Geoffrey Blainey
Ann Blainey (present)
Sir Ernest Scott Prize (1955)
Australian Literature Society Gold Medal (1964)
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria (1967)
Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1969)
Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (1970)
Captain Cook Bicentenary Literary Award (1970)
Officer of the Order of Australia (1975)
Britannica Award for Disseminating Knowledge (1988)
Honorary Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (1988)
Australian National Living Treasure (1997)
Companion of the Order of Australia (2000)
Mining Hall of Fame (2009)
Tucker Medal (2013)
Prime Minister's Literary Awards for History (2016)
Australian history
World history
The Peaks of Lyell (1954)
The Tyranny of Distance (1966)
The Causes of War (1972)
A Short History of the World (2000)
Blainey is noted for his authoritative texts on the economic and social history of Australia, including The Tyranny of Distance.[1] He has published over 40 books, including wide-ranging histories of the world and of Christianity. He has often appeared in newspapers and on television.[2][3][4]
Blainey held chairs in economic history and history at the University of Melbourne for over 20 years.[2] In the 1980s, he was visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University,[3] and received the 1988 Britannica Award for 'exceptional excellence in the dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of mankind', the first historian to receive that award[5] and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2000.[6]
Blainey was once described by Graeme Davison as the "most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, most controversial of Australia's living historians".[7] He has been chairman or member of the Australia Council, the University of Ballarat, the Australia-China Council, the Commonwealth Literary Fund and the Australian War Memorial.[2] He chaired the National Council for the Centenary of Federation.[2]
Blainey has appeared in lists of the most influential Australians, past or present.[8][9][10] The National Trust lists Blainey as one of Australia's "Living Treasures".[11] He served on the boards of philanthropic bodies, including the Ian Potter Foundation (1991–2014) and the Deafness Foundation Trust since 1993, and is patron of others.
Biographer Geoffrey Bolton in 1999 argues that he has played multiple roles as an Australian historian:
In 2006, the Melbourne historian John Hirst made his assessment: "Geoffrey Blainey, the most prolific and popular of our historians".[13] Alan Atkinson, author of a three-volume history of Australia, called Blainey "our most eminent living historian" in a long review that mixes criticism with praise.[14]
Views on Asian immigration[edit]
On 17 March 1984, Blainey addressed a major Rotary conference in the Victorian city of Warrnambool. He regretted that the Hawke Labor government in "a time of large unemployment" was bringing many new migrants to the areas of high unemployment, thus fostering tension. He blamed the government, not the migrants themselves. Criticising what he viewed as disproportionately high levels of Asian immigration, then running at 40 per cent of the annual intake, he added: "Rarely in the history of the modern world has a nation given such preference to a tiny ethnic minority of its population as the Australian Government has done in the past few years, making that minority the favoured majority in its immigration policy".[33]
Three days later, in response to the prediction of the "increasing Asianisation" of Australia made by Labor's Immigration Minister Stewart West, Blainey argued: "I do not accept the view, widely held in the Federal Cabinet, that some kind of slow Asian takeover of Australia is inevitable. I do not believe that we are powerless. I do believe that we can with good will and good sense control our destiny.... As a people, we seem to move from extreme to extreme. In the past 30 years the government of Australia has moved from the extreme of wanting a white Australia to the extreme of saying that we will have an Asian Australia and that the quicker we move towards it the better".[34]
Blainey's speech, along with subsequent articles and a book on the subject, ignited nationwide controversy, especially in the Australian federal parliament, which had not debated the principles of the immigration policy for many years. Some critics argued that Blainey's views were moderate and not racist, citing the idea that "All peoples of the world are worthy and deserve respect" was the 'prime principle' of Blainey's book, All for Australia, which he wrote on the topic. However, in All for Australia he criticised the belief that "immigration policy should primarily reflect the truth that all 'races' are equal.[35] On the contrary, an immigration policy should not, any more than a trade or tariff policy, be designed primarily to reflect that fact". According to Blainey, the Australian government's immigration policy was increasingly being influenced by multicultural ideology to the detriment of the national interest and the majority of Australians. He argued: "We are surrendering much of our own independence to a phantom opinion that floats vaguely in the air and rarely exists on this earth. We should think very carefully about the perils of converting Australia into a giant multicultural laboratory for the assumed benefit of the peoples of the world". Blainey also warned that the "crimson thread of kinship" invoked by Sir Henry Parkes was being undermined, stating: "The cult of the immigrant, the emphasis on separateness for ethnic groups, the wooing of Asia and the shunning of Britain are part of this thread-cutting."
