Almanac Tribute: Vale Gillian Hibbins

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was privileged to know Gillian Hibbins when she was a researcher and volunteer at the Melbourne Cricket Club Library. By then she had published several books including two in particular that I found indispensable and stimulating. The first was the critical assessment of and complete text of Henry Colden Harrison’s autobiography. The second was her self-published Sport and Racing in Colonial Melbourne: The Cousins and Me: Colden Harrison, Tom Wills and William Hammersley, Lynedoch Publications, Melbourne in 2007. The latter is a beautiful production and the best post-modern writing about early Melbourne, even though she would have never described it as such herself. In the body of the text she has woven a delicious, arch and absorbing fictional autobiography by Hammersley. The historical substance appears in 54 pages of endnotes, where she discursively presents the research in the archives on which the book is based. So you can follow her tracks in detail and wonder at the skill with which these are transformed into the page-turning story that is the main text.

 

 

 

 

She also wrote a series of articles for domestic and international journals on the history of sport with a particular focus on the much-contested origins of the Victorian-Australian code of football. These included forensic analysis of the University of Cambridge connection of several of the key personnel involved and a very clear-eyed and sceptical dissection of a popular notion that the game had Indigenous ancestry, first proposed by Jim Poulter and later promoted by Martin Flanagan, David Thompson, Jenny Hocking and Nell Reidy, Ciannon Cazaly, Barry Judd and others. Since some of her reflections on the subject appeared in midst of the history wars, she was drawn into a most unsavoury episode in which her scholarship, research and thorough work in the sources, written, oral and contemporary was traduced. Much of the focus was on her contribution to a history of the game published by Slattery Enterprises to mark the 150^th anniversary of the Australian code. Critics failed to appreciate that the brief remarks therein were supported by years of research, not a spur of the moment response to a very late request from the publisher. If Gillian Hibbins had a political bone in her body, she might have realised that this might lay her open to criticism, but the form it took and the viciousness would have wounded the toughest academic warrior. She did not deserve that.

 

Gillian Hibbins was a dedicated and generous researcher and I benefited enormously from her example and her willingness to discuss her methods and findings. Knowledge was to be shared, not hained, and sources and ways of tackling them were to be explained patiently and with good humour. She could be a very funny conversationalist, but you had to be on your toes to win her respect and confidence. I was privileged to spend time in her company on some of my visits to the Melbourne Cricket Club library when I was drawn into the study of the domestic code. As someone brought up as a devotee of soccer, Association football, I’ve always felt that I did not have anything like the depth of knowledge that Gillian shared so freely. She was the best mentor one could wish for and she will be missed by everyone who knew her and benefited from her wisdom.

 

 

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