Albert Gordon Austin

 August 20 marked the twentieth anniversary of the death of Albert Gordon Austin, sometime Professor of Education at the University of Melbourne. Austin was an inspiring teacher, the author of a number of pioneering books on education in colonial Australia, and the man who was most responsible for his Faculty’s reputation, in the 1960s and 1970s, for being at the forefront of scholarship in the field of educational history.

Much might be made, by a social historian, of the ways by which a talented young man of humble birth (Austin’s father was a potter in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick) was enabled, in maturity, to climb to the top of the tree in academe—a state school education, a studentship at Melbourne’s teacher training college, military service in the Second World War (Austin enlisted as a private, rose to the rank of captain and was awarded the Military Cross), and the federal government’s scheme of postwar reconstruction (which, among other good works, gave ex-servicemen the opportunity to undertake university courses). But the purpose of this brief appreciation of A.G. Austin is, rather, to comment on his role in making the history of education a respectable academic study, and to offer an assessment of Austin’s own historical perspective.

Austin’s training in R.M. Crawford’s School of History after the war provided him with the technical equipment that he put to splendid use a decade later. George William Rusden, published by Melbourne University Press in 1958, is the study of “a minor educational hero” who, as an agent of the National Schools Board, in the late 1840s and early 1850s travelled on horseback through southern Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, on a mission to take the light of learning to numerous scattered communities on the far-flung rural frontier of colonial Australia. Later, as an officer of the government and as a pamphleteer, Rusden became an indefatigable champion—in the face of considerable opposition from the mainline Christian churches—of a system of state-financed non-denominational schools. Austin’s Australia-wide analysis of the evolution of the public (government) school in the context of the church–state issue appeared three years later: Australian Education 1788–1900: Church, State and Public Education in Colonial Australia was published by Pitman in 1961 (a revised edition followed in 1965).

These books were—in the words of one who was in turn his student, colleague and collaborator, R.J.W. Selleck—“meticulously researched, carefully organised, rigorous and satisfying examples of the historian’s craft”. Undoubtedly, these qualities help explain how Austin, at the end of the 1950s and at the beginning of the 1960s, played a major part in making the study of educational history respectable in Melbourne. As the late Barbara Falk pointed out, “education had been laughed out of court” when, during the term of office of one of Austin’s predecessors as Faculty head, academic pedagogy “failed to convince Melbourne academics of the scholarly depth of the study of education”.

As a writer Austin accomplished far more than simply achieving an improved academic profile for his discipline. As his readers would quickly have discovered, he was acutely aware of the complexities of his subject’s political, economic and cultural context, which enabled him to make his studies of colonial education a valuable contribution to the broader field of the social, intellectual and religious history of Australia up to the time of Federation. Simultaneously, he succeeded in bringing to the attention of other historians a somewhat neglected topic—the evolution of the constitutional foundations of the government school systems in colonial Australia.

A.G. Austin was firmly in the tradition of historians who aspire to do more than contribute to the scholarship of their chosen field: they wish to make their work accessible to a wider readership than academe—in other words, to the general public. Any idea that consumers of the various contributions to this or that controversial topic should be confined to a handful of academic experts appears to have been quite foreign to him. His style was precise and detached (to quote Selleck once more); his prose, elegant and utterly unpretentious, was invariably clear and forthright. Perhaps most of all, it was his sense of irony—in a way reminiscent of the English constitutional historian J.R. Tanner—that made irrelevant, to Austin’s readers at any rate, Dr Johnson’s contemptuous assessment of education’s “fatal dullness”. It was more than a writer’s being witty for its own sake. Austin’s understated irony had the effect of sharpening his reader’s perception of character and situation:

Francis Russell Nixon, first Anglican bishop of Tasmania … sympathized with his clergy for the years during which they had laboured without “effectual resident Episcopal supervision”, but these tribulations, he assured them, were over—“your spiritual father is amongst you; your counsellor is at hand”. That there might be no doubt of the benefits to be derived from episcopal supervision the bishop went on to inform them that he had suspended two of their number, had taken steps to set up a Consistorial Court to ensure the maintenance of sound discipline, had quarrelled with the Secretary of State and the Archbishop of York over the appointment of Convict Chaplains, and was about to return to England to settle affairs with these two dignitaries …

He [George Higinbotham] pointed out that whatever harsh things he might have to say about denominationalism, he did not intend these remarks to apply “directly or indirectly to the clergymen connected with those denominations”. The full weight of his attack on denominationalism was reserved for something he called “the sects themselves”, but as plain men might conclude that he meant the laity, he went on to assure the House that the impediment to his scheme came “not from the laity, but from the sects as corporate bodies”. One might imagine that once the clergy and the laity were severed from a denomination one would have little to fear from the dismembered thing that remained, but there was still life in these monsters, he declared.

