Samples of the Australian Experience

Australian Dictionary of Biography
1966 to the present, 19 volumes so far

In March 1966 the Australian Dictionary of Biography was born. It was greeted variously as “the birth of a giant” and an invaluable work of reference. The ADB’s first editor, Professor Douglas Pike, modestly hoped that it would “inform and interest the lonely shepherd in his hut as readily as the don in his study”. Not just shepherds and dons, though. “Anyone with an ounce of interest in the myriad origins of his nation is bound to find it fascinating.” In a thoughtful review of the first two volumes, Geoffrey Blainey predicted the ADB would “probably be the most valuable reference work in Australian history; it is already one of the most readable works on Australia history. This twin achievement would have been unattainable without outstanding editors.” Blainey neatly concluded:

The last article in these volumes records briefly the life of Yuranigh, an aboriginal guide and traveller who died west of the Blue Mountains in 1850. The anonymous author quotes a tribute by Sir Thomas Mitchell to this obscure aboriginal: “his intelligence and his judgment rendered him so necessary to me that he was ever at my elbow”. The same will be said of these volumes for years to come.

These volumes—now nineteen in number—have appeared irregularly over the past half-century but the look, the style, the scholarship and the process have been consistently rigorous and exemplary—and so it continues. More than 12,000 lives from Isaac Aaron to Traugott Zwar; from Dirk Hartog, born in 1580, to Azaria Chamberlain, born (and died) in 1980. And among them twenty-two convicts and twenty-one sopranos, twenty-four bushrangers and thirty-one Olympians, 130 governors and 187 premiers, 980 army officers and 623 teachers, 277 novelists and 414 benefactors, six socialites and eighteen eccentrics.

Volume 18 (1980–1990: L–Z), the latest volume to be published, confirms the sterling standard. Of the 669 lives, there are Bing Lee and Ben Lexcen, John Meillon and Hephzibah Menuhin, Patrick White and Cyril Pearl, Douglas Stewart and Kenneth Slessor, Robert Trimbole and Kylie Tennant, Margaret Woodhouse and Olwen Wooster. K.S. Inglis writes of Stephen Murray-Smith, as a commissioning editor, “His imagined typical reader was a matron at a hospital somewhere near Port Hedland.” There is Lloyd Rees’s exhibition after his visit to Chartres Cathedral: “he envisaged Australia through European eyes, and Europe through Australian eyes”. Sir Colin Syme: “one of the leading businessmen of his generation … although living in Toorak, he continued to drive an old Holden car, used a battered plastic briefcase …” And the heart surgeon Harry Windsor: “When he first started cardiac surgery he used to sleep next to the patient’s bed and he did this for years.”

The ADB has generally been blessed with its critics over the decades. George Shaw greeted Volume 11 (1891–1939: Nes to Smi) joyously. He delighted in the Australian tendency towards irreverence in the face of the ponderous and serious. He seized upon the entries of Bridget Partridge (“lapsed nun”), John Pomeroy (“inventor and pieman”), and Joseph Perry (“Salvationist and showman”). He suggests, with what many a contributor might see with a touch of envy, the indulgence of the editor in allowing P.A. Howell to “get away with” the comment on Frederick Poole:

when he found himself growing deaf in Ballarat, he returned to Adelaide to take over a choir school and later in life was chaplain to Adelaide’s hospital, its destitute asylum, its prison and two of its bishops, Harmer and Thomas.

Geoffrey Dutton also wrote of thoroughly enjoying himself in reviewing the same volume for the Sydney Morning Herald. He saw “the brief entries” not as “gravestones but life-windows” and delighted in finding among its subjects Helena Rubinstein (whose autobiography J.R. Poynter described as “a romance undermined by flashes of candour”), and the sheepdog expert John Quinn (1864–1937), “whose kelpie Coll was, said the Bulletin, ‘to the dog world what Victor Trumper was to cricket’”). He also praised the “wonderful women here: the artists Thea Proctor (‘I am not the sort of person who could sit at home and knit socks’), Kate O’Connor, Margaret Preston, Ellis Rowan”.

