Vale Emeritus Professor Johnson Lockyer Bradshaw
Vale Emeritus Professor Johnson Lockyer Bradshaw
23 February 1940 – 3 June 2025
Tribute
John Bradshaw was born on the kitchen table into a world which didn’t offer much hope to those struggling with neurodegenerative diseases. He departed having significantly increased the knowledge and understanding of many debilitating conditions.
Ironically, John’s vibrant, enriching life was shaped by several of the conditions in which he was an expert: Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and stroke. As such, his intellectual knowledge later in his life was imbued with an added level of empathy and insight.
John, who died peacefully aged 85 years, was an experimental psychologist - Australia’s answer to Oliver Sacks, according to the ABC’s science show presenter Robyn Williams – a career which later was known as physiological psychology, neuropsychology and latterly behavioural neuroscience.
He was amongst the top researchers in the world in the field of human cerebral asymmetries and had a long record of achievement on the neurological correlates of behaviour which earned him an outstanding international reputation.
His first book, Human Cerebral Asymmetry (1983) was regarded as a major treatise on the functions and interactions of the left and right hemisphere in the determination of behaviour. The Evolution of Lateral Asymmetries, Language, Tool Use and Intellect (1993) led him to being invited to prepare an article for the popular science magazine Scientific American on the topic.
Throughout his career he published prolifically in major international journals such as Nature, Brain, and Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.
John came to Monash in 1968 as a lecturer in psychology. He was soon promoted to senior lecturer and then reader in 1982. In 1994 he was appointed to a personal Chair in Psychology.
Four years earlier, he had set up a neuropsychology research unit to study disorders of movement associated with Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases and also to study attention deficits following stroke. His work soon extended to dystonia, Alzheimer’s disease and Friedreich ataxia, and to neurodevelopmental disorders of the frontostriatal system such as Tourette’s and Williams syndromes, obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorders, schizophrenia and autism. These were followed by research into addictive behaviours, depression and fragile X syndrome. John was also interested in the evolution of language, praxis and tool use, synaesthesia, phantom limb and many other arcane phenomena in which he made significant and lasting contributions.
Johnson Lockyer Bradshaw was born in the kitchen on 23 February 1940, at No 12, Village Road, Bebington, Cheshire, the only child of Harold Johnson, a maintenance engineer at the nearby Stork Margarine works, and Hannah Mary Lockyer. He was frequently ill as a child due to the airborne pollution from coal fires and the local gasworks. Some of his earliest memories were of the Second World War, one of which was hiding in a shelter his father built in the garden whilst the sky over Liverpool, only a few miles away, was lit red with fire. For many years he was to be repeatedly haunted by a nightmare in which he was chased by a small black plane.
John’s parents believed passionately in the importance of education and made many sacrifices on his behalf. In his autobiographical book, Reflections of a Neuropsychologist, he describes a childhood marked with simple pleasures; his father grew vegetables and competed in marrow competitions, and he spent many blissful hours hiking and cycling in the nearby countryside of North Wales.
John’s uncle, a primary school headmaster, gave him an IQ test at an early age and pronounced him ineducable, much to his mother’s annoyance. Uncle Ned was soon proved wrong, however, when John won a place at the prestigious Birkenhead School, followed by a scholarship to Oxford to study Classics. He planned to switch to medicine but there was a surfeit of medicos, and the government would not extend his scholarship for that purpose. Instead, he chose to study the very new Physiology, Psychology and Philosophy (PPP) course. The drawback, he discovered, was that it wasn’t yet accredited as a precursor to advanced studies at Oxford. After two years in London as a systems analyst with ICI learning how to programme one of the first-ever business computers, the iconic IBM 140, he returned to academia, undertaking a PhD in physiological psychology at Sheffield University, where he researched pupillary dilation as an index of arousal.
Whilst at Sheffield, he met and married Judy, a botanist and high school science teacher from Bamburgh, Northumbria. (He noted that when he casually mentioned to his mother, who had volunteered to be a guinea pig in one of his early experiments, that he would be getting married to a woman she had yet to meet, the widening of her pupils was the biggest he ever recorded).
After leaving Sheffield, the newly wedded couple migrated to New Zealand, where John worked at the University of Otago for a year before moving to Monash. Here, he continued to be prolific in his experimental work whilst at the same time broadening his theoretical perspective. He was an old-fashioned scholar with a very broad knowledge, founded in biology as well as psychology. One colleague described him as a shy man at heart, who did not push his own barrow as effectively as he might. Yet his publishing record was exceptional.
John undertook a number of visiting appointments including terms at the University of Edinburgh, Cambridge, Victoria (Canada), St Andrews and Exeter to name but a few. In 1987 he was awarded a DSc by Monash for his contribution to research on the neurology of behaviour.
A Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the British Psychological Society, upon his retirement from Monash in 2002 he was appointed Emeritus Professor.
John was a strong supporter of voluntary euthanasia and always carried “do not resuscitate” cards, believing quality of life was infinitely more important than life itself.
His own father developed Parkinson’s, and his mother eventually succumbed to Alzheimer’s, as did he.
John and Judy, who died in 2023, are survived by their daughter, Professor Catriona Bradshaw, who is a clinician scientist, Head of Research Translation and Mentorship and Head of the Genital Microbiota & Mycoplasma Group at Melbourne Sexual Health Centre (a department of Monash University and Alfred Health).