Australian Dictionary of Biography

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Award of ADB Medal to Gerald Walsh for long and distinguished service (2002)

Citation

Gerald Walsh has served the Australian Dictionary of Biography in four voluntary capacities.  In the early 1960s he carried out research in Sydney for the fledgling project.  From 1962 until the present he has given specialist advice to successive general editors.  For twenty years, as a member of the New South Wales Working Party, he helped choose subjects for A.D.B. articles and authors to write them.  As an author himself, he has produced more articles for the A.D.B. than any other person.  His work was first published in volume 1.  When volume 16 appears in November 2002, he will have contributed 181 articles and more than one hundred thousand words to the dictionary.  Two forthcoming volumes will each contain four more of his biographical essays.

Gerry Walsh’s forty years of unpaid advice and practical assistance to the A.D.B. has been of immense benefit to the project.  The accounts he has written of the lives of merchants, manufacturers, financiers, pastoralists, farmers, public servants, politicians, engineers, scientists, solicitors, rural workers and sportsmen have illuminated the nation’s mercantile, economic, industrial, agricultural, political, administrative, scientific, social and cultural history.  Thoroughly researched, expressed in stylish prose, and admirably balanced in judgement, his articles have contributed greatly to the overall excellence of the dictionary.  Gerry Walsh has an exceptional record of selfless and wholehearted commitment to the Australian Dictionary of Biography.