Geoffrey Blainey

Biography

Geoffrey Blainey AC is a prominent Australian historian, academic, and commentator with a wide international audience. The sales of his books now approach  1,400,000,  and many have been translated into foreign languages. Since the publication  of his first book in 1954 he has been noted for authoritative texts on the economic and social history of Australia, including The Rush that Never Ended (1963) and The Tyranny of Distance (1966) and Triumph of the Nomads (1975). He himself admits that he has sometimes been singled out as “controversial”. In all he has published some 40 books, including global  histories such as A Short History of The World (2001) and A Short History of Christianity (2012), and has written prolifically for learned journals, newspapers and television. In military circles in the United States, and especially in the Pentagon, his book The Causes of War (1973 with later editions) is still widely quoted. He held chairs in economic history and then in history at the University of Melbourne from 1968 to 1988 and was dean of the arts faculty from 1982 to 1987. He served as Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University in 1982-83. At the United Nations Building in New York in 1988 he shared the Britannica Award for “ the dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of mankind” along with J Kenneth Galbraith, Jane Jacobs and Octavio Paz. In 2000 he  was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, having already received the A.O. or Officer in its inaugural year of  1975. He has been chair of a wide range of Australian Government councils and  boards, including the Australian Council for the Arts, the Commonwealth Literary Fund, the Australia-China Council, the Literature Board,  and the National Council for the Centenary of Federation. He was the inaugural chancellor  of Federation University, founded  in Ballarat .  From 1997 to 2004 he was on  the council of the Australian War Memorial. During the last quarter century, the National Trust annually has named  Blainey as one of Australia’s ‘Living National Treasures’. He has  served on the boards of philanthropic bodies, including the Ian Potter Foundation from 1991 and the Deafness Foundation Trust from 1993, and is patron of others.  His wife Ann Blainey is a well known biographer.