Tinkering with the ‘Temple of Fame’ or systematically reimagining the Australian Dictionary of Biography?
MELANIE NOLAN
The gates of fame are open wide,
Its halls are always full;
And some go in by the door marked Push
And some by the door marked Pull.
Anonymous
Illustration: ‘The Temple of Fame’ (1895) by William Mainwaring Palin (1862-1947), The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, reproduction credit: Wikioo Encyclopedia
Abstract
All readers of Circa will have used the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), and some will have written entries. This paper sets out the technological and cultural changes which have led to the development and expansion of the ADB, which is now one part of a digital information suite.
Where once revisions were envisaged of a ‘tinkering’ or corrigenda kind, now it is all too clear that the ADB needs revising systematically. The ADB’s revision plans rely on its national collaboration, its volunteer and unpaid working party members and authors. This article reminds professional historians that the ADB will be only too pleased to hear from them if they come across candidates for inclusion in the dictionary. Indeed, it may well be able to commission proposers to write the entries.
Tinkering with the ‘Temple of Fame’ or systematically reimagining the Australian Dictionary of Biography?
The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) was established at the Australian National University (ANU) in 1958 when its first employee was appointed.[1] ANU was founded with its specific nation-building charter in 1946 to encourage and provide facilities for research and postgraduate study, both generally and about subjects of national importance to Australia. Professor Max Crawford suggested in 1947 that the ‘role of the National University in terms of history might be the eventual production of an Australian Dictionary of National Biography’. [2] Preparations began but it was not until Professor Keith Hancock organised a conference in 1957 to consider research priorities in Australian history, that there was general agreement that a dictionary project would be a fillip for historians and that it ought to be a national collaboration.[3]
In the first instance, the ADB was under contract with Melbourne University Press (MUP) to produce 12 volumes. When the ADB project was reviewed by an ANU committee in 1986, it was agreed that it would continue and produce eight more volumes, which would take it to the end of the twentieth century. This was confirmed in another review in 2007. [4] The previous year the ADB went online and the ANU Press became its publisher after the contract with MUP ended in 2012. The volumes look the same and the project seems to have been constant over six decades, ceaselessly producing concise biographies of significant and representative Australians. As the largest and most successful cooperative research enterprise in the humanities and social sciences in Australia, as Tom Griffiths wrote, ‘it has become inscribed into the very fabric, identity and rationale of our national university’.[5] The ADB is now widely recognised as an Australian national cultural institution.
I was appointed as the General Editor of the ADB in June 2008. From an insider’s point of view, while the ADB has to some extent been continually amended, recent change has been intended to be more than merely ‘tinkering with the temple of fame’. We have ambitions to reimagine an ADB which involves cultural change.[6] In this paper, I consider the changes that have followed from the ADB’s going online in 2006, especially the development of data retrieval, visualisation and networking.[7] The balance between the selection principles of significant and representative subjects is shifting and our engagement with our community is changing. I discuss our vision to refit the ADB, both its redesign and potential as a research tool, some inherent difficulties to achieving this and the strategies we are adopting in the pursuit of systematic revision.
Keith Hancock planting an English oak tree on the southern lawn of University House in 1984 to celebrate the house’s thirtieth anniversary. The ‘Hancock oak’, grown from an acorn he brought from Cambridge, commemorates the association between The Australian National University and Cambridge, England. The ADB was another of Hancock’s ‘oaks’. ANUA225-511. This was used on the cover of The ADB’s Story.
The ADB’s mission: same but different when rendered digitally
For over six decades, the ADB’s mission has been constant. In The ADB’s Story (2013) I argued that there were three main activities that laid at the heart of the project since the 1950s:
• publishing books of well-researched, well-written concise biographies of significant and representative Australian lives;
• compiling the Biographical Register of potential subjects initially on index cards, as a book in 1986 and then as an internal database; and
• indexing entries.[8]
The first volume of the ADB was published in 1966; volume 19 was published in 2021, and we expect volume 20 to appear by 2026. By that stage, the ADB will have compiled the concise lives of 14,000 Australians up to the end of the twentieth century by way of a collectively wordy, 10 million words.
