John Ramsland, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in June 2006, principally for his historical research into child poverty and abuse, the Indigenous experience and institutional life in colonial Australia, as well as to education.
The award recognised a distinguished 40 year (and continuing) career that has been dominated y Professor Ramsland's pioneering studies into the history of childhood and the experience of growing up institutionalised.
This accumulated body of work has helped confirm what Professor Ramsland calls the “disquiet around the world” about the effectiveness of large-scale, highly regimented asylums for homeless and neglected children, and along with that of other social historians, has influenced new generations of social workers and social welfare officials.
His teaching has brought Australia’s child welfare history to life for succeeding generations of students, often convincing them of the need for sensitive and individualised programs for neglected children and youth.
A passionate historian from childhood, John Ramsland has through his 11 published books, his teaching and mentoring tried to demonstrate how powerfully the past can influence the present. And along with other historians, he places great emphasis on helping the Australian community come to terms with its own history.
A former Dean of the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Professor Ramsland is a Fellow and Life Member of the Australian College of Educators.
He continues to write and research, supervise postgraduate students, mentor both students and academics, and promote Australian history internationally.
At the same time, his interests are broadening into the history of Australian feature films, the social history of sport, the historical forces that shape celebrity in Australia, and the cultural history of childhood and coming-of-age into adulthood.
“It is the historian’s task (as Shakespeare put it) to ‘summon up remembrance of things past’,” he says. “For all of us interested in history, amnesia is the problem; remembering, recalling, evaluating, interpreting and then narrating are the solutions.”
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