Abstract
The title of this excellent new biography, Jean Blackburn Education, feminism and social justice, by Craig Campbell, and Debra Hayes, gives the reader immediate insight into the three passions that drove the life and work of this influential Australian educator and policy maker. Blackburn was first and foremost an educationalist, whose work was informed by feminist views that preceded and anticipated the work of the second wave feminists; her unshakeable beliefs in equality of opportunity, fairness and redressing disadvantage provided the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings for her remarkable contributions to educational and social policy.
The book comprises 10 chapters. The first three are largely about the struggle she, as a young woman growing up between the two world wars, experienced to access an education that would prepare her for later professional life. Born Jean Muir on 14 July 1919 (Bastille Day, the revolutionary significance of which she was later to link with her own radical efforts at educational reform), she attended first Lloyd Street Higher Elementary School in Malvern, Melbourne, then University High School and the University of Melbourne. At every stage, she had to fight her father to continue. Les Muir was a working-class man who aspired, successfully, to belong to the middle class. Having got on well in life without an education, he was incapable of seeing its value, especially for a girl whose path in life, or so he firmly believed, would necessarily be confined to marriage and motherhood. His views were not unusual, especially among men of his class and upbringing at that time. It was only through her own iron determination and the support of her mother, Claire, that Jean managed, with great difficulty, to overcome her father’s fierce opposition and graduate from the University of Melbourne in 1936 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in economics and economic history.
As a university student, Jean became active in politics. She held office in the Labor Club and joined the Communist Party where she met and later, in April 1943, married committed Communist, Dick Blackburn, whose mother, Doris Blackburn was the second woman (after Dame Enid Lyons) to serve in the Australian parliament. His father founded the law firm of Maurice Blackburn.
The Second World War gave Jean and many other women the opportunity to do ‘men’s work’ while male workers were in the armed forces. From early in 1943, as Australia feared a Japanese invasion, she was employed in the Federal Department or War Organisation of Industry working on reorganising the economy as an essential part of the war effort. She continued her political activism and feminism with her involvement in the Federated Clerks’ Union and membership of the executive of the Council of Women in War Work with Mollie Bayne and Kathleen Fitzpatrick. She was enjoying this stage of her life when, following her first pregnancy around April 1944, she largely withdrew from public life to devote herself to home and family, thus conforming to the social expectations of the time.
In 1946, the Blackburns moved to Adelaide, where Dick was employed as a research scientist with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Jean had few friends at first, but she kept up her some of her political interests through the Communist Party and involvement as President of the Adelaide branch of the New Housewives Association, said to be a ‘front’ for the Party. Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) kept files on both her and her husband.
The middle and later chapters of the biography describe Blackburn’s career as she progressed from working with Peter Karmel, whom she had known as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, on an enquiry and report into education in South Australia to her work, also with Karmel, under the reformist Whitlam government, which, in 1974, resulted in the establishment of the Australian Schools Commission, and her many later roles.
In Victoria, Jean Blackburn is remembered for her successful leadership of an enquiry into the growingly dysfunctional upper secondary years of education in that state, and the production of the report that subsequently bore her name: ‘The Blackburn Report’. This was a task that demanded the full deployment of her fine intellectual skills and knowledge of education at the school as well as policy level; it required her to negotiate with a range of stakeholders and competing interests, including the so-called ‘five organisations’ which comprised the three teacher unions and two parent organisations. The result was a single Year 12 certificate that went a long way towards meeting the needs of a diverse range of student interests and capabilities, and which lessened the divide between ‘technical’ and ‘academic’ education. The Blackburn Report transformed the post-compulsory years of education in Victoria and, subsequently, all Australian states.
Blackburn’s contributions, as one of two full-time Schools Commissioners (Ken McKinnon, the Chairman of the Commission, was her full-time colleague), were of incalculable value as the federal government began to exercise more influence, mainly through funding, on Australian education. A major achievement was her conception and direction of the Disadvantaged Schools Program which reflected her unswerving commitment to equality of educational opportunity and overcoming the educational disadvantages suffered by poor and marginalised groups in Australian society. Another was the report of her investigation into the education of girls, Girls, Schools and Society, which reflected her own struggles in achieving secondary and tertiary education.
For the general reader, the earlier and later chapters of the biography, which provide insight into the more personal aspects of Blackburn’s life and character, will probably be the page-turners. The writers have been circumspect in these areas, leaving this reader, at least, wanting to know more, for example, about her family life and her relationships with some outstanding contemporaries such as Joan Kirner and Susan Ryan. They have succeeded, however, in presenting an engaging and sympathetic portrait of a woman, wife, mother and friend, a person of extraordinary charm and talent who invested considerable nervous energy and suffered her demons, including persistent depression and later ill-health, with courage and style.
Meticulously researched, and lucidly presented, this book will be an invaluable resource for all those who have a professional or personal interest in the history of education in Australia. It will also be of special interest to teachers and other educators who were involved in education in the years of Jean Blackburn’s greatest influence. With more than a little nostalgia, those readers will recall how her egalitarian philosophies and principles illuminated the policies that informed their work during what Bill Hannan, union leader and friend of Jean Blackburn, has described as ‘the best of times’.
We will never know how many students, especially girls and those from disadvantaged families, including children of non-English speaking background, profited from Blackburn’s work, but we can be sure they were many. Today, as the rules of market and measurement hold sway, it is good to be reminded of those days.