Professor Graeme Davison

Professor Graeme Davison FASSA

BA, DipEd (Melbourne), BA (Oxford), PhD (ANU), FAHA

Discipline: History, Heritage And Archaeology

Year Elected: 1985

I am grateful to be made a Jubilee Fellow of the Academy – recognition, perhaps, of longevity more than merit. Alan Woodland and I are the last survivors of a 1985 cohort that also included the economists Geoffrey Brennan and Helen Hughes, the educationalist Peter Fensham and the historian Rhys Isaacs. I knew and admired all four of them and I’m sorry that they did not live to share this honour.

When I graduated from the Melbourne School of History in the early 1960s, many historians looked for inspiration towards the social sciences. ‘The more sociological history becomes and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for both’, E.H. Carr had declared in his famous 1961 book What is History? I was one of those who heeded his call. In Oxford I read Philosophy, Politics and Economics with special papers in social theory before returning to ANU’s Research School of Social Sciences. There, surrounded by supportive demographers, geographers, economic historians and sociologists, I embarked on a PhD on the history of nineteenth century Melbourne. I later researched the history of the social sciences, including its American, British and Australian pioneers, and taught courses with sociologists and geographers. As a student of Australian cities I have shared ideas and undertaken projects with architects, urban planners and policy makers. I’m among those who think history should be theoretically informed and responsive to contemporary public policy debates, a viewpoint that inevitably draws me towards other social scientists.

I was elected to the Academy three years after moving from Melbourne University to a Chair of History at Monash where I joined another fellow of the Academy, economic historian John McCarty, in co-editing a volume of the Australian Bicentennial History Project. I note with pleasure that the volumes we produced are still accessible though the Academy website. Around that time I inaugurated a Masters Program in Public History designed to prepare history graduates for careers beyond the academy. So I have always appreciated the cross-disciplinary potential of the Academy and its focus on public policy. I recall powerful Cunningham Lectures by Hugh Stretton (2001) and Paul Kelly (2005) among others and the opportunity to participate in its workshops and symposia. In 1998 Ruth Fincher and I accepted an invitation from Academy President Paul Bourke to survey the state of urban studies, part of a broader ARC-initiated disciplinary review published as Challenges for the Social Sciences in Australia. As a council member of the National Archives, I became concerned about the implications of the digital revolution on official recordkeeping and contributed an essay ‘Beyond the Paper-Trail: National Archives in a Digital Age’ to the Academy’s bulletin Dialogue in 2007. Towards the end of the centennial drought my old ANU colleague Patrick Troy invited me to contribute a paper on the history of urban water consumption to an Academy symposium on the water crisis in Australia’s cities. And in 2014 I joined colleagues from the four learned academies as a member of an expert working group on ‘Sustainable Urban Transport’.

My rather sporadic record of engagements with ASSA is partly explained by competing engagements with the other Academy, which I joined in 1987. As a council member of AAH, I sometimes asked, impertinently, if we should not follow the example of our British, American and Canadian colleagues and unite into a broader academy of humanities and social sciences. Such a larger body would not only suit the convenience of disciplines, like my own, that straddle humanities and social sciences, but would surely enjoy increased prestige, economies of scale and greater lobbying power? Nobody, then, saw much merit in the idea, but as the academy ages and the external threats to the universities increase I wonder if it does not bear re-examination?