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Now in his late-eighties, and listed by the National Trust as a 'Living Treasure', in Before I Forget Geoffrey Blainey reflects on his humble beginnings as the son of a Methodist Minister and school teacher, one of five children, and a carefree childhood spent in rural Victoria, from Terang to Leongatha, Geelong to Ballarat. From a young age these places ignited for Blainey a great affection for the Australian landscape, and a deep curiosity in Australia's history. He longed to travel, and would climb atop the roof of their home to stare out at the Great Dividing Range and imagine the world beyond. His mother created gardens wherever they went and had literary ambitions of her own; his father spent more on books than he could ever afford, and the library travelled with the family. Blainey's devotion to the Geelong Football Club began in Newtown from where he'd watch his team play at Corio, and as a newsboy he developed an early interest in current affairs, following the dramas and triumphs of the Second World War and the political careers of local identities John Curtin and Robert Menzies. With a burning desire to see Sydney but barely a penny to his name, he hitched there with a schoolfriend to see the harbour that greeted the First Fleet, and visited the national theatre of Parliament House on the way home to see Billy Hughes, JT Lang, Arty Fadden, Arthur Calwell, Enid Lyons and hero Ben Chifley in action. The course of Blainey's life changed when he was awarded a scholarship to board at Wesley College in Melbourne - an opportunity that instilled in him a great love of learning, under the tutelage of a group of inspiring teachers. This flourished further at the University of Melbourne, first as a wide-eyed student at Queen's Collage, where he was lectured by Manning Clarke, and later as a professor of history. Later he and Manning Clarke became great friends, both sitting on the Whitlam Government's new Literature Board. Hours spent at Melbourne's State Library as a student poring over the country's old newspapers cemented his calling to become a professional historian. Like Clarke Blainey has always been compelled to visit the places of our historical interest, including places of archaeological and Indigenous significance. Now the author of over forty books, Geoffrey Blainey claims he has discovered Australia's history his own way - and is still learning. Warm, insightful and lyrically written, Before I Forget recounts the experiences and influences that have shaped the astonishing mind of Australia's most loved historian. But in this book Blainey has given us something more - a fascinating and affectionate social history in and of itself.

Geoffrey Blainey is often described as Australia's greatest livinghistorian, a writer whose prolific output includes such iconic books about thecountry's past as The Tyranny of Distance and Triumph of the Nomads.

Blainey (1988) argued that crises are more likely to end in war when two nations disagree about their relative power. Fey and Ramsay (2007) claim that this widely used \"mutual optimism\" explanation is theoretically incoherent. Their criticism neglects the need to specify a behavioral causal mechanism that links beliefs to the outbreak of war. We show how the rationalist game-theoretic work on the causes of war provides such mechanisms—the risk-return trade-off and costly signaling—and demonstrate that these models are immune to Fey and Ramsay's critiques. We also show that the class of models Fey and Ramsay propose make the substantively unwarranted assumption that an actor can unilaterally impose peace on an opponent who strictly prefers war. Their finding that war does not occur in equilibrium has nothing to do with mutual optimism. We conclude that the mutual optimism explanation can be grounded on firm rationalist foundations.

As a teenager I read Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and was intoxicated by the glimpse of a young questing mind wrestling with experience, evidence and argument. In my final year at school we studied Alan Moorehead's Darwin and the Beagle (Harper and Row, 1969) and learned how this voyage came to change our understanding of the world. Darwin's insight into the origin of species and the process of natural selection was carefully and anxiously developed over decades in his home at Down House in Kent and then forced into the open by Alfred Russel Wallace's 1858 letter from the feverish jungles of Malaya. Two great and very different offspring of competitive, industrial Britain had arrived at the same idea. It was at heart a beautifully simple concept but its full scientific implications are still unfolding today. As I read Darwin's account of his South American excursions and learned of Thomas Huxley's eloquent defence of The Origin of Species, I yearned to live at a time when a grand and transformative scientific idea burst upon the world. Be careful what you wish for.

As Australia's premier historian turns eighty, Richard Allsop assesses the legacy of Geoffrey Blainey.

In his desire to restore the balance between white man and black man and to make up for their scandalous neglect of the Aboriginal heritage, he has at times swung too far the other way. That is the Sydney Morning Herald criticizing Geoffrey Blainey for being too sympathetic to Australia's indigenous population. These words were published in 1975 and were contained in a review of Blainey's landmark work Triumph of the Nomads. In the early 1970s, Blainey had been the first academic historian in the country to include Aboriginal history in a general Australian history subject. Just as the breadth of Blainey's work is remarkable, so is the longevity of his career. There is no doubt the two are linked. Both are the product of his insatiable curiosity to find out about the past, and to explain it to others by writing about it in beguiling prose.