The Honourable Peter Hall

This just received from John Wormald:

I was informed recently that Peter Hall was held in such high regard by the University of Melbourne that a building on the campus has been renamed in his memory:

https://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville/building/160

I also found this reference to his award of the Order of Australia. It has a full list of his achievements, which is quite impressive.

https://www.austms.org.au/Publ/Gazette/2013/Mar13/Award_Hall.pdf

Professor Peter Gavin Hall Officer of the Order of Australia

Professor Peter Gavin Hall AO FRS FAA FAustMS has been made an Officer of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours for distinguished service to mathematical science in the field of statistics through international contributions to research, as an academic and mentor, and through leadership of advisory and professional organisations. 

• Professor of Statistics and Australian Laureate Fellow, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne, since 2006 

• Distinguished Professor of Statistics, University of California, Davis, USA, since 2006 • Australian Laureate Fellow, Australian Research Council, 2012–2016 

• Professor of Statistics, Australian National University, 1988–2006 

• Honorary Fellow, Division of Mathematics and Statistics, CSIRO, 1990 • Chair, Scientific Advisory Committee, Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, 2002–2009 

• Member, Advisory Board, KAUST Institute for Applied Mathematics and Computational Science 

• Member, International Advisory Committee, Department of Business Statistics and Econometrics, Peking University, China • Deputy Chair, International Review of Mathematics, UK, 2010 

• Member, Working Party for the National Strategic Review of Mathematical Sciences Research in Australia, 2006 

• Member, Reference Committee for the Group of Eight Universities’ Review of Education in Mathematics, Data Science and Quantitative Disciplines, 2009 

• Secretary (Physical Sciences)/Vice-President, Australian Academy of Science, 2008–2012 Professor Peter Gavin Hall, Officer of the Order of Australia 15 

• President, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2010-2011 

• President, Australian Mathematical Society, 2006–2008 

• President, Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability, 2000–2002 • Member, Statistical Society of Australia 

• Member, International Statistical Institute 

• Member, International Chinese Statistical Association 

• Fellow, Royal Society, 2000 

• Fellow, American Statistical Association, 1996 

• Fellow, Australian Academy of Science, 1987 

• Fellow, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 1984. Publications include 

• The Bootstrap and Edgeworth Expansion (1992) 

• Introduction to the Theory of Coverage Processes (1988) 

• Rates of Convergence in the Central Limit Theorem (1982) 

• Martingale Limit Theory and its Application (1980). Awards/recognition include 

• Centenary Medal, 2001.

Fretten, not frettin'.

An e-mail from Greg Fretten

Stephen

Just letting you know I am still alive and kicking, apart from all the usual aches, pains and prosthetics. 

Like the rest of the year I have joined the fraternity of grandparent hood. 2 boys. A 2 year old and a 3 week old whose mother is my daughter Alicia. Her surname is Jackson and I think you may have taught with her father in law Lee Jackson. I can only hope my son does not have any children. I do not think he will ever be mature enough.

I am still teaching casually, emphasis on casually, as it appears grand children are more expensive than children. 

We have down sized now and have slightly different address details, which are the following.

8/20 Marine Pde

Miami, Qld   4220

(0417) 409 033

gregnsue@onthenet.com.au

I will endeavour to make it down for the next reunion. It would be especially good to see that decrepit old bastard Rooster, who has had one more knee replacement than me.

I hope everyone is of fine fetal and enjoying life.

With meandering mind and rum in hand.

Regards

Greg Fretten  

-----

Comment by SDG:

I'm guessing 'fetal' is Greg's pun on 'fettle' and refers to the tendency of our kids to reproduce and make us into grandfathers, which surely is something we never expected to be.

John Reader

John Reader has just signed on...

I graduated from UNSW with a survey degree in 1974, got my registration as a Registered Surveyor in 1976. Travelled around NSW with work until 1981, when I moved to the Sunshine Coast. Started my own survey practice in 1982. I remained in practice, having fun and travelling all around Queensland. I retired in late 2013 due to health issues, and now tripping around Australia trying to play every golf course possible. Married 1982, 2 gorgeous girls, and now, one grandson.

Website Relocated

The STHS 1969 Reunion website has been relocated here.


Stephen Gard

STHS 1940s -to 1960s Re-union Lunch

From Charlie Ovadia via Chook Cohen.
Note: this is not an STHS Class of '69 initiative.
It's from the STHS Old Boys Union.

Vale Peter Hall

From the Australian Mathematic Society secretary, Peter Stacey:

With the deepest regret I inform members that Professor Peter Gavin Hall FRS FAA AO died yesterday, 9th January, in the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Peter  made a huge contribution to the mathematical sciences in Australia and overseas and served as the Society's President from 2006 to 2008. He will be sorely missed.

Tech lads: Peter's Wikipedia entry is here.  Includes a much better photo, but it belongs to a colleague who demands attribution. Photo above stolen from Uni Melbourne website. So sue me.

Vale Greg Starkey

Maree advises that Greg passed away yesterday morning (Sunday, June 28 2015).

