Obituaries

When it was time to launch Virginia Spate’s great book The Colour of Time: Claude Monet (1992), it was the former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam who spoke, at the recently-opened Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay. The MCA was the product of a decade of her tireless advocacy, just as the book crowned twelve […]

Lorenzo’s Italian origins are marked by the diversity and mobility typical of that mid-twentieth-century generation. His parents came from opposite ends of Italy: his father Antonino was Sicilian and his mother, Argilde, was from the north, near Parma. Lorenzo was born in Sicily on 11 November 1939, a few months after the outbreak of the

Philip Thomson, Professor Emeritus of German Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, died suddenly from a heart attack at his home in Port Melbourne on 30 May 2022. Professor Thomson was born into a working-class family in Newcastle, New South Wales, on 3 January 1941 and was educated

Janna Lea Thompson, one of Australia’s most distinguished philosophers, died on 24 June 2022, only a few months after being diagnosed with multiple brain tumours. She was, at least, able in her final months to spend time with her sister, who visited from Canada; to attend the Adelaide Arts Festival; and to arrange for the

Gerhard Schulz, Professor Emeritus of Germanic Studies in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, died in the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne on the 23rd of June 2022. The leading Germanist of his generation in Australia, Professor Schulz in his day was one of the most highly regarded scholars of German

Born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1928, he completed a Master of Arts at Auckland University in 1952 and a PhD at the University of Oxford in 1959, where his dissertation was the joint winner of the Gilbert Campion Award. While completing his PhD at Oxford, Emeritus Professor Wilson worked as a research assistant in

Born in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1945, she received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and German (1964), a Diploma in Education (1966) and a Master of Arts in German linguistics (1971), all from the University of Melbourne. She recognised the emerging field of psycholinguistics and continued on to the University of Texas at Austin to

Graham Nerlich, one of Australia’s leading figures in the philosophy of Spacetime and Relativity, was born and grew up in Adelaide, the son of Alfred Hugo Nerlich and Mona Pearl Nerlich (nee Burdon). His education at Adelaide Technical High School suggests that he pioneered academic pursuits in the family. At the University of Adelaide, he

Professor Alan Sorley Henry, who was elected as a Fellow of the Academy in 1993, died in early January 2022 in St Andrews, Scotland just short of his eighty-sixth birthday following a long and painful illness. He had returned to St Andrews after resigning at the age of sixty from the chair of Classical Studies

Professor Lal was born in Labasa on the northern island of Vanua Levu, Fiji, in 1952. He completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of the South Pacific, a Master of Arts at the University of British Columbia and a PhD at the Australian National University (ANU).   Freedom’s fire burnt bright in Brij

When an Academy Fellow dies, we honour their impact by publishing an obituary by another Fellow who has had a long and close association with them. Since 2020, we have published vale notices in our Newsroom’s ‘Our community’ section on a rolling basis. A ACKROYD, Joyce Irene (1918–91) by J.V. Neustupný [Australian Dictionary of Biography entry]

One of Stuart Macintyre’s books is called Winners and Losers. It is a comparatively early work (1985), the first of his monographs to deal with Australia; and its subtitle, The Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian History, introduces what was to be a dominant concern in his life as a historian and, for that matter,