His views were to receive the support of a majority of Australian voters, both Labor and non-Labor voters, as a national Gallup poll confirmed in August.[36] Victorians especially disapproved of the University of Melbourne's conduct in this matter.
In contrast, while Blainey was briefly in Europe in May, a professor and 23 other history teachers from the University distributed a public letter distancing themselves from what they called his "racialist" views.[37][38] Other historians, including lecturers in Asian history, refused the request to sign the letter.
After a crowd of left-wing students and marchers broke into the heavily guarded building where Blainey was conducting a tutorial in historical research, he was advised by the university on security grounds that it must cancel all his future addresses within the University for the rest of 1984.[39][40] In Brisbane on 5 July, when he gave a memorial address in honour of a deceased Queensland businessman in the Mayne Hall at the University of Queensland and chaired by the chancellor Sir James Foots, noisy protesters tried to dislocate the meeting.[41] These and similar protests were major items in the national television news. Blainey continued to express his views periodically on television, radio and his own newspaper columns but not in his own university. He retained his main position as Dean of the Faculty of Arts.
Blainey and his family were subject to threats of violence, prompting him at the police's request to remove his name and address from the public telephone book and organise security for his home. According to fellow historian Keith Windschuttle: "The immediate consequence of all this was that Blainey, easily Australia's best and most prolific living historian, was effectively silenced from speaking at his own university.... This violation of academic freedom, clearly the worst in Australian history, provoked no protest at all from the university's academic staff association, nor from the university council, let alone his own departmental colleagues."[42]
On the so-called "Blainey affair", Australian prime minister John Howard would remark: "Nowhere, I suggest, have the fangs of the left so visibly been on display as they were in a campaign based on character assassination and intellectual dishonesty through their efforts to trash the name and reputation of that great Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey."[42]
In December 1988, Blainey resigned from the University of Melbourne and resumed his former career as a freelance historian.[43] In 1994, the Victorian government appointed him to the honorary position of foundation chancellor of the new University of Ballarat.
Subsequently, in December 2007, the University of Melbourne granted a Doctor of Laws to Blainey[44] and declared that he was, in Australia, probably a unique professional historian, noting that he had fostered wide public interest in history. The citation observed that "few graduates of this University have exerted greater influence on national life".
Awards[edit]
Geoffrey Blainey was made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria in 1967. In 1975 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature. He was awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours list of 2000 for his service to academia, research and scholarship.[54] The following year he was awarded a Centenary Medal for his services to the Centenary of Federation, of which he was Council chairman in 2001 and previously a member.[55]
At the United Nations in New York in 1988, he was one of five intellectuals, including the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who were awarded gold medals for "excellence in the dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of mankind". Blainey's book The Causes of War, much read in military academies and American universities, was said to be one reason for the award.[5]
He is an emeritus professor of the University of Melbourne, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.[56]
In 2002 the degree of Doctor of Letters was conferred on Professor Blainey in recognition of his contribution to the University of Ballarat and the community in general.[22]
In 2010, Blainey was Victorian State finalist for Senior Australian of the Year.[3]
In 2016 Blainey's The Story of Australia's People Volume 1: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia won the Prime Minister's Literary Awards for History.
The University of Melbourne has established "The Geoffrey Blainey Scholarship for Honours in Economic History" for students undertaking academic study in 'economic history' in honour of Blainey's academic contributions.[57]