She says:

The boys and I were with him. We are all exhausted. 

There is much to do. 

We hope everyone will understand that we cannot respond to everyone at the

present time. 

I hope to be able to provide funeral plans soon. 

Warmest regards to all our friends and helpers 

Maree  Jack and Cameron xxx

2014 Reunion : Slide Show

Gard has been busy with a number of projects and has neglected reporting on the 2014 STHS Class of 1969 Reunion. It was, like all the others, enjoyable and over too soon.

Here is the slide-show Gard referred to in his Welcoming Address. Video will follow within a week or two.

Tom Jones - Poetry II

        School Competition

A chance to read a poem of my own

to all my schoolmates gathered! Would they sneer

or think me stupid, as I used to fear?

Perhaps this honour could somehow atone

for lunchtimes spent unfriended and alone.

I edged towards the microphone with hope

Of putting right the doubts and shame of years

in high school feeling lesser than my peers

while never knowing whether I could cope

with clawing up achievement’s slippery slope.

But faces looking back would never more

be schoolboys. They were greying, wrinkled men-

reunion revellers recalling when

they’d started high school fifty years before

and since had lived the lives they’d studied for.

The pressure that we’d all once felt to thrive

as sporting stars or scholars was now gone.

We’d come tonight to reminisce along

with seeing which of us was still alive.

The competition now? Just to survive.

                            Thomas Jones 21/10/14

Stephen Edgar Wins the Colin Roderick Award

From The Australian Arts Review:

DEPARTMENT of Truth is Stranger than Fiction: A novelist puts a poem of her own creation in her new book. Not just willy-nilly, but as a necessary part of the story. She is not a poet, a fact her publisher makes clear on reading the manuscript. So the novelist goes on a strange search for a poet to pen a bespoke poem for her book. She finds one, a poet she has read but never met. The poet finds the proposition unusual, too, but writes the poem and it is included in the book. It’s a fine poem. A year later, the novelist and the poet share a major literary award. Had the fiction writer come up with such a plot twist she might have been accused of overreach, but it is just what has happened to novelist Ashley Hay and poet Stephen Edgar. This week Hay’s 2013 novel The Railwayman’s Wife, which features a poem written for the book by Edgar, was named joint winner of the prestigious Colin Roderick Award. The other joint winner was Edgar, for his poetry volume Eldershaw.

Hay explains how this odd coupling worked: “I sent him some of the imagery I hoped the poem would contain, a bit about its content and its context, and a bit of information about the character in the book who would be doing the writing.’’ Edgar sent back a first draft of the poem within a week. “What amazed me,’’ Hay says, “was that it not only fitted the voice of my poet so perfectly, and contained all the imagery and ideas I’d sent through, but there were also nods to other elements of the novel that Stephen didn’t know about — couldn’t know about. It took my breath away.’’

Edgar says novelist Michelle de Kretser was the link between he and Hay, putting them in touch after hearing of Hay’s dilemma. He reveals he did not read the novel but based his poem on the one Hay had written, and on the context she provided. “I simply immersed myself in the words Ashley had sent and let my imagination work on them and try to find a new form that seemed to be effective. I found it a very interesting and satisfying process. But I regarded it as something like working on a libretto for a composer — she would have the final say and I would adapt anything I wrote to suit her needs.’’

It’s a lovely story, but we should not forget the poet’s achievement in winning a literary award open to all genres. Reviewing Eldershaw in these pages in June, Geoffrey Lehmann lauded a “high point in Australian poetry’’. The Roderick is awarded to the “best book published in Australia which deals with any aspect of Australian life’’. First awarded in 1967, it honours the Queensland author, critic and scholar Colin Roderick (1911-2000), who was the foundation professor of English literature at James Cook University in Townsville. The award is worth $10,000 to the winner — and in an act of generosity Roderick’s widow, Margaret, contributed a further $10,000 this year so that Hay and Edgar each received the full prize cheque. Previous winners include Ruth Park, Tom Keneally and Peter Carey, but as the ever gracious Hay suggests, this year may well represent a first: “Stephen Edgar becomes, in a way, the first person to win the Colin Roderick twice in a single year, because my book would not hold without him.’’

JB on PC

From John Booth:

Briefly eloquent

There’s an annual contest at Bond University, Australia, calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term.

This year’s chosen term was “politicalcorrectness."

The winning student wrote: .....

“Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and promoted by mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by the clean end."

My Secret Sydney: David Gaunt

Had fate played out a little differently, David Gaunt might have been a school teacher, rather than in the book business. He became friends with Roger Mackell, his partner in Gleebooks, while studying for a diploma of education at the University of Sydney. The bookstore was founded in 1975 by Tony Gallagher, but when he died in 1978, Gaunt and Mackell (who had been employees at the shop) took over.

"I decided to give it a go because we couldn't get jobs as teachers," says Gaunt. "For a while there, I was certainly tossing up [whether] I would be a bookseller or a teacher."

These days, Gleebooks is a Sydney institution. The 63-year-old co-owner modestly attributes the success of the store to good timing. "The inner west was just coming into its own. Glebe in the '70s and through the '80s was absolutely the place to be."

