In the footsteps of Keith Hancock

A Three-Cornered Life:  The Historian WK Hancock
By Jim Davidson
(UNSW Press, 2010, 624 pages)

Keith Hancock's stature as an historian is emphasised by a quote from Stuart Macintyre, prominently cited on the dust jacket of this new biography, that ''if there were a Nobel Prize for History, Hancock surely would have won it.''

Hancock is generally regarded as one of the big three Australian historians of the twentieth century, along with Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey.  However, where their reputations were largely built by writing about their own country, Hancock's came from writing about other places.  Major focuses in his career included the ltalian Risorgimento, the British Commonwealth, the British war effort during World War Two (he was its official historian), and South African politician, Jan Smuts.

While pursuing these subjects he was based at the universities of Oxford, Birmingham and London and, as he captured in the title of his own memoir Country and Calling, he believed that to pursue his calling, he had to be away from his own country.  Author of this weighty new biography, Jim Davidson, turns this duality into an aspect of a three-cornered life by pointing out that there were also lengthy periods when a third country was seminal to Hancock's work -- Italy earlier in his career and South Africa later -- indeed, ''he wrote far more on South Africa than he did on his homeland''.

Yet, despite the majority of his work being produced offshore and being about overseas subjects, in his home country Hancock's reputation still in large measure hangs off the book he wrote in his early thirties, during a short and generally unhappy stint at Adelaide University.  Published in 1930, Australia has remained the benchmark by which other short histories of the nation are judged.  As Andrew Kemp wrote in 100 Great Books of Liberty ''it is essential reading for the Australian liberal primarily for Hancock's eloquent criticism of the counter-intuitive policies of "state socialism" and protection, and the connection of those policies with Australia's democratic ethos.''

Hancock was never particularly proud of the book, not seeing it as forming a continuum with the rest of his opus, regarding it as "off the main highroad that I was trying to follow in my teaching and thinking'' and thought his next major work ''800% better''.  In 1968, he reflected on the book in the Review and found ''its style showy and its pronouncements sweeping'' and thought he had been ''too fond of ticking off his fellow countrymen''.  The view Hancock held at the time of writing Australia that, in Davidson's words, ''some return to classical liberalism was essential'' bore the influence of time spent lecturing in Perth under the guidance of Edward Shann.  However, over the years, Hancock became less sympathetic to free-market economics.

Late in life, he became a passionate environmentalist, an interest reflected in his pioneering environmental study of the Monaro region of NSW, Discovering Monaro, and even more so in his campaign against the building of the telecommunications tower atop Black Mountain in Canberra.  He also adopted various other left-wing stances, such as opposing Australia's alliance with the United States, although on matters of etiquette he remained a conservative, insisting that younger academics wear ties for formal occasions.

Oddly, the work Hancock partially disowned has probably stood the test of time better than those of which he was more proud.  The British Commonwealth has nowhere near the significance that Hancock foresaw for it.  Jan Smuts was undoubtedly a major figure of the twentieth century and, in many ways, worthy of the inordinate amount of time Hancock invested in producing four volumes of documents and a two volume biography.  However, even by the time Hancock had finished the work, the tidal wave of support for black majority rule amongst the Western intelligentsia had rendered the nuances of the different strands of white South African politics somewhat esoteric.

If his historical interests were different from Clark and Blainey, Hancock shared with them the characteristic of being the son of a minister of religion, in his case an Anglican one.  Born in 1898, his childhood was divided between Bairnsdale in east Gippsland and the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds.  He attended Melbourne Grammar, Melbourne University and, after a short spell in Perth, won a Rhodes Scholarship which saw him initially at Balliol, before securing a fellowship at All Souls, a college described by Davidson as ''perhaps the most exclusive club in England ... then at the peak of its influence''.  It was to have a profound influence on Hancock not just in a positive practical sense, helping secure future appointments, but also because ''just as his native country had become centred in his mind on a mythical Bairnsdale, so Oxford and even England became essentialised in All Souls.''

Other than the short spell in Adelaide, Hancock did not return to Australia to live until he went to the ANU when he was almost 60.  His on-again, off-again attitude towards whether he should take up a position in Canberra is shown to be consistent with many other periods of his life.  Davidson opines that it seemed that ''in order to function properly, Hancock seemed to need a well-developed option on standby,'' also noting other aspects of his personality such as having ''a streak of pedantry in him''.  Sometimes Hancock seemed to struggle for self-awareness.  For instance, soon after he was knighted, Hancock was ''mortified'' to discover that his new status had scared away an old Australian friend who was visiting London, and was surprised that others found him ''rather pleased with himself.''

However, it needs to be noted that Hancock was certainly not an academic detached from real life.  During the Second World War, he not only spent his days studying the economics of the war effort, he spent long nights during the Blitz acting as a fire-spotter, sometimes at St Paul's Cathedral.  The following decade, one of the more unusual episodes in his career, was being sent by the British Government to Uganda in 1954 as a constitutional expert to try to negotiate the future of the province of Buganda after its leader had been expelled.

A tricky aspect of writing this biography for Davidson was deciding how to treat Hancock's marriage to his first wife, Theaden.  His source material was limited by the fact that, not only did Hancock scarcely mention his wife in his own auto-biographical writing, he also destroyed all their personal correspondence soon after she died.  Davidson places her in her own chapter to avoid random appearances in the narrative based solely on the availability of a scrap of evidence.

The chapter begins by noting that ''if people know anything about Keith Hancock beyond his writings and his academic career, it is that he had a difficult marriage''.  Probably most of his colleagues regarded her as ''difficult'', but it is clear that this label could equally be applied to Hancock.  However despite many difficulties in their married life, there was still obviously a strong bond between them, which saw them become particularly close during Theaden's final illness.

The Hancocks were unable to have children and this is one of a number of disappointments that lend a streak of sadness to the book.  This is certainly present from the death of Hancock's brother Jim on the Western Fronr in 1916 onwards, or perhaps, given the way he reflected on it, even from the time he left his idyllic early childhood in the Victorian countryside.

While there are aspects of this book, such as the insights into personal life, which probably would not be to its subject's tastes, overall it is a biography that lives up to Hancock's three watchwords as a historian -- attachment, justice, span.  And thanks to an eye-watering list of research grants, Davidson has been able to travel the globe in the footsteps of his subject, confirming Hancock's oft-used quote from Tawney that ''historians need not only documents, but boots.''

Davidson has produced a substantial biography of an important Australian.  It is also worth noting that this is a magnificent looking book.  UNSW Press are to be congratulated for demonstrating what is obvious to any bibliophile, but sometimes obscure to others, that there is more to the reading experience than just words on a screen.