The first volumes of the ADB were greeted with acclaim.[9] Some blemishes were noticed but forgiven as relatively slight and unimportant.[10] W. G. Buick proclaimed ‘Let us celebrate the birth of a giant’ in the Australian Book Review.[11] Geoffrey Blainey predicted the ADB would ‘probably be the most valuable reference work in Australian history’.[12] The consensus was that ‘the ADB is something worth contributing to, as well as drawing upon’ and subsequent volumes were held to contribute to its being a ‘national treasure’.[13] It is hard to calibrate the ADB’s reach, for much of it is simply difficult to measure. For instance, in 2009 the Booker Prize-winning Australian novelist, Thomas Kenneally, declared his admiration for the ADB, admitting that ‘like everyone else I […] plunder it for my books’.[14]
That is just part of the ADB’s story. The transformation from a book to an online reference work in 2006 has seen a broadening of the project. The ADB began to establish companion websites starting with its Obituaries Australia (OA) in 2011, and People Australia websites soon after. These sites were a logical step in publishing our biographical registers online. While we have always collected obituaries (we have filing cabinets full of them) our research files were fairly inaccessible, even to ourselves. Similarly, obituaries are sometimes hard to isolate amongst the wealth of material available on the National Library of Australia’s online research portal Trove. It made sense for the ADB to start publishing them in one accessible place. It does not duplicate other websites. Moreover, we are able to include other biographical material such as records from Who’s Who in the World of Women published in 1934 and many other out-of-copyright compendiums of biography.[15]
The development of the ADB’s indexing has been both fundamental and transformative. When the ADB went online in 2006 our indexed fields were much like those of other national biographical dictionaries. We included fields for date and place of birth and death, cultural heritage, religious influence, and occupation. Since 2011 the ADB has begun to comprehensively index all entries to include awards, education, workplaces, key events, associations people were involved in, related entries, family connections and so on. We also list subjects’ roles in organisations and workplaces, and the years they were there so that relations between people can be easily found. This indexing, in turn, allows us to automatically generate visualisation tools, such as family trees. Our ‘view family related by marriage’ graph shows and clarifies the often-intricate family relationships that develop over the generations in a clear visual form at a glance. Indexing allows a raft of collective biographies to be constructed from our database and we provide, freely accessible, research tools for users to navigate through our various online capacities.[16]
When the ADB went online and when OA was established there was much praise for the new technology and digital development.[17] A number of countries have biographical dictionaries. As Karen Fox proclaimed:
None, however, have gone so far as the ADB in enhancing their online environments, with additional websites, online research tools, and innovative data visualisations.[18]
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s Philip Carter noted in 2013 that the ADB is ‘creating opportunities to establish hitherto unknown connections from the “bottom up”’.[19] It is revealing connections that go ‘well beyond what is possible via the existing metadata’, showing up shared activities and ‘tracing sets of interrelated people as they move through different stages of life’. The ADB now has nearly 32,000 entries in total, all fully indexed, with the potential to establish links between people. People Australia acts as an umbrella for all the websites.[20]
The online ADB is now much more than the book online; it is a digital resource. The ADB’s core activities remain: well-researched concise articles, a Biographical Register and being able to navigate around both. However, having articles online, contextualised and indexed, allows for biographical curation. The companion websites and the research tools provided digitally allow for contextualisation beyond the individual entry.
Shifting the balance between significant and representative in the Temple of Fame
While the ADB has been held up as a veritable Australian temple of fame, its shortcomings include people being overlooked. Having an ADB article is seen as a measure of biographical recognition; not having one as a slight. Anthropologist Daisy Bates wrote to her friend, botanical collector, geologist and anthropologist, Georgina King in 1927, that ‘recognition would come after we are with our loved ones’.[21] Georgina King was accorded just two sentences as an appendage to her influential brother Sir George Eccles Kelson King in the ADB vol 9, 1983. However, she was a subject herself in the ADB Supplement of ‘missing people’ published in 2005.[22] And in 2013, when Jennifer Carter and Roger Cross wrote a full biography of Georgina, they were critical of the ADB’s treatment of Georgina King, that ‘her ideas on geology’ were described as ‘grand, romantic and wrong’. They argued this was presentist, made with hindsight and showed little empathy or appreciation of her context.[23] They complained that she should have been in the temple of fame earlier and then when she was, she ought to have been written about more kindly. Increasingly, there has been criticism of not simply individuals being overlooked or depreciated but whole groups of subjects.
The concept of a Temple of Fame suggests infallibility and immortality. Oddly, the poems that inspired the idea of temples of fame are full of concerns about fame, its basis, its reliability, and its ability to endure. Chaucer’s fourteenth-century three-part poem about The House of Fame is about the unreliability of fame and the irresponsible tamperings of rumour. A poet awakes from dreaming about a glass temple festooned with images of the famous and their deeds. An eagle then captures him and lifts him into the sky to The House of Fame, which is held up by a number of large columns, with famous poets and scholars standing over them carrying the ‘fame of their most prominent stories on their shoulders’. Looking more closely, he realises that the names of the famous in The House of Fame are inscribed in ice. He notices many other names written in the ice that had melted away and are no longer able to be read. Indeed, he observes Fame herself as she metes out distinction and infamy to groups of people who arrive, whether they deserve or want it. This is a rather sophisticated meditation on the nature of fame and the trustworthiness of recorded renown. Chaucer even contemplates the role of the recorder – the poet – in reporting the lives of the famous and how much truth there is in what can be told.
Alexander Pope was inspired by Chaucer’s poem. One might suggest he cannibalised it to compose his eighteenth-century poem, The Temple of Fame: A Vision.[24] Pope’s dreamer is awed by the structure of human greatness, a temple of solid stone ‘inscriptions here of various Names I view’d […] And Poets once had promis’d they should last’. Pope suggests that there are spiritual dangers involved in any quest for fame. Some seek fame and some try to avoid it. Fame itself operates as an external force, conferring or denying honours in a largely arbitrary manner. These matters of truth and reliability and change raised by Chaucer and Pope are not irrelevant.
Historians have taken some time to take on board issues raised by poets in the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. Names written in the ice melt away and new groups need to be added as our perspectives change. Tinkering, repairing and improving, is important work. It comes to a point where revisions need to be more systemic and involve epistemic and cultural reassessments which can be controversial. In a conference of national dictionaries of biography at the National Library of Australia in 1995, Iain McCalman suggested that the genre of the national biographical dictionary stood ‘at the heart of the most ferocious and divisive contemporary debates about the epistemology and hermeneutics of knowledge’.[25] Who should be included in a dictionary was on the front line of the identity wars.
National identities fractured during the late twentieth century, most obviously as a result of multiculturalism and multilingualism. New diversity needed to be drawn together in new national stories reimaging a nation.[26] By the 1990s, Australian society had become a diverse mix of cultures from all over the world with an estimated five million people living in Australia who were born overseas.[27] ADB’s research editors are indebted to overseas universities and libraries for records and research related to contemporary people and we will use them even more when we revise biographies around European colonisation. The post-war liberalising of longstanding restrictions on non-European immigration is akin to the European peopling of Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ADB is indeed interrogating what it is to be Australian by way of biography with all the digital aids we can use.
As part of the reassessment of national dictionaries of biography at the end of the twentieth century, they have been subjected to critique and found to be tarnished. Technology itself is part of the story. In 2006 when it went online, the ADB began a cultural journey undertaken by most dictionaries of national biography into the digital world: it involved being scrutinised as never before.[28] From books that sold 10,000 copies to mainly scholars, the ADB became an open online database that attracted millions of hits and concomitant exposure. The ease of access to information, and its ever-expanding nature, as well as the facility of interaction with the public brought about by the web, have created increasing pressures to revisit and revise the existing material in the light of new research, fresh interpretations, and public expectations. A new conversation with ADB authors and our public began, as the case of Georgina King has shown.
The issues are not simply who has been included and who has been left out. In 2019 journalist Paul Daley suggested that the ADB had wilfully misrepresented some subjects:
There are many […] examples of where the ADB’s biographies have been exposed, with the passage of time as, at best, historically incomplete and at worst, perhaps, deliberately so in some cases.[29]
He pointed to articles on colonial leader Lachlan Macquarie, pioneering ‘settler’ John Batman and former Governor General William Slim. Rather than humanitarian, Daley argued Macquarie
used “terror” (his words) tactics including cutting off and displaying the heads of Aboriginal victims and ordered that black children be stolen from the sites of his soldiers’ massacres.[30]
Batman led massacres of Indigenous Australians. It has been alleged that Slim was a paedophile who molested young boys when, as Australian Governor General from 1953 to 1960, he visited schools and orphanages. Others have pointed to ADB subjects who were the beneficiaries of legacies of slavery.[31]
Ironically, the digital developments that have assisted the ADB to write and revise articles have occasionally also been the means of showing its shortcomings. For instance, the University College London has developed the Legacies of British Slave ownership (LBS), a publicly available database of 47,000 British slave-owners, their antecedents and descendants.[32] Georgina Arnott has argued that subjects in the ADB were entangled in the transatlantic slave trade which has been submerged in the ADB articles.[33] When the British parliament emancipated slaves, it compensated British slave-owners for the loss of their human property. It kept a record of who in 1834 received the £20 million, which is estimated to have been around £300 billion in today’s money.[34] Half of this money, £10 million, left the British Isles for its colonies and Arnott has argued that:
The database shows that dozens of slave-owning men and women, and their children, travelled to the newly forming Australian colonies to take advantage of their opportunities [with lasting] impact on the society.[35]
An illustration of this can be found in the ADB’s 1972 entry on Louis Hope (1817–94), son of the fourth earl of Hopetoun. It noted that Hope’s family enslaved people in Jamaica and his work in establishing the sugar industry in QLD used ‘Kanaka labour from 1865 onwards’.[36] Mostly Hope’s slave-owning legacy has been ‘selectively forgotten’, with implications for the imagination of the Australian colonies as ‘the cradle of liberty’.
