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Top 50 most influential
Who are the most influential people of the past five decades? We’ve taken on the challenge of narrowing it down to just 50, from politicians and businessmen to artists and activists. Who to put in, and who to leave out? See if you agree with our list of legends.
Politics
Bob Hawke
Robert James Lee Hawke had a streak of larrikinism that endeared him to many Australians
Politician, 84
When Bob Hawke was elected president of the ACTU in 1969, he was already the best known person in Australia. But Hawke wasn’t just popular — he was one of the most influential, and powerful, people in the country. In the 70s, he garnered immense authority due to his ability to resolve industrial disputes. As prime minister in the 80s, he cast himself as a consensus leader who could unite Australians behind his government’s ambitious reform program. His great skill was to keep his party united and maintain strong voter support while fundamentally restructuring the Australian economy.
Son of a congregational minister, nephew of a West Australian premier and educated at Oxford, Robert James Lee Hawke had a streak of larrikinism that endeared him to many Australians. He saw the prime ministership as his destiny. Although reluctant to cede his power as ACTU president, he did enter parliament – with The Australian’s support — in 1980. Less than three years later, he replaced Bill Hayden as Labor leader and defeated Malcolm Fraser’s government.
Determined not to repeat the mistakes of the Whitlam years, he led a disciplined, focused and pragmatic administration. He gave his ministers free rein and saw this as one of the hallmarks of his success. The first Hawke cabinets, with Paul Keating as treasurer, were among the best since Federation.
Hawke led Labor to an unprecedented four election victories. In 1984, his approval rating reached 75 per cent, a figure unmatched since. Labor shibboleths were jettisoned as markets were opened to competition and industries forced to modernise. An accord with unions saw wage demands moderated to control inflation in return for a social wage that delivered higher standards of living. Education was overhauled, universal healthcare was introduced and welfare assistance was better targeted towards those most in need. The economy became more competitive, businesses were more efficient and productivity was energised. The environment became a core concern of government.
By 1990, the economy had plunged into recession. Hawke’s shine had rubbed off. Keating toppled him in 1991. Although Hawke was the first Labor prime minister to be dislodged from office by his own party, he will be remembered for his significant contribution to the economic and social reforms that shaped modern Australia.
Troy Bramston
Media
Rupert Murdoch
Tycoon From Down Under Takes On The World.
Media tycoon, 83
Born in 1931, still active in 2014, still master of the media and monarch of the headline, Keith Rupert Murdoch bestrides the Australian continent like a colossus. His name and influence are everywhere; his legend, too. How, then, to assess or appraise him? The empires he has built were undreamt of before him; his business schemes and hunches have changed the landscape of both Australian and world publicity and communications. He has made, almost from nothing, a group of news assets on three continents, a film studio, a TV network — he is almost beyond praise or blame.
Half a century ago this month he founded the publication you have before your eyes today; he ran it for decades at loss. It was a nation-shaping project, a vision — he made it real. In 1987 he swooped to buy up the combined assets of the Herald and Weekly Times group: this completed his dominion of the local market for printed news.
Australia then became his platform for a deepening assault on both Britain and the United States: a reverse colonial takeover. When Murdoch acquired The Times in 1981 and The Wall Street Journal in 2007, he proved that capital and enterprise had no national flavour and respected no sequence of historical development. The great media brands of Britain and America would be refashioned by Australian hands; indeed, Murdoch was, by this mid-stage of his career, already globalised. He had set aside his Australian citizenship to expand in the US, but this somehow merely made him seem more relentlessly like a win-at-all-costs antipodean.
What manner of man acts lifelong with such drive and force? Murdoch, responsible for such unveilings in the worlds of politics, such a trafficker in the narratives of disclosure, has remained a picture of personal reticence. If there are constants in his business and life, they are a fondness for the bold gamble and a need for horizons: new markets, new media, new means of communication.
No stillness, only movement, only restlessness. The phone still rings in the offices of his high functionaries: “Murdoch here,” intones the voice, and silence falls.
What an arc! From an afternoon newspaper in Adelaide, from youthful campaigning pieces in the far western desert, to today’s mogul and Twitter star, sending off his wry barbs to half a million followers. A headline is the only summation possible: “Tycoon From Down Under Takes On The World.”
Nicolas Rothwell
Politics
Robert Menzies
He valued the individual and private enterprise over the state but was not doctrinaire.
Politician, 1894 – 1978
On the day The Australian was first published, Robert Menzies had less than two years to run in his total of more than 18 years as prime minister. Yet the party he founded has governed for 28 of the 50 years this newspaper has existed. Dubbed “Menzies’ Child” by historian Gerard Henderson, the Liberal Party has been in power for almost two out of every three years since the war.
“Ming”, as he was known in a nod to the Scottish pronunciation of Menzies, opened trade with Japan just a decade after we were at war, negotiated the ANZUS treaty, initiated the Colombo Plan, expanded universities and oversaw a burgeoning period of industrialisation, post-war migration and economic development.
The uniquely broad church of his party has given a particularly Australian flavour to right-of-centre political thought. As a state then federal politician, representing the Nationalist Party then the United Australia Party in his first stint as prime minister (1939-41), Menzies was able to carefully consider the best construction to put on the non-Labor side of politics. He valued the individual and private enterprise over the state but was not doctrinaire. He also stood firmly against the sectarianism of his time.
Menzies founded a party for the “middle class”, which he explained would be “for the most part unorganised and unselfconscious”. This assessment has, thus far, been the secret of the party’s success. His eloquent speeches displayed an easy connection with mainstream values, a preference for “lifters” over “leaners” and an ear for the “forgotten people” who “properly regarded represent the backbone” of the country.
Our longest-serving prime minister, with a second stint 1949-66, he enjoined Australia in World War II and later saw the nation through the post-war and Cold War years when he engaged with Asia to underpin growth and took a strong alliance-based stance on defence to secure a modernising nation.
Winning honours from Britain, the United States, Japan and Australia, Menzies — for all his traditionalism — ushered a self-sustaining nation onto the world stage.
Chris Kenny
Arts
Cate Blanchett
Of Blanchett’s performance, John Lahr in The New Yorker wrote that he was unlikely to see better in his lifetime.
Actor, 45.
Whatever Cate Blanchett does, it seems we can’t take our eyes off her. She fascinates, not only because of her beauty and celebrity, but also because of her actorly art of creating character.
During her time as co-artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company, she appeared on stage almost every year: a remarkable run of performances by an actor so in demand at home and abroad. Sometimes it seemed that she must have a double. One day she would be treading those hardwood boards at Sydney’s Wharf Theatre, the next sinking her high heels into crimson Axminster carpets in London or New York.
She does grandeur, vulnerability and so many shades in between. In recent years she has specialised in broken souls teetering on the edge of collapse: her febrile Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, lost Lotte in Botho Strauss’s Gross und Klein, and Jasmine in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.
Blanche was a role that Blanchett was destined to play. In an audacious move, STC in 2009 took its production of Streetcar to New York, where the play was first performed in 1947. Of Blanchett’s performance, John Lahr in The New Yorker wrote that he was unlikely to see better in his lifetime.
With her writer-director husband Andrew Upton, she made STC an international company, bringing collaborations with such figures as Liv Ullmann, William Hurt, Isabelle Huppert and the late Philip Seymour Hoffmann. When she collected her second Academy Award this year, for Blue Jasmine, she thanked “every single member of Sydney Theatre Company”. Not many theatre troupes get a name-check on Oscars night.
Blanchett is an actor who has not exhausted her dramatic potential, and leaves audiences guessing as to what she might do next. A few years ago there was talk of her doing Antony and Cleopatra opposite Richard Roxburgh. That would be something to see.
Matthew Westwood
Politics
John Howard
His hallmark was to under-promise and over-deliver
Politician, 74.
It sounded like a laconically unambitious agenda but by making Australians more “comfortable and relaxed”, John Howard understood better than most the relationship between the mainstream and their ideals for government. Treasurer in the Fraser government and dumped as opposition leader, he learned hard lessons in the crucible of political failure. As prime minister he absorbed political and personal vitriol as he insisted the nation stay true to traditional strengths, alliances and values.
Counterintuitively, Howard understood how this conservative approach underpinned our innovative spirit, successful immigration program and engagement with the region. He argued that relentless economic reform (GST, labour market liberalisation, educational choice, finance regulation) had to be the norm. When he looked wobbly in his first term, rather than run from taxation reform he sought it out to grasp a political purpose. It worked. He presided over almost a dozen years of strong growth, reduced taxes, surpluses and repaid debt.
Howard transformed social policy, replacing the employment service with a privately run network and focusing on mutual obligation with schemes such as work-for-the-dole. And he grasped how secure borders and an orderly system underpinned successful immigration. By declaring “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come” he correctly judged the nation’s mood on asylum-seekers and the weight of his responsibilities.
He faced serious national security challenges — he was in Washington DC on September 11, 2001 — and he committed troops to East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. He demonstrated that ties with our alliance partners in military endeavours and trade need not hamper, and could even compliment, stronger relationships with China and our Asian neighbours.
His hallmark was to under-promise and over-deliver, but in the end he probably over-stayed, voted out of his seat in 2007. Yet before long he was missed and his memoir was a bestseller.
Chris Kenny
Arts
Patrick White
The first — and so far only — Australian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature,
Author, 1912 – 1990
Australia’s most important literary novelist, White brought the “dead” landscape of the Australian interior to brutal life in Voss, which in 1957 won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award. He was the first — and so far only — Australian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy lauding an “epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature’’. White sent artist Sidney Nolan to Stockholm to accept the 1973 prize on his behalf and used the proceeds to establish the Patrick White Literary Award, which nurtures fellow writers to this day.
