question, I'll go no further.

Simply, I regard it as having been a very important institution in the development of universities in Australia. I think, and I think I said this earlier, it should be assessed not only in terms of its own achievements which had been very considerable but also in the influence that it's had on other universities, particularly in the area of post-graduate work. I positively am not in touch with it at present.

I decided before I retired that I wasn't going to be one of those old men who hang around the university and get in people's hair, so, not in anger, but I felt that part of my life was finished, I have had very little to do with it. I think they have fallen on hard times now, as have all other Australian universities and that's a very unfortunate thing. I'm not sure that the leading figures there today are of the same quality as they were in earlier years but then I really have no justification for saying that because I don't know enough about it at close range.

          Thanks very much, Bob. Is there anything that you think that I should have asked you or that you'd like to add to ...

No.

          ... bearing in mind that you're not contemplating an early departure and I can come back to you.

At the moment I'm not thinking of it, no.

          That being the case, on behalf of the university, thank you very much indeed for all your thoughts.

Good, I hope they are some use.

END TAPE 3, SIDE A

END OF INTERVIEW

1. Manuscripts in the British Isles relating to Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific.