Setting sail: The making of sociology in Australia,1955–75

Launching the ship

SAANZ was started amid a larger burst of institution-building. Higher education was booming in the 1960s, as the Menzies government pumped in nation-building money. The first autonomous chair in sociology was created in 1959 at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), a former technological institute then acquiring a Faculty of Arts. (creating a sociology chair was a crucial step, as the God-Professor still reigned in Australian universities and departments were normally built around one Professor.) A Canberra Sociological Society had been set up in 1958 and ran for a number of years, eventually merging into SAANZ. Monash established a joint Anthropology-Sociology chair in 1961, as the Australian National University (ANU) had done in the 1950s. In 1963 the first Master’s programme in sociology was planned, at ANU, and it was operating in 1964–5. The first locally made textbook, Australian Society, was workshopped in a seminar in 1963 and published in 1965. In 1964 a best-selling pop sociology book, Donald Horne’s lively and cynical The Lucky Country, appeared. The next year saw the first issue of SAANZ’s sober academic journal, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology.

A cascade of sociology chairs, departments and courses around the country followed these moves. By 1976–7 there were 11 named sociology departments (or joint departments) in Australian universities, and many sociology or part-sociology courses in departments of education, social work, anthropology, politics and health sciences. This institutional growth was meticulously documented in the pages of the Journal and in Bill Scott’s documentary monograph Australian and New Zealand Sociology 1971–78. The news was always good. This was a chronicle of progress, a Whig view of sociological history.

The flaw, from the founders’ point of view, was not the pace or direction but the lateness of growth. ‘Sociology as an academic discipline makes a late start in Australia and New Zealand’ declared the editorial board in 1965, on the first page of the first issue of the Journal. The statement was frequently repeated (e.g. Baldock and Lally, 1974: 3). Actually, in world terms, Australia and New Zealand were not particularly late: an academic discipline of sociology was being established in many parts of the world about this time or later (Patel, 2010). But the belief was significant.

The main business of sociologists in the new departments was teaching. Full bachelor’s degree programmes were rapidly constructed and reported in the pages of the Journal. (For instance, vol. 5, no. 1: 82–4 gave a detailed description and full-page diagram of the 1969 degree structure at UNSW.) How sociology should be taught became one of the main areas of debate. It was the subject of anxious conferences in 1968 and 1970, a book of the conference, a ‘Sociology Manifesto’ at La Trobe in 1969, a decision to set up a Sociology Teachers’ Section of SAANZ in 1970, and long articles in the Journal by Timms and Zubrzycki (1971) and Witton (1972). The reason for this urgency was explosive growth in student numbers. In 1960 the UNSW programme reported 15 students, in 1964 it had 275. By 1970, Monash had hit 700 and was expecting 900 students the following year.

There was a sudden, large demand for teaching staff, and few were available with qualifications in sociology. So people were whisked in from other disciplines and other countries, few with already established careers. Sociology in Australia did not recruit from the existing academic elite. Much of the bread-and-butter teaching was done by part-time or temporary staff, young people still getting their qualifications.

In one major respect, however, sociology conformed to academic custom. With the exception of Jean Martin, all the prominent figures in the new discipline were men. At the launch of the Journal in 1965, there was not one woman office-holder of the association, member of the executive, or member of the editorial board. In the first edition of Davies and Encel’s (1965) pioneering textbook, every one of the 17 authors was a man.

Gender apart, the discipline’s spectacular success meant some diversity of background and training among its first-generation practitioners. This diversity might be an asset; but what would give the enterprise coherence?

The project

When Alan Davies and Sol Encel opened the batting for the new team, on the first page of the first textbook, they defined sociology as:

an academic discipline seeking to illuminate the results of social surveys (including the census) by systematic thinking about social groups and institutions. (1965: 1)

This was hardly a clarion call, but it was accurate enough as a description of what the sponsors wanted, and what the practitioners set about providing. They were filling a significant gap in the spectrum of knowledge. University administrators were the vital audience, and they became persuaded that sociology programmes filled a gap that a modern university had to fill. The ‘late start’ rhetoric helped here: Australia had to catch up with America and Europe. The newer universities, self-conscious modernizers, were first to do so.

Two phrases in Davies and Encel’s definition need attention. ‘Systematic thinking’ drew the line against unsystematic talk about Australian society. J.J. Mol, one of the original three staff in the ANU research department of sociology, wrote a review praising Davies and Encel’s textbook as a decided advance over the ‘impressionistic writings about Australian society’ that prevailed before (Mol, 1966: 63).

Many contributors to the new discipline used a particular language to draw this line. They spoke of prevailing ‘myths’ about Australia, and saw sociology as demolishing these myths by confronting them with the facts produced by research.

The most important of these myths was ‘the egalitarian picture of Australia’ (Encel, 1970b: 3). This was the main target of criticism in Encel’s magnum opus Equality and Authority, and in the ANU group’s presentation of their flagship survey of stratification: ‘However, social reality presents a rather more complicated picture than such idealized accounts suggest’ (Broom et al., 1968). The myth-busting rhetoric probably helped sociology’s popularity with students, promising insight into hidden truths and challenging tired conventions. This mood had been caught in Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year, a challenge to Anzac Day, first performed in 1960.

Implicitly, the myth-busters were acknowledging that the knowledge gap was not entirely empty. There was an existing discourse about social life in Australia. When a group of left-wing students went looking for materials on class in Australia, they found nearly a thousand publications (Ancich et al., 1969). But sociologists in the university departments drew the line in a way that excluded almost all of this work.

If we are to be serious about our sociological facts then they must derive not from one person’s observations, no matter how sensitive they may be, but from techniques which are replicable, designed to produce the same results for different data-gatherers in the same situation – intersubjectively ascertainable – in the language of the trade. (Western, 1969: 92)

The weapon that John Western was wielding here – against a right-wing commentator in this case – was a criterion of scientificity. Pure, replicable description was the task of sociology. Introducing their article on political participation in the next issue of the Journal, Wilson and Western (1969: 98) disclaimed all concern with whether participation was functional for democracy:

Rather, our goal is to describe and analyse the political participation of a sample of voters and leave the normative noise-making to others.

Scientificity was a constant concern. John Barnes opened his 1967 Presidential Address with the questions ‘What meaning can we give to the claim that sociology is a social science? More generally, what does the word “science” mean when we modify it with the adjective “social”?’ (1967: 78). The scientificity of sociology was emphasized, rather than queried, by Jerzy Zubrzycki in the 1972 Presidential Address: ‘the scientific task of explanation of the society’ being one side of the sociologist’s role, the task of policy-maker and critic being the other (1973: 6).

The need to establish scientificity helps to explain why, in a time of deep social conflict and rapid change, the main debates carried on in the pages of the Journal were about fine points of quantitative methodology. They concerned how to measure occupational prestige, how to measure class in a questionnaire, how to factor-analyse the census to get the dimensions of a city, and how to interpret the correlation between church school education and church-going.

The other important phrase in Davies and Encel’s definition named the method, ‘social surveys’, which became the main research activity of the new discipline. There was in fact a social demand for this research technology. In the first reflective article in the Journal about the context of research, Lois Bryson and Faith Thompson noted that:

during 1966 and 1967 our Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Monash University was approached by eight bodies, mainly municipal councils, who seemed to have a hazy idea that a survey would assist them. (1970: 62)

They agreed to do one of the eight, and that became the influential community study An Australian Newtown (1972). Small surveys were the usual method in sociology PhD theses, and in the articles published in the Journal.

The effect was a rapidly growing but apparently unorganized heap of survey data. Mills’ critique of ‘abstracted empiricism’ in the USA was known, but did not yet bite. The local problem was aimless empiricism. In the second edition of Australian Society the editors acknowledged the criticism but defended the genre because of ‘the lack of really detailed information about Australian social affairs. To remedy the latter is our main objective’ (see Dowdy, 1971).

The heap was more organized than it seemed, but the principle of organization was latent. The typical article in the Journal, before reporting the methods and results of the local survey, offered a literature review describing American and British research on the same subject. ‘The business of sociology is largely comparative assessment’ (Broom and Jones, 1976: 5), but when explicit comparisons were made, it was almost always with American and British material, occasionally adding non-English-speaking parts of western Europe.

For instance, when Jean Martin reported her excellent Adelaide survey of suburban kinship, she set up her argument by citing the Chicago school, Warner, Burgess, Parsons, Litwak, Bott, and others from the US and UK. Her explanation of the role that her own research was to play in this field of knowledge is exceptionally clear:

Australian research reported since the second World War and a recent study of my own in Adelaide can make some contribution towards illuminating the central question which remains at issue: what factors are associated with variations in the structure and functioning of kin groups, and how are these various kin structures articulated with the larger society? (Martin, 1967: 45)

This passage connects with the idea of the ‘late arrival’ of Australian sociology. The central concepts and problems have already been defined, by sociologists in the metropole. The local research will ‘make some contribution’ to it – usually by adding a new bit of data for comparison, sometimes (as in Martin’s case) also debating the theory.

If this was the way that Australia’s best sociologist thought about her own work, it is not surprising that much of the work done by others consisted of copying, with slight variations, studies already done in the United States and Britain. The commonest title for a report of sociological research at the time was ‘X in Australia’, where ‘X’ could be religion, social stratification, divorce, prostitution, political leadership, urbanization, or any other phenomenon already researched in the metropole.

For the most part, then, the ‘systematic thinking’ part of Australian sociology occurred offshore. The scientificity of the Australian discipline was guaranteed not by local epistemological struggle, but by matching it up with the known scientific practice of sociology in the global metropole. A flow of academic visitors – the most influential being Leonard Broom, who linked the University of Texas with ANU in the 1960s – and professorial appointments from Britain and the United States, brought more extensive knowledge of the metropole’s research agendas and methods, and helped make metropolitan science the taken-for-granted meaning of ‘sociology’.

There was a certain grandeur in the conception of knowledge in this founding moment. Sociology was understood as a universal science, a genuinely important enterprise, a necessary part of modernity’s system of knowledge. Australians and New Zealanders might be late in joining the forward march, but the contingent from the South Seas had arrived at last. And while Australian researchers were feeding their modest offerings into the international body of knowledge, they would use the international science to illuminate Australia’s share of – as Zubrzycki put it – ‘the problems which men and women experience in modern industrial society’ (1973: 6).

Zubrzycki’s 1972 Presidential Address was titled ‘The Relevance of Sociology’ (Zubrzycki, 1973). Radical students were calling for relevance and the founding academics were keen for it too. Accordingly, Zubrzycki argued for more sustained research in the three fields of poverty, equal opportunity and community development.

Zubrzycki and Martin were significant figures in the national policy shift from migrant assimilation to multiculturalism, though they had somewhat different views of it – Martin, more radical, argued that cultural pluralism had to be based on ‘structural pluralism’ and include robust public critique (1981: 152–3). Encel served as an adviser to Australian Labor Party (ALP) policymakers. Western carried out a long series of policy studies for state and federal governments. Bryson and Thompson’s Australian Newtown study was sponsored by would-be community leaders in the suburb being studied, and their article, mentioned above, was a discussion of the difficulties of doing policy sociology. In short, the founding project had a practical dimension. As well as building universal science, sociology was to contribute accurate knowledge and informed advice to the reform and modernization of Australian society.

