colleagues." On the so-called "Blainey affair", Australian prime minister John Howard would remark: "Nowhere, I suggest, have the fangs of the left so visibly been on display as they were in a campaign based on character assassination and intellectual dishonesty through their efforts to trash the name and reputation of that great Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey." In December 1988, Blainey resigned from the University of Melbourne and resumed his former career as a freelance historian. In 1994, the Victorian government appointed him to the honorary position of foundation chancellor of the new University of Ballarat. Subsequently, in December 2007, the University of Melbourne granted a Doctor of Laws to Blainey and declared that he was, in Australia, probably a unique professional historian, noting that he had fostered wide public interest in history. The citation observed that "few graduates of this University have exerted greater influence on national life". Blainey and the "History Wars" Blainey has been an important contributor to the debate over Australian history, often referred to as the History Wars. In his 1993 Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture, Blainey coined the phrases "Black armband view of history" versus the contrasting "three cheers" view (see History wars). The phrase "Black armband view of history" began to be used, pejoratively or otherwise, by some Australian commentators and intellectuals about historians and journalists, judges and clergymen, whom they viewed as having presented an unfairly critical portrayal of Australian history since European settlement. Blainey coined the term the "Black armband view of history" to refer to those historians and academics, usually leftist, who denigrated Australia's past to an unusual degree and even accused European Australians of genocide against Aborigines. Former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser described the Australian history wars as a branch of the "culture wars" and attributed Blainey with having initiated the wider wars in his immigration speeches of 1984. Reflecting on the Australian Bicentenary in 1988, Blainey accused some academics and journalists of depicting Australian history since European colonisation as essentially a "story of violence, exploitation, repression, racism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism, and a few other 'isms'." Blainey also accused multiculturalists of having "little respect for the history of Australia between 1788 and 1950," claiming that in their eyes "Australia was a desert between 1788 and 1950 because it was populated largely by people from the British Isles and because it seemed to have a cultural unity, a homogeneity which