Hugh Anderson, Historian

Hugh Anderson (1927–2017) was a scholar of formidable breadth, productivity and versatility. While it is as a folklorist that he is best known, Anderson’s prolific output also included biography, bibliography, history, school textbooks and documentary collections. Anderson seemed as comfortable writing about John Pascoe Fawkner as Squizzy Taylor, as at home with an Aboriginal gumleaf player and a Sydney street poet as with the exquisite verse of John Shaw Neilson or the stately poetry of Bernard O’Dowd. Anderson’s boundary-riding between history, biography, folklore and literary criticism occurred at a time when universities were moving towards a sharper focus on specialised research, theory and discipline-based knowledge—in ways that both deepened and limited understandings of Australian history and culture.