The underlying problematic

Embedded in this project was a certain problematic: a way of understanding the object of knowledge and defining the fundamental problems about it. The founding group made few ontological statements, but we can identify an implicit perspective on social reality that was repeatedly called into play when they designed their research and spoke of their findings.

This perspective was decidedly anti-reductionist. The most original researchers, Alan Davies and Jean Martin, did address issues about emotion; but for sociologists in general, psychology was left to another department. So was economics; one of the reasons for the founding group’s dislike of Marxism was their discomfort with the idea of economic determinism. The sociologists generally believed they were working on realities beyond the reach of psychology and economics. The staid pages of the Journal gave off a scent of suppressed excitement as more and more facets of this previously ignored or misunderstood reality were brought into view by the new research methods.

We might now call this object of knowledge ‘the social’, but at the time a more concrete language was used: sociologists spoke of ‘a society’, especially ‘Australian society’, and sometimes sub-units called ‘a community’.

This object of sociological knowledge was a coherent, bounded entity; internally structured and stratified but able to be understood and measured as a unit; built of interactions, institutions, cultural traits and practices; into which youth and migrants were socialized; capable of surviving over time. A beautiful statement of this concept was provided in the introduction to the first edition of the book tellingly named Australian Society (Davies and Encel, 1965).

The theoretical framework available in the 1960s that made best sense of this perception of social reality was, unquestionably, Parsonian functionalism. Exactly that model was urged by Harold Fallding in a 1962 article, ‘The Scope and Purpose of Sociology’, published just before the foundation of SAANZ. To Fallding, sociology was the study of systems of social action, to be analysed by functionalist logic, and there was no other path for sociology. This was strong meat, and was followed by further emphatic writing to expound the functionalist approach, especially a book published soon after Fallding left Australia, The Sociological Task (1968).

Others too were reading functionalist texts, so there were many undertones of conservative American functionalism in Australian sociological writing at this time. They can be found in the prevalence of ‘social system’ language, in the preoccupation with assimilation of migrants, in studies of socialization of children (Musgrave, 1971), and in the idea of social differentiation behind the occupational status studies and the social stratification surveys. So the world-wide prestige of Parsons at Harvard and Merton at Columbia could reinforce the new Australian science.

However we can not say that Australian sociology in its founding years was systematically functionalist. C. Wright Mills was almost as well known as Talcott Parsons. Jean Martin (1972: 3) opened her Presidential Address by citing The Sociological Imagination and listing work by Mills’ American friends. Encel was dismissive of Parsons, influenced by Mills’ The Power Elite, and presented his work as loosely Weberian rather than loosely functionalist.

There was a touch of national pride in some discussions of ‘Australian society’; but this was more than counter-balanced by the new discipline’s powerful identification with the global metropole. This identification became very clear in declarations about what kind of a society Australian sociologists were studying. Here, for instance, is the specification in the ANU group’s final report of their 1965 stratification survey:

Despite a tendency for commentators to dwell on rural images, Australia in the 1960s was a highly urbanised society in the mass consumption phase of industrial growth.… By way of international comparison, in 1966 only the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, and Canada had higher per capita incomes … (Broom and Jones, 1976: 3)

The point being emphasized was Australian society’s modernity; and this was a theme of great importance in the launching of the discipline in Australia. For the concept of ‘a society’ as a coherent, bounded entity was ultimately derived from anthropological functionalism, and in Australian universities in the 1950s and 1960s, anthropology was an established discipline. For sociology to gain its own academic space it needed a point of distinction, and this was found in a very traditional contrast between the modern and the pre-modern.

The theme of modernity was duly emphasized by many writers in the Journal: ‘contemporary industrialized democratic societies’ (vol. 1, no. 1: 12); ‘carried further, perhaps, than in any other advanced society’ (vol. 1, no. 2: 89); ‘modern, urbanized, large-scale society’ (vol. 3, no. 1: 44); ‘western democracies’ (vol. 5, no. 2: 98); ‘Australia and New Zealand are amongst the most modern of societies’ (vol. 6 no. 2: 145); and so on.

