ANU Founders - Noel Butlin

ABLative No.13, Autumn/Winter 1991

Noel George Butlin 1921-1991

Author: Michael Saclier 1991/ edited by Sigrid McCausland 2001

Noel Butlin died on 2 April 1991 aged 69. Other obituaries having told his life in detail - there is no need to do more than sketch it here. The purpose of this essay is different, as will appear anon.

Born on 19 December 1921, Noel's early life was one of considerable hardship owing to the loss of his father in a hit and run accident when he was very young.

His ability was apparent early. He received First Class Honours and the University Medal at graduation from Sydney University in 1942. He was snapped up by the Commonwealth and spent the rest of the War working first in London and then in Washington as an economic adviser.

From 1946 to 1949 he lectured in Economics at the University of Sydney where his brother was Professor and then spent two years as a Rockefeller Fellow at Harvard. In 1951 he accepted a Senior Research Fellowship in Economics at the Australian National University, thus beginning an association which was to last the rest of his life.

Becoming successively Reader in Economics (1954) and Professor Economic History (1962), Noel Butlin proceeded to produce a series of major works which revolutionised a number of areas of historical and economic discourse.

His Public Capital Formation in Australia 1860-1900 (1954) and Private Capital Formation in Australia 1861-1900 (1955), together with his major book, Investment in Australian Economic Development (1954), rewrote the history of the Australian economy from the gold rushes.

During the late 1960s and the 1970s Butlin pursued themes which had emerged in his earlier work, especially the economic role of the public sector, and published Government and Capitalism in 1982.

He was also Director of the Botany Bay Project in the mid-1970s and edited its publications. This might have been his crowning achievement but it never achieved its potential. It was one of the few sub-optimal results of Noel's career.

In the 1980s Butlin turned towards a re-evaluation of the Australian economy before 1850. It was typical that his articles and book - Our Original Aggression (1983) - made major contributions in the area of Aboriginal history and gave rise to debate on a number of occasions. At the time of his death he was reworking this research into a two-volume history of the Australian economy to 1850 which was published in 1992.

On the day before his death the Queen gave special approval for the award of Companion of the Order of Australia.

Noel Butlin and the Archives

When research work in economic history began at the Australian National University in 1952, "the first step taken" - and here I am quoting from an unattributed paper written in 1960, probably by Noel Butlin -

was to explore the resources of the National Library, the Victorian Public Library, and the New South Wales Public Library. This check showed that, except for holdings of the last-named library, covering the period up to about 1850, but not after that date, no significant basic material, other than conventional government records and newspapers were available in Australian libraries for purposes of research in economics or economic history at this or any other university.

They began by microfilming all extant unpublished government statistical records ("Blue Books"). This project had an interesting echo in 1989 when the Australian Bureau of Statistics published a comprehensive microfiche edition of colonial statistics 1804-1901.

This was followed in 1953 by the first approaches to firms in Sydney, Melbourne and Newcastle for the loan of records. A second quotation from the 1960 document informs us:

In the course of these approaches to firms, two important issues emerged. First, borrowing selected records was very inadequate. Secondly, a great deal of valuable material of wide interest and almost entirely manuscript was being held by these firms and much was being destroyed. It became apparent that business firms while conscious of the historical value of their records were unable to retain them and were willing to transfer them to safe-keeping of the Australian National University. At the same time, no Australian library or university was actively attempting to preserve these essential research sources.

The first "indefinite" loan deposit agreements were concluded in 1953 with certain Melbourne building and finance firms. In 1954 the first very large deposit was received from the Australian Agricultural Company covering its pastoral, mineral, land-owning and urban development interests, 1823-1914.

In 1955 Goldsbrough Mort and Co. deposited its records 1850-1950. By 1957, the University had at its disposal, the records of some thirty business firms.

In 1959 - perhaps partly in response to the growing unwieldiness of the mass of records which was being acquired, but probably more directly as a response to the awareness of the quantity of company records available, the Research School of Social Sciences appointed its first archivist. The fact that Bruce Shields had no experience in archives indicates, I think that Noel Butlin had not yet realised that archival skills were something to be sought after. Rather, Shields was an ideal choice for the hunter-gatherer role which was required of him.

It was not until 1961, in fact, that the Archives got its first archivist with training and experience, in the person of Barbara Ross.

From its origins the Archives' activities in collecting, a field traditionally viewed as the domain of Manuscript Libraries, attracted support and encouragement but also some criticism and hostility especially from Sir Harold White, Commonwealth National Librarian.

This tension between the Library and the Archives continued at a relatively low level for several years, erupting again in 1960 over the issue of collecting trade union records - an initiative which Noel Butlin approved of and supported. This dispute ended by involving the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the Councils of the Library and the University and a formal agreement, before it was finally settled in 1961.

Butlin continued (with some intermissions) to be a major protagonist in the development of the Archives throughout the 1960s and 1970s as chairman or member of the Archives Committee. During that period he oversaw much of the growth and development of the Archives in both staff and material terms. He was deeply involved in the effort to acquire the Archives' present accommodation in Acton Underhill and the formal opening of the new building in 1981 was probably his last significant interaction with the Archives.

He was not always an easy man to deal with. He could be domineering and intimidating. He could be abrasive and infuriating. He could be wrong. He could also be kind, warm, amusing. He was human.

Although I was never close to Noel and would not presume to claim friendship I admired his great qualities and I shall miss him. Inevitably, his writings will be superseded in the normal course of academic life. His students and colleagues will age and pass away and so his memory will fade from the public memory. I would like to think of the Archives remaining as a longer-term memorial to this great Australian.