Geoffrey Blainey
| Geoffrey Blainey | |
|---|---|
| Native name | Geoffrey Norman Blainey |
| Born |
11 March 1930 Melbourne, Victoria |
| Awards | Sir Ernest Scott Prize (1955) Australian Literature Society Gold Medal (1964) Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria (1967) Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1969) Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (1970) Captain Cook Bicentenary Literary Award (1970) Officer of the Order of Australia (1975) Britannica Award for Disseminating Knowledge (1988) Australian National Living Treasure (1997) Companion of the Order of Australia (2000) Mining Hall of Fame (2009) Tucker Medal (2013) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Melbourne |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of Melbourne |
| Main interests | Australian history World history |
| Notable works |
The Peaks of Lyell (1954) The Tyranny of Distance (1966) A Short History of the World (2000) |
Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC, FAHA, FASSA (born 11 March 1930) is an Australian historian, academic, philanthropist and commentator with a wide international audience. He is noted for having written authoritative texts on the economic and social history of Australia, including The Tyranny of Distance. He has published over 35 books, including wide-ranging histories of the world and of Christianity. He has often appeared in newspapers and on television. He held chairs in economic history and history at the University of Melbourne for over 20 years. In the 1980s, he was visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. He received the 1988 Britannica Award for dissemination of knowledge and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2000.
He was once described by Professor Graeme Davison as the "most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, most controversial of Australia's living historians". He has been chairman or member of a wide range of Australian Government and other institutional councils, boards and committees, including the Australia Council, the University of Ballarat, the Australia-China Council, the Commonwealth Literary Fund and the Australian War Memorial. He chaired the National Council for the Centenary of Federation. His name sometimes appears in lists of the most influential Australians, past or present. The National Trust lists Blainey as one of Australia's "Living Treasures". He currently serves on the boards of philanthropic bodies, including the Ian Potter Foundation since 1991 and the Deafness Foundation Trust since 1993, and is patron of others.
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