With the death of John Rickard, Australia has lost a distinguished cultural historian, an elegant and perceptive biographer, an inspiring teacher, and a generous supporter of the arts. From his first career as an actor, Rickard brought a keen understanding of the human comedy, a mastery of the spoken and written word and a wide-ranging appreciation of the arts, evident especially in his most influential book, Australia: A Cultural History.
John David Rickard was born on 9 February 1935, the second child and only son of a middle-class Sydney couple, Philip and Pearl (Mildred) Rickard. ‘My parents’, he recalled in his poignant portrait of their marriage, ‘took England and Empire as a given.’ His father Phillip was an RAAF officer and church organist, and John grew up in a household steeped in the music of Elgar, the rituals of the Anglican Church, and the BBC radio comedies of Jimmy Edwards and Dick Bentley. During the Second World War, the family moved between postings in Melbourne and regional New South Wales, where John attended primary schools, before returning to the upper North Shore. At Knox Grammar he began to pick up prizes and, encouraged by his family, to aspire to university. He began an arts-law degree at Sydney University but dropped law after a year or so. ‘I never for a moment imagined one could aspire to be a historian’, he later recalled. He narrowly missed winning a Shell Scholarship but the company, hoping to recruit him as an executive, sent him off to Oxford for a year. There he completed a diploma in politics and economics and joined the Balliol Players on a summer tour of Aristophanes’ ‘The Frogs’.
Back in Australia he quit the oil company to follow his burgeoning interest in theatre, first in Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre and later, as the junior lead, in the touring company of ‘The King and I’. Acting would become, for several years, his profession, and the theatre his second home. It was there, among other gay men, that he first found the space and affection to be his authentic self. ‘I had at the age of twenty-five, crossed the border into the freedom of strange new territory’, he later wrote.
By his mid-thirties, he realised that acting was too insecure a career and decided to enrol as an MA Prelim student at Monash University. He immediately impressed his teachers who, in those days, included such luminaries as Geoffrey Serle, Allan Shaw and Ian Turner, and was appointed as a lecturer even before he had completed his PhD. His thesis topic, suggested by Serle, was one of standard topics of Australian history– the emergence in the 1890s of class-based political parties. But while the topic was old, John’s approach was not. He rejected the long-held view of Labor as the party of initiative and non-Labor as the party of resistance, insisting on seeing each party in its own terms and class as something that was ‘made’, as E.P. Thompson contended, through the political contest. The book of his thesis, Class and Politics, New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth 1890-1910 (1976) was immediately recognised as a major work, winning the premier award for Australian and New Zealand history, the Ernest Scott Prize.
As a lecturer, John became responsible for a large full-year second and third year subject, regularly drawing 150-200 students. He quickly mastered the art of lecturing. As an actor, he knew how to pitch his voice, adjust his pace and tone to the response of his audience, and deliver his lines with appropriate humour or irony. His speaking voice was cultured, mellifluous and confident, yet without airs or exaggerated gestures. As a tutor and supervisor, he enabled his students to develop and express their own views rather than to follow his or anyone else’s line. He was the most genial of colleagues, interested in the lives of others, unfailingly helpful yet maintaining a discreet distance.
In Class and Politics John had been drawn to the group of middle-class radicals, mostly Victorians, whose lives and commitments seemed to transcend conventional class alignments. How could we get inside the minds of these men to reveal the psychological springs of their politics? As he began work on a biography of Henry Bournes Higgins, the ‘father of the Australian arbitration system’, John visited Los Angeles to meet some American ‘psycho-historians’, as they called themselves. He recoiled from the pretensions of the word ‘psycho-historian’ – it reminded him, he said, of ‘a demented historian escaping from a Hitchcock film’– but he attended some sessions in psychoanalysis (‘analysts as a group are fun to watch’) and began to reflect on Higgins’ childhood as he also reflected more deeply on his own. Among the gay community in California, he witnessed the approach of the AIDS epidemic, a crisis that would rob him of dear friends and bring questions of personal and sexual identity to the forefront of his attention.
H.B. Higgins, a reticent man of high intellect and deep integrity, was a sympathetic subject for a historian with similar traits. In H.B Higgins’ The Rebel as Judge the theoretical scaffolding is almost invisible but the insights into Higgins’ upbringing and identities as Irish-Australian, husband, father, politician and judge are rich and absorbing. His beautifully written book became the Age Book of the Year and remains among the most satisfying and psychologically penetrating Australian political biographies.