Revising and redesigning the ADB: a tension between willingness and means
Most criticism of the ADB has been for a lack of balance in terms of class, gender and race. Anyone using the ADB can see that there are only 4 per cent women in the first period up to 1850, even fewer indigenous subjects,[37] not many convicts and, as Paul Pickering has noted, very few working-class subjects.[38] The ADB now conducts systematic revision but it has not simply been reactive. The ADB had already begun to reconsider its own notions of significance and representation before public calls to decolonise its database. In 2005 Beverley Kingston, Stephen Garton and Chris Cunneen edited a supplementary volume of the ADB, its own ‘missing persons’, with another 500 lives with nearly 30 per cent women and 9 per cent Indigenous subjects.[39]
The ADB is made up of historians and scholars who in many ways mirror Australian society and their views, research interests and publications have changed over time as its people have changed. One has to ask, for instance, why, with a selection principle of representative and significant lives, did volumes one and two of the ADB have a total of merely 134 convicts? After all, 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to various penal colonies in Australia between 1788 and 1868. Convicts make up 11.82 per cent of entries in the first period. Moreover, eight of them were entries that George Rudé contributed, of non-typical convicts who were social and political protesters.[40] In the past middle-class notions of respectability reigned supreme and the ADB’s working party members and staff shared the prejudices of the common culture, including a reluctance in the 1960s, even with a significant and representative selection principle to include ‘too many convicts’.
In 2008 the ADB was integrated into the National Centre of Biography, which was tasked with becoming a research centre including academic staff with independent research agendas, a commitment to teaching and supervising students, attracting visitors, holding seminars, and establishing a journal. In 2010 the Centre was integrated into the School of History at the ANU. Half its staff is female, several of whom have written feminist history.[41] In 2020 the ADB hired an Indigenous officer, Kiera Donnelly. A number of us have worked in public history, have published contact history,[42] and/or have written family history.[43] Most recently Malcolm Allbrook coedited, with one of the National Centre of Biography former PhD students, Sophie Scott-Brown, Family History and Historians in Australia and New Zealand. They describe their association and connection as a confluence, or the ‘place where two great oceans of research are meeting: family historians outside the academy, with traditionally trained, often university-employed historians’.[44]
ABD Editorial Board, 2008. Standing: Beverley Kingston, Stephen Garton, Jill Roe, Nick Brown, Tom Griffiths (chair), Melanie Nolan, Geoffrey Bolton, David Dunstan. Seated: David Horner, Peter Howell, Pat Buckridge, John Lack.
The ADB’s wider structure, its Editorial Board and working parties, have similarly changed. Different kinds of people are making the selections and deciding directions.[45] As a consequence, we are concerned with the woeful proportions of Indigenous Australians, women, and working-class subjects in the ADB and are working to revise this.[46] In 2015, the ADB established an Indigenous Working Party made up of Indigenous scholars from across Australia. On advice, the ANU Vice Chancellor appointed the first Indigenous members to the ADB Editorial Board, as part of the ADB’s and the ANU’s commitment to its Reconciliation Action Plan. One of its members, Shino Konishi, was joined by the ADB’s Managing Editor, Malcolm Allbrook, and its Chair of the Editorial Board, Tom Griffiths, to apply successfully for an ARC grant, and private sector funding from the J.T. Reid Foundation, to develop an Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography (IADB) project. The 190 Indigenous biographies coming out of the IADB project are indeed wonderfully divergent and written in collaboration with communities. These developments are matched by increasing nominations from other regional and thematic-based working parties. They are underwritten by a developing historiography including Queensland Working Party member, Libby Connor’s Warrior (2015), Michael Powell’s Musquito, (2016), Alexis Wright’s Tracker (2017) Cassandra Pybus’s Truganini (2020) and Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements most recent, Tongerlongeter (2021).[47] Thanks to the National Centre of Biography’s Visiting Fellow, Tim Rowse, the ADB has an Indigenous Autobiography Archive of 50 Indigenous autobiographies showing the richness of this genre of historical writing and providing in-depth analysis of lives for our database.[48]
Another example of structural shifts changing the culture involves women’s biography. One of the first graduates in Women’s Studies at the ANU was Christine Fernon, who is the ADB’s Online Manager. She has led the First Three Fleets and Their Families research project which is systematically adding approximately 4500 people who came out to the New South Wales colony on the first three fleets between 1788 and 1791 to the People Australia website. This involves also adding entries for their partners, and the children and grandchildren (and the partners of the children and grandchildren) of the fleeters who remained in the colony. The project will bring in an additional 100,000 people to our websites, a great many more women, and will improve the research potential of colonial period entries. Because it was revealed in the process of indexing entries, Christine Fernon has also begun indexing histories of domestic and sexual violence, identifying victims, perpetrators, trial judges and commentators.[49]
The ADB Editorial Board in 2017.