The boundary was a little fragile when closely examined – the third of these quotations comes from a paper in which Martin concluded that the folk/urban contrast was misconceived. But the distinction usually was not examined. Common sense identified Australian society as modern, and in sociological theory at the time there was only one modernity.

The idea not only justified the existence of the discipline, it automatically justified its key procedures. Frequent comparisons with America, Britain, and occasionally Canada and western European countries, were appropriate, even necessary: these were the other modern industrial democratic societies. Australian modernity made it appropriate to cite American and European sociological writings, whether theoretical or empirical, as the basis for Australian research. It was appropriate, even necessary, to seek higher degrees and take sabbaticals in America or Britain, the destinations constantly mentioned in the Journal’s ‘Notes and Announcements’. Selection committees would appoint American and British academics to Antipodean chairs without qualms about their appropriateness.

Modernity was not the concern of sociologists alone. The years when academic sociology was being created in Australia were also the years of Dunstan’s and Whitlam’s rise to political power; and their rhetoric was precisely about modernization. Whitlam’s refrain, in the ‘It’s Time’ election campaign of 1972, was that Australia lagged behind ‘any comparable country’ in urban infrastructure, education, etc., and only an activist national government could bring Australia up to scratch. The countries that Whitlam thought ‘comparable’ were the same ones with which the sociologists compared their data.

The achievement

Not much of Australian sociological writing from the 1950s or 1960s is read today, and a great deal is, in charity, best forgotten. But the founders’ collective project of research and publication did work, and through a couple of decades built up the body of knowledge they intended to build.

An ‘Australian society’ did come into view that had no corks hanging on its hat. This society was modern, mainly urban, intractably unequal, ethnically diverse and increasingly professionalized. Sociology strongly encouraged a more inclusive vision of Australian experience. The struggles of migrants could become part of the national narrative. Suburban ways of living could be viewed with respect and not just satirized. The humble social survey could be a democratic cultural influence.

Though Whitlam did not appoint sociologists to top positions, the reform agenda pursued in his three turbulent years as prime minister, and by the state of South Australia in the Dunstan Decade, overlapped considerably with the research agenda of the sociologists. It included urban development, ethnic communities, educational inequality, family relations and poverty.

In the longer run, the social vision and research technology introduced by the founding group of sociologists was quite important for the next wave of social reform. For instance, sociological ideas fed into the Disadvantaged Schools Programme, which ran from 1975 to about 1990 and produced some of the most innovative work ever seen in Australian schools. Research techniques and concepts from sociology were taken up by the new feminism and played an important role in equal opportunity reforms from about 1980 onwards.

These were effects of the sociologists’ collective project. Their individual projects rarely had that kind of impact. No Australian sociological writing of the 1950s and 1960s had a reception remotely comparable with that of The Lonely Crowd, The Power Elite, Outsiders or The Affluent Worker.

Unique individual projects there could be. The very first issue of the Journal carried one of Alan Davies’ distinctive and witty studies of children’s social and political consciousness (Davies, 1965). But the Australian researcher who showed the power of a sociological approach was Jean Martin, one of the best social scientists Australia has produced. When appointed to a chair at La Trobe in 1966 Martin joined a very small group of women at that level in Australian universities. Professors had wives, they were not expected to be wives. Her story is increasingly known, including the remarkable growth of her department, and we look forward to the forthcoming biography.

As early as her Master’s research in the 1940s, Martin (then Jean Craig) was using the ethnographic method to explore a problem that still had no name – gender relations and the social subordination of women. She carried this theme, among others, through her work with refugees in the 1950s and her study of suburban kinship in the 1960s. In 1968, on the eve of the Women’s Liberation movement, she and Katy Richmond published an analysis of the status of working women in Australia (unfortunately in a boring semi-official publication called Anatomy of Australia; Martin and Richmond, 1968).

