Perspectives of a Sentimental Journey: V. Gordon Childe in Australia 1917–1921 (1981)

This chapter is a revised version of a seminar paper given in the Australian National University in 1978, at the time when I was preparing the Childe entry for The Australian Dictionary of Biography (Allen 1979). Ann Turner, a Melbourne historian, was at the same time researching in the Australian Archives Office among First World War censorship reports compiled by the Australian Department of Defence, and had encountered a number of letters written to and by Childe, which she passed on to me. I am indebted to her for the time and trouble she took on my account. These letters are valuable for a number of reasons. They assist in reconstructing Childe’s movements and activities in Australia for the four years before he returned to Britain; they shed light on Childe’s relationship with other members of his family, and his alienation from them; they provide important insights into the Australian society of the period, with the generally left-wing contents more than balanced by the appended censorial minutes; more specifically they offer an intimate view of Childe’s political ideology and personality as a young man. Lacking these sources I had previously proposed (Allen 1967) that Childe’s Australian experience had directly influenced his later archaeological contributions. This chapter attempts to develop this theme further. The decision to write this paper has been triggered by the recent Antiquity editorial (March 1980) that reproduced a Childe letter that removes the last doubt that Childe took his own life. It is clear from this editorial that there is wide interest in Childe, his works, and their inspiration. As well, however, Childe reiterates in this letter the dissatisfaction with Australian society that he expressed elsewhere shortly before his death: ‘I like Australian society much less than European without believing I can do anything to better it; for I have lost faith with all my old ideals.’ I contend that this loss of faith can be traced to his Australian experiences between 1917 and 1921. In ‘Retrospect’, Childe’s apologia pro vita sua published in Antiquity in 1958, in the year following his death, Childe dismissed his return to Australia some forty years earlier in a single phrase as a ‘sentimental excursion into Australian politics’.