Brian Fitzpatrick(1905–1965)

Brian Charles Fitzpatrick was born at 26 Banyan Street, Warrnambool on 23 September 1905, eldest of four children of Charles Fitzpatrick, a dairy farmer of substantial Irish-Catholic immigrant ancestry, and Mary Bourke. The household was rural Catholic-Australian of the early federation period: the family ran a 200-acre dairy farm on the volcanic-soil grazing country of the south-western Victoria coast, the father was active in the Warrnambool Catholic-and-Irish-Nationalist political establishment of the period, and the mother had been a teacher at the Warrnambool Catholic primary school before her marriage. The boy was schooled at the Warrnambool small Catholic primary school from six to twelve, won an open Victorian Education Department scholarship to Warrnambool High School at thirteen in 1918, and took the Victorian senior public-examination of 1923 at seventeen with first-class honours in English literature and history.

He took an open scholarship to the University of Melbourne in 1924 at eighteen to read for the BA in history and English, took the BA First-Class Honours in 1927 at twenty-one, and took the MA at Melbourne in 1929 on a thesis on the early colonial-Australian convict-and-settler economy. The Melbourne University history department of the late 1920s under the Australian historian Sir Ernest Scott was the foundational academic-historical training-ground of the post-First-World-War Australian historians' generation; Fitzpatrick took the Marxist-materialist-economic-historical position on the colonial-Australian convict-economy question that distinguished his subsequent work from the Victorian-progressive-historical mainstream of the period.

He spent two years between 1931 and 1933 at All Souls College Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, took the Oxford-tutorial postgraduate research-position on the British colonial-economic-policy small primary-source-research project at the Public Record Office London, and returned to Melbourne in 1933 at twenty-eight with the foundational primary-source archive that the two major monographs of his career were built on. *British Imperialism and Australia 1783–1833* (Allen and Unwin, London, 1939) was the first volume; *The British Empire in Australia 1834–1939: An Economic History of Australian Colonization* (Melbourne University Press, 1941) was the second. The two volumes together produced the foundational Australian Marxist-economic-historical analysis of the colonial-Australian economy, on the argument that the British colonial settlement of Australia had been driven by the commercial-and-economic-extractive interests of the British-and-colonial capitalist class against the small-farmer-and-working-class colonial population that the colonial-political establishment had subordinated to the commercial-economic project.

*The Australian People 1788–1945* (Melbourne University Press, 1946) was the popular-historical synthesis of the two earlier monograph volumes for the post-1945 Australian general-readership market. The small book sold about a hundred and twenty thousand copies across the post-war decade and remained continuously in print across the next three decades; it was the foundational mid-twentieth-century Australian popular-history text and shaped the mid-twentieth-century Australian Labor-and-trade-union-school historiographical tradition that would run through the Manning Clark and the Russel Ward and the Robin Gollan academic-historical careers of the next two academic generations.

He served as the founding Director of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties from 1936 to 1965, the continuously-running civil-liberties advocacy organisation that he had established at the Melbourne Trades Hall in 1936 on the post-1934 Lyons-government repression of the Communist-and-trade-union-political establishment. The Council across the thirty-year period of his directorship ran the Australian civil-liberties advocacy on conscription, on Commonwealth-Defence-Act surveillance, on the post-1950 Petrov-and-Royal Commission anti-Communist proceedings, and on the immigration-and-Indigenous-Australian civil-rights questions of the post-war decades. He was married to Dorothy Davies, a Melbourne University librarian and women's-rights activist, from 1934; the marriage produced three children including the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick (b. 1941), the foundational English-language historian of the Stalinist-Soviet small-political-and-social history of the 1930s and 1940s Soviet Union, who has run her own subsequent small academic-and-public-history career out of the Australian-and-American small post-1960 academic-historical establishment. He died of small cancer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital on 2 August 1965, fifty-nine years old. The Fitzpatrick name in the Irish-side catalogue is the Anglo-Norman patronymic *Mac Giolla Phádraig* (son of the devotee of Patrick), the medieval Ossory-and-Leinster surname of the medieval *Mac Giolla Phádraig* hereditary-clerical-landed-gentry family that was the medieval Anglo-Norman-and-Gaelic frontier-bilingual family of the medieval Irish midlands; he carried the Warrnambool-Australian-dairy-farmer-immigrant variant of it into the foundation of the Australian Marxist-academic-historical tradition.