ADB Files as an Historical Source

Since the publication of volume one in 1966, it has gradually dawned on readers of the Australian Dictionary of Biography that a national institution was being built before their eyes. When its online version received the Manning Clark House National Cultural Award (Group Category) in 2006, the citation stated, ‘The unit, the project itself, is a national treasure’. Successive volumes of the ADB have inevitably attracted error spotters and champions for those who have not been included, but the consistent response has been high praise, with reviewers urging us to look beyond their reference utility. Of volume 16, John Thompson said it deserved to be read in its own right ‘as a key to understanding the human condition shaped and defined by the peculiar exigencies of Australian life and experience’.

The distributed ‘ADB family’ (the thousands of authors that have written for the ADB, and the distinguished members of the Editorial and Working Parties) probably did not realise they were doubly making history as they researched, wrote, argued over inclusions, edited, checked the facts, and conducted correspondence. Paralleling the publication of the volumes was another more organic output. Day-by-day, the core ADB team nourished a living resource in two parts, the Biographical Register which contains references to over 40,000 individuals, and the hundreds of five-drawer cabinets of biographical files that have gradually taken over the offices and corridors of the National Centre of Biography at the ANU.

Compiled for internal purposes, the files are also valuable research tools in their own right and were used as historical sources, for instance by Ross McMullin for his biography of prime minister Chris Watson and John Thompson for his biography of historian, biographer and former ADB General Editor, Geoffrey Serle.

Recently the cabinets were decanted into over eight hundred acid-free archive boxes; listed; and transferred to the ANU Archives where they are now more accessible to public researchers in the archives’ reading room in the Menzies Library. Here, during recent months, my own sampling of a dozen files on prime ministers has convinced me just how rich this archive is.

Because word limits imposed on ADB entries force conciseness, the files can be disarmingly revealing as they track author and editors negotiating the essence of a life and the relative significance of its stages. If the ADB’s collective biography of 11,000 parts is a view of the Australian people, the files document how that view was shaped. Captured in them are not only the rejected drafts, readers’ comments and internal arguments, but academic gossip, copies of key documents such as birth, death and marriage certificates, Dr Gandevia’s comments on ‘cause of death’ and, at times, hints of biographers’ chaotic lives and the oppressive influence of subjects’ families. The afterlife of the published volumes is on show too, when reviewers and regular correspondents point to mistakes, triggering a fresh round of internal debate, usually to do with corrigenda versus interpretation.

I am certain the ADB’s biographical files could support any number of doctoral theses, and in the right hands, a book as popular as Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne. In particular the minds of its main editors are extensively revealed. In the Dictionary’s own obituary of General Editor Dr Geoffrey Serle, the late John Ritchie quoted the Reverend Dr Davis McCaughey’s eulogy in which he said that Geoff took the “fragments of a useable past” and wove them into “the stuff of consciousness and conscience”. How those fragments were transformed is all here in his tiny writing on those blue and yellow editorial sheets.

When General Editors turn authors things get even more interesting. As prime minister John Curtin’s biographer, Serle reveals his consciousness and conscience in his angry 1994 letters to the then general editor, John Ritchie, one of which ends “It reads like a cheap shot at the politician from the soldier. It stinks”.  And there is this, from a 1989 note to ADB editors by volume six general editor, Bede Nairn, re his efforts as author to encapsulate prime minister Watson:

My sentence is ADB compression at its worst (or Best) – you wouldn’t allow me an extra 5000 words to elucidate it.  And as you missed my point, I don’t think anyone else will get it. It was G. Greene (wasn’t it?) who said that what M. Proust was really on about was ‘Remembrance of Times Pissed [on absinthe]’: which shows how hard it is to understand what authors are trying to do. So the sentence should get the chop!

And so on. A national treasure about a national institution indeed. Check it out.

by Michael Piggott
*archivist Michael Piggott has spent the last few months compiling a list of resources on Australia’s Prime Ministers, held at the ANU Archives, for the Prime Ministers Centre at Old Parliament House.