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Interviews

Vol. 7 No. 2 (2016)

A Conversation with Ann Moyal, Lord Beaverbrook’s Researcher

Submitted
January 5, 2017
Published
2016-12-01

Abstract

Ann Moyal is a distinguished Australian historian, whose works on the history of Australian science have included important studies such as Scientists in Nineteenth-Century Australia: A Documentary History (Stanmore, NSW: Cassell, 1976), Clear across Australia: A History of Telecommunications (Melbourne: Nelson, 1984), and Platypus: The Extraordinary Story of How a Curious Creature Baffled the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004). She has published two autobiographical volumes, both of which deal in part with her association with Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, as a writer and research assistant during the 1950s, as well as articles in the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society (1965) and History Today (2011) that also recall those years. Dr. Moyal, who has held positions at the New South Wales Institute of Technology and Griffith University, as well as with the Australian Dictionary of Biography at the Australian National University, later became the founding president of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia. The conversation that follows is an edited version of an interview conducted by Skype on 28 September 2015 (in Canberra, 29 September). It focuses primarily on her visit to Fredericton and the Miramichi with Beaverbrook in October 1955, and on other aspects of Beaverbrook’s links with New Brunswick and New Brunswickers. Digital files of the original recording may be consulted either at the Saint Mary’s University Archives or the University of New Brunswick Archives and Special Collections. The interviewer and editor is John Reid (Saint Mary’s University).