Professor Geoffrey Blainey's importance to Australian culture extends far beyond the shelves occupied by his many books. He belongs to that increasingly rare class of scholar who helped a nation understand itself and who, when intellectual fashions changed, was prepared to defend the legitimacy of Australians taking pride in their inheritance. The Tyranny of Distance alone supplied Australian historical consciousness with one of its enduring organising ideas: that geography, isolation, transport and the immense distances of the continent were not incidental details but forces that helped make Australia what it became. Triumph of the Nomads demonstrated another side of Blainey, taking Aboriginal achievement seriously and presenting Indigenous Australians as extraordinarily successful adapters to one of the world's most demanding environments. The caricature of Blainey as merely a reactionary historian has never done justice to the breadth of his work.
What ultimately made Blainey a cultural figure rather than simply a distinguished historian, however, was his willingness to enter debates from which academics were increasingly expected to keep away unless they held the approved opinions. The decisive controversy came in 1984 when Blainey questioned the direction and pace of Australia's immigration policy, particularly the increasing Asian component of immigration. The ensuing argument was fierce and reached universities, newspapers and Parliament. His opponents regarded his intervention as dangerous and discriminatory; his supporters saw something quite different: an eminent scholar insisting that immigration policy, national cohesion and the cultural future of Australia were legitimate matters for democratic discussion. Even decades later Blainey described his essential concern as being that the pace of change was moving ahead of public opinion.
An immigration policy is necessarily selective: governments decide how many people enter, under what categories, and from where. To argue about those decisions is not necessarily to pronounce upon the individual worth of the people concerned. Blainey's argument was about the collective consequences of policy and about whether governments were entitled to transform the demographic and cultural character of a country faster than substantial parts of its population were comfortable with. One can reject his conclusions while still recognising the legitimacy of the question. Indeed, the intensity with which the question itself was sometimes treated as morally illegitimate demonstrated precisely why someone of Blainey's standing was important.
It is also worth remembering a figure who complicates the simplistic racial interpretation of the debate: the Sri Lankan-born legal scholar L. J. M. Cooray, previously discussed. Cooray was hardly an Anglo-Celtic Australian frightened by the arrival of people who looked different from himself. Yet in the same period he mounted his own vigorous critique of official multiculturalism. Cooray distinguished between the freedom of individuals to retain their traditions and a government policy that subsidised and institutionalised separate cultural identities. He asked a fundamental question: did Australia ultimately want an Australian culture capable of absorbing people from many origins, or merely a collection of ethnic cultures sharing the same geographical space? He argued that Australia's liberal institutions and inherited political traditions had themselves been among the things attracting migrants to the country. Cooray also specifically defended Blainey's right to put his position into public debate rather than be answered by personal vilification or threats.
Blainey's next great cultural intervention was even more enduring. In his 1993 Latham Lecture he gave Australia the phrase "black armband" history. The phrase has subsequently been simplified by both supporters and opponents, because Blainey's actual argument was more balanced than the slogan that emerged from it. He did not say that Australia's past was spotless. On the contrary, he acknowledged that the older patriotic school of history had been excessively congratulatory. His complaint was that the intellectual pendulum had swung from one distortion to another, until Australian history was increasingly narrated through injustice, oppression and shame. A mature country, he argued in effect, should be capable of recognising historical wrongs without concluding that its civilisation was therefore essentially illegitimate.
That intervention may ultimately be Blainey's greatest cultural legacy. Nations require historical memory. This does not mean mythology, suppression of wrongdoing or pretending that ancestors were saints. It means understanding that a civilisation is an inheritance built by imperfect human beings and that gratitude and criticism can coexist. Australia can acknowledge dispossession, prejudice, failed policies and injustice while also remembering exploration, settlement, democratic government, the rule of law, military sacrifice, scientific and industrial achievement, voluntary associations, churches, families and generations of ordinary people who built remarkably successful communities in an extraordinarily difficult continent. Historical maturity requires the entire ledger.
Blainey therefore became important not merely because of the positions he took, but because he resisted the proposition that intellectual respectability required Australians to be embarrassed by their own civilisation. He insisted that the country's British institutional inheritance, its distinctive national development and the achievements of earlier Australians remained worthy subjects of serious history. That was not an argument for freezing Australia at some imaginary point in the past. Blainey's own historical work ranged across Indigenous Australia, mining, economic history, Christianity, war and the history of the wider world. His scholarship itself demonstrated that a civilisation could be studied critically without being treated with contempt.
There is a particular courage required when an academic challenges the moral consensus of his own profession. Politicians expect abuse; controversy is part of their trade. University professors traditionally claim a different vocation: to examine evidence, challenge assumptions and say what their inquiries lead them to believe. Yet the real test of academic freedom arrives precisely when an academic says something colleagues consider deeply objectionable. The 1984 Blainey controversy became an early Australian example of that tension. Whatever judgment one makes about his immigration argument, the answer to an argument made by a historian should have been more argument, more evidence and more open debate.
Forty years later, that lesson has lost none of its force. Immigration, multiculturalism, national identity and the interpretation of Australian history remain contested questions. Some of Blainey's conclusions will continue to be disputed, as they should be in a free society. But the questions he insisted Australians were entitled to ask have not disappeared. How rapidly can a society change while retaining social cohesion? What obligations does a government owe to the existing population when designing immigration policy? Does multiculturalism mean private cultural freedom within a common national culture, or the permanent institutionalisation of separate identities? Can Australians acknowledge historical injustice without teaching successive generations that their national inheritance is principally an object of shame? Those are not relics of 1984. They remain questions about what Australia is and what Australians want it to become.
Blainey's cultural achievement was therefore larger than winning or losing any particular controversy. He helped preserve a space in Australian public life for historical continuity, national memory and legitimate pride. He reminded Australians that criticism of their country need not culminate in repudiation of it, and that respecting other peoples does not require becoming indifferent to one's own inheritance. Above all, he demonstrated the usefulness of the historian who refuses to become merely a custodian of fashionable opinion.
Australia has produced many able historians. Few have given the country concepts that entered ordinary political language, altered national debates and remained alive decades later. "The tyranny of distance" and "black armband history" did precisely that. Blainey's opponents helped prove his cultural significance simply by spending so many years arguing with him. His books remain, his phrases remain, and the questions he raised remain. In an age increasingly inclined to regard inherited national culture as something requiring apology, Geoffrey Blainey's enduring contribution was to insist that Australia had a history worth understanding in full, and an inheritance worth defending.