Some are masters in the art of storytelling. Others are leaders in business. Many have excelled in their field, and a few have beaten the world. All, however, have played a part in how our nation thinks and feels, votes and works, dreams and plays. These are the Australians we say have had the greatest influence during the past 60 years 

Bob Hawke burst into the public spotlight in the late 1950s as a dynamic trade union advocate and earned a reputation as a larrikin intellectual.

As ACTU president in the 1970s, and Labor’s national president, Hawke was respected for his ability to resolve industrial disputes. He was immensely popular and admired for his authenticity, never hiding his struggles with alcohol and infidelity. Chronicling his ups and downs, The Australian wondered what kind of prime minister he might make.

In 1980, Hawke entered parliament with his sights set on the prime ministership. Destiny and ambition fuelled his rise, and Bill Hayden stepped aside as Labor leader ahead of the 1983 election.

Hawke led Labor to its greatest victory since 1943 and won three subsequent elections, becoming the only federal Labor leader to win more than two in a row. His ambition was to reconstruct the economy by bringing Australians together to embrace consensus policymaking.

His government delivered Australia’s great economic transformation, although it was tarnished by an end-of-decade recession. Labor orthodoxy was turned on its head as the dollar was floated, the financial sector deregulated, tariffs slashed and government enterprises privatised. An accord with unions moderated wage claims in return for a social wage that raised living standards. Medicare was established, welfare payments were better targeted, high school completion rates doubled and environmental protection became a priority. Hawke strengthened the US alliance and boosted trade with China, pushed for the end of South African apartheid, led the fight to save Antarctica, and established the APEC trade forum. He kept Labor united through nine years of profound change.

Some doubted Hawke’s capacity to be a disciplined and collegiate prime minister. But he surprised them and was a pragmatic politician, effective administrator and cooperative cabinet leader.

Hawke formed a close partnership with treasurer Paul Keating but relations later exploded as ambitions collided, and he lost a leadership challenge in 1991.

Hawke’s popularity transcended generations and he became a model for subsequent Labor leaders.

– TROY BRAMSTON, PICTURE BY RICHARD FREEMAN

Rupert Murdoch’s ambition for his company, our country and the national newspaper he founded 60 years ago continues to unfold through the printed pages and digital platforms of The Australian.

It is a vision invested in free markets and free people, economically conservative but socially libertarian, championing both the rights and responsibilities of the individual as well as the proper limits of government power. A vision that animated this masthead and Murdoch’s world view from the day The Australian first published on July 15, 1964.

True to form, the naysayers sniffed that it couldn’t be done; on a practical level, the tyranny of distance would defeat the effort to produce and distribute a newspaper coast to coast. Commercially, there was said to be no market for a national daily when tastes and interests, right down to the football code people followed, varied mightily among states.

Equally true to form, Murdoch pressed on, absorbing decades of losses until The Australian turned a profit then thrived. A hallmark of his success – and there’s no argument that he is the most successful businessman to emerge from this country – has been his ability to recognise opportunity, accept risk and back his judgment. His audacity and deal-making skills over seven decades have made him one of the most influential media leaders in the democratic world; he flourished by bucking orthodoxy.

At 93, he maintains a guiding presence as chairman emeritus of the multinational, multibillion-dollar enterprise that is News Corp, having handed over the day-to-day running of the company to eldest son Lachlan Murdoch.

But as Donald Trump famously quipped, there is only one Rupert Murdoch.

He built his inheritance of a struggling afternoon paper in Adelaide into a global behemoth that spanned continents and mediums, and reached audiences numbered in the hundreds of millions.

At the heart of the business was a restless propensity to innovate and grow: Murdoch broke into the nascent television industry in the 1950s, expanded his print operations to Sydney and London, and by the 1970s had a foothold in the biggest market of all, the United States. He took on the powerful British print unions in the 1980s and prevailed, introducing technology that revolutionised newspaper production. He bought the Hollywood movie studio, 20th Century Fox, and built America’s fourth free-to-air television network, as well as the hugely profitable Fox News cable service. In addition to The Australian, prestige print titles including The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal were brought into the fold.

Murdoch’s genius was also to know when to sell, as he did in 2019 when most of News’ film and TV assets – excluding Fox News and sports channels – were offloaded to the Disney company in a $US71.3bn ($111bn) deal that will allow the company under Lachlan to exploit emerging opportunities in the fast-moving digital space.

What’s next? Stay tuned, or reading, or scrolling. Be assured that Murdoch will have something big in mind.

– JAMIE WALKER

Following John Howard’s election to parliament in 1974, the former solicitor rose rapidly to become a minister (1975) then treasurer (1977) in the Fraser government. In 1983, he became Liberal deputy leader in opposition then leader when Andrew Peacock suddenly resigned.

But Howard’s opposition leadership, from 1985 to 1989, was not smooth sailing with divisions over policy and personality. The “Joh for PM” campaign shattered the Coalition, and he lost the 1987 election to Bob Hawke. Given Howard’s low poll ratings, it prompted The Bulletin to ask: “Mr 18% – Why on earth does this man bother?”

In 1989, Peacock regained the leadership and Howard seemed consigned to history. But after losing two more elections and cycling through two more leaders, the Liberals realised Howard was the man who, as he said, the times would suit. So, in 1995, Howard was back as Liberal leader, and a year later led the Coalition to power.

Howard wanted Australians to be relaxed and comfortable, but his years in power were polarising for many. The story of the Howard years can be told through protests: on refugees, workplace relations, reconciliation, racism, climate change and foreign wars. Howard’s greatest achievement was securing national gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre.

The economic prosperity of the Coalition’s nearly 12 years in power is also significant, with rising living standards and falling unemployment, an expanding middle class (the so-called “Howard Battlers”), alongside 10 surplus budgets and paying down debt to nil. He delivered the GST after winning a mandate for tax reform. The integrity of Australia’s borders was more strictly enforced. Howard promoted freer trade, mutual obligation in welfare provision, and greater choice in education.

Reform of the waterfront and greater flexibility in workplace relations was overdue, but WorkChoices was an overreach. Howard struggled with Indigenous issues, refusing to apologise to the stolen generations and the NT intervention had mixed results. Troops were deployed to East Timor and Afghanistan following September 11, but the invasion of Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein of weapons never found was a major blunder.

Howard was disciplined, shrewd and cunning, and learned from mistakes. Respected but never wildly popular, he lost his seat and government in 2007.

He led the Coalition to four election victories and was prime minister from 1996 to 2007, second in longevity to his hero, Robert Menzies. Howard remains a model for Liberal leaders.

– TROY BRAMSTON

Missionaries and pastoralists had already arrived in northeast Arnhem Land when Yunupingu was born, and miners would soon follow. The phrase “walking in two worlds” was not in common use as he grew into a man, but Yunupingu was the first to do it with such potent authority and grace.

The consequence of his early interpreting and advocacy cannot be overstated. The Yolngu people lost the Gove land rights case, but Yunupingu’s interpreting in court stands as a rich record – the first of its kind – of Aboriginal people’s connection to the land and their system of law and culture.

The evidence was so compelling it led to the Woodward Royal Commission and the nation’s first land rights legislation. The case also laid the legal groundwork for the Mabo decision that resulted in the Native Title Act. Under that legislation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people now have title to almost half of the Australian land mass.

Yunupingu’s charisma, grasp of politics and skills as a strategist were outstanding. He was twice chairman of the Northern Land Council and pushed for a treaty. He wanted constitutional recognition for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. He favoured the proposal for an Indigenous voice to parliament enshrined in the Constitution, and died six months before Australians voted no.

From the Yirrkala bark petitions to parliament in the 1960s to the aftermath of the Mabo decision, he was the defining figure of the land rights movement in Australia. As he grew in stature and influence, prime ministers came to him. He said: “Australians understand that their success is built on the taking of the land, in making the country their own, which they did at the expense of so many languages and ceremonies and songlines – and people – now destroyed. They worry about what has been done for them and on their behalf, and they know that reconciliation requires much more than just words. So the task remains: to reconcile with the truth, to find the unity and achieve the settlement.”

– PAIGE TAYLOR

There’s something about Margot Robbie. How did she go from being the Dalby-raised girl next door on Neighbours to the highest-paid actress in the world, twice over?

It may have something to do with her fearlessness. Few would have the guts to go off-script and slap Leonardo DiCaprio across the face during an audition. Fewer still would do it to the delight of Martin Scorsese.

Or it may be her subversiveness. She burst into Hollywood, the blondest of bombshells with a megawatt smile, as the trophy wife in The Wolf of Wall Street, and followed it up by shirking the same natural gifts as the brace-faced feral frizz ball Tonya Harding in I, Tonya. Her gleefully homicidal turn as Harley Quinn was lost in the teen-boy fantasy muck of James Gunn’s Suicide Squad, but Robbie redefined the character in its sequel, Birds of Prey. Producing the film herself, she turned it into a quasi-feminist revenge fantasy where women, both behind and in front of the camera, were in total control.

Perhaps it’s in her work ethic. The willingness to throw herself into clown school, take lessons in professional pickpocketing, or subject herself to months of gruelling figure skating training. It’s no wonder modern auteurs Quentin Tarantino, Scorsese, Damien Chazelle and Wes Anderson are falling over themselves to work with her.

At 34, Robbie has two Oscar nominations, five BAFTA Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards under her belt. And that’s just for her acting. Our Margot is a one-woman film industry. Her production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, which she founded in 2014, has consistently released ambitious and provocative films that have dominated the cultural conversation. On home soil, at this year’s AACTA awards, she was bestowed with the prestigious Trailblazer Award, an accolade reserved for Australian screen artists “whose body of work has served as an inspiration to others”.

Robbie is a girl’s girl, who consistently uses her platform to champion female stories and storytellers. Take her two collaborations with the British director Emerald Fennell. The first, the daring rape-revenge thriller Promising Young Woman, notched five Oscar nominations and a screenwriting win for Fennell. Then came Saltburn, which, despite being overlooked by awards institutions, wholly captured Gen Z’s imagination, was one of the most talked-about films of last year, and sent Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 2001 song Murder on the Dancefloor soaring up the charts.

Then there was Barbie, the biggest film of last year. Robbie saved the project from a decade-long limbo and had the smarts to get Greta Gerwig, a hot indie director with major feminist credentials, to reimagine this passé plastic doll so abhorred by feminists for reinforcing conventional gender stereotypes, and plonked her into a bracingly witty, heart-tugging film that actually made women feel good.

– GEORDIE GRAY, PICTURE BY SOPHIA SPRING

Sir Sidney Nolan’s most important and memorable work was made in the 20 years before 1964, but he remained one of the giants of Australian painting during ensuing decades, a model both in his restless experimentation with materials and his endless inventiveness in subject matter and themes.

With Albert Tucker and others, he was part of the first truly avant-garde movement in this country. As early as 1944 Paul Haefliger called him the “enfant terrible” of Australian art. His real importance, however, lies in the way he transcended the rootless avant-garde to reconnect with the specificity of Australian experience, and in particular with what was already by his time a tradition of Australian landscape painting.

As he later recalled, “I gradually … completely identified with what I was looking at and I forgot all about Picasso, Klee and Paris … and became attached to light.”

In what is probably his most memorable and mysterious series, Nolan placed the figure of Ned Kelly in a blue and gold landscape setting that is clearly borrowed from Streeton and Roberts. Like the masters of the Heidelberg School, he confronts the quintessentially Australian experience of living in a new and strange land, but replaces the quietly heroic figure of the selector, who earns his sense of belonging through labour and industry, with the existential anti-hero of the bushranger who – as his empty helmet reveals – is also an incarnation of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men.

This combination of originality and formal boldness with a deep connection to the history and natural environment of this land helps explain why Nolan is, together with Russell Drysdale and Arthur Boyd, among the very few Australian artists to have achieved eminence and even a degree of influence internationally. Perhaps significantly, this was also partly because the second half of the 20th century was the last period in which Australian art could still be considered as a part of the larger category of British art; in recent decades, between the bland internationalism of the contemporary and the fetishism of the Indigenous, the very idea of an authentic Australian expression has become elusive.

– CHRISTOPHER ALLEN, PICTURE BY MICHEL LAWRENCE

Few Australians have achieved the success in any one field that Sir Frank Lowy has reaped in multiple arenas. Whether it was co-founding the Westfield shopping centre empire in 1959 and overseeing its growth around the world, or his roles in sports, diplomacy, medical research and philanthropy, he has led almost multiple lives. The ambitious refugee, who arrived in Australia in 1952 after growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust and later fighting for Israel, has made an extraordinary contribution to the nation.

With his legendary business smarts, an iron will, fierce intelligence and an almost uncanny ability to see around corners, Lowy grew his shopping mall empire into the world’s largest. He then sold out at the top in 2017, having been executive chairman of Westfield for 50 years and then non-executive chairman from 2011 to 2018.

Lowy was briefly the country’s richest individual in 2010, but his contribution to how we live has been a more remarkable achievement; going shopping at Westfield became part of our everyday lives and is embedded in the nation’s story.