The new 24-member editorial board is now virtually gender-balanced. A decade ago, women comprised less than a third of the 17-member board. It now includes Indigenous Australian and Oceania women. A Women’s Working Party has recently been established. In association with family history and women history’s groups, a list is being compiled of 1500 women who might be added to the first period of the ADB, which has been opened to public nominations. In association with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH), we have begun a labour subjects project, the Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement (BRALMS).
As a consequence of these various changes, the ADB has initiated its own campaign to decolonise the ADB.[50] Surely, for instance, instead of nine articles in the volumes one and two we might have more balanced representation of Indigenous Australians before 1850, at a time when they were the majority of the Australian population, and we might include biographies of Indigenous Australians before 1788.
Accumulating bigger databases and developing longitudinal processing methods give us the technical capacity to register all deceased Australians on our websites. Some estimate that there were around 14 million deaths of Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, from colonisation in 1788 to 2020.[51] Of course 1788 is arbitrary and there were deaths before 1788 but the demographers disagree on how many there were. Len Smith estimated 2.4 billion deaths before 1788.[52] Demographers I have talked to suggest that is too high, but unlike the deaths after 1788, it involves modelling and controversial assumptions. We are already pushing the boundaries of succinct biography and allowing scope for those that do not fit the model, namely ancient biographies, biographies of apocryphal Indigenous figures such as creation or dreaming figures, myths and spirits. Malcolm Allbrook recently published articles on Mungo Man and Mungo Woman, the cremated remains of a family who lived 42,000 years ago around the shores of Lake Mungo in what is now southwest New South Wales.[53] He was able to write this biographical article as a result of archaeologists’ recent research.
In doing this we have constraints. Although the ADB has the ability to register all Australians who have died before 2022 on our websites, it needs to balance this with the dictates of the discipline of the dictionary. While big data is a catchcry today; a dictionary is not a complete who’s who, or an expanded telephone book. The discipline of a dictionary is constrained by the evidence, selections, and the need to be concise. We have much retrofitting to do, which is the legacy of adding new technology and approaches to an older system. Furthermore, the initiative to decolonise and revise the ADB is constrained by our funding.[54] Digital is expensive. The UK Dictionary of National Biography attracted £25 million to revise between 1994 and 2004 and the number of women included rose from 5 to 10 per cent. The ADB would need $10m to revise volumes 1 and 2, while doing our current work, but it is highly unlikely that a benefactor or the Australian government will fund the revision as occurred in the UK or New Zealand. Sustainability is one hurdle which the ADB has not faced, but development funds and resources to revise are scarce. The trick is to avoid replicating our current shortcomings in the process of developing data and allowing free public digital access to the new developments in a challenging financial environment.
In 2019 I proposed three ways forward. First, we have Obituaries Australia, which can capture and index all recently published obituaries of more recent lives. Once we complete the current period (those who died between 1991 and 2000) we could take the whole ADB work process back to the first period (those subjects who died before 1850), revising and adding new articles for which the revisions project has prepared the way. This means we do not ‘go on’ to write up entries on more recent subjects. Secondly, in addition to the existing State, Commonwealth, armed forces, and the Indigenous working parties we establish four further themes – women, convicts, labour and cultural or group identities – to assist with questions of balance and innovation. Thirdly, we do some limited strategic commissioning of subjects’ lives from 2001 to be added to the People Australia website. Doing this would address many of our current problems to do with revisions and can be done within current resources. The board accepted this proposal. The revision will be slow: 'It won't happen overnight but it will happen’.
Conclusion: reliance on the historical community including its professional historians
Where once the ADB was held to encapsulate ‘the imaginative life of the nation and embody the whole community’ accusations have been made that it has merely reflected the elites within society. There has been some debate over the extent to which this was true.[55] Even if it was, the ADB is changing and currently decolonising and considering a range of kinds of significant and representative Australians that have been overlooked. We continue to tinker with the Temple of Fame as we have always done but digital revisions are becoming both more obviously needed, as well as easier to implement systematically.
Most historians believe in a form of objectivity: that there is something external to us that we can know and whilst it may be elusive, we are systematically coming closer to knowing it. An abiding strength of the ADB is its devotion to the empirical record. The dogged fact-checking that began in the 1960s continues unabated and is central to our whole biographical work process.[56] We are digital but that does not absolve hard research work, which comes, quite literally, at a cost.
There has been a fundamental transformation of the ADB project, concomitant with the digital redesign. We can identify and add whole groups of ‘missing persons’, create bigger data and manipulate it, lump and split groups of articles for research purposes and link them to other digital resources. Prosaic matters constrain our ambitions including interoperability, trying to innovate while addressing our existing flaws and honouring our national mission. Like so many Australian research centres, we are under resourced and rely on the historical community as unpaid members of working parties, as nominators of women neglected in the colonial period, as authors, as community people collaborating on Indigenous subjects in all their diversity and so on.