As well as revealing new facets of social structure, Martin was able to use conventional research techniques to get a depth of understanding of social process unique in her generation in Australia, and rarely matched overseas. This capacity is best shown in her book Refugee Settlers (1965), reporting research in 1953 in a large country town, with data from follow-up interviews in 1962–3. It was based on her PhD, one of the first sociology doctorates in the country, but was in no sense a student exercise; the author was already a practised researcher when she started the project.

The starting-point of Refugee Settlers is, conventionally for the time, the problem of ‘assimilation’ to Australian society. Exploring the process through multiple interviews with about 70 refugees, Martin went far beyond the conventional discussion of social conformity, into tough issues about exclusion and suspicion, paranoia and depression. She also explored the economics of refugee life, the poverty, the struggle for livelihood, the constricted lives of the migrant women and the migrant men’s contempt for Australian women. Then she traced the compromises and mellowing through which, over time, some came to terms with the new environment and did well for themselves by the 1960s.

There is a passionate realism in Refugee Settlers that makes it still, emotionally, hard sledding. Martin conveys the profound loss the ‘displaced persons’ had gone through in Europe at the war’s end, the tension and tragedy in individual lives. This book shows, better than anything else in the literature of the time, the depth, complexity and compassion that was possible in empirical sociology. I will quote the conclusion of one chapter:

But in establishing themselves financially in this country, only a few of the migrants included in this study have journeyed along such a straight and unbroken path, moving steadily towards well-defined goals from year to year. Most of these people – including some who are now quite secure financially – have encountered obstacles to delay them, been led along deceptive blind alleys, or been forced to retrace their steps and begin the journey again. Illness, unemployment, marital troubles, excessive ambition, and ignorance in handling business affairs have served to make progress towards financial stability often erratic and uneven. So have drinking and gambling, prompted sometimes by an inward rebellion and at variance with conscious purposes, but in other cases rather the manifestation of a search for identity, an attempt to find a place in a group and to share in communally-accepted interests and routines. Indeed, the more these people have come to take part in community life of any kind, the less have they been able to concentrate on their personal economic welfare, for they have had to incur obligations to provide hospitality, to give presents, to support churches, associations, and local causes. In one way the migrant certainly travels fastest who travels alone: not alone in that he lacks a helpmate, but alone in the sense of being isolated from the distractions and obligations of sociable living. (Martin, 1965: 25)

Martin is synthesizing here, but she never falls into stereotyping. With consummate skill she keeps a sense of multiple trajectories running through the text. And she shows us, rather bluntly, Anglo-Australian society in the early 1950s through the eyes of a group forced to deal with it from a position of weakness: a society closed, racist, hierarchical, uncultured and self-satisfied.

Contradictions

The collective project of the sociologists articulated in the early 1960s could only be realized by creating an institutional base. The creation of the base depended on sociology’s popularity among students. It was rapidly rising undergraduate enrolments that most strongly persuaded university administrations to create chairs and fund departments.

But what the students were looking for, and what the founding group of sociologists provided, did not necessarily match. Australian military involvement in the war in Vietnam was the dominating fact in student culture and politics at that time, and the new science of society seemed to have nothing to say about it, or about the conditions that made it possible. The Journal scarcely mentioned the war in the years of extreme violence from 1967 to 1972.

In the same years a radicalization of both theory and practice was happening, expressed in the Moratorium movement, the magazines Outlook and Arena, the Sydney Free U (from 1967), Women’s Liberation groups (from 1969), and increasingly sophisticated social and political critique (e.g. Gordon, 1970). This radicalization led younger sociologists rapidly towards structural analyses of class and gender, a concern with entrenched power and oppression.