Inclusiveness is always an issue for dictionary makers, and most critics are unable to resist finding subjects they believe have been overlooked. In 2005, the ADB produced a supplementary, its own “missing persons”, with a further 500 lives. It included 161 women, the greatest number in any volume, and it can be said that the imbalance is undone by a preponderance of community and charity workers who, despite their worthiness, may not have warranted inclusion. As Paul Brunton, in the Australian Book Review, noted of the Supplement volume:

There are, for example, a lot of nurses. If one is ill this may be a good thing, but it may be overkill in a biographical dictionary. While they were all clearly worthy, conscientious, and necessary, perhaps this is not sufficient for inclusion in a national work.

Yet in its inclusiveness, the Supplement has remained true to the representative aim of the ADB, especially when one sees that Aborigines, Pacific islanders, working people, criminals and non-white immigrants have been rescued from oblivion. There are forty-nine entries on indigenous lives; as the preface states, “a far higher proportion than in earlier volumes”. Also embraced are the exceptional who were inexplicably missed, like Granny Smith and Arthur Yates, who do real credit to this exercise.

Volume 14 (1940–1980: Di to Kel) was greeted with an enthusiastic review by Carl Bridge in the Times Literary Supplement, titled “Good Blokes and Others”. An almost exhilarated Bridge saw the volume as constituting “a sort of post-modern journey through Australia’s immediate past, peopled by a diverse cast of worthies, good blokes, crooks, eccentrics, rogues and grotesques”. Yet for all these—the actress Dorothy Dunckley, who would return Christmas cards unopened, endorsing them with “and the same to you”; the skywriter Fred Hoinville, the loop-the-loop motorcyclist Jim Gerald; and the rainmaker Jack Johnson—Volume 14 was not just an amusement park roll-call. Bridge also acknowledged the presence of Cardinal Gilroy, Harold Holt, Howard Florey, H.V. Evatt, the Duke of Gloucester and Peter Finch.

Above all the ADB has changed over time; quite significantly in gender and race, of course, but also occupation, state of origin, and sexuality. A.W. Martin made it clear in 1966 that the bias he saw in the subjects for the first period (up to 1850), was itself a reflection of what he believed to be the characteristic of Australian society:

candidates for such preservation are largely self-selecting: to then become more than a name on a registry file or shipping list one had to be literary enough to leave records, or noticeable enough to be written about contemporaneously by the literate … Inevitably, the “cavalcade” has its invisible men.

By the late twentieth century nearly a quarter of all the subjects in the ADB are either academics (6.7 per cent) or those in art (16.2 per cent). The military has shrunk to less than a tenth (9.9 per cent) and women stand at 14.3 per cent of the total.

Volume 17 retained the pace, the standard and the style of its predecessors, but as it was the first to cover lives lost in the 1980s, it reflects the features and fortunes of that decade. Bobby Goldsmith succumbed, at the age of thirty-eight, to AIDS, that decade’s epidemic, while Dame May Couchman died at the age of 106, the oldest dame in the history of the Commonwealth. Another sign of the times was the simple statement in Christopher Sexton’s entry on Sir Robert Helpmann, “Despite his showmanship, Helpmann was a private man. The great love of his life, with whom he shared a flat in London, was Michael Benthall (d.1974).”

A.W. Martin was typical in his review of Volume 1 of the ADB, noting two facts: “the level of accuracy originally achieved by the editors and their staffs (the errors are, for the most part, trivial), and the continuing care devoted to revision and correction”. Yet he also observed:

Space tyrannises and a regular format cramps the multiple authorship, which sometimes cringes under the editor’s whip. Plain, clear narrative is required, especially in the minor entries, and the pages fold quietly over corpses being decently docketed and laid back to rest.

