Brian Fitzpatrick(1905–1965)

Brian Charles Fitzpatrick was born at Warrnambool, Victoria, on 23 September 1905, eldest of four children of a dairy farmer of Irish-Catholic immigrant ancestry. He was schooled at Warrnambool and won an open Victorian Education Department scholarship to Warrnambool High School, taking the senior public examination of 1923 with first-class honours in English literature and history.

He took an open scholarship to the University of Melbourne in 1924, a first-class honours BA in 1927 and an MA in 1929 on a thesis on the early colonial-Australian convict-and-settler economy. The Melbourne history department under Sir Ernest Scott was the training-ground of the post-First-World-War Australian historians' generation; Fitzpatrick took the economic-historical position that distinguished his subsequent work.

He spent two years from 1931 at All Souls College Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, doing primary-source research at the Public Record Office in London, and returned to Melbourne in 1933 with the archive on which his two major monographs were built. British Imperialism and Australia 1783-1833 (1939) and The British Empire in Australia 1834-1939 (1941) produced the foundational Australian economic-historical analysis of the colonial economy.

The Australian People 1788-1945 (1946) was the popular synthesis of the two monographs for the post-war general readership: it sold about a hundred and twenty thousand copies across the post-war decade, stayed in print for three decades, and shaped the mid-twentieth-century Australian Labor-and-trade-union historiographical tradition that ran through the later Manning Clark, Russel Ward and Robin Gollan careers.

He founded the Australian Council for Civil Liberties at the Melbourne Trades Hall in 1936 and served as its Director for thirty years, running the Australian civil-liberties advocacy on conscription, surveillance, the post-1950 Royal Commission proceedings and immigration-and-Indigenous civil rights. His daughter is the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, the leading English-language historian of Stalinist-Soviet social history. He died in Melbourne on 2 August 1965, fifty-nine years old. The Fitzpatrick name, the Anglo-Norman patronymic Mac Giolla Phádraig of the Ossory frontier, he carried from a Warrnambool dairy-farming immigrant family into the foundation of the Australian academic economic-historical tradition.