Richard Alan Rothschild

Sandy Bay

Richard Alan Rothschild was born at 7:15 am on 24 June 1953 at Calvary Hospital in Lenah Valley, the second child of James Leonard Rothschild and Helena Margaret Rothschild née Blackwell. His father, born in Hobart in 1924, was a history teacher at a state high school who rose in time to become a headmaster. His mother, born in 1926, had worked as a librarian until the birth of their first child and did not go back. Helena was a practising Catholic. James's family had been Jewish two generations back and nothing in particular since, and he had never been curious about it.

The family lived in a brick house in Sandy Bay with a long sloping garden and a view of the river. Richard's elder sister, Catherine Louise Rothschild, was born in 1950. Three more children followed: Philip Andrew in 1955, Rebecca Elaine in 1958 and Julian David in 1962. It was a crowded, noisy, bookish house. James read history at the dinner table and expected his children to argue with him about it. Helena ran the household with a librarian's sense of order and a Catholic mother's sense of duty, and saw that all five children were at Mass on Sundays.

Richard was the quiet one. He read early and obsessively, mostly history and anything about railways, and he spent long afternoons in a corner of the garden with a book while his brothers played cricket on the lawn. He played too, when made to, without much talent or interest. His father noticed that Richard asked better questions than his other children and began, when the boy was about ten, to bring him books from the school library that were meant for older students.

St Virgil's

Richard went to St Virgil's College, the Christian Brothers school in Hobart, from 1959 to 1970. He was a strong student in history, English and Latin and an indifferent one in everything else. The Brothers were strict, occasionally violent and, in two or three cases, genuinely learned, and Richard attached himself to the history master, an elderly Brother from County Cork who taught Tasmania's colonial past as a story of crime, cruelty and survival rather than of progress. It was the first time Richard heard the island's history told without pride, and it changed how he understood it.

He ran the school's history club in his final two years and wrote, at sixteen, a long essay on the Black War of the 1820s that his teacher returned with a single comment, telling him that he had read the sources and must now go and read what they left out. Richard spent the next decade trying to do so.

His faith did not survive adolescence. He stopped going to Mass at seventeen, which caused the first serious argument of his life with his mother and a long silence afterwards. His father, who had married into Catholicism without believing in it, took no side and told him privately that he would have to make his own peace with Helena. He did, eventually, though it took several years.

The Frontier

He enrolled at the University of Tasmania in 1971 and read history. He lived at home, worked in the university library in the evenings and spent most of his weekends in the State Archives, reading colonial correspondence, court records and the reports of the government's dealings with the island's Aboriginal people. His honours thesis, completed in 1975, was titled "The Frontier Experience: Conflict and Accommodation in Early Colonial Tasmania". It was awarded first-class honours and the university medal, and it argued, unfashionably for the time, that the island's Aboriginal people had not simply been destroyed but had resisted, negotiated and survived.

His professors encouraged him to take a doctorate overseas. He considered it seriously and decided against it. He wanted to teach, and he wanted to stay in Tasmania, and he suspected, correctly, that a doctorate in England would take him away from the island for good. He went instead to the University of Melbourne in 1976 to take a Graduate Diploma in Education, and spent two years there, teaching relief classes in the northern suburbs to pay his rent. He hated Melbourne's size and noise, and he came home at the end of 1977 with a teaching qualification and a clear sense of where he belonged.

St Michael's

In 1978 Richard joined the staff of St Michael's Collegiate School, the Anglican girls' school in central Hobart, as a history teacher. He was twenty-four and nervous, and the school's daughters of judges, doctors and graziers found him at first easy to tease and then hard to fool. He became senior history master in 1983 and stayed at the school for twelve years.

He rebuilt the school's history curriculum around Tasmania itself, including the colonial frontier and the fate of the Aboriginal people, at a time when most Tasmanian schools taught the island's history as a story of explorers and governors. Not everyone welcomed it. Several parents complained to the headmistress in the mid-1980s that he was teaching their daughters to be ashamed of their ancestors. The headmistress backed him, though she asked him to be more careful, and he was not.