With the approach of the 1988 Bicentenary of Australia, John accepted the invitation of an English publisher to write a short history of Australia. Most short histories are concise political narratives with incidental social comment. Australia A Cultural History was different. John’s personal knowledge of high culture –music, literature, film, opera, painting and architecture – was wide but his book adopts a broad ‘anthropological’ definition of culture embracing vernacular as well as refined forms. Rather than joining the well-worn arguments about whether, and when, Australia would evolve an independent national culture, he insisted on viewing the culture just as it was, attending to what was derivative as well as to what was original. He elicited the unresolved tensions – between egalitarianism and class-consciousness, independence and dependence– that permeate our national life. He was a fond but sometimes disappointed observer of his fellow Australians. ‘It might be the best of all possible worlds if Australia could gain the self-respect of independence without the accompanying trappings of nationalism,’ he wrote. ‘As it is, there is a danger that we might be conditioned to accept the trappings without the substance.’ Australia A Cultural History (1988) became one of the most admired and durable short histories of Australia. John Hirst included it in his “First Eleven’ of Australian historical works. The publication of a third edition in 2017 enabled John to bid his lifelong commitment to Australian history a fond farewell.
Raised in Sydney, John had become, without quite intending it, a Melburnian. By the 1990s he had plans for a group biography of the intellectuals and politicians who gathered around Alfred Deakin and his family in Federation Melbourne. While there was much to admire in that liberal tradition John resisted the assumption that Victoria was somehow special. ‘It may be that I have I arrived too late in life to be truly received by my adopted State’, he wrote in 1978. ‘There are things about Victoria I refuse to take seriously.’ Detached yet with close connections in each place, he was a shrewd observer of the two cities that defined much of the nation’s life.
In 1996 John delivered an instalment of his Deakin project. A Family Romance: The Deakins at Home focuses on a pivotal moment in Deakin’s domestic life. In exploring the complicated three-way relationship between Deakin, his wife Pattie and his sister Catherine, John had moved beyond the familiar territory of the historian. ‘It is the plot of their family romance which lures me on and my interest needs no other justification’, he wrote. ‘[W]hy should that imaginative territory be regarded as the being the sole preserve of the novelist?’ A crucial scene in the Deakin’s family romance, an argument between Deakin’s wife and sister at their holiday house at Point Lonsdale, is only alluded to in the original sources, but in a memorable passage of his book John imagines what might have occurred and reproduces the scene as dramatic dialogue.
Perhaps only someone who had trodden the boards himself could have brought it off. But that painful scene between the Deakins also resonated with John’s own life experience. At each stage of his writing career, John’s instinct was to go deeper — deeper into his subject and into his own subjectivity. An Imperial Affair: Portrait of an Australian Marriage (2013) begins with another family conflict. John is a small boy, lying awake in the sleepout behind his parents’ house in Dubbo when he overhears them arguing. While stationed abroad in London his father has had an affair with an Englishwoman. Listening in the darkness, John feels the anger and recrimination his parents carefully shielded from their children. In tracing the reverberations of the affair, John is also tracing the dissolution of the imperial world to which his parents belonged. An Imperial Affair is the most unflinchingly personal of John’s works and the most moving.
By the 1990s John’s stature as a leading Australian historian was confirmed by his appointment in 1990 as editor of the premier journal in the field, Australian Historical Studies, his election in 1991 as a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, his promotion in 1995 to a Professorial Fellowship in the Centre for Australian Studies at Monash and, in 1997, his appointment to the Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard. He retired formally from the university in 2000 but continued to be closely engaged with Monash, the Royal Historical Society of Victoria and a host of other cultural organisations, including the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Opera, Victorian Opera, Australian Book Review and the Green Room Awards.
From the mid-1980s, John was a regular attender at St Mary’s Anglican Church in North Melbourne, drawn to its warmly inclusive fellowship and the beauty of its Anglo-Catholic ritual. He became a soloist in its choir, where his unaccompanied chanting of Exsultet for the Easter vigil is fondly remembered. He also served in the vestry and on church committees, and in 2008 wrote a history of the parish, An Assemblage of Decent Men and Women. His Christmas visits to his family in Sydney remained one of the constants in his life; his sister Barbara, a fellow writer, was a constant presence in his thinking and writing. In 2012, he underwent an operation to remove a cancerous growth in his throat. The operation was successful, but it silenced his singing voice. Later complications sapped his strength and he died in Caulfield Hospital on 26 July 2024. He was fittingly farewelled at a Requiem Mass at St Mary’s on 9 August 2024.
Towards the end of his biography of Higgins, John describes the old man grappling with the prospect of death and the fear that he will soon be forgotten. ‘There is, in one sense, no alternative to forgetting’, he writes, ‘and the writing of history represents our forlorn attempt to shine a torch into the darkness behind us. Yet if the hope of immortality is a form of human vanity, [he continues] it is remarkable how the beam of the torch can sometimes suggest that the man is still speaking to us.’ Alas, we will miss John’s wise and gentle presence but through his luminous words he will still be speaking to us.
Emeritus Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor Graeme Davison AO FAHA FASSA
Monash University
