Australian historians and biography

Abstract

Macintyre pointed to a fork in Australian biographical practice in the 1950s (common to western historiographies) when, on the one hand, professional historians turned to biography and, on the other, academic historians developed a newly found ‘mistrust’, finding defects in adequately comprehending a completed life and a tendency to rely on singularity and individual agency in preference to structural causation.3 Biography is perhaps only just starting to shake off this history, although to some it remains academic historians’ ‘unloved stepchild, occasionally but grudgingly let in the door, more often shut outside with the riffraff’.4 Macintyre, however, found evidence that Australian historians had ‘largely dropped any suspicion of the genre of biography’ by the end of the twentieth century, not least because they recognised its considerable potential for bringing historical research to