Geoffrey Norman Blainey, AC, FAHA, FASSA (born 11 March 1930) is an Australian historian, academic, best selling author and commentator.
Blainey is noted for his authoritative texts on the economic and social history of Australia, including The Tyranny of Distance.
[13] Alan Atkinson, author of a three-volume history of Australia, called Blainey "our most eminent living historian" in a long review that mixes criticism with praise.
[20] In one of the book's early chapters, Blainey challenges the notion that Australia was colonised by the British in the 18th century solely to serve as a place of exile for convicts.
Blainey's assertion that broader strategic and commercial factors also influenced Britain's decision to establish a penal settlement in New South Wales led to significant debate among Australian historians.
[21] Triumph of the Nomads is "a book which has done more than any other to open Australian minds to the pre-European past of their land", according to Ken Inglis of the ANU.
[22] The Causes of War has become one of the most cited works in founding modern scholarship on international conflict (as at Sep 2020 – 2095 citations on Google Scholar).
[25] Blainey was invited by Prime Minister Harold Holt in 1967 to sit on the advisory board of the Commonwealth Literary Fund, serving until its abolition in 1973 (chairman 1971–73).
Blainey represented writers on the small group instructed to find the new national anthem that Whitlam had promised.
[citation needed] In 1976, he became an inaugural commissioner on the Australian Heritage Commission, set up by the Fraser government to decide on conservation and environmental matters.
[citation needed] In 2001, Blainey presented the Boyer Lectures on the theme This Land is all Horizons: Australian Fears and Visions.
[29] Under the Howard government, he served as a member of the council of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra from 1997 to 2004, an appointment initially criticised in parliament by Laurie Brereton of the Labor opposition but approved in other circles.
[30] After the decisive failure in 1999 of the referendum to make Australia a republic, Blainey and the constitutional lawyer, Professor Colin Howard, were singled out by the Australian republicans' leader, Malcolm Turnbull, as deserving a special share of the blame.
In their defence, it was contended that their influence was fair, for they operated in an official committee chaired by the neutral Sir Ninian Stephen, lawyer and former governor general.
[citation needed] He sat, from 1997 to 2004, on the Council of the Royal Humane Society of Australasia which recommended awards for acts of civilian bravery.
[citation needed] He was said by leftist critics to be closely aligned[citation needed] with the former Liberal-National Coalition government of John Howard in Australia, with Howard shadowing Blainey's conservative views on some issues, especially the view that Australian history has been hijacked by social liberals.
Criticising what he viewed as disproportionately high levels of Asian immigration, then running at 40 per cent of the annual intake, he added: "Rarely in the history of the modern world has a nation given such preference to a tiny ethnic minority of its population as the Australian Government has done in the past few years, making that minority the favoured majority in its immigration policy".
[36] Blainey's speech, along with subsequent articles and a book on the subject, ignited nationwide controversy, especially in the Australian federal parliament, which had not debated the principles of the immigration policy for many years.
Blainey also warned that the "crimson thread of kinship" invoked by Sir Henry Parkes was being undermined, stating: "The cult of the immigrant, the emphasis on separateness for ethnic groups, the wooing of Asia and the shunning of Britain are part of this thread-cutting."
In contrast, while Blainey was briefly in Europe in May, a professor and 23 other history teachers from the University distributed a public letter distancing themselves from what they called his "racialist" views.
Blainey and his family were subject to threats of violence, prompting him at the police's request to remove his name and address from the public telephone book and organise security for his home.
"[44] On the so-called "Blainey affair", Australian prime minister John Howard would remark: "Nowhere, I suggest, have the fangs of the left so visibly been on display as they were in a campaign based on character assassination and intellectual dishonesty through their efforts to trash the name and reputation of that great Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey.
Subsequently, in December 2007, the University of Melbourne granted a Doctor of Laws to Blainey[46] and declared that he was, in Australia, probably a unique professional historian, noting that he had fostered wide public interest in history.
[citation needed] Blainey coined the term the "Black armband view of history" to refer to those historians and academics, usually leftist, who denigrated Australia's past to an unusual degree and accused European Australians of genocide against Aboriginal people.
The past treatment of Aborigines, of Chinese, of Kanakas, of non-British migrants, of women, the very old, the very young, and the poor was singled out, sometimes legitimately, sometimes not....
The Black Armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced.Critics of Blainey's article claimed that it was anti-Aboriginal.
"[54] In June 2020, Blainey was critical of iconoclast destructions of historical monuments and public statues following the George Floyd protests.
[55] Blainey viewed the destructions as rallying against Western civilization, calling for a tempered approach to acknowledging the West's "virtues", in addition to its shortcomings.
[57] At the United Nations in New York in 1988, he was one of five intellectuals, including the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who were awarded gold medals for "excellence in the dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of mankind".
[58] In 2002 the degree of Doctor of Letters was conferred on Professor Blainey in recognition of his contribution to the University of Ballarat and the community in general.