Lowy’s drive also led him offshore and his empire sprawled across the US and Britain. An investment of $1000 in Westfield in 1960, with dividends reinvested, would have grown to $440m by 2017 when the company was sold to France’s Unibail-Rodamco. The Lowy family then sold out of local shopping centre owner, the Scentre Group, and the tycoon now invests privately with sons David, Peter and Steven.

His vaunted “second life” was a further source of influence on the nation. As News Corp chairman emeritus Rupert Murdoch said in his 2013 Lowy Lecture: “Today Frank’s story is the story of Australia.”

He gifted the nation not only his eponymous international affairs institute, but under his leadership of the Football Federation Australia, the nation fell in love with soccer as the country qualified for the 2006 World Cup and fans chanted his name.

His public service also spanned banking, the arts and medicine. Lowy sat on the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia for a decade, and was president of the board of trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW. He set up the Lowy Medical Research Institute, which is dedicated to preventing vision loss due to macular telangiectasia type 2, lifting it to global status.

In 2017 he was knighted at Windsor Castle by Queen Elizabeth II.

Now, at 93 and residing in Israel, Lowy’s legacy lives on in Westfield shopping centres around the world. Just as significantly, the breadth of his contribution to Australian business and community is almost unmatched.

– BEN WILMOT, PICTURE BY AVISHAG SHAAR-YASHUV

Migrating from Wales to Australia in 1966, Julia Gillard was a student leader, lawyer and political staffer before being elected to parliament in 1998.

She quickly demonstrated her abilities as a debater, policy wonk and media performer, forming a successful leadership ticket with Kevin Rudd to topple Labor leader Kim Beazley in 2006. They led the party to victory the following year.

Gillard was a reforming deputy prime minister in the education and workplace relations portfolios. In 2010, after a loss of party confidence in Rudd, she launched a late-night leadership challenge and he resigned. Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister, but her ascension unleashed sharp divisions within Labor.

Gillard was a skilled negotiator, tough but empathetic, and a highly efficient prime minister. Her Gonski school reforms, alongside testing of students, a national curriculum and ranking of schools, remain. The NDIS, a landmark reform, was legislated. The NBN began its rollout, plain packaging of cigarettes was introduced and an apology offered to those affected by forced adoption. The royal commission into child abuse unleashed an overdue revolution in institutions. A price on carbon and a mining tax were legislated, but later repealed. Gillard allowed the US to station marines in Darwin, and recast a policy for Australia in Asia. Relations with India were elevated, and Australia won a seat on the UN Security Council.

During a heated parliamentary debate over Speaker Peter Slipper’s vulgar text messages becoming public, Gillard made a passionate speech about “sexism and misogyny” that gained global attention. The speech has become influential for a new generation of women, embracing it as an anthem of their own.

With Rudd hellbent on revenge, and facing relentless opponents in politics and the media – including a gendered element to some criticism – Gillard was often under siege. But she made policy and political blunders of her own, and the Labor Party’s 2010 re-election campaign was a disaster.

Despite the loss of a parliamentary majority, Gillard was able to secure passage of major legislation by striking deals with the crossbench. She fended off a leadership challenge from Rudd, but a second in 2013 was successful.

Out of office, she reinvented herself in London, winning respect for staying out of politics, and instead leading international organisations focused on health, education and women’s leadership. Gillard is, even according to her former opponents, the “model” former PM.

– TROY BRAMSTON

Travel the cricket realm and marvel at the stamp Shane Warne left upon it. Just as the batsman’s and Australia’s eyes were fixed on him as he paused at the top of his bowling mark like a predator focused on its prey, so were the world’s.

Warne changed Australian cricket as he managed somehow to be both the most competitive and most captivating in a team of champions, rallying them to believe a win was possible anywhere, from any position.

England had the running in the 2006-07 Adelaide Test from day one. Double-century maker Kevin Pietersen had his measure and the opposition had the game in the bag, but the leggie manifested another destiny on the last day. The umpire believed Andrew Strauss edged a ball he’d missed, Ian Bell’s mind became so scrambled he ran himself out. KP was bowled with his first delivery.

It was as if Warne could shape the game and all who participated in it to an outcome he desired. We were all living in Warne’s world. Similar scenes occurred when the conjurer snatched victory from the hands of the South Africans in the 1999 World Cup. The opposition lost its way and its mind as things went Warne’s way.

Warne changed world cricket. Over at English county side Hampshire, they tell tales of how he picked them up, dusted them off and took them from also-rans to the upper reaches of division one during his time there. “He believed any match could be won from any position and that maximum effort and hard work were the minimum every player should be willing to give to the club,” said club chair Rod Bransgrove recently.

Warne made us all believe, made us watch, made us marvel and changed our expectations of slow bowlers. In particular leg spinners. It is unlikely any who follow will match his achievements, but it is impossible for them to not be shaped by his influence.

– PETER LALOR

In 1973, Patrick White won the Nobel Prize in Literature and remains the only Australian to have earned that honour.

White was born in Knightsbridge, London while his parents were visiting before World War I. He returned to Australia with them as a six-month-old and stayed until he was 12, schooling at Cranbrook in Sydney’s Bellevue Hill and at Tudor House in the Southern Highlands, before being sent to board in Britain.

He hated it and begged his parents to let him return to Australia, where he promised to work on the land. For two years he toiled as a jackaroo, remembering “swimming my horse through floodwaters to fetch the mail”.

White left Australia to study modern languages at King’s College, Cambridge. After having a first novel, Happy Valley, published in Britain in 1939, he decamped for New York, where he was turned down by all but one publisher. He was delighted to have embarked upon a literary career, but then came the war. He joined the Royal Air Force and served in Egypt, Palestine and Greece. He later described his service as “advancing or retreating across deserts (and) sitting in dust-ridden tents”.

During the war he met Manoly Lascaris, a Greek army serviceman. They would stay together for life.

White’s Tree of Man was published in the US in 1955. American critics loved it; contemporaneous Australian critics, not so much. His next novel, Voss, won the inaugural Miles Franklin Award in 1957. He won a second Miles Franklin in 1961, and would later decline a third, to give other writers a chance.

The citation on White’s Nobel Prize says he received the award “for an epic and psychological narrative art, which has introduced a new continent into literature”. He used the money from the Nobel to establish an award for writers who had not been adequately recognised.

White was named Australian of the Year in 1974, telling a friend the nation had apparently run out of “swimmers, tennis players and yachtsmen” to whom to give the title. He died in Sydney in 1990, and his ashes were scattered in his beloved Centennial Park.

– CAROLINE OVERINGTON, PICTURE BY AXEL POIGNANT

To get an idea of how disruptive Andrew Forrest has been across Australian society, consider what he has pursued and achieved outside the iron ore industry that has made him incredibly wealthy in just two decades.

The man universally known as “Twiggy” has built one of the country’s largest private philanthropic foundations, Minderoo, with more than $7bn in assets, secured 10 million Covid test kits for Australia at the height of the pandemic, rescued the iconic R.M. Williams brand and the Western Force rugby union side, and now seems hell-bent on saving the planet from fossil fuels.

Forrest’s energetic pursuit of a suite of ambitions has made him one of the most influential and polarising figures in Australian business and society.

For decades, the biggest mining companies in town were BHP and Rio Tinto. Critics laughed and potential investors ran for the hills when Forrest, with a career in stockbroking and a corporate failure with Anaconda Nickel under his belt, said he was going to build the “third force” in mining when he started Fortescue Metals Group in 2003.

But he did it, with a mixture of risk-taking, great timing, restructuring debt at key moments, riding China’s seemingly insatiable appetite for Australian iron ore, and breaking the Rio and BHP duopoly in Western Australia’s Pilbara.

Fortescue is now one of the biggest companies on the ASX and made its shareholders, including Forrest, incredibly wealthy via its stock price and huge annual dividend payments.

Yet Forrest’s crusading nature is now transforming Fortescue into what he hopes will be the biggest green energy producer in the world – a staggeringly large ambition even for the always enthusiastic Perth billionaire.

That ambition has led Forrest to try to wield his power on a global stage, crisscrossing the world to meet its leaders, from the White House to the COP climate summit and Davos, as well as trying to clinch a string of big green hydrogen contracts.

The jury is still out as to whether Forrest can pull off an incredible transformation from an old industry to new.

Forrest’s retort is that having built Fortescue from scratch, he can do it all over again. It looms as his biggest challenge yet.

– JOHN STENSHOLT, PICTURE BY ANDREW McDONOUGH

The thing about Noel Pearson is he defies ready or glib description. He’s the innovative thinker and lifelong champion of Aboriginal causes who is prepared to call out his own people on welfare dependence. A gifted communicator, his writing and speeches brim with wisdom and generosity. Yet he can be confronting too, if not brutal on occasion.

He’s the boy from the far-flung former Lutheran mission of Hope Vale on Cape York Peninsula who grew up to be a man of letters, contributing formidably to the intellectual life of the nation.

He has fought both ignorance and cancer, argued passionately for an Indigenous voice to parliament, and against the creeping disregard for individual responsibility in all sections of society. Pearson tells hard, difficult truths and Australia is the better for it.

He calls himself a radical centrist, which is as good a rendering as any. He believes in the transformative power of education because that is how he was lifted up after attending boarding school in Brisbane then the University of Sydney to study law and history.

He burst on to the national stage in 1993 as a member of the Indigenous negotiating team that crafted a legislative response to the High Court’s Mabo decision on native title with then Labor prime minister Paul Keating. The outcome was a landmark agreement.

“I learned that in order to secure wins, we needed leadership and we needed to have the courage to make decisions,” Pearson told The Weekend Australian Magazine in April last year, describing that experience.

Pearson sold the next prime minister, John Howard, on recognising the special status of First Nations peoples in the Constitution, demonstrating a keen ability to work both sides of the political aisle. The idea stalled.

A regular contributor to this masthead, he continued to make the case for the uptake of the welfare and classroom reforms his organisations trialled on Cape York to help young folk learn or earn, and ultimately break the cycle of disadvantage gripping remote Indigenous communities.

And if you could reach troubled kids with direct instruction teaching in peninsula-top Aurukun, you could help them at school in Adelaide, he reasoned. A community-backed Family Responsibilities Commission encouraged and sometimes compelled parents to live up to their obligations at home.

Pearson endured a harrowing bout of blood cancer in 2012 before throwing himself back into work.

His influence and eloquence permeated the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart that gave rise to the proposal for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice.

But despite his formidable advocacy, it was voted down at last year’s referendum.

– JAMIE WALKER, PICTURE BY NIC WALKER

Dawn Fraser is arguably Australia’s greatest female swimmer. A superb freestyler, in 1962 she became the first woman to crack the one-minute mark in the 100m freestyle, clocking 58.9 seconds.

She won Olympic gold in the 100m freestyle at three consecutive games, the first to achieve such a feat. Over her career she broke 27 individual world records. She held that 100m record for 16 years. All up she won eight Olympic medals, and may have won more had there been more freestyle events for women at the games during her reign. But beyond records and medals, Fraser has irrefutably left an extraordinary mark on Australian sport.

Never one for rules, she at times found herself at war with swimming officialdom. Famously embodying the Australian “larrikin” spirit, Fraser was punished for her rebellious ways.

She refused to swim the butterfly at the 1960 Rome Olympics and didn’t wear her national tracksuit to receive her gold medal. She was, in turn, left off the national team for a time. In 1964, at the Tokyo Olympics, she marched in the Olympic opening ceremony against orders. And after winning Olympic gold in Tokyo, Fraser and two other team members nicked an Olympic flag from a street leading to the Imperial Palace. They were arrested and threatened with jail time. Australian swimming officials banned her for a decade, so Fraser retired.

An embodiment of resilience, she has also survived sexual assault, domestic abuse and the loss of her mother in a car accident – Fraser was the driver.

Weeks later, still dealing with the grief of her mum’s death and chipped vertebrae suffered in the crash, Fraser won gold at the 1964 Games.

Of all her wins, Fraser most cherishes her first Olympic gold at the Melbourne 1956 Games: “My first gold in Melbourne will always be the most special because (my mother) was there to watch me. Nothing can compare with that.”

– JESSICA HALLORAN

In 2014, at the pinnacle of a golden career, George Pell sat for a portrait for The Australian’s 50th anniversary magazine. He left for Rome that day to begin one of the Vatican’s three top jobs – Prefect for the Economy – to reform the Church’s corrupt, arcane finances.

The Cardinal’s legacies are formidable. He headed our two largest archdioceses and helped to establish four universities. He reformed seminaries, brought World Youth Day to Sydney in 2008, and led a new English translation of the Mass.

From February 2019, he endured 404 days’ wrongful imprisonment on charges of child sexual abuse he could not have committed. Quashing those convictions in April 2020, the full bench of the High Court saved the reputation of the nation’s justice system before the world – just.

The years leading up to his imprisonment were torrid: digging out billions of euros despite resistance at top levels of the Vatican, two trials, and a vicious backlash. The humiliations of handcuffs, strip searches and a failed appeal followed.

His handling of that adversity cemented his reputation as one of Catholicism’s most influential sons.