White was born in Knightsbridge, London, to a family of NSW pastoral stock. They moved to Sydney when Patrick was six months old, though he was sent back to England at age 13 to complete his schooling and went on to study at Cambridge University. There he started to come to terms with his homosexuality. In the early and mid-1930s White had poetry published in London and plays staged in Sydney and, after a trip to the US, found a taker there for his first novel, Happy Valley, released in 1939. The next year he was commissioned into the Royal Air Force. He worked as an intelligence officer and while in Egypt met Manoly Lascaris, a Greek army officer who would become his life partner.
After the war White lived briefly in London before returning permanently to Sydney, where he was joined by Lascaris. The Aunt’s Story was published to acclaim in 1948 and the novels on which his reputation rests followed at regular intervals: The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957) Riders in the Chariot (1961), The Solid Mandala (1966) and The Vivisector (1970).
After the Dismissal he became staunchly anti-monarchist, and in his last decade was often most visible as a beanie-clad protester against issues such as uranium mining.
Stephen Romei
Sport
Ron Barassi
With Barassi the fanatical on-baller leading the way, Smith’s Demons won six premierships from 1955 to 1964
Aussie rules legend, 78
A giant in the world of Australian Rules football, player and coach Ron Barassi (AM) has left a deep footprint on the Australian sporting landscape. So synonymous is his name with his game, it was playfully coined by an academic to describe the meandering boundary that divides Australian Rules fans from League types on the continent: the “Barassi Line”. In the pagan territories, the only thing people supposedly know of the “other” game is the name of its most famous identity.
The great grandson of an Italian immigrant, Ronald Dale Barassi Jr was born on a country road outside Guildford, a goldmining town near Castlemaine, Victoria. His father Ron played for Melbourne in the 1940 VFL premiership, and was killed in Tobruk the following year. Later, coach Norm Smith took the teenage Ron Jr into his home and schooled him in the game. Some say the ruck rover position was invented for young Ron, who would wear his father’s 31 on his jersey and go on to make that number the most famous of the era.
With Barassi the fanatical on-baller leading the way, Smith’s Demons won six premierships from 1955 to 1964 before Barassi controversially defected to Carlton. There he strengthened the struggling club and crafted a new style, unveiling the handballbased play-on game in the second half of the 1970 grand final. Carlton came from behind to pull off an audacious victory, and a new approach to football was born.
Later at North Melbourne, the new coach with his hot gospelling style guided the struggling working-class club to a pair of premierships. And naturally, he was called on in the 90s when the struggling Swans needed a firm footing in Sydney.
In 1996, Barassi was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame, where he is one of the few to be named in the Legend category. His old-school manhood came to the fore and a further chapter of the legend was written in 2008 when, aged in his 70s, he intervened to protect a woman being beaten in a Melbourne street, only to suffer from an assault himself.
Peter Lalor
Thinkers
Noel Pearson
Widely admired as a deep and original thinker whose contribution to the nation’s intellectual life transcends Aboriginal affairs
Activist, 49
Raised in the former Lutheran mission of Hope Vale on Cape York Peninsula,
Noel Pearson burst on to the public stage seemingly fully fledged. Confident, fearsomely intelligent and at times brutally articulate, he was a key figure in hammering out a deal in 1993 with then prime minister Paul Keating to implement the High Court decision on native title.
A lawyer by training — he attended the University of Sydney — Pearson takes a keen interest in education and social welfare reform. He rails against “passive welfare”, arguing that Aboriginal people must take responsibility for their own lives and for their families, and not reach for the deadening hand of social security. His Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership has driven useful social reform, and a back-tobasics classroom program being piloted in peninsula communities is achieving promising results.
He has his critics, especially in the vipers’ nest of indigenous politics. His bluntness can be confronting. But he is widely admired as a deep and original thinker whose contribution to the nation’s intellectual life transcends Aboriginal affairs, as challenging as that field is.
As an advocate, he is ferociously independent. He went in hard against “wild rivers“ preservation laws enacted by the Bligh government, warning they would hold back economic development on the Cape. The wild rivers regime is now being unwound.
Jamie Walker
Business
Kerry Packer
With both ACP and Nine he wielded power and influence rarely surpassed in contemporary business history
Media tycoon, 1937 – 2005
Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer learnt many things from his legendary father Sir Frank. But the most important were to play hard and to have fun. And he had the stature and the funds to do both.
Sydney-born Kerry was only 37 when he inherited the Australian Consolidated Press magazine group and the Nine television network upon his father’s death. Over the following decades, with both ACP and Nine he wielded power and influence rarely surpassed in contemporary business history. He became a figure feared in the corridors of power in the business world and in Canberra. But he also had a presence and charm that engendered loyalty beyond belief from politicians, his staff, his friends and his family.
He was known for his lavish gambling habits (he was never a drinker, preferring Coca-Cola) and his clashes with the Australian Taxation Office. In 1984 the Costigan Royal Commission, using the codename Squirrel (renamed Goanna in newspaper reports), alleged he was involved in tax evasion and organised crime, including drug trafficking. Packer strenuously denied the allegations and he was never prosecuted.
His greatest contribution on the global stage was the creation in the 1970s of World Series Cricket, which transformed the game. White balls, coloured clothing and day-night matches are now the norm, thanks to Packer’s World Series revolution.
In 1987 he pulled off what to this day is widely viewed as the nation’s greatest business deal when he sold Nine to West Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond at the record price of $1.05 billion, before buying it back three years later for a mere $250 million.
Packer later quipped: “You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine.” But it might also be said that there will only ever be one Kerry Packer.
Damon Kitney
Business
Frank Lowy
He arrived in Australia in 1952 with a suitcase and little else
Businessman, 83
Frank Lowy changed the face of retailing in Australia, building an empire in the process. His Westfield Group emerged from a single delicatessen in Sydney’s west to become one of the largest shopping centre landlords in the world, overseeing 90 malls in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Britain and Italy in a portfolio totalling $70 billion.
This landlord is a tough and constant dealmaker, retailers complain, but they queue to open in the likes of Westfield London or in the group’s rebirthing of New York’s World Trade Centre retail. A historic but contentious restructure, won by a narrow unitholder vote in June, will see the empire split into two listed companies: Australia/ New Zealand shopping centre landlord Scentre and international developer and mall owner Westfield Corporation, with which the family can pursue its global ambitions.
Lowy was born in 1930, survived the Holocaust in Hungary and fought for the Israeli army through the country’s independence in 1948. He arrived in Australia in 1952 with a suitcase and little else. In 1959, he and another Holocaust survivor, John Saunders, opened their first shopping centre in Sydney’s Blacktown. By 2008, Westfield had courted some of the world’s biggest investment funds as its partners and opened its largest centre, the £2.4 billion Westfield London.
One of Australia’s most successful post-war immigrants with powerful political and business connections, Lowy regularly tops rich lists, with some of this fortune funding the influential Lowy Institute for International Policy. Outside business, soccer has been a passion since his youth and he reinvigorated the national competition as chairman of Football Federation Australia. His vision has been distilled to his sons David, Peter and Steven, who are deeply involved in the family businesses.
Westfield celebrated its 50th year in 2010. In his chairman’s address at the time, Lowy wrote that in the early days, he and Saunders were kept awake at night not by dreams of a global empire, but instead worried: “Could we pay the bills next week?’’
Turi Condon
Arts
Brett Whiteley
He devoted his life to art, and drew on his life for art
Artist, 1939 – 1992
Few artists have stoked our imagination in the same way as Brett Whiteley. Certainly no other has attained his level of popular mystique. But while his personal reputation preceded him, art was always at his core. He devoted his life to art, and drew on his life for art.
Sydney-born Whiteley spent his early years near the harbour and in the NSW central west, which became enduring subjects. His arrival in London in 1960 coincided with a brief British romance with Australian art. Assured and charismatic, he was the youngest artist to have work acquired by the Tate. He wrestled with varied subjects — wife Wendy, a serial killer, the zoo — before moving to the US. Two years passed in an intoxicating blur. The family escaped to Fiji, only to be expelled after a minor drug bust.
Brett, Wendy and daughter Arkie settled in Sydney’s Lavender Bay, and his paintings of the harbour views from there are some of his best loved work. Then came the Archibald trifecta, and soaring prices at every show. His fight with heroin addiction ended in 1992 when he was found dead in a hotel on the NSW south coast.
Debate continues about precisely where Whiteley fits into the Australian art tradition. It’s clear, though, that he has lost none of his allure.
Ashleigh Wilson
Politics
Bob Brown
His calm, dogged and principled persona infuriated opponents but strengthened support for his party and its aims
Politician, 69
Rarely does a single event in one man’s life have such far-reaching consequences. In 1976, a young Launceston GP was invited by a local forester to raft a rarely navigated and little-known wild river in Tasmania’s south-west, the Franklin.
The experience had a profound impact on Dr Bob Brown. “The process of 30 years which had made me a mystified and detached observer of the universe was reversed and I fused into the inexplicable mystery of nature,” he explained in a 1984 book by Peter Thompson. With others he formed The Tasmanian Wilderness Society, which set its sights on halting plans for a hydro-electric scheme that would have flooded the Franklin.
The campaign included the famous Franklin Dam blockade of the summer of 1982-83 and formed the template for a more assertive, sophisticated conservationism. The issue also helped propel Bob Hawke’s Labor to an election victory in 1983 and, through a High Court decision, established the primacy of federal powers over the environment.
