I Wonder, based on papers delivered at a 2016 colloquium for Ken Inglis, held just over a year before his death, reminds me. This collection draws out more than is usually encompassed in ‘life and work’ tributes. Of The Australian Colonists, for example, Frank Bongiorno unpacks that book’s ‘vital yet ambiguous space’ in Inglis’s professional positioning, in the writing of Australian history, and perhaps even in its presentation. (Richly illustrated, the book was designed by Melbourne University Publishing to reach a wide market in a ‘semi-coffee-table format’, as one eminent professor stiffly observed.) Each chapter draws out similar elements of Inglis’s distinctive place in a formative period of Australian historical writing, in interrogating patterns of meaning in our civic culture, enriching forms of commentary and scholarship, and testing ways of presenting the past to reach new, or refresh established, audiences.

Ken Inglis (photograph via Black Inc.)

The title captures Inglis’s characteristic preface to seminar, supervision, or conference questions, and his probing but gentle personality: the reflective questioning rather than resolved argument in research; his gentle induction as a teacher (Joy Damousi recalls) into the ‘seriousness’ of historical study; his positioning as an observer rather than as an activist in much of his work on public as well as historical issues. Introducing a 1995 selection of Inglis’s shorter pieces, Craig Wilcox evokes Inglis as a ‘vernacular intellectual’. That description is affirmed in this collection and set in a wider context.

Starting in Preston in 1929, Inglis’s life was, he conceded, never far from his history, and his history in turn was framed by significant transitions in cultural and political engagement. The boy, self-conscious at not having the medals of a war-veteran father to pin to his shirt at school Anzac ceremonies, would become a leading scholar of war memorialisation. His particular attention to Australia’s ‘civil religion’ of Anzac was built through the 1960s, as Graeme Davison notes, when negotiating a ‘critical but respectful’ enquiry on such a topic was far from straightforward (Davison recalls wondering ‘was he just being polite to the old diggers?’). Anzac was at that time clouded by the politics of Vietnam rather than boosted by later culture warriors. In 1998, Inglis’s award-winning Sacred Places could still insist on vigilance in defining concepts such as ‘holy’ and ‘religious’ – a task almost impossible given the remorseless secularisation and politicisation of the issues since then.

Growing up with the constant presence of radio, including its slow search for an identifiably Australian voice, Inglis would write histories of the ABC (1983 and 2006) that emphasised its place in the lives of listeners as much as its institutional evolution (and he would realise, on first hearing the word ‘podcast’, that the world of broadcasting he understood was ‘over’). Flourishing in the postwar expansion of secondary and tertiary education, and associated social democratic politics, Inglis’s first work on health, class, and the church was, as Janet McCalman traces, shaped in, if not ‘overwhelmed’ by, the emergence of the new social history (Stuart Macintyre adds that Inglis was advised not to pursue an Oxford PhD topic on the Socialist League: a ‘man called E.P. Thompson was working on that’).

Back in Australia by 1956, at the University of Adelaide, Hugh Stretton counselled Inglis not to ‘sit on the fence’, but his temperament tended more to the power of questions than answers, and a trust, Robert Dare suggests, in a ‘less credulous, less cruel’ citizenry that might think through issues for themselves. He found a ‘comfortable place’ through ‘moonlighting’ in the new journalism of reportage and current affairs, Tom Fitzgerald’s journal Nation (launched in 1958) providing the opportunity to be (in Peter Browne’s phrase) ‘cool and questioning on the page’. The trial of Max Stuart, an Arrernte man charged with the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl, stirred the opportunistic instincts of the young Rupert Murdoch while also leading to Inglis’s meticulous ‘ring-side’ account of Stuart’s conviction. Hoping to ‘tell the story, not be part of it’, Inglis modelled The Stuart Case (1961) on American writers he admired as both ‘omnipresent and invisible’. Updated in 2002, the book ‘is still used as a major study in the training of journalists’, Bob and Sue Wallace report; it also informed a docudrama, Black and White (2002). Rich in the texture of testimony, it teased away at, while also being partly defined by, the extent to which Stuart ‘troubled the white man’s world more than he knew’.

While celebrating Inglis’s work, this collection prompts reflection on such issues of historical perspective. Martin Crotty asks why Inglis never completed the book covering his journey to Gallipoli with veterans in 1965. He was concerned that the manuscript ‘didn’t come out right’ in balancing the honour of Anzacs and the ‘rather sad and sorry spectacle’ of elderly men abroad. Ian Maddocks recognises Inglis’s contribution as foundation professor of history (1967) and then vice-chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea – ‘a huge turning point in race relations’, Diane Langmore recalls, and in fostering new national leaders, in contrast to more troubled times since. Maddocks regrets, however, that Inglis’s ‘genius as an observer’ did not draw more on this experience. The pointed contrast is to the work of his wife, Amirah Inglis (remembered in a chapter by Judith Keene as an energetic activist and historian), in tracking the fusion of gender and race in Australian rule.

At ANU from 1975, Inglis conceived the ‘slice’ approach to a bold bicentennial history ‘gift to the nation’: multi-authored volumes taking a profile at fifty-year intervals through Australian society. Innovative and consolidating Inglis’s enduring ethnographic interest (discussed by Shirley Lindenbaum, his sister and a City University of New York anthropologist), the project had a mixed reception in design and delivery. Marian Quartly focuses particularly on criticism from women’s and feminist historians, who sought a more structural, critical understanding of the past. Not one for theory, Inglis’s test for history, Seumas Spark observes, was ‘does it tell us something we don’t know’. That ‘us’ defined both the nuances of both shared memory and culture that Inglis plumbed with such sensitivity, but it perhaps begged its own questions.

Inglis’s last work in retirement was on the Dunera ‘boys’ – refugee ‘aliens’ from Nazi Germany, several of whom he met as they contributed to postwar Australia, from guiding his student curiosity to questioning his ‘woolly liberalism’ in Port Moresby. A surrogate for a memoir for his grandchildren, this subject captured not only the history Inglis valued but also that which he represented. We have lost several leaders from a transformative generation of Australian historians in recent years: each – like Inglis, as remembered lovingly in this book – has much still to tell us about what the craft can offer, and what shapes and supports its contribution.