David Philips, Historian and Associate Professor
18 March 1946 – 6 August 2008
By Ian Britain
David Philips, once encountered, was impossible to forget. His grand simian bulk made him an exceptionally imposing figure, whether on the lecture podium, the squash court or the rugby field. The booming command of his voice, combined with the passion and forensic precision of its utterances, dominated any gathering or venue, not only academic ones. You might happen across him at a party (he loved parties) or just in the supermarket aisle on a Saturday morning, and you’d inevitably be ‘treated to a tutorial’, as a former student of his neatly put it. Whether he was expounding on the state of the weather or the state of the world, it was a treat, but it could also feel like treatment. He daunted as many people as he attracted and inspired - often the same people. He was capable of great warmth, but (unwittingly perhaps) put up something of a bar against most kinds of intimacy.
The same passion and precision that characterised his vocal style he brought to all his writings. These ranged over several fields – crime and the law in nineteenth-century England and colonial Australia; indigenous land rights in settler societies of the British Empire; the politics of Apartheid and reconciliation in South Africa – and formed the basis of a steady and impressive stream of periodical articles, monographs and co-authored books. It is difficult to draw any clear distinction in them between professional, political and personal imperatives. Scrupulously researched, impeccably documented, mercifully free of stylistic pyrotechnics, they yet spoke to and spoke of a series of fervent if sometimes ambivalent allegiances in his life: family, cultural, intellectual and institutional.
His interests in South African history can partly be related to his birth and upbringing in Johannesburg, where he attended King Edward VII School between 1952 and 1962, matriculating with distinction in Afrikaans as well as in English, Latin, History, Mathematics and Physical Science. He then spent a year doing National Service in the South African Navy before proceeding to one of the country’s most prestigious universities, Witwatersrand, between 1964 and 1966, where he took out a B.A. degree with first class honours in History and English.
It is reflective of the deep dissension of many of his generation of white South African students from the racial policies of the prevailing regime that he took the earliest opportunity to cut his physical ties with his homeland while remaining a vigorous protester against those policies in various arenas abroad. From 1967 to 1973 he based himself in England: first, at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he ended up reading for another undergraduate degree, in History, and again graduated with first class honours; then at Nuffield College, where he completed his doctorate, partly under the supervision of expatriate Australian historian Max Hartwell.
With Hartwell’s encouragement, he applied for, and was successful in attaining, a lectureship in Modern British History in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne, where he was to remain until his retirement at the end of 2007, having been promoted to an Associate Professorship in 1994. Any concerted engagement on his part as a scholar or teacher of South African History did not begin until after the Apartheid regime was dismantled, the only condition on which he could contemplate returning there for the necessary periods of sustained research.
Aspects of his early upbringing may also partly explain his general preoccupation with the history of the law. His father had long practised as a barrister (with occasional periods on the bench) and David possessed the rhetorical skills and analytic power to follow this path. There were certainly times when he appears to have contemplated an active legal career. During his first few months at Oxford, he had initially embarked on a law degree before turning again to history, and then late in his career (after the death of his father) he actually completed one, at the University of Melbourne, and with sufficient distinction to take leave from the History Department while he gave serious thought to the prospect of attaching himself to a Melbourne law firm. Once again, however, he returned to his first love, history, and to the Department that had sustained him and that he had helped sustain and enrich for so long.
‘It’s like the library at Alexandria going up in flames again,’ another former student observed, on first hearing the sad and dramatic news of David’s passing. This is a wryly affectionate tribute to his astonishing range of erudition in fields far outside his own specialties, but its symbolic import is broader, sadder for our culture as a whole. The immediate cause of his death was a sudden heart attack, which he suffered while on a trip to Port Douglas in the first few months of his retirement. Both death and retirement were premature. He was not forced to retire but those close to him towards the end knew how embittered and worn out and finally defeated he felt in his efforts to stem what he saw as the steady erosion of intellectual values and academic freedoms in Australia’s universities. Innocent of tact in these efforts as of any guile, and incapable of compromise, he might be said to have died of integrity.
David is survived by his mother, Joan, his sister, Margaret, and his two brothers, Michael and Bobby.
Ian Britain taught Modern British History with David Philips at the University of Melbourne between 1982 and 1990.