Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Norman Blainey is an Australian historian, academic, best-selling author, and commentator. He is noted for having written authoritative texts on Australia's economic and social history, including The Tyranny of Distance. He has published over 40 books, including wide-ranging histories of the world and Christianity. He has often appeared in newspapers and on television. He held chairs in economic history and history at the University of Melbourne for over 20 years.

In the 1980s, he was visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. He received the 1988 Britannica Award for 'exceptional excellence in the dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of mankind,' the first historian to receive that award. He was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2000. Graeme Davison once described him as the "most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, most controversial of Australia's living historians".

He has been chairman or member of the Australia Council, the University of Ballarat, the Australia-China Council, the Commonwealth Literary Fund, and the Australian War Memorial. He chaired the National Council for the Centenary of the Federation. His name sometimes appears in lists of the most influential Australians, past or present. The National Trust lists Blainey as one of Australia's "Living Treasures." He served on the boards of philanthropic bodies, including the Ian Potter Foundation (1991-2014) and the Deafness Foundation Trust since 1993, and is a patron of others.

Biographer Geoffrey Bolton 1999 argues that he has played multiple roles as an Australian historian: He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a pioneer in the neglected field of Australian business history ... He produced during the 1960s and 1970s a number of surveys of Australian history in which explanation was organized around the exploration of the impact of the single factor (distance, mining, pre-settlement Aboriginal society) ... Blainey next turned to the rhythms of global history in the industrial period... Because of his authority as a historian, he was increasingly in demand as a commentator on Australian public affairs.

In 2006, the Melbourne historian John Hirst made his assessment: "Geoffrey Blainey, the most prolific and popular of our historians." Alan Atkinson, the author of a three-volume history of Australia, called Blainey "our most eminent living historian" in a long review that mixes criticism with praise. Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a succession of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university, he resided at Queen's College and was editor of Farrago, the University of Melbourne Student Union newspaper.

After graduating, Blainey took a freelance writing assignment and traveled to the Mount Lyell mining field in Tasmania to research and write the history of the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company at Queenstown. In the 1950s, many older residents could remember the beginnings of the community. The resultant book, The Peaks of Lyell (1954), achieved six editions.^ He then wrote a history of his university: The University of Melbourne: A Centenary Portrait (1956). He married Ann Warriner Heriot in 1957, who, as Ann Blainey, has become an internationally regarded biographer.

Blainey has published over 40 books, including his highly acclaimed A Short History of the World. His works have ranged from sports and local histories to interpreting the motives behind the British settlement of Australia in The Tyranny of Distance, covering over two centuries of human conflict in The Causes of War (1973), examining the optimism and pessimism in Western society since 1750 in The Great See-Saw; Aboriginal Australia in Triumph of the Nomads (1975) and A Land half a Won (1980); and his exploration of the history of Christianity in A Short History of Christianity (2011). 

He has also written general histories of the world and the "tempestuous" 20th century. 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. Blainey was also "the first writer to make that daring comparison that Aboriginal societies differed as much from one another as do the nations of Europe."

The Causes of War has become one of the most cited works in founding modern scholarship on international conflict (as of Sep 2020 - 2095 citations on Google Scholar). The Hoover Institution commonly cites it as a foundation work in the field. He has revisited some of his earlier successes to take into account new discoveries and scholarship. Triumph of the Nomads and A Land Half Won was revised as The Story of Australia's People Vol 1: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia and The Story of Australia's People Vol 2: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia.

Throughout the course of his career, Blainey has also written for newspapers and television. The Blainey View (1982) was a history of Australia shown in ten episodes on ABC television.