Graeme Davison is a Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor and Director of the Monash University London Centre. From 1982 to 2005 he was Professor of History at Monash University. He has published widely in Australian urban cultural and public history where his books include The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978, 2004), which won the Ernest Scott Prize, The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time (1993), The Use and Abuse of Australian History (2000) and Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered our Cities (2004), which was awarded the Victorian Premier's Prize for Non-fiction. He has served as an advisor to both the Victorian and Australian governments on heritage, museums, archives and other aspects of public history. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Edinburgh, the Australian National University, King’s College London and Harvard where he was Professor of Australian Studies in 1988-89.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe, poet and essayist, was born in Melbourne in 1934. Altogether he has sixteen volumes of poetry, a novel, and numerous prose works. His Selected Poems 1956-1995 (Carcanet Oxford Poets) won the Age Book of the Year Prize. Back in 1987 he won the quinquennial Dublin Prize for the Arts and Sciences, while in that year he also went to Harvard as Professor of Australian Studies. He has read his poetry widely around the world, and addressed contemporary issues in the visual and verbal arts.
In 2006 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Melbourne, and the St Michael's Medallion, for his services to literature and culture in Australia; he also published the long "zany epic possibly a masterpiece", entitled The Universe Looks Down (Brandl & Schlesinger), along with a book of essays on poetry, Read It Again (Salt). Wallace-Crabbe's Dante translation, "The Flowery Meadow", recently appeared from Electio Editions. He is currently at work on "The Serious Songs", reflections on the current disasters befalling Western cultures.
Tim Flannery, Australian of the Year for 2007 and Professor in Earth and Life Sciences at Macquarie University began his career with a degree in English. After graduating, he found a temporary job at the Museum of Victoria in its vertebrate palaeontology department. This led him to undertake a Masters degree in Earth Sciences, graduating from Monash University in 1981 and a PhD from UNSW.
An internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer and conservationist, he has published more than 130 scientific papers and written many books, including, The Future Eaters, which was made into a successful television serial, while The Weather Makers has been translated into over 25 languages.
He writes regularly for The New York Review and the Times Literary Supplement and he has edited and introduced many historical works including The Birth of Sydney and The Birth of Melbourne. In 2002, he was invited to give the Australia Day address to the nation.
From 1998 – 1999 Tim was Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard, where he taught in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. His pioneering research as a field biologist in New Guinea prompted Sir David Attenborough to describe him as being in the league of the world's great explorers.
He is chairman of the SA Sustainability Roundtable and Premier's Science Council, a director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, and the National Geographic Society's representative in Australasia. He is also an active member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, which reports independently to government on environmental issues of concern to Australians. In April 2005, he was honoured as Australian Humanist of the Year.
Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University and a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He writes regularly on security and international issues for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. From 2001 to 2004 Professor White was the first Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Over the two decades before that he had served as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments, as a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, as a senior adviser on the staffs of Defence Minister Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and as a senior official in the Department of Defence, where from 1995 to 2000 he was Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence. He studied philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford Universities.
Jill Roe is Professor Emerita in the Department of Modern History, Macquarie University, Sydney, and Director of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. Her field is Australian history, with particular reference to intellectual, social and cultural aspects, and historical biography. Her publications include Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939 and scholarly editions of the writings of author and feminist Miles Franklin. She has served on the Australian Research Council and is currently a member of the editorial board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography and president of the History Council of New South Wales. Jill was Visiting Professor of Australian Studies (Women’s Studies) at Harvard 1994-95 and in June 2007 was appointed to the Order of Australia AO).
Helen Irving is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Sydney University. She holds degrees in political science, anthropology, history, and law, and teaches and researches in constitutional law and history. She held the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies in 2005-2006, as Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. Her publications include To Constitute a Nation: A Cultural History of Australia's Constitution (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and most recently, Gender and the Constitution: Equity and Agency in Comparative Constitutional Design (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Members of the Harvard Australian Studies Committee and Australian Nominating Committee, Canberra, Australia, November 2007