But when established sociologists addressed the student left and radical intellectuals, their disapproval was clear. The SAANZ Presidential Addresses for 1968, 1969 and 1971 were respectively hostile, patronizing and admonitory towards the radicals (Encel, 1970a; Martin, 1972; Robb, 1968). When the Journal ran a symposium on Playford and Kirsner’s book Australian Capitalism, reviewers’ critical comments ranged from ‘intellectual laxity’, and ‘patently ridiculous’ to ‘dogmatic claptrap’ (vol. 9, no. 1: 62–8).

In this way the founding group in SAANZ missed an opportunity for renewal. To a considerable extent the radicals shared their collective project and wanted to push it further: criticizing its current framing (Osmond, 1972), expanding its agenda and reforming its teaching methods (Witton, 1972). Conflict came to a head in 1972. The younger sociologists at UNSW, hosting the annual conference, changed its style dramatically to be informal and participatory. The association’s general meeting voted to make editorship of the Journal elective. Lois Bryson, who was then elected as the Journal’s new editor, considers the event as part of a longer process of academic democratization (Bryson, 2005). It certainly turned the association away from a professionalization strategy, under discussion at the time among the senior sociologists, that was intended to give it a hierarchical membership structure.

In the aftermath, a considerably more divided, multi-stranded knowledge project emerged in the institutional space that the founding group had created. The moment is caught by Bell and Encel’s collection Inside the Whale: Ten Personal Accounts of Social Research (1978). This book makes a rather startling contrast with Baldock and Lally’s (1974) Sociology in Australia and New Zealand, which reflected the founding project and was published only four years earlier.

Empiricist research continued, though empiricism eventually merged with radical perspectives in new stratification studies led by John Western at Queensland (Baxter et al., 1991). A feminist presence grew from the late 1970s (Richmond, 2005), with centres at La Trobe and Macquarie universities. Feminist sociology soon became the strongest area of Australian sociological research, realizing the promise of Jean Martin’s work. Industrial sociology emerged, class analysis matured (Boreham and Dow, 1980), and critical sociologies of education and of health (Collyer, 2012) emerged. In the late 1970s Allen and Unwin Australia began publishing a notable sociology list, eventually about 60 books. The core of this output was the ‘Studies in Society’ series under the energetic editorship of Ron Wild, himself the author of a critical ethnography of status, class and power in a country town (Wild, 1974). The series drew on the graduate theses now coming in volume from sociology departments. Some sociologists moved into the school sector, some into the welfare sector and community activism. This experience yielded Yoland Wadsworth’s unique and best-selling Do It Yourself Social Research (1984), an apotheosis of the little-survey tradition and a witty anti-professional manifesto.

What did not change was Australian sociology’s position in the wider world, and here a deeper contradiction emerged. Australian society was presumed to be part of modernity, and mainstream sociology made a foundational distinction between modern societies and the pre-modern or underdeveloped rest of the world. The radicals were horrified at the way the modern was bombing, napalming and machine-gunning the pre-modern, but most did not see this as a structural issue about their own object of knowledge.

The assumption of shared modernity gave Australian sociology a global role: feeding a little comparative information into the knowledge-production machine of the metropole. Locally, the assumption of modernity allowed sociology to focus almost entirely on the white settlers while forgetting the consequences of their being settlers. Opening the first edition of Australian Society at its first substantive chapter, ‘The Population’, we find the chilling words with which, after some preliminaries, R.T. Appleyard begins his narrative: ‘White settlement in Australia began with the arrival of the first fleet in 1788 …’ (1965: 4). Not a breath about the fact that there was already a population in Australia.