Brown used a seat in the Tasmanian parliament from 1983 to 1993 to cement an enduring green presence in the state’s legislature, moving to the Senate in 1996 and crafting an enduring role for the Greens in federal politics. His calm, dogged and principled persona infuriated opponents but strengthened support for his party and its aims.
Brown retired from politics in 2012, but declared: “I’ll be green until the day I die.”
Matthew Denholm
Politics
Paul Keating
I’m not here to protest,“ he told a Labor MP in the 1970s. “I’m here to be in charge.
Politician, 70
When Paul Keating entered parliament in 1969, he was just 25. Three years later he was trying to engineer his way into Gough Whitlam’s cabinet but narrowly missed out when the caucus vote failed to go his way. He became minister for Northern Australia just weeks before the Dismissal in 1975.
A new breed of politician schooled in the ways of the NSW Labor Right, his ambition to lead was barely disguised. He was a razor-tongued political street fighter who collected antique clocks and admired Winston Churchill’s courage. “I’m not here to protest,“ he told a Labor MP in the 1970s. “I’m here to be in charge.“ But first he became treasurer in the Hawke government.
The two united behind an ambitious policy agenda, Keating driving the economic reform program. Product, labour and capital markets were deregulated, the dollar floated, tariffs slashed and the tax and transfer system overhauled. The 1990-91 recession diminished his standing with voters but he said he never “chased cheers”. When Hawke reneged on a deal to hand over the reins, Keating won a party room ballot and became prime minister in 1991.
He remade the government by championing economic reforms such as competition policy, workplace relations and universal superannuation. After re-election in 1993 came his “big picture” agenda: native title and indigenous reconciliation, continued enmeshment in the Asia-Pacific, a new cultural policy and a republic. By 1996, his considerable political skills were not enough to secure a sixth election victory for Labor. Although the voters had tired of Keating’s often controversial policy agenda, his impact on Australia in the 1980s and 90s is enduring.
Troy Bramston
Thinkers
Eddie Mabo
Two decades on, native title claims are settled quietly and sensibly by tribunal or the Federal Court. Eddie Koiki Mabo can rest easy: without him, it may never have happened.
Activist, 1936 – 1992
What a pity Eddie Mabo didn’t live to see his life’s work vindicated in the High Court’s 1992 recognition of native title, the historic judgment now forever bearing his name. He had died of cancer, aged 55, five months before the ruling came down. For the first time in Australia’s settled history, the entitlement of indigenous people to a limited form of tenure over their traditional lands was established at law.
Mabo, who was born and raised on Mer (Murray Island) in the Torres Strait, confronted racism in its crudest form in 1960s Queensland. Unbowed, he sat in a whites-only café brandishing a sign demanding to be served. In 1974, he was working as a gardener at Townsville’s James Cook University when he learned that his ancestral lands did not belong to his people; they were the property of the Crown. At a 1981 land rights conference, he outlined how a land inheritance system allowed plots to be passed from generation to generation on his island home. A lawyer suggested a test case to claim land rights at common law: the Mabo case was born.
While he became consumed by the stop-start court action that wound its way through the Queensland legal system before reaching the High Court, Mabo, a tempestuous character at times, could rely on the steady support of his wife Bonita, the mother of their 10 children. The High Court decision prompted hysterical warnings that suburban backyards would be up for grabs. It never happened. Two decades on, native title claims are settled quietly and sensibly by tribunal or the Federal Court. Eddie Koiki Mabo can rest easy: without him, it may never have happened.
Jamie Walker
Arts
Joan Sutherland
She was one of the great singers of the century.
Opera singer, 1926 – 2010
Some performers merely inhabit roles; truly great artists seem to personify an art form. That’s how it was with Dame Joan Sutherland, who represented opera for generations of Australians, even those who never heard her sing.
By 1965, the soprano had made her celebrated role debut in Lucia di Lammermoor at London’s Royal Opera House. The Italians called her La Stupenda. When she returned after 14 years abroad for a three-month tour of Australia, Sutherland mania swept the nation. Her husband, Richard Bonynge, was appointed music director of the Australian Opera, so she came too. She appeared at the Sydney Opera House more than anywhere else, jetting back and forth from Europe and the US.
Sutherland was blessed with good lungs, solid technique, superb musicality and an unbelievably beautiful, agile coloratura voice. Even after her retirement in 1990, audiences would stand and applaud when she entered the Opera House. She was one of the great singers of the century.
Matthew Westwood
Sport
Don Bradman
None stands so far above his predecessors, contemporaries or those who followed
Cricketer, 1908 – 2001
The best batsman Australia or the game has produced is easily one of the greats of all sport. None stands so far above his predecessors, contemporaries or those who followed. Want statistics? Let it be recognised that 99.94, The Don’s batting average, is a popular pin number etched on the collective conscience and the ABC’s postbox number in all states.
A short, wiry man of nasal tones and sinewy determination born in the NSW bush, Bradman played his first Test against England at the SCG in 1928, his last two decades later. These years bestrode the Depression and war, and made him a giant. In the 1948 Ashes he attracted excited attention from both sides that defied logic, for here was a man who had caused England nothing but angst. “We want him to do well,” English cricket writer R.C. Robertson-Glasgow said. “We feel we have a share in him. He is more than Australian. He is a world batsman.”
In 1986, when former prime minister Malcolm Fraser visited Nelson Mandela in prison, one of the first things the South African asked of the outside world was: is Bradman still alive? John Howard has said The Don, who also served half a century as a South Australian cricket administrator, was a selector for the Test team and chairman of the Board of Control, “reminded Australians they were capable of greatness in their own right”.
Peter Lalor
Politics
Gough Whitlam
The overarching principle and theme of his career can be stated in just two words: contemporary relevance
Politician, 98
In the twilight of his life, Gough Whitlam believes the overarching principle and theme of his career can be stated in just two words: contemporary relevance. From the time he wrested the leadership of the Labor Party from Arthur Calwell in 1967, Whitlam’s mission was to make the party relevant again. After eight election defeats, he was determined to reform Labor’s structures to dilute the influence of powerbrokers and to renovate its policies. Whitlam invested the party with a new reformist zeal that reached its apogee during the 1972 “It’s Time” election campaign and saw Labor returned to government after 23 years in opposition.
His program was implemented at breakneck speed, paying little attention to public service advice, the state of the economy or budgetary constraints. Within days of the election victory, a government of two — Whitlam and his deputy Lance Barnard — were sworn in to start implementing reform.
A shift to needs-based school funding, the introduction of universal healthcare and a new foreign policy outlook, including diplomatic recognition of China, were standout initiatives. The legal reforms were sweeping: no-fault divorce; reducing the voting age to 18; legal aid; abolition of the death penalty; and one-vote, one-value electoral laws. The remaining troops in Vietnam returned home and conscientious objectors to the war were freed from jail.
Whitlam was a “crash through or crash” party leader. He survived a challenge to his leadership and narrowly avoided being expelled. When his program failed to win Senate approval he secured a fresh mandate at a double-dissolution election in 1974. He was the first Labor leader to win back-to-back elections. A joint sitting of parliament enabled Medibank to be passed. But a series of scandals, not least an attempt to borrow $US4 billion from the Middle East to invest in national resource projects, led to the opposition blocking the budget in the Senate. Following a battle of constitutional brinkmanship, Whitlam was dismissed by governor-general Sir John Kerr in November 1975.
Whitlam saw himself as the victim of a conspiracy executed by vice regal ambush. He urged the faithful to “maintain the rage”, but Labor was decimated at the December 1975 election.
Troy Bramston
Sport
Cathy Freeman
I felt all of Australia was holding me up
Athlete, 41
The pressure is hard to imagine. Cathy Freeman, a shy 27-year-old north Queenslander, was Australia’s only gold medal hope on the athletics track at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. More than 112,000 people were crammed into the arena, with another nine million Australians watching on television.
It was a burden many athletes could not have carried. But Freeman took it in her considerable stride, and in exactly 49.11 seconds on that magical September night, she delivered. One 400m lap of Sydney Olympic Stadium in a space-age green hooded bodysuit, and she won our hearts and a place in history: our second indigenous Olympic champion after 1996 Hockeyroos gold medallist Nova Peris-Kneebone.
The lanky girl from Mackay had already made her mark in 1990, when at just 16 she became our first indigenous Commonwealth Games gold medallist. She took out the 400m at two world championships, in Athens in 1997 and Seville in 1999. But her Olympic gold on home soil is the one everyone remembers. “I felt all of Australia was holding me up,” she said after the race.
The tattoo on her right arm said “Cos I’m Free”. But what would she do now that she had, as she said, achieved her life’s ambition so young? Freeman had never been comfortable in the limelight, but after retiring from major competition in 2003 — the year she split from her husband Sandy Bodecker — she struggled to find an alternative track for her life. Her second marriage, to Melbourne stockbroker James Murch, who she met in 2005, has given her peace and purpose. In July 2011 she gave birth to their daughter, Ruby Anne Susie Murch.
And with the purpose is a new passion: an active role as director of the Cathy Freeman Foundation, which she established in 2007. The foundation works to improve educational outcomes for children in the disadvantaged community of Palm Island, where Freeman’s mother Cecelia was born.
Speaking about finally coming to terms with her fame, Freeman told The Australian last year: “I guess it’s a good story. This indig kid goes on to win an Olympic gold medal.
“I have a feeling it could be around for a longtime, that story.”
Margie McDonald
The Innovators
Ian Frazer
God’s gift to women
Immunologist, 61
The Weekend Australian Magazine got it mostly right in describing Ian Frazer as “God’s gift to women’’. Actually, his breakthrough vaccine for cervical cancer is also being given to boys to protect them against Human papillomavirus, or HPV, the main cause of cervical cancer in women and a health issue for males, too.
