Jeff Grey in his ADFA office
The conference held in Canberra on 29-30 July by the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society (ACSACS) to reflect on the legacy of war historian Charles Bean was heavily overshadowed by the sudden death three days before its opening of Professor Jeff Grey, himself one of Australia’s leading scholars in military history, at the early age of 57. Not only was Jeff the creator and first director of ACSACS, he was scheduled to be a speaker on both days of the Bean conference, so his absence was keenly felt by everyone attending—not just other speakers like myself.
My association with Jeff went back more than 25 years, since I first encountered him in the history department of the University of NSW at the Australian Defence Force Academy, which he had just joined in 1988 after a brief stint in the Historical Section of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The next year or the year after, he became co-supervisor of the PhD thesis I was researching and writing on the development of Australian air power in the decades between the world wars of last century. The friendship formed at that time was strengthened by professional contact that followed at infrequent intervals over the next two decades.
His passing is cause for particular sadness on my part, because it was only in March last year that Jeff did me the great honour of launching my book Olof’s Suitcase—something I asked him to do after he told me that in his youth he had once met and interviewed Michael Terry, the English-born explorer who undertook numerous expeditions into Central Australia and was a tangential figure in the drama surrounding the 1930 expedition to “re-find” Harold Lasseter’s “lost” gold reef in which my Swedish grandfather, Olof Johanson, was also involved. I particularly recall that Jeff contacted me on the morning of the launch to say that he was not well, feeling the worst effects of a heavy cold, but he did not want to disappoint me by cancelling so insisted he would turn up to say a few words even if he could not stay long afterwards.
Although many people, his students especially, found Jeff a forbidding and intimidating presence because of his high expectations and standards, I will always have reason to value his loyal friendship and generosity. His death is a loss not just to his family and colleagues, but to the Australian and international community of historians.