Nicholas Brown

‘A sense of number and reality’: economics and government in Australia, 1920–50

This article integrates three lines of enquiry through a study of Australian economics in the inter-war years. The first relates to the ‘systems of dispersion’ surrounding the formation of economic enquiry in the Australin context of state interventionism and developmentalism. The second explores the forms of professionalism through which that knowledge was brought into practice especially with reference to the education of economists drawn into wartime government in the 1940s. The third strand more tentatively proposes a critical perspective on the emergence of ‘economic rationalsim’ in public policy in the 1980s by historicizing the values seen to be inherent in the culture and practice of welfarist economics, and particularly by assessing aspects of the relation between micro-economic and macro-economic models of state intervention with reference to the impact of Keynesian theory in the late 1930s.

Douglas Copland: Scholar, Economist, Diplomat

good broad Australian accent. And her life started badly. Her parents’ marriage was unloving. She had an appalling convent education. A young brother died. The main influence at university was Ernest Scott, who, amongst other things, it is claimed, taught her how to lecture. He certainly ‘treated’ his best students, male and female. Kleinhenz documents Fitzpatrick’s political radicalisation, but offers no explanation. It seems to have been the influence of her friends. Then began the traumas: her ‘failure’ in Oxford (1926–28), her marriage to Brian Fitzpatrick (1932–35), very sensitively handled, and the rejection of her study of Henry James. It is strange that she remained for the rest of her life Mrs Fitzpatrick. The author is especially good on her relations with Max Crawford, and his exploitation of her. This needed a subtle hand. The definition of Fitzpatrick as his ‘work wife’ is especially felicitous. The reaction when Crawford announced his second marriage (‘But what about Katie?’), which was related to me, reveals all. Crawford does not come out well: an egotist and even a ‘stinker’ (199), surely the reaction of a betrayed woman. This I would number as a fourth trauma. There was finally the ‘Social Studies Affair’ (1961), still incredible to read. Lloyd Churchwood told me that he had never seen anyone of such reputation as Crawford so utterly destroyed overnight. Fitzpatrick’s relationship with Manning Clark involves a jump which is not documented, from her revulsion at his early uncouth behaviour to an intimate correspondence. Did she need, on the other hand, to pick a fight with Martin Boyd, ‘a delightful minor novelist’, which anyone who has read his Langton quartet would find hard to swallow. She was famous, above all, for her lectures. They seem to have been delivered from very carefully crafted and fully written-out scripts. There are many drawbacks to this. The text tends to become set in concrete. It’s hard to read and look at the audience at the same time. And everything goes to pieces if you are distracted— as when Barry Humphries capers around you (192). She published little—but who published much at that time? Teaching loads were crippling then (see my Jessie Webb, 1994, 123). The book is a delight to read, marked by a most felicitous style. Too many people, however, are unidentified, hiding behind initials. ‘Helen and David of Parkville’ (261) are the Ferbers. The only ‘typo’ I detected is piazza dell’Esedra (65). Crawford was professor from 1937, not 1938 (267). There seems to be a mistake in the caption to the illustration of VP day: the woman next to Ian McCartney bears no resemblance to Pat Gray (see the next photo). The bibliography inconveniently divides published memoirs from secondary sources and puts them between archival sources and newspapers. Both she and her sister, it might have been noted, are buried with their parents in Melbourne General Cemetery. A final demur. I do not see much that was ‘brimming’ here. There are many hints at an alternative title: ‘behind the careful mask’ (see 131, 248, 264). I for one find it more revealing.

Albert Hall: The Heart of Canberra, by Lenore Coltheart

Designed in 1926, the Albert Hall was from the start a perfect emblem for the complex project Canberra has always been. It was identified by the then prime minister as integral to making the city ‘...

Book review - The Archetypical Contingent Narrative by Barbara Caine. Biography and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp viii+152

It is a long time since biographers have had to edge their way into the company of historians, suspecting that ‘there’s something second-rate that seems to cling to biography and its practitioners’ (Skildelsky, 1). Even so, there is still a sense that their practice needs a point of consolidation amid advances proceeding on several fronts. If not the ‘service industry’ of old (a ready quarry for facts, leaving the heavy-lifting to others), there perhaps remains unease that biography is captive to a vogue (Monk qtd in Tridgell, 57). The ‘age of biography’ has obvious momentum whether evident on airport bookstands or celebrity-driven television, or in the ‘biographical turn’ of social sciences, embracing new questions of reflexivity and agency. But does it have (or need) coherence? The created life story has clear appeal to the ways in which we experience and understand our times, but is this as symptom or solution? It might reflect adaptive, resilient responses to contemporary contexts of social fragmentation. But might it also, in according priority—in Lauren Berlant’s formulation—‘to interpersonal identification and empathy over the vitality and viability of collective life’, contribute to hollowing out more than enriching the project of inclusiveness which has energised so much historical enquiry (51)? In this astute, succinct and eloquent survey, Barbara Caine engages directly with these questions. Her answer, in general, is unequivocal. Biography, especially in its current forms, is the ‘archetypal “contingent narrative”’. Concentrating on the field from the late seventeenth century forward, Caine charts the ways in which biography has been a creature of its times but, most recently more than ever, has also served to expand historical awareness of basic questions of change and context. Most particularly, biography carries the ‘democratising impulses of the new social history’ from the 1970s into approaches that, increasingly, allow Life Writing, 2014 Vol. 11, No. 3, 369–372, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2014.928661