He was braver after he returned to Rome, calling out serious weaknesses in Francis’s controversial pontificate, branding Synodality “a toxic nightmare couched in Neo-Marxist jargon”. His “street friends” near his apartment benefitted from his generosity and his prayer life deepened. Offering daily Mass in English, he also drew closer to traditional Latin rites.

True to his episcopal motto “Be Not Afraid”, before hip surgery at the hospital where he died, Pell told the anaesthetist in Italian: “I know I’m a high-risk patient, but I welcome His will for me.”

– TESS LIVINGSTONE, PICTURE BY ANDREW QUILTY

How did that great queen of elves, Galadriel, describe herself in The Lord of the Rings?

“Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn; treacherous as the sea; stronger than the foundations of the Earth. All shall love me and despair,” she bellows to the little hobbit Frodo in a posh Sydney accent.

That pretty much sums up the actor who brought Galadriel to life, Cate Blanchett.

You never forget the first time you see her. She’s a hurricane in dramatic form.

She can do loud and bombastic, like her two turns as Good Queen Bess, or that blistering monster of an orchestra conductor, Lydia Tár.

She can do something quieter and more seductive. Think of how she made Rooney Mara and audiences everywhere melt as the flirtatious, sad, lesbian lover in Carol.

She’s played great heroes like the slain Irish journalist and great fighter against corruption, Veronica Guerin. And Blanchett loves a good villain, from her Soviet spy in Indiana Jones to the wicked stepmother in Cinderella.

The only Australian with two acting Oscars, she’s more than earned her recognition as the successor to Meryl Streep – “the greatest actress of her generation”.

But back home in Australia, she’s perhaps something more profound. She’s the guardian – and probably the pinnacle – of a proud acting tradition.

Australia has produced some world-renowned actors, but none quite with the breadth of Blanchett, who has the ability to stride across blockbuster films and premier global theatre.

Theatre may even be her greatest Australian legacy.

When Blanchett and her husband Andrew Upton were artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company from 2008 to 2012, it was the closest this country has come to a Laurence Olivier-style National Theatre of international standing. Ingmar Bergman’s muse Liv Ullmann came here, as did the great French actress Isabelle Huppert, to work with Blanchett on stage.

Off stage, Blanchett has also made a name for herself as a progressive, pro-Labor bulwark and a luvvie of the luvvies.

She also hasn’t been afraid to take on the woke narratives in the acting world, defending the right of actors to play people with sexualities and backgrounds different to their own, and slyly interrogating the ferocity of #MeToo in Tár.

Whatever your politics or artistic tastes, there’s no denying Blanchett’s imprint on Australian culture.

From elves to monsters to lovers, she’s the queen of the screen.

– RICHARD FERGUSON, PICTURE BY GREG WILLIAMS

Meryl Streep said it best when presenting Nicole Kidman with her Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute: “This woman is a Valkyrie.”

One of an elite 49 to receive the honour, and the only Australian, Kidman has been embraced by Tinseltown ever since 1990, when she starred opposite Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder.

But the girl who married and divorced Cruise, then embarked on one of the nation’s greatest love stories with Caboolture country singer Keith Urban, has never forgotten her roots. Named The Australian’s Australian of the Year in 2004, she starred in the Baz Luhrmann epic, Australia, opposite Hugh Jackman in 2008, and began this year on Vogue Australia’s cover. She has become a cultural touchstone.

Kidman’s crowded trophy case also contains an Oscar and a BAFTA for Best Actress for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours, a Screen Actors Guild award, two Primetime Emmy awards and six Golden Globe awards.

But Kidman is more than the sum of her accolades. She is, as Streep said, an artist of “stamina, drive and discipline”. Woolf, Grace Kelly, Lucille Ball, Diane Arbus, a nurturing mother, a sociopathic taxidermist and a murderously ambitious weather girl, Kidman has played them all. With more than 70 films under her belt, the word “stamina” feels like a gross understatement.

Streep spoke of Kidman’s “seismic bank of emotion”, which has been vividly displayed in the heavy-hitting dramas that have defined her career. Kidman also has a taste for the unconventional, taking on daring roles in art-house projects such as Dogville, Birth and Eyes Wide Shut.

She has worked with every director worth their salt, often before their stars ascended; Park Chan-wook, Jonathan Glazer and Yorgos Lanthimos are just a few.

Not content with conquering the silver screen, Kidman has also made television her growth industry, extending her reach even further with production company Blossom Films, producing hits like Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers.

– GEORDIE GRAY, PICTURE BY MAX ABADIAN

When The Australian was first published in 1964, Robert Menzies was nearing the end of his record run as prime minister. He had served from 1939-41 and returned to power in 1949 with a new party, a moderate centre-right political philosophy and policy agenda, and remained in office until his retirement in 1966.

Menzies is the only postwar prime minister – so far – to leave office at a time of their choosing.

Although he never scaled the heights of popularity, Menzies was a respected and reassuring prime minister. He had learnt from his earlier period in power, which ended in rejection and resignation, and emerged to become an effective cabinet and party leader, developed productive relationships with senior public servants, and was an orator and parliamentary debater without peer.

He had a shrewd understanding of politics, was able to frame issues and events to his advantage, and cleverly exploited the defects in his political opponents. He led the Coalition to a record seven election victories in a row.

Menzies presided over the postwar economic boom, with a huge influx of migrants, rising living standards and an expanding middle class that prized suburban home ownership. His government cemented the US alliance with the ANZUS Treaty, signed a commerce agreement with Japan, and originated the Colombo Plan. The Menzies government provided limited funding to non-government schools, which helped to break down sectarian barriers, increased higher education funding tenfold as new universities were opened and provided scholarships for most students, and developed Canberra as the national capital.

However, sending combat troops to Vietnam was a mistake – opposed by The Australian – and the attempt to ban the Communist Party of Australia was a departure from liberal principles and was opposed by voters at a referendum.

While many of Menzies’ views are outdated today, such as his support for White Australia policies and regulated product, labour and capital markets, and he did not support the 1967 Indigenous referendum, his influence lives on as a lodestar for the Liberal Party.

He mastered the art and science of politics, worked co-operatively with the Country Party, and provided a new liberalism within a conservative policy framework. He was the principal founder of the party in 1944, shaping its ideals, organisation and culture. He remains the standard against whom all other leaders are judged.

His 1942 “forgotten people” speech remains an enduring creed for Liberals. No other Liberal leader is so routinely invoked.

He saw public service as an honourable profession, developed friendships across the political divide, and left office without a hint of scandal.

– TROY BRAMSTON

Kerry Packer never did media interviews.

But in 1979, keen to spruik his World Series Cricket revolution, he granted English talk-show host Sir Michael Parkinson an unforgettable insight into his remarkable life.

“You live very much in your father’s shadow,” Parkinson suggested, referring to the formidable Sir Frank Packer. “I hope so,” the son replied softly, before making light of his difficult childhood overcoming polio, dyslexia and a cruel father who shunned him.

Packer’s difficult formative years instilled in him a burning drive to achieve. The non-drinking chain-smoker became a spectacular deal-maker and brutal opponent.

His volcanic temper was matched by his unrivalled charm and steadfast loyalty to employees and associates he trusted and liked.

When his father passed away in 1974, Packer inherited a media business worth about $100m. When he died of kidney failure at his home in Sydney on Boxing Day 2005, he was Australia’s richest man with an estimated wealth of $7bn.

He was one of Australia’s largest landowners and had a keen interest in polo, creating the spectacular Ellerson property near Scone in the NSW Hunter Valley.

There he suffered his first heart attack in 1990, leaving him clinically dead for seven minutes. He famously quipped of the afterlife: “There’s no one waiting there for you, there’s no one to judge you, so you can do what you bloody well like.”

The episode highlighted his immense and often deeply private generosity, as he became a big donor to the Ambulance Service of NSW and various important philanthropic causes.

As a passionate gambler, he was also a famous tipper at casinos across the world.

But Packer is best known for running the Nine television network and the Australian Consolidated Press magazine empire, with which he was able to lay his mark on Australian society. He had an uncanny knack of knowing what people would watch. By founding World Series Cricket and airing it on live television, he shaped Australia’s identity as a sporting nation.

Packer personified the Aussie larrikin spirit to the very end. Fading in and out of consciousness in the final hours of his life, he awoke to exclaim: “Am I still here? How f..king long is this going to take?”

– DAMON KITNEY 

As a political leader, Paul Keating is a one-off. He left school at age 14, won a safe seat in parliament at 25, was a minister at 31, treasurer at 39 and prime minister by 47. He had a burning ambition for politics, but was not content only to preside; he was a reformer, a passionate proselytiser, a visionary and a romantic who dreamed about “the big picture” and could be ruthless and determined when required. He was a quick study and learned from mistakes. He watched John Gorton and Billy McMahon fall, witnessed the tragedy of Gough Whitlam, and noted Malcolm Fraser’s missed opportunities. He was driven by values of social justice and a keen understanding of both economics and the intersection of leadership and power.

As treasurer (1983-91), Keating is the principal architect of Australia’s modern economy, laying the foundations for long-term prosperity. He floated the dollar, removed exchange controls, deregulated banking, negotiated the accord that kept a lid on wages, reformed the tax system with big reductions in personal and company tax rates, privatised assets and delivered the first budget surpluses since the 1950s.

Keating wrested the prime ministership from Bob Hawke after two leadership challenges in 1991. While never popular, he won the “unwinnable” 1993 election, validating his takedown of Hawke. Keating’s prime ministerial legacy (1991-96) is often overlooked but substantial: passage of the Native Title Act in response to the High Court’s Mabo judgment, shuttle diplomacy to create the APEC leaders meeting, a security agreement with Indonesia, investing in arts and culture with his Creative Nation statement, and presenting a model for an Australian republic to parliament. His economic reforms include compulsory superannuation, which created trillions in national savings, enterprise bargaining, which turbocharged productivity, national competition policy, which energised growth, and trade liberalisation, which made companies more efficient.

Keating made politics thrilling. Nobody dominated parliament with such withering invective, nor could they equal his high oratory, such as his speech on Indigenous reconciliation at Redfern in 1992 or his eulogy for the unknown soldier in 1993.

Although Keating’s contemporary views are polarising, he is sought out by a new generation of Labor and Liberal politicians for counsel.

– TROY BRAMSTON 

The first Labor leader born in the 20th century, Gough Whitlam remains the great moderniser. No prime minister so fundamentally turned the policy settings of Australia in a new direction so broadly or so quickly. He inaugurated the modern prime ministership, with a centralisation of authority within his orbit, and an activist approach. Whitlam was a change agent, identifying a vision for Australia that was enthusiastically supported by The Australian in 1972. But the paper’s approval of Whitlam did not last.

A superb parliamentarian and commanding public speaker, Whitlam pioneered modern campaigning, using polling, market research, cutting-edge advertising, glitzy events, merchandise and television to its full potential.

As deputy Labor leader (1960) and leader (1967), he challenged the established party-union power structures and outdated policies with a “crash-through or crash” style. He made Labor relevant, and led it to government after 23 years in the wilderness.

His lone-ranger style, however, was not suited to the more collegiate requirements of cabinet government. Determined to implement “the program”, he paid little attention to the budget or economy, the advice of public servants, or the voters. Governing was often chaotic and shambolic. Ministerial scandals and a madcap scheme to borrow $US4bn via a Pakistani commodities trader led to a constitutional crisis over supply and his vice-regal dismissal by ambush.

In three years (1972-75), his government’s legacy was substantial and lasting: universal health care, needs-based school funding, no-fault divorce, legal aid, diplomatic recognition of China, withdrawal of remaining forces from Vietnam, the end of conscription and conscientious objectors freed from jail, a lowered voting age of 18, territory senators, abolition of the death penalty, the end of legal appeals to the UK Privy Council, a new honours system and anthem, grants for the arts, slashed tariffs and new trade practices laws, the introduction of environmental impact statements, and sewers in the suburbs. The Fraser government did not turn back the clock, passing Whitlam’s land rights legislation. It did dismantle universal health care, although this was reinstated by the Hawke government.

While the Whitlam era remains inspirational for true believers, hard lessons were noted by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.

– TROY BRAMSTON 

Frequent travellers will recognise the rush: the moment Sydney Harbour comes into view, when the plane tips its wing over the water,and flashes of white streak across the surface below. Few artists could resist this view – but there are times, too, when the pull seems to come from the other direction, the landscape bending to the brush of one of Australia’s favourite artists, rather than the other way around.

While he is now identified with Sydney Harbour, for Brett Whiteley, the subject was almost incidental. When he settled in Lavender Bay late in 1969, with his wife Wendy and daughter Arkie, there was no denying the beauty all around. Whiteley was returning with a certain profile and bohemian glamour, having found prominence in London as a young painter. But he also had a way of finding art in life around him, and so it was as he looked through the trees to Sydney Harbour in front of his eyes.