For over sixty years the ADB’s success has rested on the voluntary contribution of community networks throughout Australia. We welcome Professional Historians Australia (PHA) members’ suggestions of subjects for inclusion in the ADB. Indeed, we well may be able to commission the proposer to write the entry. We are you, and you are us.
I thank the two anonymous reviewers and Christine Cheater for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper and Fiona Gatt for her editing.
Melanie Nolan is a professor of history, director of the National Centre of Biography and general editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. She chairs the Editorial Board of ANU.Lives, the ANU Press series in biography, and is a board member of the Australian Journal of Biography and History. Her book Biography: A Historiography will be published by Routledge in March 2023. This paper is based on her keynote address at the Professional Historians Australia national conference in Brisbane, in September 2021.
Citation details: Melanie Nolan, ‘Tinkering with the ‘Temple of Fame’ or systematically reimagining the Australian Dictionary of Biography?’, Circa: The Journal of Professional Historians, Professional Historians Australia, 10 October 2022, https://www.historians.org.au/circa-online
Endnotes
1. Melanie Nolan & Christine Fernon (eds), The ADB’s Story, ANU Press, Canberra, 2013.
2. Professor R. M. Crawford, ‘History’, 10 October 1947, in W. K. Hancock (ed), Research in the Social Sciences in Australia. Reports Prepared at the Request of Professor Keith Hancock, January 1948, ANU, Canberra, 1948, p. 3.
3. Australian National University Archives (ANUA): Keith Hancock Notes, box 69, Q31, ADB archives, Canberra. The ADB’s provisional Editorial Board met for the first time on 19 June 1959; the first ADB Editorial Board meeting was held, jointly with the National Advisory Panel meeting, on 23 April 1960.
4. ANUA: ADB archives, NCB/ ADB files, 1, R. G. Gregory, Tom Griffiths, Ann Curthoys, Linda Boterill, & Daniel Stoljar, ‘Australian Dictionary of Biography Working Party Report to the Director’, Research School of Social Sciences Review, 2007.
5. Tom Griffiths, ‘Foreword’ in Nolan & Fernon, The ADB Story, p. xi.
6. Karen Fox (ed), ‘True Biographies of Nations?”’The Cultural Journey of Dictionaries of National Biography, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019.
7. See Melanie Nolan ‘Preface: Refitting the ADB’, in Nolan, (ed), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol 19, (1991-1995), ANU Press, Canberra, 2021, pp. v-xiii.
8. Melanie Nolan, ‘From Book to Digital Culture’, in Nolan & Fernon, The ADB’s Story, pp. 373-96.
9. See Mark McGiness, ‘Assessing the ADB: A Review of the Reviews’, in Nolan & Fernon, The ADB Story, pp. 322-36.
10. Allan Martin noted the omission of local born (15) aboriginals (5) women (barely a dozen). A. W. Martin, Historical Studies: Australia & New Zealand, vol 12, no 48, 1967, pp. 584-6. Malcolm Ellis complained about an imbalance with significant subjects being undervalued while radicals, people who achieved nothing and ‘unimportant scallawags’ were overemphasised: M. H. Ellis, ‘Disaster in Australian Research’, Bulletin, 26 March 1966, pp. 48–9. M. H. Ellis, ‘Biography Soup’, Bulletin, 10 June 1967, p. 82.
11. W. G. Buick, ‘Whom Was Whom and Why’, Australian Book Review, April 1966, p. 112.
12. Geoffrey Blainey, Papers and Proceedings [Tasmanian Historical Research Association], 15, no. 2, 1967, p. 63; and Book review, Historical Studies, vol 14, no. 53, 1969, pp. 102-4.
13. See Mark McGinness, Courier-Mail [Brisbane], 27 April 2000; Paul Pickering, ‘Review: Di Langmore (ed), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 17’, Labour History, no 95, November 2008, pp. 271–3.
14. Thomas Keneally to Melanie Nolan, 19 October 2009: I thank him for permission to use this email communication.
15. See https://history.cass.anu.edu.au/centres/ncb/digitised-biographies.
16. Nolan, ‘From Book to Digital Culture’, p. 392.
17. According to the 2011 media alerts the 13 April 2011 media release ‘Life after death in the digital hereafter’ on the occasion of the launch of Obituaries Australia database generated 55 media stories.
