Hirst, John Bradley 1942–

PERSONAL:

Born 1942. Education: University of Adelaide, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, La Trobe University, Victoria 3086, Australia. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, associate professor and reader in history.

MEMBER:

Commonwealth Government's Civic Education Group (chair), National Museum Publications (deputy chair member), Film Australia (board member).

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Adelaide and the Country, 1870-1917; Their Social and Political Relationship, Melbourne University Press (Carlton, Australia), 1973.

Convict Society and Its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales, Allen & Unwin (Boston, MA), 1983.

The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy, Allen & Unwin (Sydney, Australia)1988.

The World of Albert Facey, History Institute of Victoria/Allen & Unwin (North Sydney, Australia), 1992.

A Republican Manifesto, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor, with Graeme Davison and Stuart Macintyre), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Australia's Democracy: A Short History, Allen & Unwin (Sydney, Australia), 2002.

Sense & Nonsense in Australian History, Black Inc. Agenda (Melbourne, Australia), 2005.

The Australians: Insiders and Outsiders on the National Characters since 1770, Black Inc. Agenda (Melbourne, Australia), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

John Bradley Hirst is considered one of Australia's most important historians. His books have covered various aspects of Australian history, especially the republican movement. He, along with Stuart Macintyre and Graeme Davison, coedited The Oxford Companion to Australian History, published by Oxford University Press in 2001.

In The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth Hirst charts the course of the birth of Australia as a single political entity. He contends that the people of the continent were ready to regard themselves as a country with a distinct and independent identity well before the idea found an organized political expression. He gathers material from a wide variety of areas, including poetry and cartoons, to make his argument. Hirst suggests that some of the principal shapers of the Australian Commonwealth regarded the movement not as the undoing of the British Empire, but rather as the beginning of the process of the federalization of the empire. John Ramsden in the Times Literary Supplement hailed Hirst's argument as a cogent one and observed that the historian "writes with lucidity and wit."

Hirst served as a member of the prime minister's republic advisory committee, which was assigned the task of collecting information and suggestions from various parts of the society in order to understand what the citizenry would like to see in a new constitution. The author favored the republican form of government, and his book A Republican Manifesto presents a proposed constitution and the arguments for it. Law Institute Journal contributor Graham Fricke considered the book thorough, direct, and sensible. Robert Murray in Quadrant expressed similar praise, concluding that Hirst's study is the best among several published on Australian republicanism in 1993.

The Oxford Companion to Australian History contains 1,600 entries by 317 contributors. The book covers a wide range of topics, from history and fine arts to popular culture and slang. Times Literary Supplement critic Geoffrey Blaine admired the work's scope and balance, and he concluded that "many of the major articles in The Oxford Companion to Australian History say something new with clarity and pithiness. The three editors deserve praise, not least because they themselves have written many of the major articles, commenting with insight even on fields that are not their own."

Hirst's 2005 work, Sense & Nonsense in Australian History, is a wide-ranging collection of his essays produced over the last thirty years. The book touches on several major themes in Australian history, such as pioneer legend, Australian egalitarianism, multiculturalism, Aboriginal policy, and colonial culture. Each of these essays is "addressed with Hirst's trademarked centre-left ‘objectivity,’" as Melbourne Historical Journal's Kelly Butler stated. "The title of the book, including the words Sense and Nonsense, neatly summarises Hirst's approach to his subjects, for he employs careful and logical arguments to demolish some standard and widely accepted interpretations of Australia's past," observed Richard Waterhouse in his review of the book for the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society. "If viewed overall, the collection is somewhat patchy and readers would be ill-advised to read it cover to cover. However, it offers a neat snapshot of Hirst's oeuvre and provides a highly accessible way to engage with the work of one of Australia's most prominent historians," asserted Butler. "This is a book that reflects an extraordinary knowledge of Australian history. It is a work that refuses to accept standard and widely accepted interpretations of our past and present. Its arguments are provocative, intelligent, and sometimes deliberately politically incorrect. Because they are based on such deep understandings and knowledge of Australian history they cannot be ignored," noted Waterhouse.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Arena Magazine, February 1, 2006, Rachel Power, review of Sense & Nonsense in Australian History, p. 49.

Choice, March, 2000, D.S. Azzolina, review of The Oxford Companion to Australian History, pp. 1278-1279.

Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, December, 2006, Richard Waterhouse, review of Sense & Nonsense in Australian History, p. 213.

Law Institute Journal, August, 1994, Graham Fricke, review of A Republican Manifesto, p. 757.

Melbourne Historical Journal, 2006, Kelly Butler, review of Sense & Nonsense in Australian History, p. 111.

Quadrant, April, 1994, Robert Murray, review of A Republican Manifesto, pp. 76-78; December, 1998, Robert Murray, review of The Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 77.

Times Literary Supplement, October 1, 1999, Geoffrey Blainey, review of The Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 8; May 10, 2002, John Ramsden, review of The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth, p. 13.