When the first edition of Australian Education was published in 1961, it was envisaged by Austin that, following an offer from his publishers (Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons), the book would be “the first of a number of volumes on the history of Australian education” under his editorship. “Clearly,” wrote Austin in his preface, “we shall need two further studies of education in the nineteenth century (one on the development of private schools and the universities, and another on the development of adult and technical education) and at least three volumes on the educational developments of the twentieth century”. But they never eventuated. In 1963 the series produced a book of documents, edited by Austin, illustrating his arguments in Australian Education. It was given the title Select Documents in Australian Education 1788–1900. In 1964 a third book appeared in the series: a study by Gwyneth M. Dow of George Higinbotham. The next year the series published the Australian diary of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. (Austin was its editor.) Reviewing it, A.M. McBriar—while he was critical of some details of Austin’s interpretation of the diary and the diarists—wrote:

Professor A.G. Austin is to be congratulated on his success in persuading the Passfield Trustees to allow the publication of the Webbs’ diary of their Australian visit in 1898 … [He] has done splendid editorial work, providing useful commentaries and an index, as well as a “biographical directory” which must have involved a considerable amount of research. Pitman’s Melbourne office also deserves praise for a fine piece of printing.

Finally, in 1968, there was a published version of R.J.W. Selleck’s PhD thesis on the new education movement in England (The New Education: The English Background 1870–1914). But for all their intrinsic value, these books can hardly be said to have fulfilled the early promise of the projected series. There was still, in these years, what E.L. French called the “bountiful stream of historical studies” in education, but of necessity it was channelled into the series Melbourne Studies in Education between 1957 and the 1980s, into publications such as Australian Historical Studies and the Journal of Religious History, and into biographies and monographs, mainly—although not entirely—from the Melbourne University Press.

Four years before he retired in 1978, Austin collected and edited, in collaboration with Selleck, another book of primary sources (The Australian Government School 1830–1914: Select Documents with Commentary). Although it, too, was published by Pitman, the original series by that date had evidently become defunct, and Austin’s last book appeared under the imprint Pitman Pacific Books.

Introducing what, therefore, had been planned as a series of historical studies, “Education in Australia”, Austin had written:

Few institutions need the corrective of historical investigation more than the nation’s schools and universities.

They are, by their very nature, potential agencies of conservatism and even of reaction. Their task is essentially a conservative one. It is to preserve, to classify and to transmit the nation’s accumulated wisdom and experience. Unless there be care, this task can be a corrupting and misleading one, for the teacher is constantly in danger of presenting his pupils with a picture of the world made in the image of his generation, not theirs. At times the teacher … sinned viciously by suppressing information, distorting evidence and hampering the processes of inquiry—this in the name of tradition or political stability or national expediency.

This statement of intent is important for two reasons. It provides an insight into Austin’s political and philosophical liberalism. It is also evidence of how drastically, forty years on (to quote the Harrow school song), things have changed. Fairly recently an educationist in New South Wales asserted that the return of the conservative government of John Howard was an indication that schoolteachers had fallen down in their task of persuading the nation’s pupils to direct their sympathies to the left of the political spectrum. Thus far had the nation’s schools and universities travelled from their having been, at least in Austin’s eyes, “agencies of conservatism and even of reaction”. If, in the twenty-first century, a justification is needed to study educational history in this country, it would appear that a rationale different from the one he formulated in the early 1960s will have to be found.

In his generally very favourable review of Australian Education (in Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand, November 1961) Douglas Pike observed that Austin’s “hopeful eyes look always for the dawn: ‘vindication of the belief that every Australian child could be given an effective elementary education no matter how isolated his home or how impoverished his parents’.” Seventeen years later, speaking at the function marking Austin’s retirement, R.J.W. Selleck pointed out that there were “certain beliefs” that “he held with quiet passion”. These were: “a belief in the value of education for its own sake” which “suffuses all his work” and “a conviction that the entry of the state into schooling was a liberalizing process”.

One might add that, despite his fair-mindedness, judicious tone and disinterested weighing of evidence, A.G. Austin frequently betrayed a certain impatience with those men who had lined up against the side of the angels—Archdeacon Thomas Hobbes Scott, for example. Statements such as “Fortunately for the good of Western Australian education, the bishop [Augustus Short] betook himself to Adelaide after this display of opportunism” and “A High Churchman and Tory, Robe quickly demonstrated his obtuseness” are further evidence of the assumptions that underlay Austin’s view of the historical process.