Some 32 years have passed since Whiteley died, and his popularity with collectors and admirers, and even people with only a passing interest in art, remains as strong as ever. No other local artist has enjoyed quite the same level of recognition, which is why the outlines of his story are well known: the Sydney artist whose talent propelled him to London, New York and Fiji; the struggle with addiction; the rock stars; the Harpo Marx hair; the early grave. But the outlines of his art remain just as clear – and after all this time, it’s worth noting the durability of a vision that acts as a counterweight to a legend.

He won the Archibald twice and his works now sell for millions, but there’s more to his story beyond the superficial markers of success. Whiteley was restless, forever seeking new ideas. He could curve life into lines and light into forms. “I love above all a sense of poetry and quietude,” he said, and it could be this, along with his energy and looseness and his ability to forge his surroundings into art, that continues to endear him to those who lean in for a closer look.

– ASHLEIGH WILSON, PICTURE BY LEWIS MORLEY

Bartholomew Augustine “Bob” Santamaria was the most distinctive and original figure Australian politics has ever produced. He never ran for parliament, never belonged to a political party, but, as John Howard said, was “one of the most profoundly influential identities in post-war Australian politics”.

Santamaria was a lifelong activist who always had a strategic view, a tactical plan and a bias for action. He was initially important from the early 1940s in organising Catholic workers to oppose Communist Party influence in trade unions.

He was central to the great Labor Party split in 1955 and the birth of the anti-communist Democratic Labor Party. The DLP won up to 10 per cent of the national vote and had five senators and the balance of power.

After the Labor split, Santamaria set up the National Civic Council, which continued working inside trade unions but also sought to influence the whole of society. Santamaria’s profound critique of communism was vindicated by history. A brilliant speaker, immensely personable, often self-mockingly humorous, he was so active in so many ways with so many people that his influence is widely underestimated.

From 1963 to 1991, he broadcast a weekly seven-minute editorial on TV, the famous Point of View. As Gerard Henderson recounts in his brilliant biography of Santamaria, he memorised each commentary and delivered it exactly to time, without notes, each week. To anti-communist Catholics, such as my family, these Sunday morning commentaries were compulsory viewing. Santamaria penned a widely read column in The Australian from 1976 to 1998.

He ran student groups at most universities and recruited or influenced highly talented students, among them Tony Abbott. He ran specialist groups in defence, family policy and the battle for orthodoxy within Christian churches, through the journal AD 2000. Many influential Australians were friends of Bob’s, from Cardinal George Pell to Malcolm Fraser.

Santamaria was seen as conservative but was a true social democrat. His was the most significant voice arguing to take large numbers of Vietnamese refugees right from the fall of Saigon in 1975. He championed defence self-reliance, taxpayer assistance for non-government schools, compulsory superannuation, rigour in education, and state support for the family long before many of these positions became mainstream.

He was a warm, courteous and drolly humorous man with wide and deep friendships, and an inimitable TV voice. A dear friend of mine and a great Australian.

– GREG SHERIDAN 

It’s fitting Ron Barassi will forever be flying at the Punt Road end of the MCG, his powerful right leg booting an invisible ball forward. Only our sporting greats – Shane Warne, Sir Donald Bradman, Leigh Matthews and Betty Cuthbert among them – are immortalised in bronze at the great stadium. Barassi stands comfortably in their company.

What Barassi achieved is captured on the plinth: 254 games played for Melbourne and Carlton; 515 games coached at Carlton, North Melbourne, Melbourne and Sydney; 10 VFL premierships from 17 grand finals.

Young Barassi had to overcome the loss of his father, also named Ron, in World War II. Like his father, he would join the Melbourne Football Club, playing his first game in 1953 as a teenager.

Perhaps this resilience helped power the determined young man who captured the imagination of football fans through his sheer courage and grit on the footy field.

Barassi possessed that rare gift of being able to inspire the masses. He was a hard man, but an articulate one. A big thinker on and off the field, he was an evangelist for transforming Aussie Rules into a truly national sport. Reasonably late in his coaching life, he headed to Sydney to coach the struggling Swans and is credited with putting them on the path to the success they have since enjoyed.

Barassi remained loyal to Melbourne to the very end, cheering on the club’s most recent premiership in 2021. But even such affinity never blinded Barassi to his overall loyalty for the game of Aussie Rules.

– DAMON JOHNSTON

Ash Barty won Wimbledon. Won the French Open. Won the Australian Open in red shoes that looked like dancing slippers. Became the World No.1. Adored by all. Had us in thrall. And yet when you ask Barty to list her greatest achievement, she says, “Without doubt, my son.”

Sport is such an integral part of the big, sprawling Australian story, and Barty has written some of its most seriously beautiful chapters. In a nutshell: the small, shy Queensland kid who dreamed big, who dreamed of winning Wimbledon like her hero Evonne Goolagong Cawley, and then stood on that picture-perfect Centre Court at the All England Club and melted our hearts by saying in the most endearing, sincere, quavering tone, “I hope I made Evonne proud.”

Not a dry eye in any Australian house. A year later, aged 25, she retired. Because she was true to herself. Perhaps that’s the real power of her story. She’d done everything she aspired to in tennis, so why keep doing it? Evolve. Grow. It’s a beautiful life message. Know who you are and what you want. Then go get ’em. Barty never stopped dreaming. She just found new dreams.

“To be able to win Wimbledon, the one true dream that I had in tennis, that really changed my perspective,” she said. “I just had that gut feeling after Wimbledon … as a person, I wanted to chase some other dreams. There was a perspective shift in me. My happiness wasn’t dependent on results. Success for me is knowing that I’ve given absolutely everything I can. I’m fulfilled. I’m happy.”

What more could you want? From yourself? From a role model? Dream big. Go big. But don’t lose perspective. Keep moving forward. Update your dreams.

I saw plenty of Barty’s career. It always felt to me like a pursuit of happiness. “It’s amazing what can happen when you tell the universe what you want – and then you go after it,” she told me in an interview. I loved that quote. Wrote it down and stuck it above my desk. It’s still there.

Now she’s a wife and mother. Living her family-oriented dream. The Ash Barty Foundation is helping young folks go skipping down their own magical paths. Rarely has a superstar been so down-to-earth. Perhaps that’s the beauty of all this. If a regular soul like Barty can seek and touch the stars, any of us can.

Her own inspirations? Without doubt, Goolagong Cawley and Cathy Freeman. “For not only what they achieved as athletes, but how they’ve contributed to communities all around Australia,” Barty says. “I hope I can help inspire young boys and girls to dream big – and believe their dreams are possible.”

– WILL SWANTON 

In 1992 our prime minister, Paul Keating, broke royal protocol by placing his hand on the back of visiting monarch Queen Elizabeth II. In those halcyon days, we still celebrated rule breakers and bravery.

Enter a renegade director who showed us the glitz, glamour and drama behind the stiffly lacquered smiles of ballroom dancing with his debut film, Strictly Ballroom.

It was the start of one of Australia’s most successful and enduring creative partnerships between Baz Luhrmann and his wife in charge of production and costume design, Catherine Martin. The duo revolutionised how Australia makes and consumes films.

They leaned heavily into the “cultural cringe” we harboured, spun it around a Hills Hoist on a Kings Cross rooftop, and took it to the big screen.

From there came international acclaim at Cannes, Oscar buzz and more blockbuster projects, giving their inimitable spin on classics Romeo + Juliet, The Great Gatsby and Moulin Rouge, and catapulting them to another level of regard and respect in the industry. They did it again most recently with Elvis.

BAFTAs, AACTAs, Golden Globes and Oscars litter their résumés in tribute to their innovative and idiosyncratic joint vision. They’re even regulars now on the head table at the glamorous Met Gala.

Luhrmann and Martin are not only integral to Australia’s cultural fabric, their work is considered part of the film canon.

– JENNA CLARKE, PICTURE BY CLAUDIO RASCHELLA 

Donald Horne did not know how much Australia would love the ironic title of his book, The Lucky Country. He was arguing Australian leaders were so complacent, they were getting by on luck. But the phrase gained a life of its own, embraced by millions who don’t see irony – not at all.

Horne was a journalist, editor, academic and writer. Educated at state schools and the University of Sydney, he left before he earned a degree. He served in World War II, based in Australia, before working for Frank Packer’s tabloids. In time he became the editor of The Bulletin, removing the slogan “Australia for the White Man” from the masthead.

As a young man, he was undoubtedly a conservative, but by the time he wrote The Lucky Country in the early 1960s, had drifted to the left.

Extracts of the 1964 book, which immediately sold out and has never been out of print, were published in the early days of The Australian.

In the 1970s Horne left journalism for academia. He would chair the Australia Council for the Arts, and co-founded the Australian Republican Movement. Over his career he published four novels and 20 volumes of history. He died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2005.

His widow completed his final work, Dying: A Memoir, in his absence. It, too, appeared as an extract in The Australian, in 2007.

– CAROLINE OVERINGTON 

Sam Kerr is reclining on a sofa in a Matildas team hotel. “A bit of a ratbag,” is how she laughingly describes herself.

“Not naughty. Just cheeky. I’ve always been like that, especially when I was younger. I started playing for Australia when I was 15. I was so naive. I just wanted to have fun. Coaches kept telling me, ‘You’ve got to knuckle down. You’ve got to get serious.’”

Kerr was talking shortly after she’d become Matildas skipper – before the Matildas became Australia’s most popular sporting team at last year’s World Cup. “Obviously I’m more professional now,” she said. “I know my boundaries a bit better. I know when is the time to have a joke and when it’s not. I was a clown at school. I still am now, I guess. I haven’t changed too much. I don’t want to.”

Kerr’s never pretended to be anything she’s not. We know what the Matildas have done under her leadership. The team as a group has become influential beyond measure. Getting boys and girls into football. Getting young Australians into sport. Uniting the nation like Don Bradman, Cathy Freeman and Phar Lap did. Convincing the federal government to fork out $200m for women’s sport. The team stirs us, whether Kerr is playing or not.

In the past year she’s missed a lot of football because of injury. But her rocket of a goal in the World Cup semi-final was a moment of brilliance to match Shane Warne’s Gatting ball and Freeman’s Olympic gold.

The free-spirited Matildas didn’t win the World Cup, or score everyone a public holiday, but their influence did extend to the highest office in the land. Anthony Albanese acknowledged Kerr’s side had “changed Australian sport forever”.

Her own legacy has been clouded by a charge of racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress during an argument with a policeman in London while intoxicated. The matter is still before a court. And her injury will keep her out of the Paris Olympics. But for now, Kerr’s playing the long game.

– WILL SWANTON, PICTURE BY DANIELA PORCELLI/EURASIA SPORT IMAGES/GETTY 

Sir Arvi Parbo’s rise to mining’s top table started from humble beginnings. Fleeing Europe at the tail end of World War II, he arrived in Australia as a German-speaking refugee from Estonia.

In 1949, securing a quarry job near Adelaide “drilling holes in rocks with a jackhammer” gave him a start in a new land. Another challenge lurked. Parbo was determined to get to grips with Aussie slang. “I certainly couldn’t follow the discussion in the lunchroom for some time,” he recalled in 2009. “But like everything else, if you keep listening, you soon pick it up.”

Parbo’s perseverance and prodigious work ethic followed several years of conscription working in German mines to escape a displaced persons camp.

Once in Australia, total immersion in the local dialect proved a winner. Parbo picked up enough English to study engineering at night school at Adelaide University a year later.

Graduation led to a job at a West Australian gold mine as an underground surveyor for Western Mining Corporation (WMC). It was there, in 1956, that one of the great postwar Australian stories began to take shape.

Parbo’s next steps chart some of the most fabled years in the formation of Australia’s modern mining industry.

He worked his way up WMC’s corporate ranks in Melbourne and was a driving force behind its entry in record time into the nickel sector in the mid-1960s, putting Kambalda on the map. The discovery led to what was described by The Times as “probably the greatest speculative boom of all time”.

The move cemented Parbo’s own rise, becoming WMC boss in 1971. He also had a pivotal role in establishing Alcoa, the world’s largest alumina producer, in Australia. He became WMC chairman for more than two decades until 1999, later scooped up by BHP.

He was also founding president of the Business Council of Australia, which under his leadership was one of the first groups to propose enterprise bargaining.

Many of his feats propelled Australia into a global minerals producer, but much like his first-ever interview to land the job at WMC, Parbo liked to keep things low key and simple.

“I understand you want to work for Western Mining?” Parbo was asked. “Yes.” “Done!” came the answer. Parbo was set. And he never looked back.

– PERRY WILLIAMS 

The Germaine Greer archive occupies 83m of shelf space and comprises 487 boxes of notes, diaries, 40,000 letters and 150 hours of audio, covering 60 years of her work. Trawling through it a few years ago for an upcoming book on Greer, biographer Elizabeth Kleinhenz had in mind a working title: Behind the Mask. Yet, as she worked through the material, all donated to the University of Melbourne in 2013, she realised there is no mask. The brilliant writer, intellectual and provocateur has never concealed who she is or what she thinks.

“In public, as in private, as in her writing and performances, she is complex, engaging, amusing, often puzzling and frustrating, occasionally downright nasty, but if she is hiding anything of significance about herself, I have not been able to find it,” Kleinhenz said.