The expatriate Scotsman started working on the technology behind the vaccine in a tiny, makeshift laboratory at Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra Hospital. Research teams around the world were working on a way to synthesise virus-like particles to speed vaccine development, and Frazer beat them to the punch in the early 90s, with the assistance of gifted Chinese-born scientist Jian Zhou. Tragically, Zhou did not live to see the outcome. Aus
In Australia, teenage girls now have free access to the vaccine, trademarked as Gardasil, under a national immunisation program. The rollout was extended to boys aged 12-13 in 2012 to protect them against sexually transmitted genital warts caused by HPV. Frazer had already immunised his three sons.
A fit man who likes to ride a bicycle to work in the gleaming new Translational Research Institute attached to the PA Hospital, Frazer has been showered with honours for his lead role in developing the vaccine, the first in the world to tackle cancer. He won the CSIRO Eureka Prize for Leadership in Science in 2005, was named 2006 Australian of the Year, and received the Howard Florey Medal for Medical Research in 2007 and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science in 2008.
His latest vaccine, against genital herpes, was this year cleared for a human safety trial. What’s next for Frazer? Could it be the Nobel?
Jamie Walker
Business
Lang Hancock & Gina Rinehart
All real wealth is in the ground, and societies become prosperous only by exploiting that wealth
Mining magnates, 1909 - 1992; 1954 –
“All real wealth is in the ground, and societies become prosperous only by exploiting that wealth.” These visionary words belonged to Lang Hancock, the leathery prospector who, despite his many eccentricities, was the first Australian to believe in and act upon our potential to be a great exporter of minerals.
The Hancock legend dates from 1952, when Lang was flying his light plane above the Hamersley Ranges in Western Australia’s remote Pilbara region. He noticed something unusual buried in the rust-red gorge. He returned to take mineral samples, which confirmed he had found the world’s biggest deposit of iron ore.
Hancock kept his stunning discovery a secret for almost a decade while he furiously lobbied the federal government to lift an embargo on iron ore exports and struck a development deal with Rio Tinto that delivered him a huge royalty stream. The Rogue Bull died two decades before iron ore became our most valuable export commodity, worth tens of billions of dollars a year.
His heir Gina Rinehart, 60, is now Australia’s richest citizen thanks to Hancock’s original discoveries and her own business acumen. Like her adored father, she has strong convictions and makes plenty of enemies (including, famously, some of her own children). She campaigned against the Labor government’s mining and carbon taxes, and controversially acquired stakes in Fairfax Media and the Ten Network.
This year, Hancock Prospecting signed a $US7.2 billion deal with financiers to pave the way for Rinehart’s Roy Hill project in the Pilbara, a huge mine that will employ thousands of people and generate billions in export revenues. It will be the realisation of Lang Hancock’s dream: that the family would one day own an iron ore mine.
Andrew Burrell
Sport
Dawn Fraser
She is now the larrikin from Balmain, the girl who spoke her mind.
Swimmer, 76
The only place Dawn Fraser ever feels truly at peace is in the water. “There’s a certain love in the water that you have,” she says. “I’m in a dream of my own. I’m free. I can’t argue with anyone. No one can argue with me.”
Arguments, it must be said, have shaped Fraser’s life almost as much as that soothing element in which she found both peace and fame. Principally arguments with the Amateur Swimming Union of Australia, which banned her for 10 years. Ostensibly she was punished for souveniring a flag at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In fact her real sins were marching in the opening ceremony in defiance of ASU orders and then refusing to wear an official swimsuit she claimed was too small and endangered her modesty.
These days, what our Olympians wear or where they march are subjects for calm and rational discussion, and in a sense that’s Fraser’s legacy. She helped win those freedoms for those who followed her, but at great personal cost. She was the first of only three swimmers in history to win the same event at three successive Olympics, but she might have won a fourth 100m freestyle gold in Mexico in 1968 were it not for the ban. And her reputation suffered, too: she was branded a troublemaker. Over time, that has softened into something more fitting. She is now the larrikin from Balmain, the girl who spoke her mind.
Over time, too, the honours came. Australia named her a living treasure, the International Olympic Committee acknowledged her as the world’s greatest living female water sports champion. Fame has followed her, but not fortune. She still works to pay off her mortgage, the price of peaking in the amateur era.
Wayne Smith
Arts
Graham Kennedy
Mr Melbourne by the generations who grew up with him in that city. The rest of Australia called him the King
Television host, 1934 – 2005
He will always be remembered as Mr Melbourne by the generations who grew up with him in that city. The rest of Australia called him the King. Or just Graham. For 30 years he was our biggest star, the first to be known by his first name. And we worshipped our Gra-Gra.
Kennedy reigned restlessly over local television for three decades: as talk-show host, game-show presenter, satirist and commentator, and as an actor of quality when he moved on to film. On the box there was In Melbourne Tonight, The Graham Kennedy Show, Blankety Blanks and Graham Kennedy’s Coast to Coast, in which he created a hybrid form of often hysterical TV with his raucous, sometimes vicious blend of vaudeville and current affairs.
He wasn’t just a talking head but a thinking comedian who happened to love pratfalls. He always treated us with deference and curiosity, though he wasn’t afraid to slag off at the dead-arses (he loved swearing on television) who offended him by their failures of propriety.
He turned conversation into humour and comedy into social commentary, nearly all of it ad-libbed. He showed us that the power of television resides in its normalcy, and he always seemed to be there at the push of a button, taking the piss out of anything and anyone who took themselves too seriously.
Anything we didn’t know about him — he was the most enigmatic of performers — the press filled in, though nobody ever explained why he was always so solitary and often seemed lonely. Even when he was rich, lived in big houses with chauffeurs, boasted about his wine collection and was the cream of upper-class elegance, we wanted him to seem happier.
Graeme Blundell
Politics
Malcolm Fraser
Our fourth longest serving prime minister, Fraser restored economic and administrative stability.
Politician, 84
While most history considers how people exercised power, Malcolm Fraser’s legacy will always spring from how he seized it. The Dismissal of 1975 is the constitutional crisis we never wanted nor want again, and it could not have happened but for Fraser’s single-mindedness. Was it ruthless? Unquestionably. Was it legal? For all the debate, it was constitutionally allowable. But was it fair, honourable, responsible and democratic? The conversation continues in front bars and university seminars to this day.
Life was never going to be easy for Fraser after blocking Labor’s supply bills in the Senate and forcing Gough Whitlam’s sacking. But, installed as a caretaker prime minister, he led the Coalition to a landslide victory. It was vindication enough to right a shambolic government ship.
Our fourth longest serving prime minister, Fraser restored economic and administrative stability. He reduced public expenditure and streamlined the public service but he largely carried on Whitlam’s cultural agenda, including more liberal attitudes to the environment, land rights, multicultural issues and human rights. He battled the economic impact of a severe drought and recession.
He wept on losing office to Bob Hawke in 1983. He drifted away from his party on populist left-of-centre issues, resigning from it in 2009.
Fraser is now a darling of human rights organisations. Once a defence minister during the Vietnam War, he has become a critic of the US alliance. Once endorsing Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor, he opposes Australia’s strong border protection regime. And once installed as prime minister by the Queen’s representative, he campaigned alongside Whitlam for Australia to become a republic.
Chris Kenny
Thinkers
George Pell
Three decades later, with unshakeable confidence, Pell strode into the public square
Cardinal, 73
In 1964, an Australian theology student in Rome penned an article on his homeland in his college magazine. George Pell, 23, was aware of the launch of The Australian 20,000km away and shared its belief in a bigger, more independent nation. Chafing under the “protective custody of Mother England’’, he urged us to “unshackle ourselves from the White Australia policy in an empty land in an ocean of changed conditions’’.
He also argued for the church to exert a greater influence in Western life. Three decades later, with unshakeable confidence, Pell strode into the public square. Over 18 years as archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, with “Be Not Afraid” as his motto, he ruffled feathers and frequently drew stronger support from other Christians, with whom he maintained close ties, than from fellow Catholics.
Pell’s insights, expressed in the plain language of his parents’ Ballarat pub, were shaped by prodigious reading. Both political sides courted him and occasionally he went into battle, punching like the Aussie Rules ruckman he once was. More economically literate than many churchmen, he deplored both the Greens and One Nation.
As a defender of the Christian faith, the sanctity of life, families and education he overhauled seminaries and religious teaching in schools, funded adult stem cell research and helped establish four universities. His legacies include a buoyant generation of young priests; the revised English translation of the Mass that Saint John Paul II appointed him to oversee; and Domus Australia in Rome.
On pilgrimages, young Australians warmed to him as a father figure. He urged them to devote their lives to “some great and good cause’’, rode a camel up Mt Sinai to pray with them in the desert and hurtled down waterslides beside the Jordan. Leading 500,000 pilgrims at Sydney’s World Youth Day in 2008 was probably his best week.
One of the toughest, at the royal commission into child sexual abuse this year, ended with Pell accepting “ultimate responsibility’’ for the errors of the Archdiocese of Sydney. Whatever its limitations, the Melbourne Response he set up was one of the first in the world.
In a medieval tower overlooking Rome, Pell is now thriving on new challenges as Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, one of the Vatican’s three top jobs.
Tess Livingstone
Media
Ita Buttrose
A new generation of young women learned what a blessing she was to their grateful mothers and grandmothers.
Media revolutionary, 72
IF she thought she would drift quietly into her senior years, Ita Buttrose was catapulted back into the limelight when the ABC telemovie Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo aired in 2011. A new generation of young women learned what a blessing she was to their grateful mothers and grandmothers.