This idea of the inevitability of progress is particularly clear in his explanation of the way in which the Church and Schools Corporation came to grief in the 1820s. It is encapsulated in the observation near the beginning of his account: “Unfortunately for the peace and progress of New South Wales the policy of supporting the Anglican Church in the colonies by means of Clergy Reserves had an unwarranted attraction for Earl Bathurst …” Reviewing George William Rusden, Kathleen Woodroofe wrote of Austin’s “seeking to explain why the National system [sic: did she mean the dual system of national and denominational schools?] was doomed to fail”.

Thus in Austin’s work there is a body of assumptions about progress and reaction, about doom and dawn, and about the liberalising process of the entry of the state in the provision of education. Above all, there is a sense of inevitability attached to the triumph of public (government) schools, to the decline of Protestant and Anglican schools and to the denial of state aid to the one religious body that attempted, with some success, to maintain its system of parochial schooling (the Catholic Church). Bearing all this in mind, one finds it hard to escape the impression that Austin’s writing, for all his fair-mindedness and sensitivity to alternative interpretations, is somewhat tinged with a Whiggish, teleological view of the historical process.

As Felipe Fernandez-Armesto said of the late Sir Geoffrey Elton, “Whiggery is a glutinous doctrine which tends to stick to the fingers of those who dabble in it.” It was perhaps Austin’s liberal-secularist-progressive view of history that may have enticed him into making himself a hostage to fortune. In Australian Education’s penultimate chapter, he explained—“with the same zest, the same dispassionate clarity” that characterise all his writing—the passing of the “free, compulsory and secular” education acts. Then he observed:

Even at this distance it is difficult to add to the judgment made on this issue [state aid to church schools] some years ago by Professor G.V. Portus. The abolition of State aid to Church schools was theoretically indefensible, he declared, but “practically it has come to stay … In my judgment it will take nothing short of a religious revolution to alter the minds of Australians on this question.”

Within two years of Austin’s excursus into prophecy, state aid was reintroduced and by the end of the decade was embraced by both major political parties. In the second edition of Australian Education, that concluding paragraph of chapter 6 was, not surprisingly, entirely rewritten. Unlike the Crimean War (as seen by the authors of 1066 and All That), the complete triumph of the state in the provision of Australian education was not, it seems, as things turned out, quite so “exceptionally inevitable”.

Thus the resumption, after a century, of government aid to denominational schools appears to have resolved the church–state issue along lines rather different from those that Austin seems to have predicted in 1961. But here, there is a rather piquant paradox—or rather, a double paradox. Austin had been in the forefront of historians who analysed the main reason for the decline and fall of state-financed denominational education: the growing secularisation of nineteenth-century society. Yet it was the twentieth-century extension and consolidation of the same secularisation process that had made possible the reinstating of state aid to church schools. It had done this by making irrelevant, first, sectarian bitterness, and second, those theological and doctrinal matters that the Victorians had found so absorbing. The other paradox is more personal. Noting that, shortly after Austin wrote Australian Education, the state aid issue was revived anew, Richard Selleck suggested that Austin’s disinterested scholarship, fair-mindedness and moderation, in his examination of the historical foundations of that question, had helped to civilise the debate. Perhaps, therefore, by his very strengths as an historian, Austin unwittingly contributed to an outcome that he, himself, had failed to foresee.

Austin’s nickname “Bon” was bestowed with good reason. Even after he retired in 1978, his scholarship, his almost legendary ability as a teacher and his personal characteristics of courtesy, tolerance and good humour all continued to make him a byword among his ex-colleagues and his former students, and even within the much larger circle of people who read his books. It is not surprising that a person possessing these qualities was a severe critic of the historical works of one G.W. Rusden, the man who was otherwise Austin’s hero. Towards the end of his life Rusden wrote History of Australia, which Austin described as “tendentious and inaccurate”. In his last two decades Rusden was often (again according to Austin) “obsequious, sycophantic and reactionary”, and his historical works were “so riddled with personal prejudice and bias as to be worthless as histories in any acceptable sense of the word”. Which particular item or items from this catalogue of vices would have disqualified Rusden from being given the posthumous honour of having his bust placed next to that of Manning Clark on a shelf in the departmental library of the History School in which Austin was trained, is a matter that must be left to the reader’s own judgment.

Paul Nicholls is a fellow of the Melbourne University School of Historical Studies and a former student of A.G. Austin.