John Hirst (historian)
| John Hirst | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
9 July 1942 Adelaide, South Australia |
| Died | 3 February 2016 (aged 73) Melbourne, Victoria |
| Awards | Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (1986) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Adelaide (BA, PhD) |
| Thesis title | [University of Adelaide Adelaide and the Country, 1870–1914: A Study of their Social and Political Relationship] |
| Thesis year | 1970 |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | La Trobe University |
| Main interests | Australian history Political history |
John Bradley Hirst FASSA (9 July 1942 – 3 February 2016) was an Australian historian and commentator. He has been described as an "historian, public intellectual, and active citizen". Born in Adelaide, Hirst attended Unley High School and undertook his undergraduate and postgraduate study at the University of Adelaide. Abandoning an early desire to become a Methodist Minister, in 1968 he was appointed a lecturer at Melbourne's new La Trobe University, where he remained until the end of his career. His wife and fellow-student Christine accompanied him to Melbourne. They had two children, Catherine and David. Hirst was subsequently head of department and Reader in History at La Trobe. He retired in 2006, and was an Emeritus Scholar at La Trobe until his death. Hirst had a distinguished career "in teaching, supervision and research. He developed new subjects and methodologies to teach them. In addition to those concerning Australian history there was his pioneering subject designed to inform students about Australia's European cultural heritage." This work was published as The Shortest History of Europe and has been translated into nine languages (Swedish, Greek, Chinese, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and Korean). Hirst was seconded to the University of Melbourne to edit Historical Studies, Australia's leading historical journal, from 1977 to 1980. In retirement, he travelled regularly to Sydney to instruct, without remuneration, groups of post-graduate students in thesis writing.
Hirst produced a large number of important articles, chapters and books on Australian history. His academic interests were wide-ranging, including social, cultural and political history. Hirst's goal was to elucidate the qualities and characteristics of Australian society and how they had developed. Jeremy Sammut has described him as "an elegant and outstanding stylist, as adept at clarifying complex issues by reducing them to their essentials as he was at crafting the pithy line that eliminated all doubt his interpretation was true and correct". In his historical work, Hirst's colleague at La Trobe University, Alan Frost, has noted that Hirst "challenged orthodoxies and produced many new insights". He wrote two seminal books on colonial New South Wales which Frank Bongiorno has described as displaying "a raw intellectual power":Convict Society and its Enemies (1983) and The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy (1988) (both reprinted as Freedom on the Fatal Shore in 2008). Convict Society and its Enemies was particularly influential, arguing that rather than being a brutal slave society, early New South Wales was a place where rights and freedoms were well-established from the beginning. Hirst's study of Federation, The Sentimental Nation, was also a ground-breaking work, arguing that national sentiment was more important than economics in uniting the nation. Alan Frost has described Hirst's shorter analyses as notable: "Distance in Australia: Was It a Tyrant?" (1975), his response to Geoffrey Blainey's most famous concept, "deserves much more attention than it now receives"; his "Egalitarianism" (1986) challenges "received wisdom about colonial life". Many of his best shorter pieces were collected in Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2009). A major achievement of Hirst's was a project to index the Melbourne Argus newspaper (1860–1909).
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