I read my first Geoffrey Blainey book as a 16 year old. It was The Tyranny of Distance, and I was captivated. Here was an historian who could really tell economic history like a story, and make me aware of all kinds of fascinating things that impacted on the development of Australia. I’ve read many of his books since, and whether he’s writing about the history of mining, of aboriginal Australians, or social history I’ve loved his books.
His new book is an autobiography that takes us through his childhood in the 1930s, in rural Victoria, to the mid 1960s when The Tyranny of Distance was published. His life story is, as you’d expect, just as interesting as his histories. It’s a unique picture of the mid-twentieth century in Australia, from someone who travelled and researched right across the country and into the outback, but also inhabited the ivory towers of academia at the University of Melbourne.
So you get wonderful pen portraits of characters ranging from Essington Lewis, the head of BHP (he wrote a biography, The Steel Master), of other historians (he was a great friend of Manning Clark), and of lesser known writers who recorded fascinating stories (H.M. Barker, a camel driver who wrote Camels and the Outback). But it’s Blainey himself who is at centre stage in this book, and he comes across as curious (as you’d expect), warm, a doer, with an impish sense of fun, and stoic. To me, a quintessentially 20th Century Australian male role model.
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