In 1972, Sir Frank Packer appointed Buttrose founding editor of his new women’s magazine Cleo. He had his misgivings about the content but his son Kerry backed Buttrose. The magazine broke new ground. Buttrose tapped into all the taboo subjects surrounding female sexuality that were barely discussed at home, let alone in print. The first edition of 105,000 copies sold out in two days; it featured a nude male centrefold and introduced a sealed section that covered such intimate subjects as masturbation, sex toys and contraception.
Cleo was a godsend for young women liberated by the pill, job opportunities and a new world that was exciting but sometimes confusing.
The Packers made Buttrose editor of the pearl in their collection, The Australian Women’s Weekly, in 1975. She gave the sedate publication fresh appeal, broadening its content beyond recipes and sewing patterns and reaching out to a younger readership. By now, Ita Buttrose and her famous lisp were familiar to Australians through her appearances on radio and television. She became a popular commentator on cultural and social issues. In 1984, she became chairperson of the National Advisory Committee on AIDS, a role she used to help dispel the myths about HIV.
Author of nine books, Buttrose turned her mind to issues faced by the over-50s as she, too, passed the half-century mark. She is president of Alzheimer’s Australia and patron of The University of The Third Age and the National Menopause Foundation, to name a few of the many organisations she serves.
Last year, aged 71, Ita Clare Buttrose joined Network Ten as anchor of the daily Studio 10 show — and was named Australian of the Year.
Lyndall Crisp
Sport
Lionel Rose
Lionel Rose viewed boxing as a ticket out of a tough place. He made it and then some, becoming a genuine national hero of his time
Boxer, 1948 – 2011
Born and raised in the Aboriginal bush settlement of Jackson’s Track, near Warragul south-east of Melbourne, Lionel Rose viewed boxing as a ticket out of a tough place. He made it and then some, becoming a genuine national hero of his time.
Rose was taught the ”sweet science“ by his father, Roy, himself a decent enough fighter on the tent-show circuit. The young Lionel trained with rags wrapped around his hands in a makeshift ring of fencing wire attached to trees.
He was 15 when a man who saw him shadow boxing gave him his first pair of gloves. He won the Australian amateur flyweight title at the same age while being mentored by a Warragul trainer, Frank Oates. Rose would later marry Oates’ daughter, Jenny.
In 1967, he took on Rocky Gattellari for the Australian bantamweight belt, knocking him out in the 13th round to announce himself as a potentially world-class pugilist. The following year, aged 19, Rose travelled to Tokyo to challenge
Japan’s Masahiko ”Fighting“ Harada for the world bantamweight title.
His manager, Jack Rennie, feared Rose would be ambushed because three of the judges were Japanese. “Australian newspapers were saying we’d get robbed,“ Rennie said at the time. “It wasn’t all that long after the war and we didn’t know if they were still crook on us.”
Harada was a feared and revered figure, but Rose defeated him in a 15-round decision to become Australia’s first indigenous world boxing champion. A short left punch to the chin did the trick. A public reception for the champion at Melbourne Town Hall drew a crowd of more than 100,000, and Rose was named
1968 Australian of the Year — the first Aborigine to receive the honour. Warragul remembers its most famous son with a beautifully understated statue.
Will Swanton
Arts
Sidney Nolan
Nolan helped establish the outback as the existential heart of the modern Australian
Artist, 1917 – 1992
One of the most influential figures in Australian art in the second half of last century, Sidney Nolan helped establish the outback as the existential heart of the modern Australian experience. His simple, almost awkwardly naïve 1946 painting of Ned Kelly riding away across an empty outback landscape is one of the most memorable images in Australian art, weaving together elements from popular culture, the earlier tradition of serious painting in our country and modern literature.
His bushranger is the archetypal Australian anti-hero, flawed, doomed but tinged with heroism. The emptiness inside Kelly’s helmet and in the arid desert all around him recall two T.S. Eliot poems whose titles, as much as their content, had entered the bloodstream of modernism in mid-century Australia as elsewhere: The Hollow Men and The Wasteland. Along with Russell Drysdale and Arthur Boyd, Nolan would achieve the standing in Britain that had eluded Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts.
Unlike Boyd, Nolan, who was born in Melbourne’s workingclass Carlton, did not spring from a family with a long tradition of art, architecture, craft and writing. But he was in this respect, and in his inglorious war record and his apparent heartlessness in personal relations, all the better suited to sympathise with an outcast like Kelly, and with other failed and tragic figures who appear in later works such as the convict Bracefell and Mrs Fraser or explorers Burke and Wills.
Nolan possessed a distinctive combination of cold-blooded detachment — again in contrast to the passionate and sentimental Boyd — with bold and uninhibited imagination, and this was the secret of his most successful work. But because he barely knew how to paint and relied entirely on inspiration, the results were extremely uneven.
Christopher Allen
Sport
Rod Laver
Laver was the best of a golden era that inspired a generation to swat balls on the asphalt and ant-bed and grass courts that dotted the nation.
Tennis player, 75
As standing ovations go, the warmest of those at the 2014 Australian Open went not to champions Stanislas Wawrinka or Li Na but to an elderly gent with knobbly knees and straggly red strands on his head. Half a century after he stunned the world with his winning style, Rod Laver — or “Rocket”, as he is better known around the world — still stands alone when it comes to deeds on the court. No other player in history has won two Grand Slams (all four major singles titles in the same year). Rockhampton-born Laver did it in 1962 and 1969.
At a fundraising match before the Australian Open in January, Roger Federer joined 15,000 fans in a standing ovation for Laver as he shuffled onto a court at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena. Together the greats swapped ground strokes back and forth, Laver graceful at 75 but also capable of packing a punch.
Decades after his heyday, Laver, who lives in California, still influences champions across the world. A measure of his reach is the fact that Toni Nadal, coach of current champion Rafael, credits the Aussie’s backhand as one to be admired.
Laver was the best of a golden era that inspired a generation to swat balls on the asphalt and ant-bed and grass courts that dotted the nation.
The courts are now blue, the stadiums have roofs and the racquets are no longer wooden. But the rest of the game is largely the same. And Laver is still the best, by any measure.
Courtney Walsh
Arts
Peter Carey
His achievements put him in the first rank of writers produced by this country
Author, 71
He is known for more highbrow works of literature but the advertising jingle “You make us smile, Dr Lindeman’’, penned for the winemaker, was one of Peter Carey’s early success stories. Carey, one of only three authors to win the Booker Prize twice, worked in advertising in the 1960s and 70s while he developed his skills as a writer of another sort of fiction.
Born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, he had his first book, the short story collection The Fat Man in History, published in 1974. His surreal 1981 debut novel about ad-man Harry Joy, Bliss, put him on the map and won him the first of three Miles Franklin Literary Awards. He was shortlisted for the Booker in 1985 for Illywhacker and won three years later for Oscar and Lucinda. The second Booker came in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang.
In 1990 Carey moved to New York with his second wife, Alison Summer, with whom he has two sons. They divorced in 2005. His expatriate status, and his 2010 comments about the dumbing down of Australian culture, make him somewhat of a polarising figure in his native land, but his achievements put him in the first rank of writers produced by this country. His 14th novel, Amnesia, will be published in October.
Stephen Romei
Arts
David Williamson
He is the most influential playwright of his generation.
Playwright, 72
HE emerged from the roughhouse excitement of the New Wave of radical student theatre in the late 1960s, and went on to become our first playwright superstar.
”David Williamson“ became a brand name in the 70s and 80s as a fresh generation of middle-class audiences started to follow him, with a devotion that helped keep state theatre companies financially viable for decades.
For the first time cashed-up baby-boomers were seeing themselves on stage — in plays set at their parties and in their lounge and board rooms.
Melbourne-born Williamson picked up on his followers’ personal and social worries, often anticipating them, in a series of half-satirical, half-sentimental plays that neatly reflected the times. He was the first playwright the media regularly consulted on matters unrelated to the theatre.
From Don’s Party to Cruise Control, he now has more than 50 plays under his belt and they are revived frequently. He also wrote the screenplays for the film versions of iconic stories including Phar Lap and Gallipoli.
As Williamson’s success grew some of his former colleagues turned against him, accusing him of selling out, and he had a series of public spats with fellow writers and with critics. In combatting their attacks he always appealed, sometimes a bit defensively, to the success his plays have had with audiences. He has never, or at least very seldom, had a box-office failure.
Since his Nellie Melba-style ”retirement“ in 2005, Williamson has been churning out new plays at a rate of two or three a year. Six are being produced in Sydney alone in 2014. No other Australian stage writer has had the broad public impact that Williamson has had. He is the most influential playwright of his generation.
John McCallum
Thinker
Germaine Greer
Arguably the most important feminist voice of the 20th century
Academic, 75
Brilliant academic, outrageous pioneer, Germaine Greer captured the world’s attention with the publication in 1970 of The Female Eunuch, in which she challenged women’s traditional role in society. Arguing for liberation as opposed to equality, she encouraged women to take control of their own future. The original print run of 5000 sold out on the first day and the book is still in print (much to her disappointment. “A tide of better books should have knocked it off its perch,” she wrote recently). It continues to stimulate debate today.
Unafraid to speak her mind on just about any subject, Greer has described herself as an anarchist. She’s shared her views while teaching at universities including Cambridge, in newspaper columns, on television and in books such as Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984) and The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991). She has travelled widely and lobbied against such abuses as female genital mutilation.
Greer can be amusing, acerbic, irritating and occasionally absurd but never dull, always thought-provoking. Hers is arguably the most important feminist voice of the 20th century.
