Allan Callaghan: A life

By Ross Humphreys, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2002, 145 pages, hardback, $34.95. Reviewed by Kathryn Lawry in the June 2002 issue.

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Ross Humphreys is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Research Consultant in Agricultural Science at the University of Queensland. He has written biographical studies of Sir Ian Clunies Ross and Professor Sir Samuel Wadham and has now produced this biography of Allan Callaghan. As Callaghan's biographer, Humphreys has the advantage of having known his subject and been a participant in several of the events of Callaghan's life. This biography is a tribute to Callaghan as one of the initiators of Australia's modern agricultural economic framework, paying close attention to his role in national and international deliberations involving agricultural policies and the development of improved strains of wheat within Australia and the promotion of Australia's wheat in a dynamic international market.

Scion of a farming family in Bathurst, New South Wales, Callaghan studied agricultural science with a particular interest in agricultural botany and genetics at the University of Sydney. He made the most of his student life, distinguishing himself academically and athletically. In sport he excelled in distance running, rugby and cricket. He became actively involved in student politics, eventually becoming vice president of the Undergraduates' Association. In 1925, Callaghan became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. His energy, commitment and leadership, coupled with a certain amount of modesty, were characteristics often remarked upon by his teachers and friends. These qualities, first demonstrated during his university years, characterised his future professional and personal life.

In Oxford, Callaghan selected St John's College and attained an Oxford Bachelor of Science within one year of his arrival through a careful anatomical study of the oat grain. Callaghan followed this with what has since become a classic study of the development of the inflorescence of the oat plant. As he did at the University of Sydney, Callaghan interspersed diligent study with intense sporting activity, concentrating on rugby. His achievement in sport, more than his academic endeavours, provided him with access to student social life. Considered a brash and blunt farmer from Australia, Callaghan had found it difficult to come to terms with a social set he found inhibiting. In this environment Callaghan worked hard to preserve what he saw as his essential outgoing Australian nature. At the same time as he was President of the Colonial Club, Callaghan also developed extensive networks with students and dons at his own and other universities. This pattern of consciously cultivating and maintaining his identity as an Australian while constructing wide-ranging and intricate social networks was one he developed throughout his adult life. The networks he had constructed and carefully nurtured as director of agriculture in South Australia from 1949 to 1959 and in his diplomatic work as a commercial counsellor with the Australian Embassy in Washington DC from 1959 to 1965 gave him several distinct advantages in his subsequent work as Chair of the Australian Wheat Board.

In these positions, Callaghan was a major influence in shaping policies regarding the cultivation and distribution of Australian wheat in international markets. As Chair of the Australian Wheat Board from 1965 to 1971 he successfully negotiated sales to new markets in the Middle-East, particularly Egypt, strengthened economic ties with Japan and opened up trade relations with China during the politically volatile period of the cultural revolution. Humphreys' pleasure in Callaghan's ability to successfully interpret the apparent political situation by ferreting out the underlying motivations behind it is clear from the opening of this biography. His Preface narrates the sequence of negotiations for wheat sales to China in 1967. During this intense three-day period, Callaghan took a stance directly against the stated policy aims of Prime Minister Holt and the Australian government. Humphreys narrates this period in the tense style of diplomatic brinkmanship and attributes the successful outcome of the negotiations to Callaghan's prescience and passive resistance to government demands through skillful procrastination.

Throughout the delineation of Callaghan's professional achievements, Humphreys is careful to attribute his energy and single-mindedness to a strong protestant work ethic. Humphreys presents Callaghan's strength of will, sense of self-worth and righteous conviction within a Christian world view. Callaghan's belief in service to the community expressed itself in his duty of pastoral care for those individuals under his authority, as in his interactions with students at Roseworthy Agricultural College where he was principal from 1932 to 1949. This duty of care, coupled with his sense of a higher responsibility, also gave him the authority to provide negative advice to his superiors in government when necessary and to passively resist government interdictions, which he saw as counter-productive, as in the sensitive negotiations with China in 1967. Callaghan's commitment to the protestant work ethic, however, also encouraged his competitive spirit and sometimes led him to emphasise his public duty over his duty to his family. At times, his decisiveness and enthusiasm sometimes led him into recklessness and insensitivity in dealing with his own children. Assuming that his way was the only way, Callaghan was sometimes puzzled by and occasionally opposed to decisions his children took, particularly in regard to their marriages and divorces. While Humphreys introduces some elements of the personal in Callaghan's relationships with his first wife Zillah and their children and his second wife Doreen, it is clear that his personal life was, if not subordinate to, at least fundamentally supportive of his public duty.

Humphreys' biography shares many of the traditional conventions of nineteenth-century Western European biography in its careful enumeration of the achievements of an influential man of science and politics written from an insider's vantage point. Refraining from a psychological study of his subject, Humphreys' biography celebrates the achievements of an Australian agricultural scientist, educator, diplomat and administrator whose role in Australia's scientific, political and economic history deserves to be remembered and acknowledged.

Citation

• Kathryn Lawry. 'Review: Allan Callaghan: A life by Ross Humphreys' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2002. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 22 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Allan Callaghan is remembered as a distinguished agricultural scientist. He was also an engaging and brilliant teacher, a skilful diplomat and an astute administrator.
  
  During his sixteen years as Principal of Roseworthy Agricultural College in South Australia, until 1948, he established it as a premier institute. He later steered the Australian Wheat Board through difficult years of fluctuating wheat prices, varying market demand and political turmoil, notably in sales to China.
  
  Callaghan's commitment to Australian agriculture was a motivating force throughout his life. He offers a rich subject for a biography, having had a long and wide-ranging career in a period of historically significant developments. His life offers an opportunity to consider the development of wheat breeding, the modernisation of agricultural education and the implementation of a post-war soldier settlement policy that avoided some of the worst problems of earlier schemes. He worked with various government agencies in South Australia to radically improve dry-land farming before taking his experience into the national and international arena.
  
  This carefully researched biography reveals Callaghan's remarkable capacities and commitments, as well as hinting at the passionate and emotional side of his complex personality.

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