Melbourne-born Greer, 85, is still lauded as a defining voice in western feminism thanks to her 1970 breakthrough book The Female Eunuch, the leading work of second-wave feminism that examined women’s oppression and challenged accepted norms of female sexuality and family.

She likened marriage to a legalised form of slavery for women and wrote that oft-quoted and devastating line: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”

A distinguished academic who won a Commonwealth scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1964 to do a doctorate on Shakespeare’s comedies, she went on to teach at Warwick University, wrote on art and literary history, and was a contributor and editor for the underground magazine OZ and European “sex paper” Suck. A keen green thumb, she even penned a gardening column for Private Eye.

After The Female Eunuch became an international bestseller she continued writing, candidly exploring touchstone issues through her own experience: marriage (it lasted three weeks, during which time she was unfaithful seven times), abortion, rape (“I was in the wrong place … it didn’t kill me”), her many lovers (Frederico Fellini, Warren Beatty, Martin Amis), infertility and sex.

Now living in an aged care home in Victoria, she remains strong of mind and opinion, even as her body slows.

At the launch of her archive at the University of Melbourne in 2017, she explained she would never write an autobiography: “I don’t want to explain myself … Once I am no longer here, I am yours to reinterpret.”

– CHRISTINE MIDDAP 

When comedian Barry Humphries died aged 89 last year, Australia lost more than an intellectual giant. It lost a part of itself.

The actor, comic, director and author was, for almost six decades, one of the country’s most influential and adored personalities, either as his avuncular, sardonic self or as one of his subversive characters that so cleverly skewered aspects of Australian society.

Recall the hilariously grotesque “inebriated cultural attaché” Sir Les Patterson, that gentlest of gentlemen Sandy Stone, or Edna Everage, the housewife-turned-doyenne of the damehood so beloved around the world, and especially by the British royal family, of which she – and Humphries himself – eventually became proxy members.

Humphries’ journey to stardom began at the University of Melbourne, where he discovered the absurdist art movement dadaism. He joined the nascent Melbourne Theatre Company, where in 1955 the humble Moonee Ponds housewife Everage was born. Humphries then joined the great 1960s exodus of Australian cultural talent to London, where his star rose working alongside comedy giants Spike Milligan, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. He became a regular on television and also starred in films, including The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, which he co-wrote with director Bruce Beresford.

But it was Dame Edna – cultural juggernaut and talkshow and Royal Variety regular – who propelled Humphries’ star to global fame and brought Australia’s cultural output into sharp focus.

Humphries was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia and Commander of the Order of the British Empire honours. The satirist always called Australia home and kept his wife Elizabeth Spender and four children close. He was always both dadaist and Dad.

Humphries once quipped that there could be “no more terrible fate for a comedian than to be taken seriously”. His then, is a fate – terrible as it may be – for which this country owes a great debt.

– TIM DOUGLAS, PICTURE BY HAROLD DAVID

Australia’s greatest sporting moment? The Cathy Freeman moment. The atmosphere, the crowd, the noise, the tension, the adrenaline, the euphoria, the emotion, the home ground, the celebrations.

Freeman could bask in, and cash in on, her living legend status, but she doesn’t like to talk about her crowning moment. Embarrassed by tributes like this. “Cos I’m free,” said her famous tattoo in 2000. It’s still all she wants to be.

The legacy of her Olympic gold medal-winning 400m run? Any truly grand Australian sporting moment is now called a Cathy Freeman moment. Nothing more needs to be said about the magnitude and magic.

In a documentary on the 20th anniversary of the Sydney Games, she recalled the race: “I know exactly what I need to do. I know how to do this. I can do this in my sleep. I can win this. Will win this. Who can stop me?”

She spent 15 years at the helm of the Cathy Freeman Foundation, now the Community Spirit Foundation, supporting children and their families in remote First Nations communities, understanding the power of education to achieve dreams.

Whether you’re running a 400m or trying to concentrate on school in far-flung locations, the message of the original Cathy Freeman moment is the same. You can win this. You will win this. Who can stop you?

– WILL SWANTON

If you happened to catch Nick Cave at the nascence of his rock ‘n’ roll career, you would have seen a man who seemed destined to be around for a good time, not a long time.

When he emerged in the mid-1970s as the frontman of Melbourne post-punk band The Birthday Party, the singer had a capacity for self-abuse that rivalled rock hell-raisers since time immemorial.

But rather than being lost to an early grave, Cave transformed into a universally respected musician.

Across the decades, this multi-talented songwriter, author, screenwriter and award-winning composer has become one of our most treasured cultural exports.

Now 66, he has trodden the boards in a finely cut suit on many of the world’s stages, most notably with his band, the Bad Seeds.

The 2015 death of one of his sons, 15-year-old Arthur, in a cliff fall shook the songwriter to his core, and the death in 2022 of his son Jethro Lazenby, 31, was another hammer blow.

His career has been a mighty one, and as Cave has grown, he has brought his audience along with him for an extraordinary ride.

But it is, perhaps, the lyrics from his 2013 song Jubilee Street that vividly capture his shape-shifting nature, even unintentionally.

Nearing its towering conclusion, Cave sounds on the verge of emotional collapse as he sings, “I’m transforming, I’m vibrating / Look at me now.” As if there was any other choice whenever this man performs.

– ANDREW McMILLEN, PICTURE BY PETER MILNE

A mining dynasty that began with Lang Hancock became a foundation for the extraordinary wealth of Gina Rinehart. Together, father and daughter have made a significant impact on the nation’s economy.

Hancock was credited with opening up Western Australia’s Pilbara region through a chance discovery of massive iron ore deposits in the early 1950s. Almost a decade later, with business partner Peter Wright, he convinced Rio Tinto to develop the Hope Downs deposits, marking the beginning of Australia’s biggest industry, generating more than $130bn a year in export income from China, Korea and Japan.

It was Rinehart who took the Hope Downs royalty stream to the next level. When Hancock died in 1992, Rinehart set about pulling together tenements in the Pilbara and her own backers to develop the $10bn Roy Hill mine in 2014. At the time it was considered a high-risk venture, given Rinehart and her company Hancock Prospecting had never developed or operated a large-scale mine. But she proved the doubters wrong. Today Rinehart is Australia’s richest person, with a fortune calculated at $50.5bn.

She is also emerging as one of the sector’s most influential investors, taking big stakes in listed lithium players and using her position to thwart a $6.6bn sale of Liontown Resources to US lithium player Albemarle.

Rinehart’s investments have a patriotic thread, ranging from owning vast pastoral leases to buying brands such as Driza-Bone and safety footwear Rossi Boots. She has also made her mark on sport, led by the long-term sponsorship of Australia’s swimming team.

The deeply private Rinehart remains an enigma, preferring to keep her businesses out of the spotlight. In a ceremony commemorating the first decade of Roy Hill last year, Rinehart offered a rare insight when she described the iron ore mine as “the mega project that we thought might not happen”.

– ERIC JOHNSTON

We just can’t get her out of our heads. From the moment she rolled up on Ramsay Street with those mechanics’ overalls and blonde curls, Kylie Minogue has had Australia – and much of the world – in the palm of her tiny, then grease-stained hand.

Just look at the past year Kylie has had. How many other women in their 50s – maybe Tina Turner, maybe Cher – can say they had the biggest club hit of the year?

That’s what Kylie achieved with the song Padam Padam. Its huge, unexpected success on the dancefloors of 2023 garnered her a Grammy for Best Dance Recording, the number one spot on Billboard’s dance charts, the Brit Pop Icon of the Year award, and she is now the only woman to have had a top 10 UK single in both the 1980s and 2020s.

She’s come a long way since she started on Neighbours, which was then a year-old TV soap with very little sex appeal, and helped to turn it into the first Aussie show to really break into foreign markets.

She went on to sing the most sugary of bubblegum pop songs in the 1980s, followed by a more indie, bad-girl phase, dating INXS frontman Michael Hutchence in 1989 and collaborating with Nick Cave in the mid-90s.

But it was at the turn of the millennium that Kylie really shone. Her song Can’t Get You of My Head is the sexiest, catchiest pop track of the past 30 years. Fast forward to now, and she’s still setting the tone in clubs everywhere.

That’s what makes Kylie different from her predecessors on the Aussie pop throne.

Olivia Newton-John was an international sensation – and heralded Kylie in many ways – while Judith Durham and the Seekers found worldwide fame with their sweet folk-pop. But Newton-John and Durham seem so much of their times; their achievements are now wrapped up in nostalgia.

Kylie Minogue doesn’t need nostalgia.

She was the princess of pop yesterday, she is the princess of pop today and she’ll always be Kylie, turning out hits for years to come. We should be so lucky.

– RICHARD FERGUSON, PICTURE BY GARETH CATTERMOLE/GETTY

From the suburbs of Melbourne, James Gorman became one of the most powerful players on Wall Street. He wasn’t a ruthless dealmaker, but he had equal impact. His exemplary risk-management skills saved one of America’s biggest banks and rebuilt it after the global financial crisis.

Gorman recently stepped down as chief executive of Morgan Stanley after 14 years. He may not be widely known in Australia, but is revered in banking circles for driving the transformation of an American institution.

When he became CEO, Morgan Stanley was reeling with losses after the 2008 financial crisis and had become emblematic of a decade of excess. Gorman knew he had to do things differently. He installed a “sandbox” approach permitting risk taking – within limits. Through several well-timed asset management and wealth acquisitions, he moved away from trading and investment banking toward a balanced financial services house.

In the process, Morgan Stanley outgrew Wall Street rivals including Goldman Sachs and Citi, as well as European players UBS and Deutsche Bank, to become the fourth-largest bank in the US. Gorman’s influence was such that his approach to risk is now widely used inside trading banks around the world.

Growing up in Brighton in the 1960s and attending Melbourne University, Gorman still identifies as a “Melbourne boy”, and recalls Saturday afternoons watching Aussie rules at Collingwood’s home ground, Victoria Park.

In a speech last year, Gorman said his only real connection with money when growing up was the time he attempted to borrow $40,000 to study at Columbia University in the US. His local bank saw him for what he was: an unsecured creditor with zero assets. However, Australia’s banking system was undergoing deregulation. “One of the new banks around the time – obviously desperate for business – deemed that I was worthy of credit, but at a challenging interest rate of 24 per cent,” he said. “I jumped at it. I was going to New York.”

On his decision to step down, Gorman last year told London’s Financial Times: “I’ve loved it. I’ve loved all of it. I’ve done it for 14 years, that’s enough.” More recently, he joined the board of Disney. And he still keeps a close watch on Collingwood.

– ERIC JOHNSTON, PICTURE BY MICHAEL BUCHER/WALL STREET JOURNAL

Glenn Murcutt, Australia’s sole winner of the Pritzker Prize – architecture’s Nobel – is this country’s pre-eminent architect.

Not only has he designed some of the country’s best-loved buildings, he conceived of a distinctively Australian architecture, too: a poetic modernism without severity, deeply attuned to the environment, to local traditions, and to the Australian landscape. He has never, in fact, built outside of Australia.

Born in London to Australian parents, Murcutt graduated in architecture from Sydney Technical College and, in 1969, established the Mosman practice where he still works.

When Murcutt won the Pritzker in 2002, the judges acclaimed his body of work as an “architecture of place” that “responds to the landscape and to the climate”. They noted his minimal intervention architecture aims to “touch the earth lightly”.

While Murcutt gained his reputation chiefly for place-sensitive homes in rural settings, some of his best known – and most publicly accessible – buildings have been on a larger scale. The centrepiece of his Boyd Education Centre is a soaring glass and concrete hall with sweeping views of the Shoalhaven River at Illaroo.

Each year since 2001, the architect has led a two-week residential masterclass at the centre, part of the Arthur Boyd bequest at Bundanon, attended by architects and students from more than 80 countries.

Murcutt’s Australian Islamic Centre, which opened in 2017 in the Melbourne suburb of Newport, introduces an Australian openness to Islamic architectural traditions. The architect’s Aussie mosque eschews minarets and domes for a roof of coloured glass triangles casting harlequin lights into the interior.

Young Australian architects will, now and then, with a touch of chagrin, refer to a “Murcutt school” that puts the countryside at the centre of a predominantly urban nation’s architectural imagination. But Murcutt’s place-specific minimalism speaks to the age of the “plyscraper”, the vertical garden, and the ideal of sustainable apartment living in the city.

In his 87th year he has never been busier, nor more relevant.

– LUKE SLATTERY

“We were a band of brothers, we really were. We just really liked each other’s company, we were very open with each other, and we were one of those teams that clicked.”

That’s how sailor John Longley describes the crew of Australia II, hailed not only for breaking the longest winning streak in world sport, but also for uniting a nation in hysterical, giddy, incredulous joy.

Few other Australian sporting victories have left such a lasting cultural and economic legacy as the 1983 America’s Cup triumph.

The crew aboard Australia II did much more than win a trophy when they defeated Liberty in the waters off Newport; they delivered a moment of national self-belief and confidence.

Images of that day came to define the era: the fluttering Boxing Kangaroo ensign, an elated prime minister Bob Hawke in his corny Australia-emblazoned jacket declaring “any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum”, and Alan Bond flashing his million-dollar smile as he held aloft the trophy.