Lyndall Crisp
Sport
Wayne Bennett
The unbroken thread running through his career is the influence he has had on young lives
Rugby league coach, 64
The secret to having a long and successful career as a coach, Wayne Bennett once said, is to avoid having a short, unsuccessful one. The rugby league world should be grateful that Bennett’s masters at Souths in Brisbane back in the late 1970s saw past his initial failings as an uncertain 27-year-old captain-coach and gave him time to learn his craft — and more importantly, to learn about himself.
Curiously, given his stern, sphinx-like public image, the most important lesson Bennett learned was never to take himself nor his achievements too seriously. His coaching record is seriously impressive nonetheless: 16 Tests as Australian coach, four State of Origin series wins as coach of the Maroons, and this weekend he was due to become the first person ever to notch up 700 NRL games as head coach.
But the wins, the trophies are not what Bennett will ever reflect on. The unbroken thread running through his career is the influence he has had on young lives, and invariably for the better. Yes, this might have benefited him as a coach. As one of his former players, Test prop Shane Webcke, once observed, Bennett early on hit upon a great and profound coaching secret: “If you make someone a better person, every aspect of their life improves, including their football.”
Yet, from Bennett’s perspective, making footballers better people is more than just a felicitous by-product of what he does; it’s why he keeps on doing it into his 60s. What’s more, it’s a two-way street. As the extraordinary newspaper column he wrote after one of his Newcastle players, Alex McKinnon, broke his neck in a game revealed, he is as profoundly influenced by the young men he mentors as they are by him.
Asked once what his legacy might be, Bennett brushed the question aside, thinking it related only to his rugby league achievements: “No idea, don’t care.” But in fact his legacy will be all the players he has helped to mould. Them he does care about.
Wayne Smith
Business
Arvi Parbo
Universally regarded as one of the greatest business leaders this nation has seen
Business leader, 88
He would likely be too modest to acknowledge it, but the fact that business has a strong voice in policy debate in modern Australia can be attributed in large part to Arvi Parbo. Universally regarded as one of the greatest business leaders this nation has seen, Parbo was also instrumental in establishing the influential Business Council of Australia.
Parbo arrived in Australia as an immigrant in 1949, having fled his homeland, Estonia, ahead of Soviet occupation. He studied engineering at Adelaide University and joined the then Western Mining Corporation in 1956, working his way up to become chairman in 1974. Hugh Morgan, who served as CEO of WMC under Parbo’s chairmanship, speaks for many when he says that what stood out was the quality of Parbo’s leadership.
Morgan believes Parbo, who was later chairman of BHP and Alcoa, is the best kind of leader because his rise to the top came without a dog-eat-dog personal ambition. “He is the one person in the world in whom I have never seen an interest in personal advancement, not one ounce of ambition to go up the ladder, but he was identified as someone talented,’’ Morgan says in the book Unearthing Wisdom, which profiles Australia’s mining and resource leaders.
It was at Bob Hawke’s National Economic Summit in 1983, a bid by the new prime minister to set the agenda for a new economic compact in Australia, that Parbo’s leadership shone though. The summit was televised nationally; union heavyweights such as Bill Kelty and Simon Crean from the ACTU were adroit users of the platform, but the business community was left flat-footed.
Parbo realised part of the problem was that many of the business leaders did not know each other. “We were also a rather secretive lot — very coy in public — so that for many citizens the televised proceedings of the summit were the first opportunity the public had to put moving faces to many of the big names in industry and commerce,’’ he recalled in 1993.
Just weeks after the summit, he and the late Peter Abeles met with other chief executives to expedite the creation of the BCA, now the premier organisation for galvanising business leadership in this country.
Geoff Elliott
Arts
Barry Humphries
Clive James says Humphries is “a pioneer in Australia’s sense of its own vernacular
Entertainer, 80
Now we are back in the dame game, what fresh honour for Edna Everage? The housewife superstar was knighted in 1974, — by Gough Whitlam, no less — in the film Barry McKenzie Holds His Own. Perhaps we could go one better and bestow nobility on this cultural icon. Baroness Everage of Moonee Ponds has a nice ring.
It is remarkable, even spooky, to consider that next year is the 60th anniversary of Edna’s incarnation. She has been the mauve marauder ever since, glossing over her condescension and political incorrectness with a wave of gladiolus. Her stage shows are the most deliriously funny nights to be had in a theatre anywhere, as long as you’re not sitting in the front row.
Barry Humphries, her creator, is a devastating satirist, whose gleeful complicity with his audience merely brings us closer for the kill. His comic grotesques — Edna, the ghostly pensioner Sandy Stone, Sir Les Patterson adjusting his trouser-snake — are vehicles for his razor-sharp social observations.
He is a supreme clown, but that is only the most visible of his gifts. He is a cultural polymath whose erudition takes in such things as dada and dandyism, gramophone records, Weimar cabaret and colourful vintage Strine. Clive James says Humphries is “a pioneer in Australia’s sense of its own vernacular”.
He was at some of the defining cultural moments of the past half-century. In London in the 1960s he was part of the group of comedians that included Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Back in Australia he was a player in the resurgent film industry of the 1970s. As Edna’s magnitude brightened from superstar to gigastar, Humphries’ most famous creation was the subject of books, uproariously funny TV and live shows and, in the United States, a controversial magazine column.
The recent stage production Eat, Pray, Laugh! is said to be Edna’s last. Is it possible Humphries could ever retire? To borrow the title of his autobiography: More, please!
Matthew Westwood
Sport
Greg Norman
A colossal figure in his prime, Greg Norman is still the textbook larger-than-life sportsman
Golfer, 59
Unmatched aura. Commanding physical presence. The No.1 golfer in the world for 331 weeks. A colossal figure in his prime, Greg Norman is still the textbook larger-than-life sportsman.
The Great White Shark — The Augusta Chronicle first called him that — has always looked a million bucks. He is media savvy. Business smart. Has befriended presidents. Transcended sport. We watched him in droves. Record, ten-deep galleries in Australia. Millions of TV viewers burned the midnight oil to watch him play overseas. He twice won the British Open. Should he have won more?
His tally of two major championships was considered an under-achievement for a player of such prodigious capabilities. He tried for two decades to win the US Masters. Year after year, close shaves, no cigars. “I think things are written on the wind,” he said.
His finest legacy is the current generation of Australian golfers. Adam Scott, our first World No.1 since Norman’s pomp ended in 1998, said last year upon becaming the first Aussie to win the US Masters: “There was one guy who inspired a nation of golfers and that’s Greg Norman. Part of this belongs to him.”
Norman’s destiny? To entertain. To win big. To lose big. And to become unforgettable.
Will Swanton
Thinker
BA Santamaria
Perhaps no Australian outside parliament has had a greater influence on events inside it
B.A. Santamaria
Activist, 1915 – 1998
Perhaps no Australian outside parliament has had a greater influence on events inside it than Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria. He still is resented by many for his role in keeping Labor out of power federally between 1949 and 1972, and there can be no doubt his anti-communist activism in the union movement and the ALP , culminating in The Split and the formation of the Democratic Labor Party, had that effect.
Yet his aim was primarily to thwart the influence of communism, and he lived to see vindication of his views with the collapse of communism across Europe in the 1980s and 90s.
Santamaria was not a politician or even a member of a party yet he exerted political influence, particularly through groups such as the Movement and the National Civic Council, which opposed communism and promoted conservative values. He aired his thinking on the Nine program Point of View, which ran until 1991, and in a column in The Australian from 1976 to 1997.
Born in Melbourne of Italian immigrant parents, educated by Irish Catholics and devoted to Australia and its indigenous game through the Carlton Football Club, he was driven by his deep faith. His political power through the DLP helped deliver state funding for Catholic and other independent schools. And he was a leading thinker and advocate inside his church, giving voice to the conservative and traditionalist strands of his faith and influencing many other high-profile Australians, including Tony Abbott and George Pell.
The school of political thought, crossing both major parties, that favours social conservatism and benign government interventions, especially in family support and education, owes a great deal to ”Bob“ Santamaria.
Chris Kenny
Arts
Nick Cave
A charming yet menacing rock aristocrat and a master of his craft; a showman like no other
Musician, 56
Many are the musos who have fallen under the spell of the rock ‘n’ roll adage “live fast, die young”. Anyone who saw the young Nick Cave perform in the late 1970s or early 80s — a prickly, scrawny, anarchic banshee throwing himself around the stage in the Boys Next Door and then the Birthday Party — would have been forgiven for thinking that such was the modus operandi and fate of the singer from Warracknabeal.
Instead, over a period of 35 years Cave has become one of the most versatile, consistent and provocative artists Australia has produced. He has pushed the boundaries with each successive album, most eloquently and successfully with his band of the past 30 years, the Bad Seeds. Songs such as Red Right Hand, The Weeping Song, Into My Arms and God is in the House are woven into the fabric of Australian rock history, but they are just a few nuggets from a rich seam. More recently his outfit Grinderman, a vehicle for joyous mayhem, has allowed him to exercise the more violent side of his rock ‘n’ roll persona.
For all that he is the quintessential rock star, a frontman whose charisma demands attention, Cave has spread his influence into many other areas of the arts, where he has proved equally adept. His credits as a film composer, many in collaboration with Bad Seed Warren Ellis, include The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and UK doco The English Surgeon. He has written music for theatre, screenplays for the films The Proposition and Lawless and published the novels And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) and The Death of Bunny Munro (2009). And over time the demonic youth who fronted the Birthday Party has transformed into a besuited gentleman, a charming yet menacing rock aristocrat and a master of his craft; a showman like no other.
