Official history

is sponsored, authorised, or endorsed by its subject. A wide range of organisations have generated such histories, and they are considered in the entry for commissioned history. In its more particular sense, official history is created at the behest of government as a record of its activity.

Official history of this kind was commonly initiated by the colonial administrations in the nineteenth century as a way of publicising the attractions of the Australian colonies to investors and immigrants. Government statisticians frequently incorporated historical material in yearbooks and other compilations, and T. A. Coghlan went further with a series of historical studies that culminated, when he was NSW agent-general in London, in the four-volume Labour and Industry in Australia (1918).

Such promotional uses of official history were joined at the end of the century by commemorative publications. James Bonwick was employed during the 1880s by the governments of NSW, Qld, SA, and Victoria to transcribe official records in London on their settlement and early administration. Bonwick's work formed the basis for the commissioned work by (G. B. Barton and Alexander Britton, History of New South Wales in two volumes (1889, 1894)), and eight volumes of (Historical Records of New South Wales, edited by F. M. Bladen (1892–1901)). These served in turn as the precedent for (Historical Records of Australia (1914–25) in 33 volumes, regarded by their editor, Frederick Watson), as ‘the birth certificates of a nation’. Watson, a medical practioner and antiquarian, was commissioned by the library committee of the Commonwealth parliament, and fell into dispute with its members; the series was abandoned after two academic historians, Ernest Scott and G. A. Wood, reviewed his work. His work is assessed by (Ann M. Mitchell in HS (1982)). A similar project was created by the Victorian government in the 1970s.

World War I initiated a new genre, military history, which tellingly became the most substantial form of official history throughout the twentieth century. When C. E. W. Bean was elected by the Australian Journalists Association as the official war correspondent in 1914, the minister for defence suggested to him that he should write a history of the conflict. Bean thought at the time (as he recalled in JRAHS, 1938) that this would require ‘a small one-volume work’. After the Armistice he submitted a scheme for 12 volumes to the Commonwealth government, which accepted and supported it for the next 20 years. Bean wrote six of the volumes and edited the others. It was agreed that the official war historians (most of them with backgrounds in journalism) would enjoy freedom from censorship: the draft of each volume was submitted to the minister for defence, who could suggest amendments, but Bean was to exercise final judgment. He later claimed that only one ‘discussion of importance’ arose from this arrangement during the entire series. On the other hand, both the publisher, George Robertson, and the retired University of Melbourne professor, T. G. Tucker, who served as ‘literary adviser’, intervened frequently. Bean's work is discussed by K. S. Inglis and his biographer, Dudley McCarthy, while Michael McKernan's introductions to the reprint of the official history by the University of Queensland Press provide a detailed commentary on its preparation.

Similar arrangements were made for the official histories of World War II, in 22 volumes, edited by Gavin Long; and the Korean War, in two, undertaken by R. J. O'Neill (1981, 1985). In both cases the writers had free access to the official records (including records closed to other historians) and were unrestricted in using them except for material deemed of continuing strategic significance. Long, like Bean, was a journalist; most of his contributors brought specialist expertise, though Paul Hasluck began the two domestic volumes as a fellow of the history department at the University of Western Australia, and the economic historians S. J. Butlin and Boris Schedvin wrote on the war economy. O'Neill combined military and academic training. They were supported by substantial research establishments and published by the Australian Government Publishing Service through the Australian War Memorial. The fourth official war series on Australian involvement in South-East Asian conflicts from 1948to1975, on the other hand, reverted to a commercial publisher, was undertaken by academic researchers, and created controversy. The principal historian, Peter Edwards, fell out with two of his colleagues, Greg Pemberton and Ann-Mari Jordens, both of whom resigned after complaining of interference.

Complementing the war histories was a series of volumes of Documents on Australian Foreign Policy 1937– (1975–), commissioned by the Department of Foreign Affairs. The present editor, W. J. Hudson, is a former academic and has also published other compilations of correspondence bearing on interwar Australian diplomacy and trade. Other federal departments and agencies have been slower to embark on official histories. David Day wrote a history of Australian customs services (2 vols, 1992, 1996); Clem Lloyd and Jacqui Rees, a history of repatriation.

Meanwhile, state governments and instrumentalities took up official history from a variety of motives. For some, it was a way of reflecting on former practice; for others, a form of public relations. Sometimes an administrator commissioned an official history to salve staff morale in a period of rapid change in previously stable and monolithic organisations; sometimes the new chief executive officer expected that a revelation of outmoded former practice would help to sweep out the detritus of the past. These commissions raised similar issues to those that bedevilled historians of business or voluntary organisations, and just as frequently strained ethical codes. Hugh Stretton argued vigorously to maintain the independence of (Susan Marsden's Business, Charity and Sentiment (1986)). From the 1980s much official history turned away from the inward study of organisational practice to more contextualised studies of the impact and effects of a public authority, frequently drawing on oral and social history techniques to develop a thematic treatment. Examples are the account by Clem Lloyd and Pat Troy of the Hunter Valley Water Board (1992); Renate Howe's edited collection on public housing in Victoria (1988); the history by Tony Dingle and Carolyn Rasmussen of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (1991); and the study of the wheat industry by Greg Whitwell and Diane Sydenham, commissioned by the Australian Wheat Board (1991).

In the past quarter-century official history has also returned to commemoration. The national sesquicentenary in 1938 was celebrated chiefly in NSW with pageants and spectacles; the other mainland states marked their centenaries during the 1920s and 1930s with a thin sprinkling of official histories. By contrast, their sesquicentenaries brought a rash of publication. WA led off in 1979 with a series of books of mixed quality, the best of them a documentary history edited by Marian Aveling (Quartly) and People of Perth by Tom Stannage; (Stannage edited the New History of Western Australia which followed in 1981). SA's historians contributed to that state's anniversary with edited collections of studies of political, social, and economic history (1986). Victoria was more adventurous with three thematic volumes on (Arriving, Settling, and Making Their Mark, written by Richard Broome, Tony Dingle, and Susan Priestley (1984)). The large audience, handsome format, and substantial budgets of these projects attracted historians; the management committees brought them into negotiation with government representatives with divergent expectations, though differences were generally resolved.

By contrast, the principal energies of the profession were occupied in the lead-up to the Bicentenary in an unofficial enterprise that they initiated, the Bicentennial History Project. The government's Bicentennial Authority sponsored a range of more popular publications, and the Commonwealth parliament commissioned three significant works: (Gavin Souter's narrative history, Acts of Parliament (1988)); an analytical study by (G. S. Reid and Martyn Forrest of Australia's Commonwealth Parliament 1901–1988 (1989)); and (Clem Lloyd's Parliament and the Press (1988)), a history of the press gallery. In similar vein, Ray Wright of the Victorian parliamentary library wrote a history of that state's legislature, A People's Counsel (1992). The centenary of the Commonwealth was marked by the preparation of a comprehensive list of archival sources, Federation: The Guide to Records (1998), and a CD-ROM, One Destiny: The Federation Story (1998). The authority established to organise the commemoration assisted a number of projects but did not attempt an official history.