Ben Lexcen’s famous winged keel showed Australian design could compete globally, delivering a confidence boost that would be felt in other industries. Tourism and investment poured into the country.

Longley told The Australian that personality was as important as skill when it came to assembling the team.

As Australia held its collective breath for the decisive final race, he said the crew was trying to block out all the attention. “We were just there racing the red boat,” he said.

“When we won, when we lifted our heads up and heard what was going on in Australia with the prime minister and all of that, it really shocked us.”

Perhaps the most tangible legacy of the win can be found today in Fremantle’s West End: the cup win helped the city attract the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to restore the area’s historic buildings.

Harder to measure was the impact on the self-belief of Australians. Longley recalled a recent conversation with a Rio Tinto executive, who said the sight of such Australian effort and innovation had delivered a collective confidence boost to industry at a critical moment.

– PAUL GARVEY

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price had been in the federal parliament for less than a year when, as the Coalition’s new spokesperson on Indigenous affairs, she confronted the proposal for the most significant reform in Indigenous affairs since 1967.

Senator Price’s arguments against the Indigenous voice to parliament were potent, characterising it as another layer of bureaucracy. This was devastating for the Yes campaign in the voice referendum because Australians could see how ineffective bureaucracy had been in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Senator Price also described the voice as “a transfer of power for those who want to maintain the status quo”, undermining claims the voice would allow the powerless to be heard.

If the voice referendum had been held in April 2023, when Senator Price was promoted to the opposition frontbench, polling shows it would have succeeded. However, analysis by the Australian National University’s Centre for Social Research and Methods shows that at some point between then and referendum day on October 14, 22.3 per cent of Australians who intended to vote Yes changed their minds. During that period, Senator Price was the No campaign’s biggest weapon. The former television presenter is charismatic, forthright and down to earth. Her call for an end to separatism has wide appeal.

About 20,000 people attended 11 Fair Australia campaign events in four states to hear Senator Price speak. Many others attended events organised by third parties where she was a drawcard. TV advertising featuring Senator Price was seen 2.7 million times in 987,000 households, in addition to 16.5 million Facebook views, 14.7 million Instagram views and 42.9 million TikTok views.

Senator Price once worked as a cross-cultural adviser and is seen by many as a bridge between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds. She describes herself with pride as Warlpiri-Celtic and has become a figure in the national debate about Indigenous history.

Senator Price has brought national attention to violence, youth crime, social breakdown and alcohol abuse in Alice Springs, where she grew up. The town’s problems have become ground zero for a debate about policy failure, personal responsibility and child welfare. Senator Price speaks plainly about extreme violence against Aboriginal women and about the rights of Aboriginal children to a safe home.

– PAIGE TAYLOR

During the past two decades, Peter V’landys’ brilliant, gritty leadership has reshaped Australia’s sporting landscape. Right now V’landys is masterfully guiding Racing NSW and the Australian Rugby League Commission. Both billion-dollar sports are booming on his watch.

V’landys’ first big goal was making The Everest not only the richest horse race in Australia, but also the “richest horse race in the world on turf”. After that came the NRL’s slick Las Vegas opening round juggernaut this year.

Playing big is V’landys’ modus operandi and that ethos has seen the NRL recently notch up a record $700m revenue, while Racing NSW hauled in $600m.

“A lot of people in sport and business talk about a three or five-year plan, but I think you’ve got to do more than that,” V’landys told The Australian. “I like to have 20 to 25-year plans … It’s all about capturing the next demographic coming through and surviving for the next 100 years.

“Sport is business and you have to grow revenues, and Vegas was all about growing future revenues and the market.”

He went hunting for the next generation of racing fans when he conceived The Everest. He believes the “younger generation don’t want to do what their parents do and want their own generational races and events”. More than 80 per cent of those who attended The Everest in its first year were under 35.

He’s an exceptional deal maker. Among his many wins over the past 15 years, V’landys extracted a $235m government funding package to manage equine influenza. A $100m High Court win over the bookies meant racing and other sports could charge a “product fee” to wagering operators. He brokered a $70m win by arguing NSW should charge the same tax as Victoria on gross wagering revenue for racing. And he gained a $60m share of point-of-consumption tax on betting from the NSW government.

As a working-class kid growing up in Wollongong, V’landys never imagined he’d become one of the most powerful men in Australian sport. The son of migrant parents from the Greek island of Kythera, where his grandfather was a farmer, hopes his blazing career inspires others.

“The one thing that encourages me more than anything, that keeps me going, is that I hope I’m an example to somebody that goes to the public school system or a poorer background that if you work hard, you can make it,” V’landys said.

“If I can be an inspiration to one person, it makes me feel better than anything I’ve done. It’s about giving hope to people that don’t normally have hope.”

– JESSICA HALLORAN

The Rockhampton Rocket is the only tennis player to win the legendary Grand Slam twice. He was world No.1 for seven years. At the forefront of the move to professionalise the game. Mastered the art of top-spin forehands and backhands in the 1960s – the sport’s biggest revolution and still a staple of the modern game.

Golden oldies cast an eye over the debate about who is the greatest – Roger Federer? Rafael Nadal? Novak Djokovic? – and still swear it’s Laver, in his bucket hat, with his wooden racquet. “Keep those balls in play,” he once said. “Don’t just give up on them, no matter how far you gotta run, chase ’em down. You never know who’s going to miss a shot.”

I have two distinct memories of Laver in recent years. Sightings of the affable, gentle, 85-year-old living legend when he makes his annual pilgrimage to take up the most VIP of VIP seats inside Rod Laver Arena at the Australian Open.

First memory: Roger Federer is playing Rafael Nadal in the final at Melbourne Park in a few hours. Nadal is belting balls and sweating bullets out on a practice court. Federer is sipping a piccolo or similar in the player cafe. Laver walks in. He sees Federer. Now, no player adores Laver more than Federer. But Laver is hesitant. He looks at Federer as if he doesn’t want to intrude. Finally, he walks over and says, “Mind if I join you, Roger?” Federer nearly falls off his seat. They chat for a good 30 minutes. Federer is clearly smitten. He’s thanked Laver in a thousand post-match interviews in Melbourne, always along the lines of, “Thank you to the great man, Rod Laver, for being here …”

Second memory: Rafael Nadal has come back from the dead to beat Daniil Medvedev from two sets to one down. The left-hander with the big top spin is in the player gym well after midnight. Laver walks in. They hug. Nadal is always like a giggling little kid around Laver. What a meeting of legendary lefties. A gentleman athlete – it takes one to know one. Laver congratulates Nadal. For keeping those balls in play. For not giving up on them, no matter how far he had to run. For chasing ’em down. For never knowing when Medvedev was going to miss a shot. “A big passion for Rod, no?” Nadal said.

– WILL SWANTON

In the 1950s, Dame Joan Sutherland auditioned for the Covent Garden Opera Company, as Britain’s Royal Opera was then called. One assessor concluded that while the Australian singer’s voice had “a good ring”, she had “very little gifts by nature”.

Sutherland went on to become one of the 20th century’s most revered sopranos. Less than a decade later, she became the toast of London, Paris and New York playing the title role in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.

In 1961, her electrifying interpretation of Lucia – a dangerously unhinged bride caught in a forced marriage – won a 12-minute ovation at the Metropolitan Opera.

Italian critics conferred the title of La Stupenda on the Sydney-born singer after her performance in a 1960s Zeffirelli production of Alcina. The nickname endured as she worked alongside the likes of Marilyn Horne, Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo.

The key to Sutherland’s success was her extraordinary vocal technique, agility and range (extending from a low G to above high C), not to mention her unassuming personality – while other divas threw tantrums, she liked to knit in her dressing room.

When she died, aged 83, Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini said: “The influence that she had on her generation of singers was incalculable. She was the greatest opera singer Australia has produced, and that includes Melba.”

Sutherland moved to London after working as a secretary and winning local singing competitions. In 1954, she married Australian conductor Richard Bonynge, who saw her true talent lay in dramatic coloratura roles rather than as a Wagnerian dramatic soprano.

In 1961, she was named Australian of the Year and, in 1965, toured the nation with a young Pavarotti. Queen Elizabeth II made her a dame in 1978. In 1990, Sutherland gave her final performances at a packed Sydney Opera House and at Covent Garden. Today, a Sydney Opera House venue and a performing arts complex in western Sydney are named for the woman who Pavarotti once described as “the voice of the century”.

– ROSEMARY NEILL

Before Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar came on the scene, you could just about count the number of Australian companies that had found global success on one hand. Let alone firms led by a couple of young blokes wearing t-shirts – one with a seemingly ubiquitous trucker cap, the other sporting a perpetually shaggy look.

In the age of “tech bros” and “unicorns”, the co-founders of software firm Atlassian also broke the mould by creating a huge technology business and not basing themselves in California’s Silicon Valley.

Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar succeeded from their home country, albeit with another pioneering twist: instead of going public on the ASX, they floated their company on the NASDAQ in the US in 2015, following several years of raising big licks of venture capital money from cashed-up, mostly American investors.

Few Australian firms would have considered such a strategy, and Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar copped criticism at the time for ignoring their local bourse. The move certainly paid off.

Atlassian is now worth $75bn and Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar are both individually among the 10 richest people in Australia. Atlassian’s shares have increased six-fold in less than a decade, and only 20 years after the now 44-year-olds used $10,000 in credit card debt to start their business.

Their success paved the way for a slew of local tech companies to raise big amounts from US venture capitalists who have beaten a path to Australia to invest in the likes of Canva, Airwallex, SafetyCulture, PsiQuantum, Culture Amp and many more.

Farquhar steps down as Atlassian co-chief executive in August, leaving Cannon-Brookes to run the business. Farquhar is spending more time with his family and on philanthropy, backing causes and investing with an altruistic strategy.

Cannon-Brookes, most notably with AGL, and Farquhar are now firmly supporting the green energy transition and have committed their private money – fuelled by yearly billion-dollar Atlassian share sales – to backing the shift.

– JOHN STENSHOLT, PICTURE BY NIC WALKER

Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt is a down-to-earth scientist with stars in his eyes. One of Australia’s most eminent researchers, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011, after he and fellow researchers discovered 70 per cent of the universe is made up of a mysterious “dark energy” that repels gravity. By observing exploding stars, they revealed the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate – a startling discovery that overturned the prevailing theory of a contracting universe.

Distinguished Professor Schmidt generously gifted $100,000 of his Nobel Prize winnings to a primary school science program. “I have always been focused on trying to ensure that Australia is positioned for the future, through a strong knowledge capability,” he explains.

Appointed vice-chancellor of the Australian National University in 2016, Professor Schmidt led ANU through the Covid-19 pandemic, which he described as “the biggest shock in the history of higher education”, before ending his term in 2023 to focus on his astrophysics research.

American born and bred, Professor Schmidt is a dual citizen and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2013. He grew up in Montana and met his Australian wife, economist Dr Jenny Gordon, at Harvard University. The couple moved down under in 1994.

Professor Schmidt has served on the Prime Minister’s National Science and Technology Council, as well as chairing Australia’s Group of Eight top research universities.

Still at ANU, Professor Schmidt is preparing a transdisciplinary course that will bring researchers from different fields to “solve wicked problems”, including climate change, energy transition, the setting of immigration levels and protecting biodiversity.

– NATASHA BITA, PICTURE BY NICK CUBBIN

Greg Norman was in Sydney 15 years ago to announce his return to the Australian Open. “I’m saddened on a global basis, not just here in Australia, that there’s been neutralisation in the growth of the game of golf,” he said. “It’s important and incumbent on all the name players, the iconic players, to promote the game of golf on a global basis. I’d like to see the game get back to its halcyon days of the 80s. It’s been stagnant for a long time.”

The irony? The only person who could send Australian golf back to the headiness of Norman’s pomp was … Norman.

A sporting Pied Piper in his prime, he drew thousands of followers to his fairways, roaring for the most swashbuckling player on the planet. Norman had swagger, charisma and derring-do, promoting the sport as spectacularly as he played it. He was world No.1 for a whopping 331 weeks. Won two majors. In short? He made golf look like a heck of a lot of fun.

Now the 69-year-old has put himself in the thick of the biggest revolution and controversy in the sport’s history, the introduction of LIV Golf. The face and CEO of the rebel tour sincerely believes it’s the best thing for the game. To eventually have a single world tour, the best players against the best every week, mirroring tennis and Formula One.

He’s golf’s new villain in traditionalists’ eyes, but says: “There’s so much white noise out there and I pay zero attention to it. I just hope it works. I really do.”

Norman’s defeats at the US Masters are legendary. Three times a runner-up at the tournament he coveted. When Adam Scott finally broke Australia’s curse of the Augusta National in 2013, he said: “There’s one guy who inspired a nation of golfers and that’s Greg Norman. Part of this belongs to him. He’s been incredible to me. He was a role model and he has devoted so much time to myself and other Australian players who came after him.

“I’d love to share a beer with him and talk through it all. Everything about the way he handled himself was incredible. Anyone near to my age, he was the best player in the world. An icon.”

