‘Provocative in a good way’: John Hirst was a rigorous historian, independent thinker and passionate believer in Australia
- Written by: Anna Clark, Professor in Public History, University of Technology Sydney
I first read John Hirst (1942-2016) as an undergraduate in the late 1990s as part of a subject on 19th-century Australian history. We discussed convict history and explored contrasting views about its role and function in the early colonies. What was life as a convict like? Was transportation a cruel punishment or a ticket to a better future? Could we compare the convict system to slavery?
Hirst’s Convict Society and Its Enemies was one of our required readings and I studied it with interest.
Review: John Hirst: Selected Writings – edited by Chris Feik (Black Inc.)
I had devoured Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore the previous summer and had been powerfully swayed by his descriptions of visceral cruelty in the penal colony. There were convicts who rubbed lime in their own eyes because blindness was preferable to working in the kilns. Others were whipped until flesh hung in strips from their backs and collapsed on treadmills from exhaustion.
A historian’s conscience
Selected Writings covers several major themes Hirst pursued in his research. We see a persuasive defence of democracy and an ongoing interest in the emergence of Australian democracy, in particular. Hirst’s account of national sentiment as a driver towards federation is compelling, as it understands the important imaginative leap required to hold a nation together beyond the establishment of political institutions. And his belief in republicanism is a thread he returned to across his career.
Another substantial theme is Hirst’s belief in, and support for, the history discipline. At the heart of his approach and practice is a contention that evidence and source criticism fundamentally broaden our knowledge of the past. Ideas are tested, and debates between historians are equally intrinsic to evaluating hypotheses and arguments.
Reading this diverse collection, I find Hirst’s writing provocative in a good way. I often had to pause and ask myself, do I agree or disagree here? What is my argument? Where is the evidence for my opinion?
Hirst’s body of work represents an implicit but powerful defence of evidence-based history at a time when the truth is under attack from venal Trumpism and students are submitting dispiriting essays written by GenAI. He was a powerful advocate for the discipline, advancing what history educators would call a form of historical literacy or historical thinking.
In response to the Howard Government’s proposal to develop a national history curriculum in 2006, for example, Hirst agreed with the need for a more rigorous and coordinated approach to the subject. Yet he also insisted that history’s purpose must be to teach the skills of empirical research and criticism, rather than jingoism.
John Hirst in 2015.
Matthew Duchesne, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Given the spread of these essays and the genealogy of Hirst’s career, it was a curious decision to organise the collection thematically, rather than chronologically. I am aware this criticism is likely framed by my own interests, and a thematic approach allows for a different organisation of ideas, but I did wonder what context was perhaps missed by not seeing the evolution of Hirst’s writing over time.
For example, the essay Changing My Mind appears first, but reflects back on Hirst’s career in Australian history. I was also surprised that one of his most well-known (and controversial) essays was not included in the collection or cited in the select bibliography. It’s another piece I first read as an undergraduate – a pointed critique of Creating a Nation by Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, published in Quadrant in 1995, in which Hirst questioned whether a gendered history of Australia could and should be written. “A history of gender relations,” he argued, “is something less than the history of the nation.”
Obviously, all edited collections require curatorial decisions based on all sorts of reasons, but the exclusion of this essay was notable, given its prominence.
Other pieces in Selected Writings include Hirst’s critiques of what he termed the “black school” of Australian history writing. He was referring to the movement of historical revision advanced by labour, feminist, migrant and First Nations histories, which have challenged Australia’s understanding of its historical “progress”.
Hirst resisted this movement for being ideologically driven. But that is not to say he wasn’t interested in the “historian’s conscience”. He was, deeply. The essay that opens the collection was published in a volume on that very topic.
Yet his commitment to the history discipline also ran up against a growing acknowledgement within the field that empirical history has been complicit in and essential to exploitative systems of imperialism and colonisation. Hirst wanted historians to understand the past in context. “History writing will always reflect our current preoccupations,” he argued, “but as a disciplined enquiry it is also committed to understanding past people in their own terms.”
It’s a view that has been challenged in recent decades, as historians have sought to understand the ways history itself has legitimised and storied the settler-colonial project by curating its own archives and rules of historical evidence. As well as uncovering the past, history also has its own “blind eyes”, as Catherine Hall famously acknowledged.
Given Hirst’s commitment to debate, and his belief in collegiality and the sharing of ideas, that is a spirited discussion I reckon he would have been up for.
Authors: Anna Clark, Professor in Public History, University of Technology Sydney
Daily Bulletin