Iain Shedden
Arts
Peter Weir
Weir forged a path of brilliant work that generations of Australian filmmakers hope to follow
Filmmaker, 69
Peter Weir doesn’t possess the razzle dazzle of Baz Lurhrmann or the budgets of George Miller. He shuns the spotlight yet he can claim to be our most revered film artist. Certainly he is the personification of the Australian film industry’s “New Wave” and later the “Aussiewood” rush of talent to the United States in the 1980s and 90s.
As governments invested in building a new film infrastructure in the early 1970s, Weir emerged from the Sydney film collective Ubu Films and stints on The Mavis Bramston Show and with the Commonwealth Film Unit as a distinct talent. And as this first generation of modern filmmakers matured, some of them in crowd-pleasing comedies, he made his name as an artisan of atmosphere.
In 1974, he broke through with The Cars That Ate Paris and Picnic At Hanging Rock before his supernatural thriller The Last Wave. Then he turned a tragic World War I battle into arguably the most beautiful war film ever made: Gallipoli. Another collaboration with Mel Gibson, The Year of Living Dangerously, revealed a director whose vision was now too big for Australia. He led a generation of directors, cinematographers and actors to the US , where he used naturalism to greater commercial and critical effect.
In quick time, he received Academy Award nominations for his direction of Witness, Dead Poets Society and The Truman Show (and a screenplay nod for Green Card) and showed that an Australian’s view of the world was not only palatable but intriguing and artistic.
Weir forged a path of brilliant work that generations of Australian filmmakers hope to follow, yet he’s also victim to film’s fickle fortune. Since 1998, he has only made two features — Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and The Way. That is film’s loss.
Michael Bodey
Thinker
Elizabeth Evatt
She has in turn held an array of influential positions and made ripples in the law, feminism and human rights
Lawyer, 80
A member of one of the nation’s great Labor-law dynasties, Elizabeth Evatt has remained true to her pedigree. She is the daughter of barrister Clive Evatt QC and the niece of Herbert “Doc” Evatt, who was a High Court judge, leader of the federal Labor Party and a NSW chief justice. She has in turn held an array of influential positions and made ripples in the law, feminism and human rights.
Born in 1933, Evatt was the first woman to win the Sydney University Medal in law and her career coincides with major initiatives of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments. In 1972 she was appointed to the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, later chairing a royal commission that led to no-fault divorce law and the creation of the Family Court of Australia. She became that court’s first Chief Justice.
In the Hawke years she was appointed president of the Australian Law Reform Commission; under Keating she sat on the Australian Human Rights Commission. She is also a former president of the United Nations committee on the elimination of discrimination against women, a former member of the UN human rights committee, and she served two five-year terms as a judge on a World Bank tribunal.
Outspoken Evatt was a strong critic of the control orders and preventive detention elements of the Howard government’s counter-terrorism laws. She once argued that sexist judges should face disciplinary proceedings, and she favours a treaty with Aborigines.
In recent years her image appeared on a special issue of stamps devoted to great Australians. She remains a life member of the Evatt Foundation, a labour think tank named in honour of her uncle “Doc”.
Chris Merritt
Thinker
Donald Horne
Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck
Author, 1921 – 2005
One of the acuter observers of Australian life, Donald Horne should have guessed that in a country where red-headed people are dubbed “Blue”, the title of his landmark 1964 book The Lucky Country would be reinterpreted.
His words, in the opening sentence of the final chapter, were intended to be brutal: “Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.” He was indicting the political leadership of 1960s Australia, and by extension the nation at large, for philistinism, provincialism, cultural insularity, economic complacency and a reliance on received wisdoms.
Critics who read beyond the title page noted the pugnacity of the prose. Still the title came to be synonymous with Godzone, which vexed Horne mightily. “I have had to sit through the most appalling rubbish as successive generations misapplied this phrase,” he said. It was a misunderstanding he tried to put right in 1976 with Death of the Lucky Country.
Horne was born in Sydney on Boxing Day 1921. He started his career as a journalist with Frank Packer’s print empire and went on to edit The Bulletin and co-edit Quadrant. In a long and productive life as a public intellectual, which included a stint as chair of the Australia Council, he published more than 20 books spanning social commentary, political history, memoir, travel and a novel. Engaged to the last, the final volume of his memoirs, Dying, completed by his wife Myfanwy, was published two years after his death in 2005.
As for that misused title, it seemed he had almost accepted it when asked in a 1992 interview what he would most like Australians to remember. “Well, how about: for God’s sake don’t whinge,” he said.
Stephen Romei
Sport
Bart Cummings
It’s his almost visionary selection of, and patience with, thoroughbreds that has made him both a winner and a model for younger trainers
Horse trainer, 86
Go back over the honour roll of Bart Cummings’ incredible 12 Melbourne Cup winners, and you’ll notice something that hints at the secret of our greatest racehorse trainer’s success. There among the greats is Light Fingers, a plain filly with a huge heart; a knock-kneed colt called Galilee; and scarred boof-headed stayer Red Handed.
Cummings has always insisted races are not beauty contests; that breeding counts for more. And be they stayers, sprinters or milers, his ability with horses seems to have known no bounds. Kingston Rule and Rogan Josh began their careers with other trainers but found their place in Cup folklore under his care. And then there was Saintly, the champion he bred himself.
Adelaide-born James Bartholomew Cummings went to work for his trainer father after leaving high school, gaining his own licence in 1953. He won his first Group 1 in 1958 and has never looked back. Over his 60-year career, he has combined an ability to read bloodlines with an eye for a yearling with potential. It’s his almost visionary selection of, and patience with, thoroughbreds that has made him both a winner and a model for younger trainers.
Cummings received the Order of Australia in 1982. In 2000 he carried the Olympic torch down the straight at Flemington, his second home, and the following year was an inaugural inductee into the Racing Hall of Fame, where he is listed as an official legend along with none other than Phar Lap. Now in his 80s, the Cups King is imparting his wisdom to grandson James.
Brendan Cormick
Arts
Harry Vanda & George Young
Their legacy as a production team is unequalled in Australia.
Musicians, 68 & 67
When Bruce Springsteen opened his set in Sydney with the Easybeats’ Friday on My Mind in February, it was a salute to classic Australian rock. The 1966 hit was written by Harry Vanda and George Young, the Easybeats guitarists who went on to steer the career of our most successful and enduring musical export, AC /DC. Their legacy as a production team is unequalled in Australia.
Vanda (Vandaberg) from Holland and Young from Scotland met in the early 60s at Sydney’s Villawood Migrant Hostel, joining forces with fellow immigrants Stevie Wright, Dick Diamonde and Gordon Fleet to form the Easybeats. Friday on My Mind was the first international hit by an Aussie rock band and prompted their move to London. After the band dissolved in 1969, the pair started writing songs and producing records under a variety of names. It was on returning to Australia in 1973 that their studio career really took off.
Young’s brothers Angus and Malcolm were in a new band and the production duo, now part of the Alberts Productions stable, took them under their wing. Vanda and Young produced AC /DC ’s first five albums in the 70s, launching their career internationally. They also wrote and produced John Paul Young’s hit Love is in the Air and Wright’s No.1 Evie and produced albums by the Angels, Rose Tattoo and the Ted Mulry Gang. Their studio project Flash and the Pan in the 70s and 80s enjoyed success here and overseas with hits such as Waiting on a Train. The pair was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in its inaugural year, 1988.
Vanda now has his own studio in Sydney, while Young is retired and lives in Portugal.
Iain Shedden
Business
Ian Potter
He moved seamlessly among the powerbrokers of post-war Australia, from business and industry to politics, the arts and science
Philanthropist, 1902 – 1994
Urbane, elegant and blessed with both a brilliant mind and a big heart, Sir Ian Potter straddled many worlds as a pioneering financier and philanthropist. He moved seamlessly among the powerbrokers of post-war Australia, from business and industry to politics, the arts and science. Charming and curious, he won friends easily and forged relationships that he would later leverage to create a better Australia through his remarkable philanthropic ventures.
Born in Sydney in 1902 and educated in Britain and Sydney, Potter was initially drawn to business, setting up a major Melbourne broking house and exuding an entrepreneurial spirit that saw him play a leading role in financing the growth of manufacturing in the 1940s and 1950s and then the mining industry in the 1960s.
A consummate networker, he helped establish the Liberal Party in 1944 but maintained close ties with both sides of politics though his life, often acting as unofficial adviser and confidant to decision-makers including Robert Menzies.
Yet it is as a philanthropist that he is best remembered. In 1964 he set up the Ian Potter Foundation, one of the largest of its kind in Australia, to fund projects aimed at developing creativity and capacity as a nation. The foundation has contributed more than $170 million to thousands of projects across the arts, academia, science and medical research and the environment.
Potter was also a long-time chair of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, which played a key role in the formation of the Australian Opera and Australian Ballet.
When he died at 92, Potter bequeathed around $50 million, more than half his personal estate, to his foundation, which continues to play an important role in cultural and creative life.
Cameron Stewart
Thinker
Dame Roma Mitchell
She made a habit of doing things that women had never done before
Lawyer, 1913 – 2000
Dame Roma Mitchell blazed a trail for women at a time when the law was hostile territory for anyone in a dress. While things have improved, Mitchell’s name is still invoked as female lawyers besiege the last bastions of the boys’ club.
There are two strands to her continuing influence: the first is the example of her remarkable career. She made a habit of doing things that women had never done before. The second is her use of her position to improve the treatment of women by the law and the legal profession.
In 2007, Mitchell was the subject of a biography titled Roma the First. She had been the nation’s first female Queen’s Counsel, the first female judge of a state Supreme Court, the first female chancellor of an Australian university and eventually the first female governor of South Australia.
