49 Facts About Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Blainey is noted for having written authoritative texts on the economic and social history of Australia, including The Tyranny of Distance.

Geoffrey Blainey has published over 40 books, including wide-ranging histories of the world and of Christianity.

Geoffrey Blainey has often appeared in newspapers and on television.

Geoffrey Blainey held chairs in economic history and history at the University of Melbourne for over 20 years.

Geoffrey Blainey was once described by Graeme Davison as the "most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, most controversial of Australia's living historians".

Geoffrey Blainey 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.

Geoffrey Blainey chaired the National Council for the Centenary of Federation.

Geoffrey Blainey served on the boards of philanthropic bodies, including the Ian Potter Foundation and the Deafness Foundation Trust since 1993, and is patron of others.

Geoffrey Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a succession of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne.

Geoffrey Blainey married Ann Warriner Heriot in 1957, who as Ann Blainey has become an internationally regarded biographer.

Geoffrey Blainey has published over 40 books, including his highly acclaimed A Short History of the World.

Geoffrey Blainey has written general histories of the world and the "tempestuous" 20th century.

Geoffrey Blainey was "the first writer to make that daring comparison that Aboriginal societies differed as much from one another as do the nations of Europe".

The Geoffrey Blainey View was a history of Australia shown in ten episodes on ABC television.

From 1994 to 1998, Geoffrey Blainey was foundation Chancellor of the University of Ballarat.

Geoffrey Blainey was visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University.

Geoffrey Blainey was invited by Prime Minister Harold Holt in 1967 to sit on the advisory board of the Commonwealth Literary Fund, serving until its abolition in 1973.

Geoffrey Blainey then became inaugural chairman of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, set up by the Whitlam government.

Geoffrey Blainey represented writers on the small group instructed to find the new national anthem that Whitlam had promised.

In December 1973, Geoffrey Blainey was an Australian delegate to the first UNESCO conference held in Asia, in Yogyakarta, Java; it recommended cultural policies for Asia.

Geoffrey Blainey was deputy chairman in 1974 and 1975 of the Whitlam government's Inquiry into Museums and National Collections, whose report ultimately led to the completion in Canberra, in 2001, of the National Museum of Australia with its emphasis on indigenous history.

Geoffrey Blainey was chairman of the Australia Council for four years and Chairman of the Australia-China Council from its inception in 1979 until June 1984.

Geoffrey Blainey was an inaugural member and later the chairman of the National Council for the Centenary of Federation and spoke at the centenary celebration of the opening of the federal parliament in May 1901.

Geoffrey Blainey was an inaugural member and later the chairman of the National Council for the Centenary of Federation and spoke at the centenary celebration of the opening of the federal parliament in May 1901.

In 2001, Geoffrey Blainey presented the Boyer Lectures on the theme This Land is all Horizons: Australian Fears and Visions.

Geoffrey Blainey argued that Australia was already a "de facto republic" and that any further change should be made only if the case was very powerful.

Geoffrey Blainey alleged that the pair had unduly shaped the official information posted to all electors.

Geoffrey Blainey sat, from 1997 to 2004, on the Council of the Royal Humane Society of Australasia which recommended awards for acts of civilian bravery.

Geoffrey Blainey is well known for speeches, often without notes, on historical and contemporary topics.

Geoffrey Blainey has served on the boards of philanthropic bodies, including the Ian Potter Foundation from 1991 to 2015 and the Deafness Foundation Trust since 1993, and is patron of others.

Geoffrey Blainey was said by leftist critics to be closely aligned with the former Liberal-National Coalition government of John Howard in Australia, with Howard shadowing Blainey's conservative views on some issues, especially the view that Australian history has been hijacked by social liberals.

On 17 March 1984, Geoffrey Blainey addressed a major Rotary conference in the Victorian city of Warrnambool.

Geoffrey Blainey regretted that the Hawke Labor government in "a time of large unemployment" was bringing many new migrants to the areas of high unemployment, thus fostering tension.

Geoffrey Blainey continued to express his views periodically on television, radio and his own newspaper columns but not in his own university.

Geoffrey Blainey retained his main position as Dean of the Faculty of Arts.

In December 1988, Geoffrey Blainey resigned from the University of Melbourne and resumed his former career as a freelance historian.

Subsequently, in December 2007, the University of Melbourne granted a Doctor of Laws to Geoffrey Blainey and declared that he was, in Australia, probably a unique professional historian, noting that he had fostered wide public interest in history.

Geoffrey Blainey has been an important contributor to the debate over Australian history, often referred to as the History Wars.

Geoffrey Blainey coined the term the "Black armband view of history" to refer to those historians and academics, usually leftist, who denigrated Australia's past to an unusual degree and even accused European Australians of genocide against Aborigines.

Former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser described the Australian history wars as a branch of the "culture wars" and attributed Geoffrey Blainey with having initiated the wider wars in his immigration speeches of 1984.

Geoffrey Blainey referred to the contrasting positive histories as the "three cheers" school.

However, Geoffrey Blainey applauded the "many distinctive merits" of the traditional Aboriginal way of life.

Geoffrey Blainey has been critical of Bruce Pascoe's work, Dark Emu, regarding Aboriginal life prior to 1788 stating that there existed "no evidence that there was ever a permanent town in pre-1788 Australia with 1000 inhabitants who gained most of their food by farming" as claimed by Pascoe.

In June 2020, Geoffrey Blainey was critical of iconoclast destructions of historical monuments and public statues following the George Floyd protests.

Geoffrey Blainey viewed the destructions as rallying against Western civilization, calling for a tempered approach to acknowledging the West's "virtues", in addition to its shortcomings.

Geoffrey Blainey was made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria in 1967.

Geoffrey Blainey was awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours list of 2000 for his service to academia, research and scholarship.

Geoffrey Blainey is an emeritus professor of the University of Melbourne, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

In 2010, Geoffrey Blainey was Victorian State finalist for Senior Australian of the Year.