Sociologists in the discipline’s founding years did not entirely ignore Aboriginal people. There was a chapter towards the end of Australian Society on ‘Aborigines in the Australian Community’, written by an anthropologist who recognized the appalling death toll of conquest. There was a paper by Colin Tatz, ‘Sociology and Gippsland Aborigines’, presented at the 1968 SAANZ conference. The bibliography of social stratification had a substantial list of publications on ‘Aborigines and Part-Aborigines’ (Ancich et al., 1969: 145–9). Most notable were the hard-hitting articles by Leonard Broom, based on the 1966 census, showing what positivism could really do by detailing the educational and workforce status of Aborigines. Broom documented the ‘discontinuity’ between the situations of Aborigines and non-Aborigines, and the extreme vulnerability created by ‘poor education, poor jobs, low income and poverty’. There is no mistaking the anger here:

Thus far Australia has run Aboriginal ‘welfare’ on the cheap and has gotten what it paid for. Aborigines have paid a higher price. (Broom, 1971: 32)

Missing were Aboriginal voices in the sociological discussion; a way of thinking about Black/White relations as a continuing colonial situation rather than as ‘prejudice’ or a case of ‘stratification’; and a way of thinking about Australia as a postcolonial country, not part of the metropole. In this respect sociology in Aotearoa New Zealand, which addressed Maori/Pakeha relations as a major theme, diverged from sociology in Australia. The split of 1988–9 cost the Australian discipline dearly.

The founding group had in fact created Australian sociology as an extraverted knowledge project, to use Hountondji’s term (Connell, 2011). In this pattern, intellectual workers in the global periphery are oriented to the global metropole’s authority; adopt its concepts, methods and pedagogy; seek training and recognition from metropolitan universities; and thus re-create in the postcolonial situation the dependence installed by colonization. Because Australian sociology was focussed on the settler population rather than the colonized, its extraversion took the particular form of presumed identity with the metropole, through the shared status of ‘modern society’. In this framework it was not possible to think that peasants in Quang Ngai province or Aborigines in Brewarrina were just as modern as the white bourgeois in Toorak.

The extraversion installed by the founding generation has persisted. We have managed to replace deference to Parsons and Lazarsfeld with deference to Foucault and Bourdieu. Perhaps that is progress, though there never was a special issue of the Journal on ‘Working with Parsons’. The neoliberal mechanisms of surveillance and competitive ranking intensify the problem, as they increase the pressure to publish in high-ranking metropolitan journals and, therefore, to speak the conceptual language of the metropole.

But there has also been increasing recognition of the contradiction between living in a settler-colonial society and practising a sociology that denies coloniality. Several Australian sociologists in the 1990s wrote about postcolonial and non-metropolitan perspectives on knowledge. Chilla Bulbeck’s Re-orienting Western Feminisms (1998) and Peter Beilharz’s Imagining the Antipodes (1997) are key examples. In 1996 John Western was a leader in establishing the Asia Pacific Sociological Association, linking Australian sociologists with colleagues in south-east Asia rather than the metropole. With the formation of the thematic group on Sociology of Indigenous Issues in 2006, TASA acknowledged an institutional responsibility, and this has been followed by plenaries on indigenous issues and postcolonial perspectives.

As the postcolonial dynamics of knowledge come into focus in Australian sociology, we can acknowledge that the underlying issues have always been there. They have been present since Jean Martin’s encounter with refugees in the early 1950s and the glimpse they gave her of Anglo-Australian society from the underneath. One of the most moving passages written in the foundation years came from Martin’s colleague in the struggles over multiculturalism. Jerzy Zubrzycki, a most correct and conservative man, had himself been a refugee and had gone through the trauma of war. At the end of his Presidential Address in the troubled year 1972, he reflected on the moral role of sociology in Australia, helping the country to face:

the choice between public policies that put premium on material affluence and impoverish man’s spiritual world through the levelling, conformist style of industrial society, and those measures that question the present social system with such of its assumptions as, for example, that Australia must be preserved for the white man in a world in which the white men are rich, and coloured men perpetually poor.

And he quoted the novelist Ernestine Hill: ‘What shall it profit a man … if Australia, getting rich, loses its soul?’ (Zubrzycki, 1973: 13). It is a question of some relevance in the era of Xstrata Coal, the Group of Eight and the Pacific Solution.