Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Cities and Urban Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to mourn the passing of Professor Stuart Macintyre on 22 November and to recognise his contribution to the discipline of history and to this country. I was privileged to have him mark my honours thesis, and I know firsthand how his passion for teaching transformed lives. Professor Macintyre had a distinguished academic career: twice dean of arts at the University of Melbourne and the Ernest Scott chair in history, amongst many other appointments. Janet McCalman AC, another great Australian historian, writes of him as 'a history warrior who worked for a better Australia', who understood and explained our winners and our losers and:

… who recognised the distinctive as well as the common in the Australian experience. And he understood as no other scholar, the institutions that bound the Commonwealth …

He leaves a big gap but an enormous legacy, with so many important books, from The Redsto The History Wars to Australia's Boldest Experiment, and with former Senator Faulkner he co-authored Labor's centenary history. He was of course a longstanding member of the Brunswick branch of the Australian Labor Party and a valued, critical contributor to wider societal debates, in particular on the issue of civics education. We have too few great public intellectuals, as Professor Macintyre was, and, while we have many great historians, for me Stuart Macintyre stands along Manning Clark as having enlarged our sense of ourselves and suggesting who we might be.