Tom Griffiths on the glacier behind Casey Station, Antarctica

First Graduate Director

BA(Hons) Melb, MA(Hons)Melb, PhD Monash, FAHA

I am delighted to announce that Tom Griffiths from History will become the School’s first Graduate Director. It is an important and challenging job. The School needs not only to increase the number of postgraduate students but also to develop taught masters’ degrees across the campus and improve its first-year training for PhD students. The School has also created a Graduate Committee and we are seeking both graduate convenors from each Program and student representatives.

I am confident that Tom’s enthusiasm and commitment mean we will take significant steps to achieving our goal of a thriving, well trained postgraduate community in the School.

I asked Tom to write a brief, informal biography. See below. His publications and other achievements are listed on his web site at http://histrsss.anu.edu.au/tomgriffiths.html

I grew up in Melbourne on the edge of the Southern Ocean and close to the tall mountain forests of the Australian Alps. While I was studying at Melbourne University, I worked as a postman in my summer holidays and got to know every letterbox and dog in the eastern suburbs. One lucky summer I won a vacation scholarship to the ANU and came to know the luminous blue skies and beguiling bushland of the capital, and I was also able to explore those beloved Alps from their northern slopes.

I completed a Master of Arts in History at Melbourne and began to cobble together a career as a ‘public historian’, a term that describes the practice of scholarly history outside the academy. I worked as a social historian for the Museum of Victoria, a ‘field historian’ for the State Library of Victoria (collecting original manuscripts and pictures for the Library’s research archives), and an environmental historian for the Victorian Department of Conservation. I loved this work because of its constant engagement with popular understandings of history, and its blend of academic and practical challenges. My doctorate in history, which I completed as a part-time student at Monash University, grew out of this work and became a book called Hunters and Collectors, a study of historical consciousness in Australia. In some of my other published work, I am pleased to have been able to revisit intellectually both the Alps (Forests of Ash: An Environmental History) and the Southern Ocean (Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica). Experience often seeds enquiry, and vice versa.

In 1995 and 1996, I worked as Deputy Director and Lecturer in Australian Studies at the Menzies Centre in the University of London. This was ‘public history’ writ large and meant that for two years I was a professional Australian – and in a city which has remained a fascinating condenser and playground of Australian identity. My accent was virtually a pre-requisite for the job, a cultural trait that became a professional tool. And the job required not only that one introduce Australian issues and perspectives to the greater British public, but also that one minister to the needs of a self-conscious expatriate community, many of whom first went to London in the lively late-1950s and 60s. The position demanded a creative mixture of academic and diplomatic roles.

When I returned to Australia in 1997, it was to the Research School of Social Sciences and to one of the best environments for postgraduate training in the world. It’s not just the Coombs Tea Room and The Gods coffee, although they are incredibly important! It’s that doctoral students become our colleagues. I feel very fortunate to be able to teach, research and write in such an institution, and one of my interests has been to foster discussion about the techniques as well as the substance of research and writing. Essaying the truth is a demanding discipline and writing non-fiction is a distinct art form.