18. Karen Fox, ‘The Art and Graft of the Australian Dictionary of Biography’, The Conversation, 5 December 2014, https://theconversation.com/the-art-and-graft-of-the-australian-dictionary-of-biography-30417, accessed 17 February 2022. Paul Longley Arthur, ‘Biographical Dictionaries in the Digital Era’, in Katherine Bode & Paul Longley Arthur (eds), Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories, Palgrave, London, 2014, pp. 83-94; Philip Carter, ‘What is National Biography For? Dictionaries and Digital History’, in Fox (ed), ‘True Biographies of Nations?’, p. 73.
19. Philip Carter, ‘Opportunities for National Biography Online: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2005–2012’, in Nolan & Fernon, The ADB’s Story, p. 354.
20. People Australia http://peopleaustralia.anu.edu.au; ADB http://adb.anu.edu.au; Obituaries Australia http://oa.anu.edu.au; Indigenous Australia http://ia.anu.edu.au; Women Australia http://womenaustralia.anu.edu.au; Labour Australia http://labouraustralia.anu.edu.au, accessed 17 February 2022.
21. Daisy Bates to Georgina King, 16 June 1927, cited by Jennifer M.T. Carter & Roger Cross, Ginger for Pluck, The Life and Times of Miss Georgina King, Wakefield Press. Kent Town SA, 2013, p. xv.
22. Ursula Bygott & Claire Hooker, ‘King, Georgina (1845-1932), in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplementary Volume, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2005, pp. 216-17, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/AS10267b.htm, accessed 17 February 2022.
23. Carter & Cross, Ginger for Pluck, The Life and Times of Miss Georgina King, p. 4.
24. Mr Pope, ‘The Temple of Fame: A Vision’, 2nd ed, Bernard Lintott, London, 1715.
25. Iain McCalman, with Jodi Parvey & Misty Cork (eds), National Biographies and National Identity, Humanities Research Centre, Canberra, 1996, p. iv.
26. Paul Longley Arthur, ‘Re-imagining a Nation: The Australian Dictionary of Biography Online’, European Journal of Life Writing, vol 4, 2015, pp. 108-24.
27. Janet Phillips, Michael Klapdor & Joanne Simon-Davies, Migration to Australia since federation: a guide to the statistics, Department of Parliamentary Services, Canberra, 2017, https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1617/Quick Guides/MigrationStatistics, accessed 4 October 2022.
28. Fox, ‘True Biographies of Nations?’.
29. Paul Daley, ‘Decolonising the dictionary: reclaiming Australian History for the forgotten’, Australian Guardian, 17 February 2019.
30. Daley, ‘Decolonising the dictionary’.
31. Paul Daley, ‘Colonial Australia’s Foundation is Stained with the Prots of British Slavery’, Guardian, 21 September 2018.
32. Legacies of British Slave-ownership, University College London, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context/ (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context/), accessed 18 June 2020. Catherine Hall, ‘Writing History, Making “Race”: slave-owners and their stories’, Australian Historical Studies, vol 47, no 3, 2016, pp. 365-80.
33. Georgina Arnott, ‘Links in the Chain: Legacies of British slavery in Australia’, ABR (Australian Book Review), no 423, August 2020, pp. 8-14.
34. LBS Principal Investigator Catherine Hall noted that almost half of this amount went to just six per cent of the slave-owners: the ‘absentee’ ones. The £20 million was in fact loaned to the British parliament by Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, and only finally repaid in 2015, ‘Writing History, Making “Race”’.
35. Arnott argues that ‘150 individuals who applied for slavery compensation migrated to, or invested in, the Australian colonies – or had descendants who did so’ ‘Links in the Chain’. But research is showing that this is an underestimate.
36. Arnott, ‘Links in the Chain’; A. A. Morrison, ‘Hope, Louis (1817–1894)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hope-louis-3791/text5997, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed 17 February 2022.
37. Shino Konishi, ‘An Indigenous Australia Dictionary of Biography’, in Fox, ‘True Biographies of Nations?’, p. 141: only nine entries out of 1,182 (0.7 per cent) were on Aboriginal individuals.
38. For a discussion of the various criticism from Pickering on class, Frances Peters-Little & Gordon Briscoe on indigenous subjects and Ann Curthoys & Patrick Grimshaw on female inclusion, see Nolan & Fernon, The ADB Story, pp. 24-26, 244, 308.
39. Christopher Cunneen with Jill Roe, Beverley Kingston & Stephen Garton (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplement 1580–1980, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2005.
40. See entries on Thomas Burbury, John Frost, George Loveless, Thomas Francis Meagher, John Mitchel, William Smith O’Brien, Kevin Izod O’Doherty and Zephaniah Williams in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vols. 1 and 2, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1966-1967. George Rudé, Protest and Punishment: The Story of Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788-1868, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978.
41. Melanie Nolan, Breadwinning. New Zealand Women and the State, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2000. Karen Fox, Māori and Aboriginal women in the public eye: representing difference, 1950-2000, ANU, Canberra, 2011.
