Australian Dictionary of Biography

Donald Rawson, May 1996

Noel Butlin Archives (ANUA 653-285)

Donald William Rawson (1930–1997), political scientist, was born on 23 March 1930 at Camberwell, Melbourne, son of Victorian-born parents Roy Robert Rawson (1898–1971), bookseller and later publisher and politician, and his wife Florence Elizabeth, née Mitchell, teacher and dress shop owner. An elder brother, also named Donald William, had died at birth in 1929.

Both parents were dedicated Esperantists who met through the Melbourne Esperanto Club and married in 1925. Rawson’s Bookshop in Exhibition Street, Melbourne, became a centre of progressive political and intellectual life. From the 1930s, Roy was a founder of and leading figure in the Book Censorship Abolition League, the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, and the Left Book Club. He was also a Labor member for Southern Province in the Victorian Legislative Council from 1952 until his defeat in 1958.

Don, as he was known, contracted poliomyelitis at the age of two and had a lifelong paralysis of the right side of his face as a result. He attended Melbourne Boys’ High School (1943–46) where he shared the history prize in 1946 with Ken Inglis, later a colleague at the Australian National University. Matriculating to the University of Melbourne (BA, 1950) in 1947, he graduated with first-class honours in history, winning the Bowen essay prize. A master of arts (1952) on ‘Factions in New South Wales Politics 1840–1860’ followed, also first-class. On 30 March 1951 he married Melbourne-born student Jacqueline Arnold Hellwig at the Office of the Government Statist in Melbourne. A daughter would follow in 1954 before they divorced in the mid-1960s.

Rawson continued at the university as a part-time tutor in history (1950–53) and Australian Labor Party Club president (1952). He then undertook a doctorate (1955) in the department of political science on ‘The Organisation of the Australian Labor Party 1916–1941,’ for which he was awarded the Harbison-Higinbotham research scholarship. The study established his reputation as a ‘hard-headed and clear-eyed’ scholar (Crisp 1956). While remaining unpublished, it had a deep and lasting influence in the field of labour history as a pioneering study of the ALP as a national as well as a federal political organisation.

Having been awarded a scholarship at the ANU, Rawson went to Canberra as a research student in the department of political science in 1953. He was appointed a research fellow in October 1956, on the eve of his departure for Nuffield College, Oxford, where he would examine white-collar unionism on a Rockefeller fellowship. Returning to the ANU at the end of 1957, he was promoted to fellow in 1960 before resigning early in the following year to become reader in political science at the University of Queensland. He declined the offer of a chair at the University of New England in 1962. Lured back to the ANU as senior research fellow in July 1964, he was promoted to senior fellow in 1965. That year, on 10 February at the Law Courts of the ACT, he married Beryl Marie Wilkinson who, as Beryl Rawson, became an internationally renowned social historian of ancient Rome. This marriage would also end in divorce.

Rawson became one of the nation’s leading political scientists and played a significant role in developing the discipline. His early books pioneered the study of Australian elections, based on methods he had observed at Nuffield. Politics in Eden-Monaro (1958), which he co-wrote with visiting American scholar Susan M. Holtzinger, was a detailed study of the 1955 Federal and the 1956 New South Wales State elections. Australia Votes: The 1958 Federal Election (1961) set the standard for election studies locally.

Subsequent publications continued Rawson’s earlier engagement with the Labor Party, trade unions, and industrial relations. In Labor in Vain? A Survey of the Australian Labor Party (1966), he was a friendly critic of the party at a time when its fortunes were at a low ebb. He emphasised Labor’s diverse electoral base, criticised excessive union power over politicians, played down the influence of socialism, and argued that Labor needed to adapt to growing affluence, declining class consciousness, and rising white-collar employment.

A steady stream of books, scholarly articles, and press commentaries over three decades displayed Rawson’s capacity for cool appraisal and clear prose. In 1978 he published Unions and Unionists in Australia and was elected a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. On 13 February 1981 he married Mary Dickenson, a political scientist who specialised in trade unions, in Canberra.

During the 1980s, Rawson led a Law and Politics of Industrial Relations project at the ANU which generated further publications on trade unions, employer associations, the industrial relations system, and the conciliation and arbitration commission. He had a career-long interest in comparative politics and industrial relations, which he pursued through study-leave visits to universities in Britain, Europe, and North America. His understanding of electoral matters developed through his appointment as distribution commissioner for Victoria (1974–75), which involved reviewing and adjusting electoral boundaries.

In 1986 Rawson became executive director of the Academy of the Social Sciences, reducing his ANU position to half-time and briefly undertaking studies in law. He subsequently became the inaugural associate director of the university’s Research School of Social Sciences (1989–92). An active unionist, he served as president of the ANU Staff Association and as first president of the university branch of the National Tertiary Education Union in the mid-1990s. His presidency coincided with the beginning of enterprise bargaining in tertiary education and he provided ‘dignified and wise leadership’ (Bourke June 1997, 6) during a time of conflict with management, branch activists, and other campus unions. He was made an NTEU life member in 1995, the year of his retirement from the university.

Rawson was a quietly spoken and somewhat diffident man who instinctively looked for compromise when faced with conflict. In his later years, colleagues regarded his conciliatory approach as evidence of even judgement and personal composure. Although raised in a rationalist household, he studied theology late in his life and embraced Anglo-Catholicism, supporting women’s ordination and worshipping at All Saints Anglican Church at Ainslie. Diagnosed with prostate cancer at the age of sixty, he died on 20 June 1997 in the John James Memorial Hospital, Canberra. He was survived by his wife and the daughter by his first marriage.