The pattern of Mitchell’s life was established early. Born in Adelaide, she discovered upon entering the University of Adelaide in the 1930s that the law students’ society was closed to women. She responded by founding the female students’ association before graduating with an award for the most brilliant law student of her year.
As a QC in the 1960s, she campaigned for women to be allowed to serve on juries. When she was made a judge, she said she hoped that in her lifetime appointments of women to high judicial office would not excite comment in the way that her appointment had done. She said women should be able to take whatever place they were fitted to take in the professions.
When she left the bench, Mitchell became the first chair of the Australian Human Rights Commission. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971 and became a Dame in 1982. By the time she died in 2000, she had accumulated enough honours for two lifetimes.
Chris Merritt
Sport
Evonne Cawley
She played the sport like a ballerina, bringing poise and strength to the women’s game
Tennis player, 62
In the Australia of the 1950s, prospects for Aborigines were poor, and discrimination and mistrust rampant. But in the tiny town of Barellan in the NSW Riverina, something about the inquisitive young Aboriginal girl he saw peeking between the fence posts of a tennis court intrigued resident Bill Kurtzman. He invited her in to have a hit, and Wiradjuri girl Evonne Goolagong was on her way. As a teenager she would move to Sydney to develop her tennis career.
Two decades on, Goolagong Cawley was one of the best tennis players in the world, and briefly, in 1976, the top. In the 1970s she appeared in 18 Grand Slam singles finals and won seven: four Australian Opens, two Wimbledons and a French Open. Luck deserted her at the US Open, where she remains the only woman to lose four consecutive finals.
Commentators said she played the sport like a ballerina, bringing poise and strength to the women’s game. Fans were captivated by the woman with the curly hair, bubbly persona and trademark backhand volley.
She married British player Roger Cawley in 1975 and they had two children. Goolagong Cawley’s last major title — a 1980 win over Chris Evert at Wimbledon — was also the last time a mother has won on that hallowed tennis turf.
The first Aboriginal player to achieve international success, Goolagong Cawley, who lives in Noosa, now pays it forward, holding regular tennis clinics in rural areas to inspire and encourage indigenous children. She was appointed an MBE in 1972, an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1982, and inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1988.
Margie McDonald
The Innovators
CSIRO WiFi team
By the time the patents expired last November CSIRO had collected $430 million in royalties
Scientists
In Enforcing patent rights worldwide has brought vast wealth to many United States tech firms but when it comes to the hugely popular WiFi technology that shifts data through the air around our homes and offices, the patent game was won by a team of five Australians, with many others backing up on the sidelines.
The guts of the problem in creating workable, speedy WiFi lay in finding a way to carry data through the heavy and unpredictable interference that exists in an office or a home. Walls, furniture, people and even pets conspire to reflect radio waves willy-nilly. This causes interference, which becomes worse the higher the data transmission rate.
Some members of CSIRO ’s WLAN team — Graham Daniels, John Deane, John O’Sullivan (pictured), Diethelm Ostry and Terence Percival — had cut their teeth on radioastronomy research in the 70s and applied what they learned in space to the micro world of WiFi. They came up with a mix of techniques for countering interference and allowing much higher data rates, and were granted a patent in 1996.
The CSIRO technology was subsequently incorporated in the first mass-market WiFi industry standard, called IEEE 802.11a, and standards to follow.
Getting the patented technology incorporated in the standard was a master stroke that led to the promise of royalties down the track. As WiFi took off in the early 2000s, big firms such as Microsoft, Netgear, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Nintendo and Belkin produced gear using the standard.
CSIRO vigorously enforced its patents through the US courts and by 2012 had licence agreements with 23 companies. By the time the patents expired last November CSIRO had collected $430 million in royalties, much of which has been ploughed back into fresh research initiatives.
Stuart Kennedy
Thinker
Sir Mark Oliphant
One of Australia’s greatest physicists
Physicist, 1901 – 2000
Today ‘s top physicists gravitate to a particle collider financed by 21 countries, in a tunnel so long that it straddles Europe’s borders. In Mark Oliphant’s day, a far less cooperative Europe channeled his work into forces of defence and destruction.
One of Australia’s greatest physicists, Adelaide-born Oliphant played an instrumental role in the development of radar and the nuclear bomb. But he ended his 98 years as an avowed opponent of nuclear weaponry.
At Cambridge University in the 1930s, Oliphant was part of a team experimenting with “heavy water”. Using a particle accelerator he had built, he discovered that sub-atomic particles reacting with each other produced far more energy than they began with. It was the first public demonstration of nuclear fusion, the sun’s energy source. Years later the work found a different application in the first hydrogen bomb.
Oliphant also championed the theory that splitting the atom could produce a hell of a bang and he helped persuade the United States to establish the research centre that produced the atomic bomb. In 1943 he joined the Manhattan Project, although he had become uncomfortable with its military objectives. By the time Hiroshima was bombed in 1945 he was working in England as a physics professor.
He became a harsh critic of nuclear weapons and attended the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, brainstorming ways of reducing the danger of armed conflict. Back in Australia, where his anti-nuclear views earned him the suspicion of the Menzies government, Oliphant became physical sciences dean at the fledgling Australian National University and the founding president of the Australian Academy of Science. When he tried to retire, he was appointed Governor of South Australia.
John Ross
Business
Alan Bond
[He]...seemed likely to amount to little until he threw in signwriting to try his luck in business
Entrepreneur, 76.
He got his start in the 1960s by selling blocks of land in Perth, including a swath of beachfront just north of the city. But Alan Bond, the brash young entrepreneur, suspected buyers might be put off by Yanchep’s vast windswept sandhills, so he covered the area with a thin layer of bitumen and painted it green. “It looked good in the brochures,” he boasted.
By the roaring 1980s the fast-talking Bond was a colossus of Australian business with interests in media, brewing, mining, satellites, property and even a Chilean phone company. In 1987 he bought Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises for $US 54 million, at the time the highest price paid for a painting. Not a bad haul for a working- class kid from Britain who moved to Australia as a boy and seemed likely to amount to little until he threw in signwriting to try his luck in business.
In 1983, Bond’s bankrolling of Australia II ’s successful bid to wrest the America’s Cup from the New York Yacht Club transformed him from Wild West tycoon into “Bondy” the national hero. He now befriended political leaders and bankers threw open their doors to fund his increasingly risky acquisitions. His worst deal was acquiring the Nine Network from Kerry Packer and selling it back a few years later at a massive loss.
Bond was declared bankrupt and in 1997 was sentenced to seven years’ jail after pleading guilty to using his controlling stake in Bell Resources to siphon $1.2 billion into the coffers of Bond Corporation. He was released from jail in 2000.
Andrew Burrell
Arts
Harry Seidler
One of the most influential architects in the southern hemisphere last century
Architect, 1923 – 2006
Born in Vienna to to Viennese parents, Harry Seidler fled the Nazi occupation of Austria, making his way to Britain and later the United States, where he worked and studied with some of the great names in architecture.
In 1948 came the request that would arguably lead to the creation of a new Australian skyline. Seidler’s parents asked him to design them a house in their new home city, Sydney. Off the back of Rose Seidler House, with its boxy outline and German modernist Bauhaus influence, the young architect launched what would become the southern hemisphere’s most innovative architectural practice. After starting with single, domestic dwellings, the ambitious Seidler turned his eyes heavenward with his design for the contentious Sydney apartment building Blues Point Tower.
The tallest building in Australia when it was constructed in 1961, the tower has been loved and loathed ever since. Standing alone at McMahon’s Point, it was to be one of some 25 buildings for a 15,000-person community. Those plans were axed.
A few years later Seidler again broke new ground with Australia Square in Sydney’s CBD, working with Italian structural engineer Pier Luigi Nervi on the nation’s first successful large-scale modern urban project. The tower at its centre was at the time the world’s tallest lightweight concrete building. Seidler repeated his collaboration with Nervi on the limitpushing MLC Centre, eventually forging a reputation as a leading member of the post-war generation of modernists.
One of the most influential architects in the southern hemisphere last century, Seidler also designed buildings in Hong Kong, Austria, Italy, France, Mexico and Israel. Almost a decade after his death at 82 his practice continues, overseen by his wife Penelope Evatt Seidler.
Michaela Boland
The Innovators
Graeme Clark
Clark stands as an inspiration to Australian school-leavers to pursue careers in research.
Medical researcher, 78
In a nation where innovators head overseas to make money from their ideas, Graeme Clark swam the opposite way. The Australian ear surgeon and medical professor converted an American idea into a global biotechnology firm that’s been twice rated our most innovative company.
Clark, who was born in Camden, NSW, and studied at Sydney University, in the 1960s stumbled on a scientific paper describing how electrical stimulation had enabled a profoundly deaf person to experience sensations of hearing. It sparked in him a determination to develop an implantable hearing device capable of translating these sensations into something that could be understood.
For more than a decade Clark and a small research team fought meagre funding and widespread scepticism. The obsession finally paid off in 1978 when the recipient of the first cochlear implant heard decipherable speech. It was the first time an artificial sensory stimulus had been successfully interfaced with human consciousness. The cochlear implant is considered the most important advance worldwide in the management of profound deafness.
What came next cemented Clark’s place as the poster boy of Australian intellectual property commercialisation. He channelled private and government funding into the industrial development of his creation and the result, Cochlear Limited, dominates the global hearing implant market to this day, its products used by more than 250,000 people. It also attracts revenue of about $750 million a year and employs 2700 people in 25 countries.
Clark stands as an inspiration to Australian school-leavers to pursue careers in research. And he reminds seasoned researchers that they don’t have to abandon their homeland to achieve scientific — and commercial — success.
John Ross