– WILL SWANTON, PICTURE BY JAMES CANT

It’s easy to understand why Dame Roma Mitchell is often referred to as Roma the First.

As the first woman in the nation to take silk, to become a state Supreme Court judge, to be chancellor of a university and the first female governor of South Australia, Mitchell didn’t just lead, she ploughed the way for women.

Mitchell’s passion for justice started young. The daughter of an Adelaide solicitor, she pursued law at Adelaide University in the 1930s. Banned from the male-only Law Students’ Society, she founded the Women Law Students’ Society and graduated at the top of her cohort.

Her appointment to the bench of the South Australian Supreme Court in 1965 caused a stir. Questions were asked. What would she wear? Should a woman be able to sentence a man to death?

Mitchell was the first chair of the Australian Human Rights Commission, and appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971. In 1972, she was the first woman appointed chancellor of a Commonwealth university, Adelaide University. She became a dame in 1982 and SA governor in 1991.

Mitchell received her final honour, Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, just before she died in 2000.

Parish priest Maurice Shinnick recalled Mitchell, a devout Catholic, as a “source of inspiration, especially to women”, adding: “But her words and actions also have and should endure as a role model to every person in public life.”

– ELLIE DUDLEY

From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, David Williamson’s box office hits were nicknamed “the Williamson economy”. This referred to how his comedies – replete with zingy one-liners and squarely focused on middle-class Australians – helped to bankroll our flagship subsidised theatre companies and underwrote less bankable works.

Williamson’s biographer, Brian Kiernan, put it this way: “I certainly wouldn’t be the first to say that without David Williamson, we would never have had the mainstream Australian theatre we have enjoyed since the early 1970s.”

Williamson’s playwriting and screenwriting career spans more than five decades. His internationally acclaimed play The Removalists (1971) explored police brutality, along with the violence and sexism that throbbed below the surface of Australian society. In social comedies including Emerald City, The Club and Money and Friends, he continued to capture the Australian vernacular, while his knack for taking the temperature of the times through funny, relatable characters was unrivalled among his peers. In a sense, our most popular playwright didn’t merely read the zeitgeist, his works embodied it.

Some critics felt Williamson’s work was middle-brow and lacked depth. Yet, at 82, Williamson still speaks strongly to audiences; he has three new plays being staged in 2024 in Sydney, Adelaide and Noosa.

Williamson is also a highly decorated screenwriter. Seven of his plays have been turned into films, and he wrote the screenplays for internationally acclaimed films including Gallipoli, Phar Lap, The Year of Living Dangerously and Balibo. He has garnered many accolades including five Australian Film Institute and 12 AWGIE awards.

In recent years, the writer has confronted his own mortality – and twice retired – because of a heart condition, only to make a Melba-style return.

“My longevity as a playwright has been helped, I think, by two obsessions,” he told The Australian. “An enduring fascination with human social behaviour, and an equal fascination with political power and its influence on our lives.”

Our most enduring dramatist also admitted: “I am a compulsive writer, and I am addicted to seeing an audience respond to what I have done.”

– ROSEMARY NEILL, PICTURE BY GLENN HUNT

Geoffrey Norman Blainey received a rare gold medal from the United Nations in 1988 for “excellence in the dissemination of knowledge”. His book, The Causes of War (1973), was among the most admired texts in the world at the time on that tricky subject.

Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in country Victoria. He attended Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. His first book, The Peaks of Lyell (1954), was written when he was just 24. He travelled to Mount Lyell, a mining field in Tasmania, to research the book; many older residents could remember the early days of mining – and the opening-up of Australia – and agreed to be interviewed. With this, Blainey established his rigorous approach to research and a clear-eyed, observant, accessible writing style.

He has since written 40 books, among them a history of Christianity, a history of Australia, a history of Aboriginal Australia, and a short history of the whole world.

He writes about sport and business and, earlier this year, agreed to tackle the phenomenon of US pop star Taylor Swift, to the delight of readers of The Australian.

Blainey coined the term “a black armband view of history” to describe those who insist upon minimising the enormous achievements of Australia and Australians, while stressing the nation’s faults.

Blainey began teaching at the University of Melbourne in 1961. He stayed at the university until 1989 in various leadership roles, with a scholarship program established in his name. In the 1980s, he was a visiting professor in Australian Studies at Harvard University. He was invited by former prime minister Harold Holt to oversee the Commonwealth Literary Fund until 1973, providing grants to struggling Australian writers. He was inaugural chairman of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, which does much the same.

Blainey’s most famous work is The Tyranny of Distance, a social history of Australia, a copy of which is likely to be found in any Australian library.

– CAROLINE OVERINGTON 

Ita Buttrose’s CV is so impressive it’s difficult to identify one role that outstrips the others as the crowning achievement of her career. But her legacy? That’s easy. It’s the damage she has inflicted, over six decades, on Australia’s glass ceiling.

“I have witnessed many changes in the past 60 years but the most significant has been the evolution of women,” the 82-year-old told The Australian earlier this year. “It changed my life.”

Buttrose was immersed in that evolution and influential in the change, driving it through her pioneering roles in the publishing and media industries.

“It allowed me to let the voices of Australian women be heard,” she said. “What a privilege.”

In 1965, aged 23, Buttrose burst on to Sydney’s media scene as women’s editor of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. It was a rock-star entrance for someone so young, but Buttrose was never going to be a one-hit wonder.

In 1972, she moved on from her early start in newspapers to become the inaugural editor-in-chief of groundbreaking magazine Cleo, and later that decade, The Australian Women’s Weekly.

She left the Packer-owned magazine stable in 1981 after Rupert Murdoch offered her the job of editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, making her the first woman to edit a major metropolitan newspaper in Australia.

Buttrose was also a popular talkback radio host for a while in the early 1980s, before moving on to her role as chairperson of the National Advisory Committee on AIDS. She was widely praised for her efforts to reduce the stigma surrounding HIV and those who suffered from it.

The mother of two has also founded her own publishing company, authored 11 books, featured on multiple daytime TV panel shows and, in 2013, was named Australian of the Year. She served five years as ABC chair.

“When I started work (as a magazine copy kid) at 15 in 1957, no one, least of all me, would have envisaged the career I have enjoyed,” Buttrose told The Australian. “I certainly didn’t think that one day I would become chair of the ABC.

“An important driver of change has been the better education of girls and women and the employment of women, especially mothers outside of the home. They were two of the most significant social changes of the 20th century.

“I was part of that change. It has been an exciting time to be a woman.”

– JAMES MADDEN

Working wirelessly from home or even while on a plane would have been impossible if not for five researchers at Australia’s peak science agency. The CSIRO team, led by John O’Sullivan, invented the precursor to modern wi-fi, wireless LAN. The technology revolutionised global telecommunications and underpins today’s hyper-connected world.

It is now used in more than five billion devices, including phones, televisions, printers, routers and more. This is not to mention the countless hotspots, from cafes to office blocks, airports to shopping centres, where internet access is often taken for granted.

Dr O’Sullivan described the project as “a lot of fun” but it required solving a problem many global technology companies grappled with: reverberation. In confined spaces, radio waves bounce off surfaces such as furniture and walls, causing the signal to become scrambled. But the now-retired Dr O’Sullivan told The Australian in 2016 that the team overcame the problem thanks to their background in radiophysics.

His group, which included Graham Daniels, Terence Percival, Diethelm Ostry and John Deane, was competing against the best minds in the world to secure the breakthrough. They not only beat more than 20 research bodies working on wi-fi globally, but also took on some of the world’s biggest companies, including Microsoft, Netgear and Toshiba, to affirm a royalty stream for the invention. Eventually a confidential settlement worth $220m was reached with some vendors.

Dr O’Sullivan said the team bounced off each other’s expertise: “We’d stop each other in the corridor and say, ‘Have you thought of this or that?’ And gradually, one by one, we knocked each problem over ... It was a series of small eureka moments.”

The development of wi-fi came as internet users were starting to log in using dial-up. While the team was solving a need to send large amounts of data wirelessly, nobody envisaged the ubiquitous take-up of wi-fi with the internet.

Major airlines – one of the last places to adopt the technology – now offer customers wi-fi while in the air.

It has become one of Australia’s most successful inventions. “The impact has been immense, so yes, we feel pretty proud,” Dr O’Sullivan said.

– JARED LYNCH

In just over a decade, Melanie Perkins has transformed the face of Australian business. In what can seem an ocean of men in suits at the helm of the corporate sector, Perkins is one of the brightest – and youngest – stars of business. At 37, she has built one of the biggest-ever fortunes by an Australian woman, and the biggest by a female founder.

Her Canva digital graphics company has become one of the better-known business brands in Australia, used everywhere from big corporations to school assignments.

But behind Canva’s snazzy graphics and cool look is a determination by Perkins and her co-founder, husband Cliff Obrecht, to build one of the world’s most valuable companies – and to give away the fortune they make.

Privately held Canva achieved a $US40bn valuation in 2021, at the time making it the fifth most valuable startup in the world ever. It has since slipped to $US26bn, but is still behind only Atlassian in Australian technology terms.

Meanwhile, the Canva Foundation is already one of the most generous of those established by Australian billionaires.

Underpinning it all is the 100-year plan for Canva that Perkins wheels out at each board meeting – with flashy graphics – that keeps Canva’s directors dazzled by its thoroughness and guessing what it will look like next.

All of which would be impressive enough, if Canva and its co-founder’s youth wasn’t also taken into account. Perkins is only 37 and Obrecht, 38. They met at university and founded Canva in 2013, six years after starting Fusion Books, which helped secondary school students design their own yearbooks.

Today’s success is a far cry from Canva’s early days. Perkins and Obrecht spent three months sleeping on the floor of her brother’s San Francisco apartment, travelling to Silicon Valley daily, pitching the idea to investors, and getting knocked back again and again.

When Perkins and Obrecht eventually take Canva public, likely on a US stockmarket and any time from mid-2025 onwards, there will be a clamour of interest in what will be Australia’s biggest-ever tech float.

– JOHN STENSHOLT, PICTURE BY NIC WALKER

Larrikin. Legend. Hit PM Paul Keating up for some cash.

“Got the prime minister for a hundred!” says Lionel Rose’s first cousin, Graeme “Porky” Brooke. “He got three prime ministers like that. What a man he was. The happiest man you ever saw. My hero. My idol. He was a joy.”

Rose was raised in a tin shed at the Aboriginal settlement of Jacksons Track at Gippsland, about 100km east of Melbourne. They couldn’t go to town in Warragul because of their skin colour. Other parents banned their children from going to their house because “the black kid” was there.

He started boxing. His punching bag was a flour sack filled with sand, hanging from a tree. In February 1968 came a life-changing opportunity. Japan’s legendary Masahiko “Fighting” Harada’s opponent for a world bantamweight bout was injured. The 19-year-old Rose went to Tokyo. Outpointed Harada in a 15-round classic.

About 10 people had farewelled him from Melbourne Airport. An estimated 250,000 lined the streets for his return. The first Aboriginal world champion. He was oh-so famous. Training in Las Vegas, he heard a voice call out, “Hey Lionel! What’s doin’?” It was Elvis Presley.

Rose once admitted he was here for a good time, not a long time. Died aged 62. Asked after the Harada fight what his triumph meant for Indigenous Australians, Rose said: “I’m not too clued up with all this. To me, we’re all Australians.”

– WILL SWANTON

You don’t need to know anything about ballet to have heard of Mao’s Last Dancer. Li Cunxin’s 2003 autobiography catapulted him to a level of fame enjoyed by few dancers, even the most admired. The book sold about half a million copies and Bruce Beresford turned it into a film. There was a version for young readers and even a stage play for children.

Li had an astonishing story to tell. He was born in rural China in 1961, the sixth of seven boys. His family’s house had dirt floors and no running water. Work was harsh and there was never enough food.

Li was taught to be a good little Maoist when the Cultural Revolution came in 1966, but the social experiment had an unexpected effect on his life. By chance, he was plucked from school to attend Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy. It gave him a window into the West and, in 1981, Li defected to the United States, where he danced with Houston Ballet.

In 1995, Li moved to Melbourne with his Australian wife, Mary, and joined the Australian Ballet. He held his last ballerina aloft in 1999 and settled down to stockbroking. His book’s success changed everything.

Queensland Ballet tapped Li to become its artistic director in 2012 and he came with aspirations, calling for far greater resources than the company had at the time. Asked in his second year if his ambitions were too large, he shot back: “Never. No, never.”

By dint of will, charisma and financial acumen he got most of what he wanted. Dancer numbers doubled, he spearheaded a $100m expansion of the company’s home and QB opened a shiny, new Queensland Ballet Academy at Kelvin Grove State College.

Audiences loved what Li put on stage and the wider world couldn’t get enough of him. He was 2009 Australian Father of the Year, 2014 Queensland Australian of the Year and, in 2019, was awarded the AO for services to the performing arts.

When Li retired late last year due to ill health, Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, now Queensland residents, were among those paying tribute. Li, they said, had “transformed our region into one of the most exciting places globally today”.

