Labour Australia

Stuart Macintyre, n.d.

Stuart Macintyre. Historian.
Born Melbourne April 21, 1947; died November 22, aged 74.

Stuart Macintyre was the most outstanding Australian historian of his generation. A prolific and powerful writer, he also gave himself unsparingly to the cause of history, to strengthening our civic institutions, and to encouraging students and other historians. His death at the age of 74 deprives the nation of one of its most talented scholars and persuasive voices. As a colleague remarked, if Stuart had been a footballer, his death would have made headlines.

Born in Melbourne and educated at Scotch College, Macintyre arrived at the University of Melbourne to study arts and law in the radical 1960s. He graduated in 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, the Tet Offensive and the May protests in Paris. In his first published essay, he challenged the “bourgeois ideology” of the Melbourne history school, personified by its founders, Ernest Scott and Max Crawford.

The task of the Marxist historian, he declared, was “the analysis of the full complexity of class oppression”. Complexity was the operative word, for even then Macintyre was a subtle as well as passionate historian.

His first book, A Proletarian Science, based on his Cambridge doctoral thesis, was on the history of communism, as was his last, The Party – the second volume of his magnum opus, a history of the Australian Communist Party, completed during his last illness.

While he remained firmly on the left, and was often critical of historical orthodoxy, Macintyre was first and foremost a scholar with a deep devotion to his craft. He read constantly and widely. He resisted dogma, political or intellectual. His friendships transcended political alignments and intellectual fashion. He dressed respectably and spoke courteously, weighing his words carefully. He wrote elegantly and with as much sympathy and insight about Victorian liberals as he did about communist trade unionists. Over 40 years, his interests ranged widely, from industrial arbitration to the universities, and from post-war reconstruction to the ­social sciences.

After appointments in Perth and Canberra, he returned to the University of Melbourne and in 1990 succeeded Geoffrey Blainey as the Ernest Scott professor of history. In his inaugural lecture, he reviewed Scott’s role as a national historian as a prologue to his own.

“Scott stood at the beginning of this order,” he observed. “I witness its decline, possibly even its supersession.” As the discipline fragmented into Aboriginal, feminist, labour and cultural history, Macintyre wondered aloud if a holistic ­account of Australian history was still possible. Had the academics forgotten the need of their fellow Australians for an inspiring narrative of the nation’s past?

He became, pre-eminently, the national historian. His prize-winning 1986 volume of the Oxford History of Australia and his later Concise History of Australia, published in Chinese, Russian, Japanese and Czech as well as English, drew the threads of economic, political and social history into a persuasive synthesis. As chair of the Keating government’s Civics Expert Group, the Howard government’s Inquiry into School History and the National Centre for History Education, he worked tirelessly to strengthen the teaching of history in Australian schools.

Macintyre’s preferred model of scholarly engagement was collaborative. He was unfailingly generous to those with whom he collaborated and in encouraging and mentoring the many who turned to him for guidance. In the mid-’90s, I joined him and our mutual friend John Hirst as an editor of the Oxford Companion to Australian History. Our politics varied but we drew on 20 years of friendship and shared scholarly and public endeavour. Hirst and I were older but we often deferred to Macintyre’s executive powers and seemingly encyclopaedic scholarship. We often asked ourselves: Was there anything he hadn’t read? Was there anyone he didn’t know?

While we met, the culture wars were hotting up. The ideological ­divisions first exposed by the 1985 controversy over Blainey’s views on Asian immigration widened during the Howard years, with conservative critics accusing academics of painting the nation’s history too black. In our meetings around the Hirsts’ dining table, we exchanged news from the battlefield while lamenting the erosion of trust in scholarly expertise the battles too often revealed. Macintyre’s memoir The History Wars (2003) leaves the reader in no doubt of whose side he was on. His severest words, however, were not for his opponents’ politics but their methods: “In submitting history to a ­loyalty test, they debase it.”

As remarkable as Macintyre’s talent was his energy. The grandson of a Congregationalist minister educated at a Presbyterian school, he acquired along with a Protestant conscience a strong dose of its work ethic. Colleagues were in awe of his ability to combine scholarly productivity with personal affability and calm administrative efficiency.

There was no professional position of consequence that he did not fill with distinction. He continued to run marathons, then half marathons, into his 70s. He was still running with years of scholarship to offer when the cancer struck him. The gap he leaves in our lives is ­immense but the legacy is greater.