A dedication to the truth is an abiding principle for the ADB and tends to explain its characteristic tautness and prudence. When interviewed in 1999, John Garraty, the editor of the twenty-four-volume American National Biography (ANB), published by Oxford University Press that year, admitted that the OUP office in Cary, North Carolina, generated “well over a hundred thousand queries”. In its five decades, the ADB will have already exceeded that number. A draft entry on Sir Edgar Tanner, sports administrator and politician (Volume 16), contained the assertion that twelve boys in his primary school class were eventually to be knighted. Some months later, in correspondence with the author, the editor advised that the team had only been able to confirm that seven boys in that class became knights. Ultimately, this morsel went unrecorded. The classic example of the ADB’s respect for truth appears in one of its corrigenda: “For ‘died in infancy’ read ‘lived to a ripe old age in Orange’.” As Peter Ryan observed, “for all that, the Corrigenda show the conscience of the Dictionary at work”. For many years the ADB had a full-time staff member who compiled lists of corrigenda which were consolidated and published with each new volume.

Since the ADB has gone online, protective descendants have plagued ADB staff with corrections. An assertion that one subject had a mistress was met with the (unfruitful) protest, a century on, that the woman was his “friend”.

The ADB has a reputation for “sharpness and focus”—so many entries of necessary worthies are so matter-of-fact, as dry as the Simpson Desert. This is a legacy of its founding editor, Douglas Pike, who had a distaste for adjectives and adverbs, maintaining, half in jest, that as there were no adjectives in the Psalms there would be none in the ADB. But more importantly, in its authoritativeness and its zeal for the truth, the ADB dares to be dull. It is, after all, a dictionary.

Many a contributor has seen favourite anecdotes or observations scrapped. Yet many an anecdote has survived to publication and added immeasurably to an appreciation of the subject and the readability of the text. As A.W. Martin put it, “No half-dozen pages lack an example of life bursting through as author answers to subject … as before, in entries great and small, the swift vignette is a source of life”: John Aitken (Volume 1) carrying his sick lambs ashore one by one to found his flock; the Aborigine, Arabanoo (Volume 1), who “was at first pleased by a handcuff on his wrist, believing it to be an ornament, but became enraged when he discovered its purpose”; and Lachlan Macquarie (Volume 2), the devoted husband and father, agreeing to have the family’s favourite old cow shipped all the way from Sydney to Mull. Surely, this is the stuff of biography.

Queensland silk Sir Arnold Bennett’s (Volume 17) brilliance as an advocate is painted in one episode. Successfully defending, at a retrial, a man charged with poisoning a testatrix, Bennett suggested that the strychnine was self-administered. He stirred forty Alophen pills into a glass of water and sipped it, “demonstrating to the jury that the extreme bitterness of the poison could not have been concealed”, and invited them to try it.

Where the primacy of such a doctrine appears vulnerable for the dictionary is when according traits and values to its subjects. Of Volume 1, Hartley Grattan wondered if “gently moralising evaluations, usually to be found in final paragraphs, are to be too warmly encouraged from writers and, really, are of much use to readers. Maybe it is best to stick to ‘the facts’.” But surely some evaluation, some assessment of character or achievement is essential? Otherwise the result is merely a Who’s Who.

From its early days, the ADB has represented an extremely wide range of lives, so that a number are more typical than necessarily influential. The tyranny of space has meant that entries for some of the more significant lives, while marking all the major points, somehow fail to shine as brightly as their subjects did. Sir Daryl Dawson’s entry on his fellow High Court judge Sir Keith Aickin (Volume 17), generally reputed to be one of the cleverest advocates of his time, is one of these. One feels Sir Daryl is too measured in his praise. But then, judges are not given to superlatives, and nor is the ADB, and perhaps that is one of its strengths: definitive, inclusive, authoritative, absorbing and sober.

