Vale Dr Alan Gregory AM
Vale Dr Alan Gregory AM
09 May 1938 – 28 April 2024
Tribute
Dr Alan Gregory, senior lecturer of Education, 1987. Photographer: Richard Crompton. Image courtesy of Monash University Archives.
Dr Alan Gregory, who has died aged 85 years, was an educator and distinguished historian who carved his own space in the annals of history.
Dr Gregory’s university career began at Monash in 1964 when he was appointed a part-time lecturer in the method of teaching economics in the Department of Education, and became a full-time lecturer five years later. In 1974 he was promoted to senior lecturer and was sub-dean of the Faculty in 1976-77, and 1984-85. Over the course of his career, he wrote widely in the field of health, economics and history, including a history of the Monash Education Faculty 1964-2014, The Surprise Rival, which was published in 2014 and charts the story of how the Faculty of Education developed from modest origins to a position of international eminence. A keen musician and organist, he also founded the faculty choir. He was Foundation Chair of the Menzies Lecture Trust in 1978, which he oversaw until 2010. The 1981 lecture, notably given by Margaret Thatcher, was particularly challenging upon discovery of an IRA hitman in the country.
Alan resigned from Monash in 1990 to take up a position as Master of Ormond College at his alma mater, the University of Melbourne. Here, he was accused by two female students of groping them at a party that followed a valedictory dinner. Unhappy with the College’s response, the pair took their allegations to the police; Alan was subsequently found guilty at the Magistrates’ Court of a single charge of sexual assault, which was later dismissed on appeal.
The Ormond Affair, as it became known, was the trigger for author Helen Garner’s book, The First Stone. The verisimilitude novel featured Gregory as the protagonist, Colin Shephard, and was a runaway best-seller when it was published in 1995, capturing a zeitgeist clamouring for change, not only to the culture of white male privilege and old boys’ networks, but also to feminism for emerging generations. It was the book that opened up deeply thorny conversations everywhere and the foment it created was remarkable, pitting men and women against each other and themselves.
It was a defining moment in Alan’s life too, veering him off the path to the upper echelons of a university career. Whilst the case against him was later dismissed on appeal, the ongoing furore resulting from the book delivered a body blow from which he never fully recovered.
Despite his acquittal, he resigned from his position at Ormond in 1993 after a vote of confidence in Council failed, on undisclosed grounds. In the aftermath, Alan initially found it hard to find work. Whilst he was not named in the book, he was far from anonymous.
He eventually reinvented himself as a skilled and notable historian and writer. In 2005, he compiled a comprehensive history of Melbourne High for the school’s centenary entitled Strong Like Its Pillars. He also wrote the biographies of two Melbourne High principals, Brigadier George Langley and former test cricketer, Bill Woodfull.
Other works include It’s Only the Game that Counts: A history of Lord Somers’ Camp and Power House and The Ever Open Door: A history of the Royal Melbourne Hospital 1848-1998. He wrote Blood, belts, booze and bikes: a history of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons’ public health interventions in response to the epidemic of road trauma in 2008.
That same year, Alan returned to Monash as an educational consultant in the Faculty of Education where he also held an adjunct professorial role from 2011-2018.
Alan Gregory was born in Melbourne in 1938 and educated at Melbourne High and the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1960 with a Bachelor of Commerce. The following year, he was a Rotary Foundation Fellow in the Department of Economics at Mumbai University, India.
In 1962, he received a diploma in education from Melbourne University and a Bachelor in Education in 1967, where he was also awarded the Sir Isaac Pitman Prize in the History of Australian Education.
He worked as a teacher with the Victorian Education Department and was a part-time lecturer in economics at the Ballarat School of Mines before joining Monash. He was awarded a PhD from Simon Fraser University, Canada, in 1976.
Alan was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1989 for services to education and the community and a Centenary Medal in 2001. He served on several government boards including the Migration Review Tribunal and the Refugee Review Tribunal. He was involved with the Victorian Inquiry into Teacher Education (1978-1981), the Ministerial Committee on Religious Education (1974), and several evaluations of programs for people with disabilities.
He also served on several school councils including Melbourne Girls Grammar and was Chair of the Sir Robert Menzies Lecture Trust (1978-2010). Other outside bodies with which he was involved included the Liberal Party of Australia and the Victorian Institute of Secondary Education, the Victorian Commerce Teachers Association, the Victorian Universities and Schools Examinations Board, and a wide range of educational institutions. A close friend of the deaf academic Pierre Gorman, Dr Gregory took over the Gorman Foundation, to continue building relationships with people with a disability and the community following Gorman’s death.
His final book on the Cormack Foundation, an associated entity of the Liberal Party of Australia, was published in 2020. Up until his death, he was working on a history of St. George’s Anglican Church in Malvern, a task he inherited from the former Monash Esquire Bedel, Brian Corless OAM, who died in 2022.
In 1971 Alan married Beryl Gregory OAM, the former head at Christ Church Grammar with whom he had three children; Christian, Elizabeth and Michael, a diplomat who died of cancer in 2019 aged 46.
In the aftermath of the 1990s court case, Ormond College reformed its procedures in regards to sexual harassment and assault. In 2018, Lara McKay became its first female Master.
Whilst Alan perhaps didn’t achieve the academic career trajectory he was hoping for, he did unwittingly become an important figure as a catalyst in early conversations on power, feminism, patriarchy and consent in Australia. He was both the warp and weft in the tapestry of the Victorian landscape, who understood that history is not inert or impartial, but lived and felt.