Malcolm Henry Ellis

Malcolm Henry Ellis, CMG (21 August 1890 – 18 January 1969) was an Australian journalist, historian, critic, reviewer and staunch anti-communist.[1] His younger brother Ulrich Ellis was also a journalist and historian.

Ellis won praise during World War II for his column, 'The Service Man', which appeared under the pseudonym 'Ek Dum'. Using radio reports and his knowledge of terrain, he described military campaigns in a realistic manner so that it was assumed he was present.[1] His series of anti-communist tracts, the most famous of which was The Red Road (1932), was lurid and divisive.

Due to his staunch criticism of the writing of Manning Clark, who in Ellis's view was a Communist fellow traveller, he almost subverted the launching of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. 'History without facts', his excoriating and now legendary review in the Sydney Bulletin of the first volume of Clark's A History of Australia, is for many the main legacy of his otherwise extensive works, which include biographies of key early Australian colonial figures, Francis Greenway, John Macarthur and Lachlan Macquarie.[2]

Awards
  • 1942 he was awarded the S. H. Prior prize by The Bulletin for his John Murtagh Macrossan lectures at the University of Queensland on Macquarie
  • Appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (C.M.G.) in 1956
  • Honorary doctorate conferred by the University of Newcastle, 21 October 1966. The vice-chancellor, Professor James Auchmuty, praised him for contributing more than any other historian to 'knowledge of our country in the first half century of its existence'[1]

Notes
  1. Fletcher, B. H. "Ellis, Malcolm Henry (1890–1969),". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Melbourne University Press. ISSN 1833-7538. Retrieved 5 August 2012 – via National Centre of Biography, Australian National University.
  2. Andrew Moore (1999) History without facts: M. H. Ellis, Manning Clark and the origins of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Dec 1999 also at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb4817/is_2_85/ai_n28745196/. Given the extent of Malcolm Ellis's contribution to historical scholarship, it is curious that sometimes he should be more widely remembered for a single book review. This was `History Without Facts', published in The Bulletin on 22 September 1962. Ellis's response to the first volume of Manning Clark's history of Australia shaped contemporary and subsequent responses to Clark's ambitious project. In less than subtle terms Malcolm Ellis introduced a new pastime to Australian public and intellectual life, that of Manning Clark 'bashing'


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