Barry Jones (Australian politician)
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Barry Owen Jones, AO, FAA, FAHA, FTSE (born October 11, 1932, Geelong, Victoria) is an Australian polymath, writer, lawyer, social activist, autograph collector and former politician. In 1998 he was named as one of Australia's "National Living Treasures".
He was educated at Melbourne High School and Melbourne University. Jones began his career as a schoolteacher at Dandenong High School, where he taught for nine years, before becoming a household name as an Australian quiz champion in 1960 on the radio show (later a television show) Bob Dyer's Pick a Box. He was famous for taking issue with Dyer about certain expected answers, and in one case he and Dyer devoted an entire half-hour program to a discussion of whether or not Warren Hastings could correctly be described as "the first Governor-General of India".
From 1962 onwards, his interest in politics and civil liberties manifested itself. He campaigned against the death penalty throughout the 1960s, particularly against the execution of Ronald Ryan.
[edit] Political career
Jones' political career began in the Victorian parliament where he represented the electorate of Melbourne as a Labor MLA from 1972 to 1977, when he resigned to go into federal politics.
In 1977, he was elected to the House of Representatives as the Labor member for the Federal seat of Lalor in Victoria, which he held until his retirement in 1998. He was Minister for Science in the Hawke government from 1983to 1990, in which role he presided over the growth of organisations such as the CSIRO.
From 1992, he served as National President of the Australian Labor Party (upon the resignation of Stephen Loosely, to whom he had lost the position in a split vote a couple of years earlier), and was a member of the committee for the National Library of Australia. Barry Jones was the chief architect of the Australian Labor Party's Knowledge Nation education concept, as chair of the Chifley Research Centre's Knowledge Nation Taskforce [1].
He was the Vice President of the World Heritage Committee from 1995 to 1996. He was a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO 1991-95.
[edit] Writings
Jones has been a prolific author of political and sociological books including:
- Decades of Decision 1860-, 1965
- The Penalty is Death (editor), 1968
- Joseph II, 1968
- Barry Jones' Guide to Modern History: Age of Apocalypse, 1975
- Macmillan Dictionary of Biography (editor), 1981
- Sleepers Wake: Technology and the Future of Work, 1982
- Barry Jones' Dictionary of World Biography, 1994
- A Thinking Reed (autobiography), 2006.
He is reputedly the owner of the largest private autograph collection in Australia.[citation needed]
