Emeritus Professor Graeme Davison AO
Emeritus Professor Graeme Davison AO is an Emeritus Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor of History at Monash University, a distinguished historian of Australia’s cities and a lifelong advocate for the public value of history and the humanities.
Professor Davison was born in Melbourne and educated at Essendon High School, The University of Melbourne, and Balliol College Oxford, where he was a Victorian Rhodes Scholar. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy at the Australian National University and taught at The University of Melbourne for twelve years before coming to Monash University as a Professor of History in 1982.
He is the author and editor of more than twenty books including The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978 and 2004), which won the Ernest Scott Prize, The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time (1994), Car Wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Conquered our Cities (2005), which won the Nettie Palmer Prize, and City Dreamers: The Urban Imagination in Australia (2015). He co-edited Australians 1888, a volume in the Bicentennial History of Australia (1987) and The Oxford Companion to Australian History (1998).
He has been an energetic contributor to the public life of Melbourne and Australia. He is a former chair of the Heritage Council of Victoria, designed Melbourne’s Golden Mile Walking trail, co-edited A Heritage Handbook and appeared in the acclaimed documentary film ‘The Lost City of Melbourne’. He was an advisor to the National Museum of Australia, co-author of a history of the Powerhouse Museum, and served on the councils of the National Archives, the State Library of Victoria and the Public Record Office of Victoria. He was a member of a taskforce appointed by the Chief Scientist on Sustainable Urban Transport.
At Monash he founded Australia’s first Master’s program in Public History to equip history graduates for employment in such fields as heritage, museums and commissioned history. He distilled his thinking on the public value of history in The Use and Abuse of Australian History (2000). His most recent books, Lost Relations (2015) and My Grandfather’s Clock (2023), have fostered collaboration between genealogists and academic historians.
Professor Davison served as Deputy Dean of Arts, chair of the General Library Committee, and Director of Monash’s London Centre. He initiated moves to establish Monash University Publishing. He co-authored with Dr Kate Murphy a fiftieth anniversary history of Monash, University Unlimited (2012). He continues to convene a regular seminar ‘Research Connections’ of retired research-active Monash historians.
Beyond Monash, he has served as President of the Australian Historical Association, panel member of the Australian Research Council, and visiting professor at Edinburgh, Harvard, King’s College London, Tübingen and the Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the Royal Historical Society of Victoria and the Federation of Australian Historical Societies.
In 2011 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community as a leading scholar and commentator on Australian urban history.”