Australian Dictionary of Biography

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Award of ADB Medal to John Lack for long and distinguished service (2012)

Citation

John Lack has been associated with the Australian Dictionary of Biography since the early 1970s when the late Dr Geoffrey Serle recruited him as an author and researcher.  At the time the Victorian Working Party consisted of three people (Geoffrey Blainey, Allan Martin and Geoffrey Serle).  John was a doctoral student in History at Monash University, undertaking pioneering research in Australian urban history and taking as his subject the place of his birth and boyhood, the industrial working-class suburb of Footscray in Melbourne’s west.  His first entry, on the Melbourne industrialist and businessman, Thomas Loader, was published in Volume 5 in 1974.  Since then he has written 44 entries and has edited innumerable others in his capacity as a Section Editor.  John’s biographical subjects for the Dictionary have reflected his broad scholarly interests in regional and labour history, in working-class and popular culture, immigration, literature and the complex psychology and motivations of community and business leaders such as Hugh Victor McKay and Sir John Storey.  Entries like these helped set standards of scholarship for which the Dictionary is renowned.  As with many others who have developed a life-long association with ‘the ADB’ John also worked as a researcher.  His task was the lists for the 1891-1939 period undertaken in the summer of 1974.  John joined the University of Melbourne as a Lecturer in History in 1978 and retired as an Associate Professor in 2003.  Throughout this time he was associated with the ADB as a contributor and frequent consultant.  He joined the Victorian Working Party in 1983 and upon Geoff Serle’s death in 1998 was the logical choice as his successor both as Chair and as Section Editor.  He joined the Editorial Board in 1998, serving with three General Editors.

For many Australian university teachers and researchers of History, working for the ADB in a voluntary capacity has been a welcome occasional responsibility and a source of pride upon publication.  For John Lack it was much more than this in the decade and more after Geoff Serle’s death.  The Dictionary had been a personal mission for Serle and he had taken a much greater degree of responsibility than most working party chairs.  Inevitably, this responsibility fell on John’s shoulders at a time when Dictionary resources were diminishing and his university responsibilities increasing.  It is a credit to him that he not only took on this extra responsibility, but did so with meticulous attention to detail and characteristic good humour.  John refashioned the Victorian Working Party, bringing in younger scholars and, at a time when other indications of and avenues for scholarship were coming into vogue, defending the ADB as a great Australian national institution worthy of the attention of scholars.  His personal contribution is a living testament to that belief.  John Lack’s involvement with the ADB spans nearly forty years and is continuing.  He is placed honourably among the group of scholars whose work has ensured that the Australian Dictionary of Biography became and has remained a major national achievement.  This medal is a symbolic recognition of that achievement.