– DEBORAH JONES

Two things lock in Sir Mark Oliphant as Australia’s most influential scientist. First, in 1940, Oliphant led the physicists at the University of Birmingham who invented the cavity magnetron, which allowed small but powerful radar sets to be installed in aircraft. It was crucial to the effectiveness of Allied air and naval power through World War II and is now found in every microwave oven.

Second, in Britain in 1940 and in the US in 1941, Oliphant provided data to show an atomic bomb would almost certainly work and that all efforts had to be made to ensure Hitler didn’t build one first. On both occasions his intervention galvanised government action. Once the Manhattan Project was under way, he was a leader in US physicist Ernest Lawrence’s team, enriching uranium that was used in the weapon dropped on Hiroshima.

Even without these successes Oliphant stands tall. In 1934, working with Cambridge’s Ernest Rutherford, he was a co-discoverer of tritium, an isotope of hydrogen. Just after the war, he pioneered a more powerful type of particle accelerator, the synchrotron.

When the Chifley government established the Australian National University, Oliphant was its star recruit. He was promised funding to build the world’s most powerful particle accelerator to study antimatter. Arriving in 1950, he remained at ANU until retirement in 1967, but the funding was never enough and technical problems plagued the venture. The project was mocked as the White Oliphant.

He was haunted by his work on the atomic bomb after it was used on Japan and resolved never to work again on nuclear weapons. He backed nuclear electricity generation but in later life lost faith in safeguard mechanisms used to prevent plutonium and enriched uranium being diverted to make bombs.

Oliphant was a plain spoken and effective leader with strong moral bearings. A vegetarian, he had an aversion to killing animals for food. “Action was his hallmark,” say his biographers, Stewart Cockburn and David Ellyard. “By instinct he was assertive, interventionist and provocative”, which premier Don Dunstan found when he appointed him governor of South Australia in 1971. Oliphant spoke out on public issues, sometimes at odds with government policy, but became tremendously popular.

– TIM DODD

It’s not only the seven premierships super coach Wayne Bennett has won that make him special, it’s also the style of his victories. No other coach in rugby league carries the same quietly commanding aura.

Those close to Bennett say his career has been built on loyalty, discipline and an ability to get the best from people. He is regarded as an exceptional “man manager” – a coach who puts the human first and the athlete second – arguably the best rugby league has seen.

Former players such as Allan Langer, Steve Renouf and Wendell Sailor still regularly seek his counsel. Many say he is like a father figure.

A quiet man, Bennett never set out to charm the press. On the eve of his historic 900th game in May last year, the coach told journalists: “If you want to talk about the team and players that’s fine, but if you want to talk about me I’ll just have to leave the conference.”

For the introduction of Bennett’s best-selling book, Don’t Die With the Music In You, Fox Sports’ executive director Steve Crawley wrote that publicly the coach was “Clint Eastwood without the Magnum. Privately, though, within the confines of his football teams, he is not just respected but revered.”

His book also revealed a trait he looked for in people: “The willingness to stand up for something, just make a stand. Be relied upon, a guy who’ll stick in the tough times.”

Bennett holds the record for most games and most wins by a first-grade coach, plus most consecutive seasons as coach of a premiership club (21 years with the Brisbane Broncos). He steered the Broncos to the finals 22 years out of 25 and 17 seasons in succession between 1992 and 2008. He now coaches the Dolphins, and will go to South Sydney in 2025.

Australian Rugby League Commissioner Peter V’landys said he “marvelled” at Bennett’s achievements. “Wayne is simply one of a kind,” he said.

– JESSICA HALLORAN

Two words are all you need to start a lively conversation in Tasmania: Bob Brown. The doctor-turned-conservationist-turned-politician-turned-conservationist-again is beatified by generations of green-tinged Tasmanians. Others, who blame the former federal Greens leader for the loss of their job or demise of an industry, are prone to froth at expletive-dripping mouths.

Brown moved to Tasmania as a doctor in 1972 hoping to find the Tasmanian tiger. He has since helped reshape the nation. A 1976 trip rafting a wild river in the state’s southwest was the catalyst.

A new sense of unity with nature drove Brown’s campaign to save that river, the Franklin, from being flooded for a hydro-electric dam. The issue helped Bob Hawke win power in 1983, gave rise to modern environmentalism and, via the High Court, established federal primacy on environmental matters.

This newspaper’s 1982 Australian of the Year, Brown entered Tasmania’s parliament in 1983 and established the Australian Greens in the Senate in 1996. In 2010, he signed a deal with the Gillard minority government for a carbon tax and clean-energy package.

On retiring from politics, Brown returned to direct action and set up his own foundation. At 79, he is still getting arrested trying to stop old-growth logging. He still hasn’t found the elusive Tasmanian tiger.

In typical fashion, he uses The Australian’s 60th anniversary to urge a greater commitment to the environment by all.

“In The Australian’s six decades, let alone my eight, 70 per cent of Earth’s wildlife has been eradicated due to human greed,” he says. “And we have become 1.5 degrees hotter. This should have been turned around but the rate of loss and heating is accelerating to meet the corporate demand for ‘growth’.

“After the Hawke government saved Tasmania’s wild Franklin River in 1983, I thought we were in a new green age. Instead we’re in a whirlwind of green spin and destruction.”

– MATT DENHOLM, PICTURE BY LUKE BOWDEN

Attempting to define an Australian sound is a riddle that might never be solved. But as long as such discussions are happening, one band stands above all.

AC/DC was formed in Sydney in 1973 by Scottish-born brothers Malcolm and Angus Young. The duo prized songwriting and arrangements featuring a rock-solid rhythm guitar, sturdy back beat, bluesy lead guitar licks and impassioned male vocals. Once the formula was settled upon, this aspect of the Australian sound was cemented. Love songs? Nah. Lust songs? Loads.

In time, the band’s influence spread outside pubs. Melbourne’s Swanston Street became the backdrop to history in 1976, with the band shooting the video for It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’N’ Roll) on the back of a flatbed truck.

The real skill in the band’s somewhat narrow approach was to create music that got the blood pumping. This is especially true of its seventh album Back in Black (1980), a hard rock classic.

Its membership has shifted across the decades, but the first “classic” era of the band was completed by Scottish-born singer Bon Scott, bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd. Fans still idolise Scott, who died in 1980, aged 33. Brit Brian Johnson took over the mic after Scott’s death.

Since Malcolm’s death in 2017, aged 64, Angus Young has led the band. AC/DC recently resumed touring in support of its 17th album, Power Up, representing a victory lap for one of the greatest rock bands to ever plug in and turn it up.

It was Malcolm’s unrelenting right-hand rhythm attack that took Back in Black, Highway to Hell, Thunderstruck, T.N.T. and scores more songs from sketched ideas to the world’s biggest stages.

And it is in his guitar-shredding, schoolboy uniform-wearing brother Angus that Malcolm’s spirit lives on in a sound that is undeniably Australian.

– ANDREW McMILLEN

Here’s what the world would lack if George Miller had stuck to being a doctor: an animated pig who thinks he’s a sheepdog, singing, dancing penguins crooning Frank Sinatra’s My Way in Spanish and, above all, an Australian police officer turned vigilante by the name of Max Rockatansky.

Miller, one of four sons to Greek immigrant parents, was born in Queensland in 1945. A good student, he went from Ipswich Grammar School to Sydney Boys High to the University of NSW, where he studied medicine alongside his twin, John.

In his final year, Miller and younger brother Chris made a one-minute film that won a student award. The same year, 1971, Miller attended a film workshop at Melbourne University, met fellow film fan Byron Kennedy and Mad Max became a glimmer in the eye.

Miller graduated and did a residency at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital. It was here, in the blood and guts of the ER, the futuristic road warrior became more than a glimmer. “I had a lot of practice before I went on a movie set,” he noted in one interview.

Miller worked as a doctor but his passion was film. He and Kennedy made Mad Max in 1979, with Miller directing. The scrimped budget was $350,000. The star was an unknown Mel Gibson in his second film role.

Mad Max earned more than $100m at the global box office, a profit margin that made the Guinness Book of World Records. The high-octane dystopian thriller supercharged an era of New Wave Australian cinema.

Miller went to Hollywood, where he received an Oscar nomination for Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) and worked on The Witches of Eastwick (1987), but it wasn’t his scene and he returned to Australia. Back home he made Babe (1995) and Happy Feet (2006), which secured his only Oscar to date, and more Mad Max – the fifth instalment, Furiosa, was released in May.

This is one of Miller’s singular achievements: he put Australian films on the world stage and kept them there, despite not staying in Hollywood. That’s not a bad answer to the question he remembers his father asking him half a century ago: “Why do you want to give up medicine to make movies?’’

– STEPHEN ROMEI, PICTURE BY NICK CUBBIN

The pity is Eddie Koiki Mabo didn’t live to see the realisation of his life’s work in the High Court decision that bears his name. It changed Australia, and how many people can credibly claim that?

In 1992, Mabo, the judgment, recognised Indigenous land ties had survived colonisation, sweeping away the notion

of terra nullius – that Australia was legally unoccupied until the British arrived. It created a new form of property tenure, native title, and associated rights.

By then Mabo, the man, was dead from cancer, aged just 55. He had lived quite a life. Born on Mer (Murray Island) in the Torres Strait, he confronted racism in 1960s Queensland, refusing to budge when he was denied service in a supposedly whites-only cafe. His activism cost him: in 1972, Mabo was denied permission to visit his dying father on Mer in what his family took to be payback by the powers that be.

Working as a gardener at Townsville’s James Cook University, he was staggered to learn from historians Henry Reynolds and Noel Loos he had no legal right to his ancestral country, despite the documented existence of traditional land ownership and inheritance on Mer.

In 1982, five Mer Islanders, headed by Mabo, sought a High Court declaration that their people had property rights based on original possession and ongoing connection to the land. The High Court vindicated Mabo’s faith. Koiki can rest easy: his legacy is a better country for all Australians.

– JAMIE WALKER

Chris Waller will never forget his first meeting with racing legend Bart Cummings. The champion trainers were next to each other on a plane to Sydney but Cummings had no idea who he was talking to.

“Been to the races, have you?’’ Cummings asked Waller, not about to let slip an opportunity to lure another stable client. “You obviously like your racing, so why don’t you buy a horse with me and you’ll have an even better day,” Cummings continued.

Waller let out a nervous chuckle before replying politely: “I told Mr Cummings I was a trainer and things went from there.”

James Bartholomew “Bart” Cummings is unrivalled as Australian racing’s most influential figure. Cummings’ record of 12 wins in the Melbourne Cup puts him above the rest.

“His deeds in the Melbourne Cup are there for all to see,” Waller said, “but he also did so much more than that.”

In 1982, Cummings was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his services to racing. In 1991, he was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall Of Fame and, in 2001, the Australian Racing Hall Of Fame. In 2008 he gained legend status in both honour rolls.

Cummings, son of trainer Jim Cummings, won his first Group 1 race in 1958 and retired with 268 Group 1 victories, the last two in partnership with grandson James, now Australian head trainer of global giant Godolphin. Cummings died in 2015 at the age of 87.

“I quite often go back to some of the wonderful sayings he used to use,” Waller said. One of his favourite lines was: “Patience is the cheapest thing in racing, but most people don’t use it.”

“He was such a wonderful horseman and he still, to this day, has an influence on me,” Waller said.

Bart’s son Anthony and grandson Edward are also registered trainers, keeping the family tradition alive and well.

– CLINTON PAYNE, PICTURE BY RENEE NOWYTARGER

Peter Doherty was just 33 when he and Swiss immunologist Rolf Zinkernagel made a chance discovery that would revolutionise understanding of the immune system. The Queensland-born veterinarian was completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the new field of T cells.

Many who have encountered this scientist only in recent years through his pioneering work during the Covid-19 pandemic assumed Professor Doherty was a medical doctor. In fact, his work at ANU in the early 1970s was the first time he had studied the immune system. “I switched my animal from sheep to laboratory mice,” he says. “That did transfer me to being an MD – a Mouse Doctor.”

It took a while for the world to catch on to the significance of professors Doherty and Zinkernagel’s 1973 discovery. Their work established that T cells kill virus-ridden cells, but only if they recognise the foreign substances (viruses) and certain substances from the body’s own cells, which are transplanted onto the surface of abnormal cells. The finding established how the body’s immune surveillance system works, and led, decades later, to the development of cancer immunotherapy. It had major ramifications for vaccine development. And it earned the pair the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1996.

“It’s been very gratifying, all these years later, to still be working as a scientist and see your work actually coming to fruition,” says Professor Doherty.

It was his important contributions to the understanding of viral immunity, in particular influenza, that put him in the box seat during the pandemic. He distributed his knowledge freely, taking to the social media platform Twitter (now X) with zeal. There was a hilarious aberration when he tweeted words he thought he was plugging into his Google search engine: “Dan Murphy’s opening hours”. “That was what made me famous,” he quips.

The pandemic jettisoned any plans Professor Doherty might have had to retire. The nation remains the grateful recipient of this scientist’s genius.

– NATASHA ROBINSON