Before I Forget: an Early Memoir by Geoffrey Blainey
Penguin Books, 2020 (first published 2019) ISBN 9781760899103
What a delightful book: sometimes a book "drops into your lap" without you ever intending to hunt it out or read it, but when it does, and when you do, it leaves you happy. Before I Forget is a beautifully written book describing the early years of one of Australia's finest historians from his own viewpoint.
The son of a Methodist preacher, Geoffrey Blainey spent his early years in a variety of Victorian towns, including Leongatha, Ballarat, and Geelong. These formative years seeded Blainey's love of history, and for the reader, we find out other things as well: he loved football, both playing the game, and supporting the Geelong Football Club, and he was adventurous, travelling and exploring as much as he could. His description of early hitch-hiking trips up and down the east coast of the country are wonderful evocations of the countryside during the late Forties. He was also clever - he won a scholarship to the prestigious Wesley College and his experiences there under the influence of good teachers and fellow students helped turn him into a writer and historian.
As for becoming the world-renowned historian, well, he sort of fell into it. Studying history at Melbourne University, he did well, and was active in student life as editor of the student newspaper Farrago, but had no plans at that stage to enter academia (astonishingly, Blainey did not even formally take his degree until after he was employed as a lecturer at the University!), feeling rather that he should take up writing or journalism full-time. But how to do that in early 1950s Australia, when even a "best-seller" didn't bring in enough money to keep hearth and home together?
Blainey found a way of managing to do just that - by being paid a salary to write a book! He fell into doing it by being recommended by one of his university teachers to write the history of the Mt Lyell mining concern, where he was paid a stipend while living on-site. His description of how he went about writing the book, and how he met the locals gives the reader not only an idea of Blainey's working methods, but also an idea of what a personable man he is. He devotes further pages to his other early books, up to and including the book that did the most to launch him as a historian, The Tyranny of Distance. It is a credit to not only his historical work, but to his writing style that many of his books are still in print.
As well as describing his writings, and the people he met through them (which included most of the big names of mining in Australia and indeed the world in the 1950s, and the last of the "old-time" prospectors), he gives us a wonderful little vignette of his journey in 1966 through China and across the USSR, a lone and carefree traveller through the Cultural Revolution and Communism - I have been meaning to read the book he wrote about that journey for a long time; I must hunt it out.
This memoir stops when Blainey has reached his forties, and focuses mostly on his childhood, education and professional life: the reason for this - as he writes in the preface - is that this was enough to make a good-sized book. Here's hoping there is another volume to come.
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