Among his students was Sandra Elizabeth Harris, the daughter of a violinist and a painter from Sandy Bay. In 1988, in Year 8, Sandra submitted a project linking the architecture of Tasmania's convict prisons to the French philosopher Michel Foucault's writing on surveillance. Richard had not read Foucault. He gave the project the highest mark he had awarded that year and spent his summer holidays reading him. He told Sandra the following year that he still did not agree with her, but that he understood her argument better than he had, and she remembered it.

Margaret

In late 1978 Richard went to a fundraiser in Hobart for a children's literacy programme and found himself standing beside a young Englishwoman who had been in Tasmania for less than three years and was looking at a display of children's drawings with a professional eye. Margaret Elizabeth Wainwright was twenty-two, from Exeter in Devon, the daughter of a garage owner and a seamstress. She had trained in botanical illustration and was working as an art teacher at Ogilvie High School. They talked for most of the evening about the colony's early naturalists, and he asked her to dinner.

They married in December 1979. Richard's mother was disappointed that it was not a Catholic wedding and came anyway. Margaret's parents could not afford the fare from England, and her side of the church was filled by her cousin, Thomas Bennett, who had emigrated before her, and his family. The couple rented a flat in Battery Point. Margaret kept teaching and painted in the evenings, and Richard marked essays at the other end of the kitchen table.

Their first child, Amelia Margaret Rothschild, was born on 15 March 1983 at the Royal Hobart Hospital. Samuel Edward Rothschild followed in 1985 and Clara Anne Rothschild in 1987. In 1984 the family bought an old Victorian house in upper Sandy Bay, with high ceilings, bad plumbing and a large garden that Margaret turned into a working collection of native plants. The house was always short of money and never short of books.

Margaret gave up teaching in 1985 to work as a freelance botanical artist. It was a brave decision on a teacher's single salary, and the family felt it for years. Richard took on private tutoring in the evenings and marked examination papers for the state each summer. The children grew up in a house that was intellectually generous and financially tight, and they noticed both.

Echoes

Richard's first book, Echoes Across the Strait: Tasmania's Colonial Frontiers, was published by a small Melbourne press in 1988. It drew on the research he had begun for his honours thesis and had continued in the archives on weekends for thirteen years. It argued that the Tasmanian frontier had been more violent, and Aboriginal resistance more organised, than the standard histories admitted.

The reception was mixed. Some reviewers praised it as overdue. Others, including a senior historian in a national newspaper, accused Richard of writing politics rather than history. A group of Aboriginal community members in Hobart told him, kindly but plainly, that he had written about their ancestors without asking any of their descendants. Richard took the second criticism harder than the first, and spent much of the next decade learning to listen.

In 1990 he left St Michael's for Hobart College, the government senior secondary college in the city, where he taught Year 11 and 12 history. He became head of the history department in 1996. He preferred the college. Its students came from every part of Hobart, and they argued with him in ways the girls of St Michael's had been too well brought up to try.

Rebecca

In his early forties Richard became seriously depressed. It came on slowly in 1993 and 1994, as a heaviness he put down to overwork, and by the end of 1994 he was struggling to get out of bed on school mornings. He told no one but Margaret, who had already noticed. She persuaded him to see a doctor, which he did reluctantly and without much faith.

In March 1995 his younger sister Rebecca died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, at thirty-six, leaving a husband and two young children. She had been the sibling Richard was closest to. Her death deepened the depression into something he could not hide, and in 1996 he took a term's leave from the college. Margaret held the household together. Amelia, then thirteen, took on more of the care of her younger brother and sister than she should have had to, and later said that she grew up a good deal that year.

Richard recovered slowly over the following two years, with medication, a patient psychiatrist and a great deal of walking on the tracks above Fern Tree. He never spoke publicly about the depression, and he was ashamed of it for longer than he should have been. His father had died in 1992, and Richard sometimes said that the illness had been waiting for him since then.