Institution: David Gaunt, owner of Gleebooks, in his Glebe store. Photo: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Things have changed a lot since those early days. "When we opened, we had to think twice if we opened late on a Saturday; would it be legal?" he says. "We made what was, at the time, a truly radical decision to open on Sundays. All these things that now seem terribly ancient were only 40 years ago."

Where did you grow up?

In the southern suburbs in Peakhurst. It was a typical '50s and '60s [experience] growing up. It was somehow suburban and vibrant at the same time – the vibrancy was because there were so many bloody kids. Lugarno, the adjoining suburb, had lots of bush, so I used to ride my bike down to the old Lugarno ferry. You had a lot of freedom.

Formative: The Inimitable Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse.

Were you a big reader as a child?

Absolutely. When Hurstville Library opened, the children's area was so under-resourced that I got special dispensation to use my mother's card to borrow from the adult's library. They had the whole library of P. G. Wodehouse and I read my way through them at the age of 12 and 13. I had all these strange phrases and arcane English that Wodehouse introduced me to.

What's the most memorable event Gleebooks has hosted?

Security: A visit from author Salman Rushdie is always memorable. Photo: Chris Young/The Canadian Press

In 1995 we hosted the first public event Salman Rushdie did when he came out of protective hiding under the fatwa. The federal police had to be here and supervise the whole event. And it was the only event we've ever had where the speaker didn't talk from the stage, because the stage has windows behind it and the federal police wouldn't discount the possibility of a sniper from the poplars over in Glebe Public School.

Which is your favourite cafe in Glebe?

I'm very fond of Badde Manors; that's been around nearly as long as we have. And if anything deserves the epithet of quirky, that is it. It's where I take anybody who calls in to see me.

Local haunt: Badde Manors Cafe, in Glebe.

Where do you live?

Gladesville. My wife and I deliberately moved away from the inner city, because we wanted green space and a decent garden. We like old things, so we've got a very old cottage in a quiet neck of the woods on Tarban Creek.

Is there a place in that area that's special to you?

Author Ceridwen Dovey's first novel, "Only the Animals", tells stories about events in history from the viewpoint of the animals involved. Photo: Peter Rae

The stand-out would be, without a question, Gladesville Hospital. It was a 19th century mental hospital, so there are places with a sad history, but it really is part of secret Sydney. An enlightened superintendent there [Frederick Norton Manning] believed that for people with mental illness, having them in open garden spaces was important. It's a large area of old buildings – some in dilapidated condition, some still magnificent – with sweeping views up and down the Parramatta River.

How would you spend your perfect day off?

It would have to involve a walk – I'm usually walking with my wife, Sally. Sometimes we'll walk through The Rocks. I've been heavily involved in conservation preservation – I've been involved in the Hunters Hill Trust for years. It means I have a vivid memory of what Jack Mundey, the BLF [Builders' Labourers Federation] and caring people did in The Rocks back in the 1970s to save it from the same fate as the rest of old Sydney. I love to go there and walk around because I think it's beautiful. It reminds me of what people who care enough to make an effort can do.

What annoys you about Sydney?

The worship of false progress is just horrendous. In my own area [of Hunters Hill], I see people buy these beautiful old houses in a garden suburb and the first thing they want to do is rip out the garden and put in a five-car carport. It's a constant battle. I remember going back to Peakhurst as a young adult. "What happened to that 1856 church?" "Oh, they needed to widen Forest Road so it's not there anymore." Once you've destroyed the past, you've destroyed the past. I think you need to be immensely conscious of how much responsibility you've got for the things that you've inherited.

Which newer local writers would you recommend?

There are three women straight away that I would reference. Fiona McFarlane – she's a terrific writer. The Night Guest was her first novel. Ceridwen Dovey's Only the Animals is great. And there's someone who used to be a detective, who's been writing the best Sydney-based crime fiction that I've read in ages, called P.M. Newton. All three of them give you an indication that in a city of this size, you'd be depressed if there weren't good writers emerging all the time.

NICOLE ELPHICK

nicole.elphick@gmail.com

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/my-secret-sydney-david-gaunt-20140915-10g8uu.html#ixzz3DvJByFB2

Source:

http://www.smh.com.au/national/my-secret-sydney-david-gaunt-20140915-10g8uu.html

Tom Jones - Verses on Reunions

Tom writes... "I regard this cohort of my peers as living parallel lives - those lives that perhaps I could have led, had I chosen differently (and had more talent).

I have composed a rhyme on the subject of reunions, which is attached.

  Old Boys’ Reunion

I’d  finished school at seventeen

When most of life was still unseen

I hardly knew my peers for I

Could barely look them in the eye.

Reunion after many years

Still generated hopes and fears

Could I now find a friendly glow

That wasn’t present years ago?

If in six years of high school then

We could not manage to be friends

What chance was there that now we’d find

Some intimacy that would bind?

But now at least I’d tasted life

Through work and study, kids and wife.

I’d learned to look men in the eye

And stepping forth, I could say “Hi”.

               Thomas Jones    14/9/13