Australian Dictionary of Biography

Geoff Serle, 1980s

Sue Edgar

Alan Geoffrey Serle (1922–1998), historian, biographer, and editor, was born on 10 March 1922 at Hawthorn, Melbourne, youngest of three children of Melbourne-born parents Percival Serle, accountant and scholar, and his wife Dora Beatrice, née Hake, an artist. His parents moved in literary and artistic circles, giving their children a culturally rich upbringing on a middle-class income. From 1927 Geoffrey attended Little Ruyton, the kindergarten and primary school associated with Ruyton Girls’ School, Kew. He then followed his father and brother to Scotch College, Hawthorn (1930–40), which he remembered fondly as providing an excellent education albeit with ‘virtually no Australian content’ (Serle 1987). An Australian in a British and Imperial world, he inherited an ‘old double loyalty’ (Serle 1967, 238) that he comfortably outgrew. Awarded the school’s Lionel Robinson scholarship in 1937, he achieved first-class honours in British history, French, and Latin. He revelled in Scotch’s sporting traditions, especially tennis, athletics, hockey, cricket, and Australian Rules football, and was both captain of his house and a prefect in his final year.

In 1941 Serle enrolled at the University of Melbourne (BA Hons, 1946), with a modest residential scholarship to Ormond College. Suspending his studies after his first year, he enlisted in the Melbourne University Rifles for service in World War II. After transferring to the Australian Imperial Force in September 1942, he trained at the Second Army Cipher School and was posted to New Guinea Force in April 1943 as an acting corporal (substantive in June). He served with the 3rd Division until 20 October when he was posted to the 9th Division headquarters at Finschhafen. When a Japanese bomb exploded in the camp five days later, he suffered shrapnel wounds to the abdomen and almost died during a protracted evacuation to Port Moresby. He spent eight months recovering in hospital, first at Atherton, Queensland, and later at Tamworth, New South Wales, while working with the Army Education Service. During his convalescence he ‘did an enormous amount of reading’ (Serle 1987) of Australian history and literature.

Discharged from the army in June 1944, Serle resumed his studies. Keen to be ‘an Australianist rather than a historian straight’ (Serle 1987), he switched to a combined history and political science course, with teachers including Manning Clark (his prime mentor), Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and William Macmahon Ball. In 1947 he co-edited an ‘all-Australian’ issue of the Melbourne University Magazine. A central figure in the Melbourne University Labor Club (president 1945), he was elected in 1944 to the Students’ Representative Council (treasurer 1946). At Ormond College he was briefly associated with the Christian Commonwealth Movement, which sought to interpret the ‘kingdom of God’ in socio-political terms on earth. As the CCM faded and Serle stopped attending church, his postwar idealism was channelled into radical nationalism of a social democratic kind. He also drew closer to his father, later recalling that ‘it was very difficult to rebel against this true liberal’ (Serle 1988, 57).

After completing his honours degree, Serle was awarded a Rhodes scholarship in 1947 and entered University College, Oxford (DPhil, 1950), writing a thesis on ‘Social Relations between Great Britain and Australia, 1919–1939,’ using literature to measure the slippery concept of public sentiment. He was chairman of the Oxford University branch of the British Labour Party, and travelled widely in Scandinavia and Western Europe, including as a delegate for the National Union of Australian University Students. His Cold War experiences, especially a trip to Czechoslovakia in 1948, confirmed his anti-Communism. While he appreciated Australia’s common heritage with Britain and was never anti-imperialist, he returned home ‘imbued with determination to explore Australia intellectually and historically’ (Serle 1987).

In 1950 the University of Melbourne appointed Serle as a tutor in its expanding history department led by Max Crawford. The next year Clark’s move to Canberra opened up a permanent lectureship in Australian history at Melbourne, which Serle filled. While his close friends Ian Turner and Stephen Murray-Smith joined the Communist Party of Australia, Serle favoured gradual reform and helped to revive the Victorian Fabian Society (chairman 1951–55). With the political scientist Alan Davies, he co-edited Policies for Progress: Essays in Australian Politics, published by the society in 1954. On 12 January 1955 at the Littlejohn Memorial Chapel, Scotch College, he married Jessie Catherine Macdonald, a graduate of the University of Melbourne (BA, 1951; MA, 1954), who became an expert writer and consultant on historic domestic interiors. The couple would have four children, Serle later attributing his professional success to his family’s devotion and ‘a household of harmony and stability’ (Thompson 2006, 203).

Social reform having seemingly stalled amid the Cold War, Serle turned to researching the birth of radical Australia, writing academic articles on the Eureka rebellion (1953) and the Victorian Legislative Council (1954), and co-editing a collection of documents, The Melbourne Scene, 1803–1956 (1957). He was associated with the radical nationalists Turner, Russel Ward, and Brian Fitzpatrick, but with his Fabian influence he ‘walked a pace apart’ (Holbrook 2012, 138). Promoted to senior lecturer in 1954, he was appointed editor (1955–63) of Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand. A regular contributor to literary journals, he was acting editor of Meanjin in 1957 and would later chair the boards of both Meanjin and Murray-Smith’s journal Overland.