42. Rani Kerin, Doctor do-good: Charles Duiguid and Aboriginal advancement, 1930s-1970s, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2011. Malcolm Allbrook (ed), Never stand still: stories of land, life and politics in the Kimberley / John Darraga Watson, Jarlmadangah Burru Aboriginal Corporation, Derby WA, 2012. Sam Furphy, Edward M. Curr and the Tide of History, ANU Press, Canberra, 2013. Sam Furphy & Amanda Nettelbeck (eds), Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries in Britain’s Antipodean Colonies, Routledge, New York and London, 2019.
43. Melanie Nolan, Kin: A Collective Biography of a New Zealand Working-class Family, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2005. Malcolm Allbrook, Henry Prinsep’s empire: framing a distant colony, ANU Press, Canberra, 2014.
44. Malcolm Allbrook & Sophie Scott-Brown (eds), Family history and historians in Australia and New Zealand: related histories, Routledge, London, 2021, preliminary pages.
45. For instance, in 1977 it was decided that there needed to be a female member of the editorial board. Heather Radi was the first woman appointed. In 1985 the board was ‘revamped’ as Geoff Serle, then general editor made clear, with some ‘younger members, more women members, and people with twentieth-century interests’: historians Ann Curthoys and Jill Roe together with Don Aitkin, a political scientist, were appointed. Nolan & Fernon, The ADB Story, p. 25.
46. See, Melanie Nolan, ‘Reshaping the Australian Dictionary of Biography: Feminist Interventions’ blog, http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/australian-dictionary-biography/ circulated on International Women's Day, 8 March 2017 on VIDA!, Australian Women's History Network and republished as ‘Missing in Action’, Inside Story, 16 March 2017, http://insidestory.org.au/missing-in-action, accessed 17 February 2022.
47. Libby Connors, Warrior: a legendary leader’s dramatic life and violent death on the colonial frontier, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest NSW, 2015; Michael Powell, Musquito Brutality and exile: aboriginal resistance in New South Wales and Van Diemen, Fullers Bookshop Pty Ltd with the assistance of the Plomley Foundation of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 2016; Alexis Wright, Tracker: Stories of Tracker Tilmouth, Giramondo Publishing Company, Artarmon NSW, 2017; Cassandra Pybus, Truganini: journey through the apocalypse, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest NSW, 2020; Henry Reynolds & Nicholas Clements, Tongerlongeter: First Nations Leader & Tasmanian War Hero, NewSouth, Sydney, 2021.
48. The Australian Indigenous Autobiography Archive is an initiative of the University of Western Sydney, hosted by the National Centre for Biography, at the ANU. Using research funds granted by the University of Western Sydney to Tim Rowse, the project employed Ms Elizabeth Watt 2011-2014, https://ia.anu.edu.au/about-us/aiaa/.
49. Christine Fernon, ‘Indexing histories of domestic and sexual violence through the online Australian Dictionary of Biography’, presentation to the Research Roadshow on Biography and Memoir, held in association with the ANU Network on the History and Legacies of Violence, 11 June 2021.
50. Shino Konishi, ‘An Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography’, in Fox, ‘True Biographies of Nations?’; Frank Bongiorno, ‘Reframing Australian Portraits’, Meanjin, vol 78, no 2, June 2019, pp. 88-94.
51. Email communication with Ass. Prof. Rebecca Kippen, 14 July 2021, based on various Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) sources: Provisional Mortality Statistics, 2020, ABS, Canberra, 2021; Deaths Australia 2016-2019, ABS, Canberra, 2020; Historical Population, Deaths, 1824-2015, ABS, Canberra, 2019, https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/historical-population/2016; all accessed 14 July 2021.
52. Len Smith, ‘How many people had lived in Australia before it was annexed by the English in 1788?’ in Gordon Briscoe (ed), The Aboriginal Population Revisited: 70,000 Years to the Present, ANU, Canberra, 2002, pp. 9-15.
53. Malcolm Allbrook, ‘Mungo Man (?–?)’ and ‘Mungo Lady (?–?)’, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mungo-lady-27703/text35292, accessed 17 February 2022.
54. https://peopleaustralia.anu.edu.au/stats/site, accessed 17 February 2022.
55. Lawrence Goldman, ‘A Monument to the Victorian Age? Continuity and Discontinuity in the Dictionaries of National Biography 1882–2004’, Journal of Victorian Culture, vol 11, no 1, 2006, p. 118; Marcello Verga, ‘The Dictionary is Dead, Long Live the Dictionary! Biographical Collections in National Contexts’, in Ilaria Porciani & Jo Tollebeek (eds), Setting the Standards: Institutions, Networks and Communities of National Historiography, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills and New York, 2012, p. 89.
56. McGinness, ‘Assessing the ADB’, p. 336.