While traditionally the ADB has taken the public road where the issue of sexuality is rarely crossed, with some lives it could simply not be avoided. The entry for the Tasmanian-born actor and legendary swordsman Errol Flynn (Volume 8), by William Bryden, is remarkably bland and, at a mere three paragraphs, almost dismissive (his zoologist father, Theodore, with whom he shares the entry, has the lion’s share with four paragraphs). Having listed, with names and dates, but without more, Flynn’s three marriages, it follows, with astonishing understatement, “Apparently a playboy all his life.” (Perhaps the fact-checkers, in the absence of an audit of assignations, would not permit anything firmer?) The fact that two well-publicised trials for statutory rape ended in Flynn’s acquittal may justify their omission but do not his string of liaisons (including the last with a fifteen-year-old) bear upon the man, if not the actor, and deserve to be acknowledged? Strangely, the author then cites, although without giving it credence, the allegation: “according to his most recent biographer, Charles Higham, [Flynn] was a friend to the Nazis during World War II”. Flynn, despite his shortcomings, deserves better.

Bryden’s ADB entry on Flynn misses three available sources. He does cite the North Shore Times but misses the fascinating titbit that the young Errol, while at Shore School in Sydney, had shared the boarding house with John Grey Gorton. Perhaps this coincidence might find its way into Sir John’s entry in a future volume of the ADB? Perhaps not.

And yet for any imperfect entry, there is a flawless gem. In reviewing the ANB for the New York Times Book Review in 2000, Richard Brookhiser pronounced what he saw as the three elements that make a good biography—a clear exposition of the essential facts, vivid detail, and judgment. Mary Eagle’s essay on Sir William Dobell (Volume 14) is the model of what an entry should be and meets all three of Brookhiser’s criteria. The progress of his life is chronological and clear, while vivid descriptions and wonderful anecdotes bring him to life:

[He] saved drastically on clothes. [His friend and fellow lodger, Eric] Wilson described him going out in the evening, “holding a newspaper under his right arm to cover the tear in his overcoat. Whenever his socks have holes … he simply paints his leg to match”.

Eagle also matter-of-factly addresses his sexuality (“From mid-1936 until September 1938 Donald Friend was based in London; he and Dobell were both homosexual and otherwise had similar tastes”). More importantly, she meets Brookhiser’s third criterion in assessing his importance: “Comparisons outside Australia may be made with the British painter Francis Bacon and the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson whose art was to choose ‘the decisive moment’.”

Manning Clark’s entry on Joseph Furphy is another pearl. Clark’s elegance, insight and wit shine from every paragraph:

he established a reputation as a Sterne in moleskins or a Munchhausen among the bullock-drivers. Nature had planted in him a vast fund of cheery optimism. All his life he was a stranger to the pessimism and the melancholy which weighed down Henry Lawson and other bush writers.

And later, “he began to have the ‘vision splendid’. It was to be a more serious-minded, non-Dionysian view of the fate of being a man in Australia.” This splendid essay makes one regret that Clark, although a section editor, has no more than four entries attributed to him.

Today, as lives spent between 1991 and 1995 are written and gathered, and Volumes 1 and 2 are being revised, nineteen handsome, royal-blue-jacketed volumes proudly published by Melbourne University Press sit side-by-side in libraries, offices and studies throughout the country recording in nine-point Juliana on cream laid paper “samples of the Australian experience”. This—the Australian experience—is what makes the ADB distinctive.

The rarest quality of all to which the ADB can lay claim is democratic accessibility. Apart from New Zealand’s, no other dictionary of biography is freely available online to its readers. As the fifth editor, Diane Langmore, put it as the ADB went online, “I always felt it was eight million words of treasure locked up and … the online version will … unlock the treasures.” What Stephen Murray-Smith had lauded in 1988 as “a remarkable gift to the nation” had been given all over again.

Many more people now access the ADB online than buy the book. In fact the ADB site records some 70 million hits a year. And even if they are in a hurry, they could not but be impressed by its scholarship and scope. Douglas Pike’s hope that the ADB would “inform and interest the lonely shepherd in his hut as readily as the don in his study” must now be stretched to the homesick expatriate in his office off-shore and the student on her laptop on campus.