In 1961 Serle accepted a position as a senior lecturer in history at the newly established Monash University, where he hoped to escape the authoritarian administration of the ‘god-professors’ at Melbourne. Promoted to reader in history in 1963, his research on radical Australia culminated in two prize-winning general histories of the colony of Victoria: The Golden Age (1963), on the gold rush decade of 1851 to 1861; and The Rush to be Rich (1971), on the boom of the 1880s. One reviewer noted that the latter was ‘undeniably a history of white men, for white men’ but added that Serle had a ‘flair for bringing to life the leading figures of the time’ (Wells 1971, 15). In 1973 he published From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia, 1788–1972, a cultural history of Australian literature, art, music, theatre, and architecture, with a focus on artists’ lives and works.

Described as ‘the doyen of Victorian historians’ (Macintyre 1998, 580), Serle believed that Victoria was central to the story of Australian identity and democracy. He stressed, for example, the ‘importance of Eureka as a tradition’ (Serle 1963, 186) that united factions of the labour movement. In 1966 he joined A. G. L. Shaw to found the Friends of the La Trobe Library, which promoted the development of the State Library of Victoria’s research collections. He was foundation editor (1968–78) of the La Trobe Library Journal and later vice-president (1989–94) of the State Library’s council.

In 1957 Serle had welcomed plans to develop the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) at the Australian National University. In this he followed in the footsteps of his father, the sole author of the two-volume Dictionary of Australian Biography (1949), which Serle regarded as his father’s greatest achievement. A founding member in 1960 of both the national committee and the editorial board of the ADB, Serle was subsequently a section editor on volumes 3 to 6 (with Bede Nairn and Russel Ward) and later on volumes 13 and 14. In 1975, at Serle’s suggestion, he and Nairn were appointed joint general editors, succeeding Douglas Pike. Nairn managed the administrative side of the project, with Serle joining him in Canberra for two or three days a fortnight. He continued to work part time at Monash.

A ‘fine partnership’ (Cunneen 2013, 138), Serle and Nairn produced volumes 7 to 10 of the ADB. Under their leadership staffing doubled and the dictionary’s collaborative editorial process developed. Acknowledging that the proportion of entries on women was ‘rather disappointing’ (Nolan and Fernon 2013, 25), Serle sought advice from women’s historians about potential subjects and appointed the first women to the editorial board. After Nairn’s retirement in 1984, and until his own in 1987, he was the full-time general editor of volume 11 and spent blocks of time in Canberra. Appointed AO in 1986, he was a fellow of the Australian academies of both Humanities and Social Sciences, and of the Royal Victorian and Royal Australian historical societies.

Serle’s biographical publications flourished through his association with the ADB. In addition to contributing forty-nine entries to the dictionary, he wrote several long-form biographies, including the meticulously researched and award-winning John Monash: A Biography (1982), for which he was granted unfettered access to Monash’s personal papers. After retiring from the ADB he wrote memoirs of his father (1988) and the university vice-chancellor Sir John Medley (1993), and a major biography of the architect Robin Boyd (1995).

Laconic and reserved, Serle was ‘sparing in judgement’ and ‘not given to self-descriptive extravagance’ (Geoffrey Serle 1994, 1). In 1957 John La Nauze had described him as having a ‘stern sense of duty’ (Thompson 2006, 30). Summarising his approach to history in 1973, Serle observed: ‘I write in the liberal humane tradition, but any discerning reader may see that I stand for a hundred things … distaste for the corruption of the market-place, the prime place of artists, tolerance, humanism, egalitarianism, liberal social democracy’ (Thompson 2006, xvii). He claimed that he deliberately avoided a single interpretation, but eventually expressed regret to his biographer that he had ‘lacked the cheek and confidence to go public often enough’ (Thompson 2006, 23).

A lifelong supporter of the Hawthorn Football Club, Serle was a keen golfer in later life. He resisted suggestions by Clark and others that he was ‘a great Victorian patriot,’ claiming instead ‘I am an Australian and Hawthorn man’ (Thompson 2006, 27). Writing until the end, he published For Australia and Labor: Prime Minister John Curtin (1998) shortly before his death, while his biography of Colin Gilray, his Scotch College principal, was published posthumously. In October 1997 Serle was hospitalised after a cardiac event while driving and he died on 27 April 1998 in Epworth Hospital, Richmond. Buried in Burwood cemetery, he was survived by Jessie, their daughter Oenone, and their three sons, Donald, Jamie, and Richard. Jessie established the Australian Historical Association’s Serle Award for the best doctoral thesis in Australian history, first presented in 2005. John Lack reckoned that Serle was a mix of ‘the patrician and the bloke’ (Thompson 2006, 9) and that is the title John Thompson chose for his biography of Serle, published in 2006.