John David RICKARD (1935 - 2024)

Professor of Australian Studies (1995 - 1998)

As a historian and Professor of Australian Studies, John Rickard, who has died aged 89, had his ear tuned to the murmurs, not just the loudest voices, in his attempts to understand the psyche of the nation in which he was born.

His visionary writing on the shaping of Australia argued that there was no single overarching paradigm to explain the complexity of its history; all events are multi-faceted. His insistence that culture is not created by striving to project a shared national identity but by the means it develops to reconcile and accommodate the dissonant forces within it, was perhaps his most crucial contribution to the national debate. To obsess about what is distinctive in Australian culture was to ignore this reality.

John was Professor of Australian Studies at Monash from 1995-1998 and as such, played a major part in developing the Australian history course and coordinating the Master of Arts in Australia Studies in the National Centre for Australian Studies. Throughout his career, John published widely on Australian cultural history and biography. His landmark 1976 book, Class and Politics, New South Wales, Victoria and the early Commonwealth, 1890-1910, which won the Ernest Scott Prize, broke new ground in an already well-worked field and remains an indispensable reference for students.

Another of his great works, Australia: A Cultural History, first published in 1988 at a time when the subgenre of cultural history was relatively new, still remains the only short history of Australia from a cultural perspective. The book was said to be remarkable in its ability to anticipate the dizzying turns that history would take. Rather than laboriously detailing governors and governments, John focused on the transmission of values, beliefs, and customs amongst the diverse mix of peoples who are today’s Australians. The third edition, published in 2018, concluded with a critical review of the challenges facing contemporary Australia and portentously warned readers that “we may get the future we deserve.”

John was known for writing with clarity and elegance, always to the point and frequently with originality. Long before there was much talk about the history of emotions, Rickard, with his early interest in psycho-history, paid increasing attention to the problems of psychobiography, offering judgements that were cool, fair and penetrating. In his work, he sought out emotional patterns in Australian life and it is here where some of his most astute insights were to be found. His capacity to temper theoretical exuberance with meticulously-gathered evidence, his sensitivity to nuances of personality and his eye for a telling phrase were his greatest strengths.

John David Rickard was born in February, 1935 and grew up in Sydney. Following an early acting career, in which he once auditioned in front of Noël Coward, he made his name as a historian in Melbourne. His love and knowledge of both cities led to him being described as “the Canberra” of historians, and the avoidance of any Sydney or Melbourne bias was a hallmark of his work.

After graduating with a BA from the University of Sydney in 1955, he received a Diploma in Political Science and Economics from Oxford in 1957. He came to Monash as a lecturer in the Department of History in 1971 and completed his PhD two years later. He continued to work his way up the academic ladder, becoming senior lecturer (1978) and reader (1986) before being appointed Professor of Australian Studies. Not surprisingly given his theatre background, he was an enthusiastic member of the Alexander Theatre Committee, which he chaired in 1979 and director of the theatre (1974-1976). In 1990 he became only the third academic outside University of Melbourne to edit the prestigious Australian Historic Studies journal where he attempted to loosen the academic constraints and make it more user-friendly.

John practised what he preached. Colleagues agreed that he was not an easy person to get to know, but the maturity of his work was matched by the maturity of his personality.

His biography of the Australian lawyer, politician and judge, H B Higgins, The Rebel as Judge won The Age non-fiction Book of the Year in 1984, whilst A Family Romance: The Deakins at Home (1996) which tackles the historian’s challenge of exploring what he called “imaginative territory” was critically acclaimed. In later years his research interests became more diffuse, branching into the history of childhood, immigration and theatre history.

Outside Monash, John was the visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University (1997-1998) and in 2007 the Monash Visiting Fellow of Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He was president of the Green Room Awards 1985-1990 and remained throughout his life a generous patron and friend of the performing arts.

John was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1991 and was appointed Emeritus Professor at Monash in 2015. He is survived by his sister, Barbara, niece Lucy, nephew Patrick and their families.

John Rickard died on 26 July 2024.

Edited version of article published in The Insider, 1 August 2024.