Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to speak about the passing of Emeritus laureate Professor Stuart Macintyre. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend his funeral, which was held in Melbourne yesterday. On 22 November Australia lost one of its greatest and most prodigious historians and public intellectuals. Stuart Macintyre, who died of cancer at the age of 74, was pre-eminently a historian of the left but, as the tributes to him from colleagues of all political persuasions testify, his scholarship was academically rigorous and never merely partisan in its approach. That did not stop him being a target in the so-called history wars because he defended the discipline of history as an inquiry into truth, an inquiry into the events and attitudes of the past that have made us the people we are today, an inquiry that must be conducted without shrinking from those aspects of our past that cannot be raised.

Conservative critics derided this as the black armband view of Australian history. Stuart was not intimidated by such a label; instead, he pointed to what those who used this term were actually doing. In his book, The History Wars, he wrote: 'In submitting history to a loyalty test, they are debasing it.' In his lectures to the generations of students and the numerous articles and books, Stuart taught that acknowledging the truth about the past is the first and most necessary step in building a better future.

Graeme Davison, another celebrated historian, was quoted in an obituary in the Australian recently saying:

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.

Another obituarist, Michael Lazarus, who wrote in the Jacobin magazine, said:

Macintyre was more than a writer and researcher. His encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian and working-class history was equalled only by his generosity as a teacher. He gave his time freely and magnanimously, and his dedication to imparting his knowledge and advice reflected the best traditions of the twentieth-century left.

I can testify to the truth of those by personal experience. I found him to be an inspiring teacher. I was one of Stuart's students at the University of Melbourne and he supervised my masters thesis on the factional mobilisation in the 1930s of the Victorian Labor Party. He was a mentor who became a lifelong friend. Stuart was an intellectual activist. He dedicated his time unselfishly outside of the university's duties, whether it be serving on the Victorian and national libraries, the Academy of the Humanities, the Heritage Council of Victoria or as President of the Historic Association or reviewing the history and civics curriculum or as an editor. He was a willing participant in political campaigns to defend democratic values. He was chair of the 'bias is bad news' committee during the time of the Kirner government in Victoria and, more recently, was chair of the International Brigade memorial committee.

The long list of Stuart's books include several that can deservedly be called landmarks. Some would say his greatest work is the two-volume history of the Communist Party of Australia. His first volume, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality, is regarded as the definitive text on the CPA. It's not a dry narrative of branch meetings and party congresses, of speeches and resolutions carried and lost; above all else, it is a history of people who were, who became, communists. It tells us their individual stories, illuminating their life experiences that led them to make their political choices.

Stuart was a member of the Communist Party for many years, which he joined as an undergraduate. When he returned from his postgraduate studies at Cambridge he joined the Labor Party. The second volume of his history on Australian communism, The Party—The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning, willbe published in February next year. When it appears, I have no doubt, it will be widely read amongst his peers in the history profession. It will be both earnestly and appreciatively criticised by some of them. Stuart will have expected no less, and his judgement on the history of the CPA will be amongst his greatest work, and that claim will probably stand the test of time.

For me, another of his books was his contribution to the understanding of Australia's national story. Australia's Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s is the history of the country in the 1940s. Specifically, it tells how the Curtin and Chifley governments set out to build a nation that was both more equal and more prosperous than the one that had gone to war in 1939. The Department of Post-War Reconstruction was created in 1942 when the end of the Pacific war was not even in sight. Most people criticised the government's decision to begin work on reconstruction at the time when the country was in such immediate danger, but the decision was vindicated by the policies that led to the public investment in manufacturing, housing, social activity, in universities and in the social agencies. Australia was transformed by the vision and achievements of the Curtin and Chifley governments, which stand us in good stead today.

Stuart wrote many books, but here I want to make note of one more: A Concise History of Australia. It's a short book, but it runs to five editions, the most recent in 2020. It lays bare the national story, its triumphs and its failures. Above all, it's told in a lucid and elegant prose, which cannot be said of every work of academic history. Stuart's socialism drew him into the course of Australian history, rather than separating him from that history. He lived the view that history is a never-ending dialogue between the past and the present.

Stuart Macintyre, I believe, can aptly be compared with Manning Clark. Both had a prodigiously extensive knowledge of Australian history. Both wrote with erudition and wore their erudition lightly. Stuart's writing was in the tradition of the great British historiography of the Whig or liberal historians such as George Trevalyan and Thomas McAulay, even EH Carr. He shared the socialist historian Eric Hobsbawn's view that history cannot be subdivided into narrow, specialist fields that lose sight of the great narratives of social development. Great historians write in a way that readily appeals to a wider readership, even in the works that are addressed to academic peers. I repeat: in this regard, Stuart was one such great historian.

With the passing of Stuart Macintyre, we have lost a great Australian. I extend my condolences to his wife, Martha; to his daughters, Mary and Jessie; and to all those who knew and loved him.