- published: 11 Aug 2014
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Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC (born 11 March 1930), is a prominent Australian historian and commentator with a wide international audience. He is said to be the “most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and - in the 1980s and 1990s - most controversial of Australia’s living historians.” Between 1967 and 2007 he was chairman or member of a wide range of the Australian Government’s councils, boards and committees. His name sometimes appears in lists of the most influential Australians, past or present.
Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of Melbourne Student Union. He was appointed to a teaching post at the University of Melbourne in 1962, becoming Professor of Economic History in 1968, Professor of History in 1977, and then Dean of Melbourne's Faculty of Arts in 1982. From 1994 to 1998 Blainey was foundation Chancellor at the University of Ballarat.