Voices

The work he did after the depression was different from the work before it. His second book, Van Diemen's Voices: Oral Histories from Tasmania's Margins, published in 1999, was built from interviews he had recorded across the state over five years with Aboriginal elders, timber workers, miners' widows, convicts' descendants and migrants. He did the interviews in their kitchens and let them talk. It was the best-reviewed work of his career, and the one he was proudest of.

He began bringing the method into the classroom at Hobart College, setting his Year 12 students to record the stories of their own grandparents. Several of the recordings ended up in the state archives. Among his students in his last years at the college, in 2007 and 2008, was Linda Marie Patterson, a quiet, observant girl from Lenah Valley whose essays were careful and whose questions were better than her marks suggested. Richard told her she should read history at university, and in 2009 she did.

His children were growing up and leaving. Amelia went from the Hobart Conservatorium to the Royal Academy of Music in London in 2006, and Richard and Margaret flew to see her in 2007, the first time either of them had left Australia in decades. Margaret took Richard to Exeter to meet her family for the first time in his life. Amelia came home in 2008 to a permanent seat in the viola section of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Samuel followed his father into history, with a focus on Aboriginal Tasmania, and the two of them argued about method across the kitchen table for years. Clara followed her mother into botanical art.

The Name

In the mid-2000s Richard turned his research methods on his own family. His father had known almost nothing about the Rothschild name, and Richard had always been faintly embarrassed by its associations. He found, over three years in the archives in Hobart and London, that the family was descended from Moses Rothschild, a jeweller's apprentice from the East End of London who had been convicted of receiving stolen goods and transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1833.

Moses served his sentence, married a Jewish woman from Hobart, and was one of the early members of the congregation that built the Hobart synagogue in Argyle Street in 1845. His son married outside the faith, and within two generations the family's Jewish history had been forgotten. Richard wrote it up as a long essay, which he called "The Name", and gave a copy to each of his siblings. His mother, by then in her late seventies, read it twice and told him she was glad someone had finally asked.

The Long Illness

In 2011, at fifty-seven, Richard was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. The first sign had been a weakness in his right hand that made his handwriting deteriorate, which he had put down to age. The diagnosis came in the same year as his third book, Tides of Change: Hobart and the Global Twentieth Century, which he finished in a race against his own hands.

He kept teaching for as long as he could. By 2013 he needed a stick to walk and could not hold chalk, and he retired from Hobart College at the end of that year. He walked Amelia down the aisle at her wedding to Nate Harrington, a landscape architect from Launceston, in 2012, with the stick in one hand and her arm in the other. His granddaughter, Elowen, was born in 2015. He held her in his lap in a wheelchair.

The illness was hard on everyone in the house. Margaret, who had developed rheumatoid arthritis in her late fifties, became his principal carer as her own hands weakened, and there were months when neither of them slept properly. The children took turns. Samuel, living nearby, came most evenings. Amelia, whose own career was disrupted by tendinitis in 2016, spent much of that year at her parents' house. There were arguments about hospice care that the family did not always resolve kindly.

Richard kept working. When he could no longer type he used voice software, and when his voice failed he used an eye-gaze system. He spent his last two years recording oral histories of his own, interviewing former students, colleagues and family members about Hobart in the second half of the twentieth century. He corresponded with former students to the end. His last finished piece of writing, dictated in 2017, was a short preface for a new edition of "The Name".

Sandy Bay Again

Richard Alan Rothschild died at home in Sandy Bay on 17 September 2018, aged sixty-five, with Margaret and their three children in the room. His funeral was held at St David's Cathedral in Hobart, at Margaret's choice. The cathedral was full of former students, colleagues from both his schools, archivists, and families whose grandparents he had recorded in their kitchens. Two of the eulogies were given by women he had taught at St Michael's in the 1980s.

His mother had died in 2007 and his sister Catherine in 2004. Philip and Julian, the surviving brothers, flew in from Melbourne and Sydney. In 2019 the University of Tasmania established a prize in his name for research in Tasmanian history. Margaret kept his study as he had left it for several years, with the eye-gaze screen still on the desk, before she gave his papers to the state archives.