Eight Fellows receive 2025 Australia Day Honours

Photograph of “keyholes” near Al Wadi, Saudi Arabia. These keyholes are just one of over 400 sites discovered by Emeritus Professor David Kennedy during his aerial tours of Saudi Arabia. Source: David Kennedy.

The Australian Academy of the Humanities is delighted to see eight Fellows acknowledged in the 2025 Australia Day honours list on 26 January 2025.

“We warmly congratulate Fellows recognised in the Australia Day Honours list. Each recipient has left an indelible mark on the tapestry of Australia’s past, present and future,” said Academy President Professor Stephen Garton AM FAHA FRAHS FASSA FRSN.

“Professor Megan Davis’ appointment as a Companion to the Order of Australia recognises her exceptional work in across constitutional law, First Nation’s rights and policy. It is the highest recognition with the Order of Australia awards, a rare achievement, and incredibly well-deserved. We also extend congratulations to archaeologist Professor Claire Smith, who was appointed the Officer of the Order of Australia, is internationally recognised as a leader in the decolonisation of Indigenous archaeology.”

“Among the list of accolades, we note two posthumous recipients — the late Emeritus Professor Lyndall Ryan and the late Associate Professor Phillip Ayres. These awards are an opportunity to celebrate and revisit their incredible contribution to Australian history. Lyndall was most well known for her work on mapping the Australian frontiers massacres, a project which she championed until her passing in 2024, while Phillip Ayres was renowned for his nuanced and challenging biographies of leading Australian figures.”

“We’re incredibly proud of our Fellows’ outstanding contributions and pleased to see them recognised on the national stage,” said Professor Garton.

List of Fellows:

Scientia Professor Megan Davis AC FAHA FASSA was one of only six Australians to be awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for eminent service to the law and to social justice, to the national and international advocacy of the rights of Indigenous peoples, and to the community.

A renowned constitutional lawyer, Professor Davis is well known for her co-leadership of the Uluru dialogue with Aunty Pat Anderson AO FAHA and she is currently the Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University.

 

 

 

Emeritus Professor Lyndall Ryan AO FAHA (decd) began her academic career as a research assistant to Professor Manning Clark FAHA, where she was sent to Hobart to uncover the details of Governor Arthur’s policies for Volume 2 of the History of Australia. It was during this trip she discovered the 18 volumes of letters and reports on Tasmania’s Black War in the 1820s.  She would go on to research and write the ground-breaking book, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, which was republished several times.  More recently, Professor Ryan led the Colonial frontier massacres project, which, for the first time, charted, and provided details of more than 270 massacre sites between white settles and Australia’s Indigenous people since 1794.  Her painstaking and detailed research methodology ensured all Australian’s have access to a digital resource that is evidence-based.

 

Professor Claire Smith AO FAHA was awarded an AO for distinguished service to social and anthropological archaeology.  With Wiradjuri archaeologist, Kellie Pollard, Claire is Co-Lead of the Australian Hub for the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prof Smith has worked with Aboriginal people in the Barunga region, Northern Territory, every year since 1990, with Ngadjuri people since 1998, and with Adnymathahna people since 2020.  Professor Smith’s book, Indigenous Archaeologies (2004) broke new ground in the methodologies and theories to support inclusion of Indigenous perspectives within archaeological practices. She served as the President of the World Archaeological Congress from 2003 to 2013.

 

Emeritus Professor David Leslie Kennedy AM FAHA was recognised for his significant service to archaeology as a researcher and academic. With particular expertise in aerial archaeology, ancient landscapes and the Roman military, David has led aerial archaeological projects in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, illuminating our ancient past in hard-to-access areas. Among his accomplishments in the field of archaeology, his work on the classical city of Zeugma, long considered an ancient meeting place of East and West, which revolutionised our understanding of Roman history, military and settlements more generally.

 

 

Professor David Runia AM FAHA, a classicist, philosopher and expert in Jewish-Hellenistic and early Christian thought, who is currently IRCI Honorary Professor at the Australian Catholic University. Professor Runia was honoured for his significant service to tertiary education, and as an academic in the fields of humanities and social sciences. Elected to the Academy in 1999, David Runia is considered the leading authority on Philo of Alexandria (25BCE – 50CE), and has significantly contributed to our understanding of philosophy in the classical world, particularly Stoicism and Platonism.

 

 

Celebrated academic of visual art and author, Professor Emerita Margaret Plant OAM FAHA was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia for her services to visual arts and to art history. After writing her first monograph on the work of John Perceval, Margaret wrote art criticism for The Age and The Australian, and taught for over twenty years across Australian art schools, most notably at Monash University where she was a Professor of Visual Arts from 1982 to 1996. A prolific writer of more than fifteen books across her career, Margaret’s work chronicles Australia’s rich and active visual arts culture across the 20th-century. Her works rebuke cultural commentators, like Donald Horne, who asserted that Australia had very little art culture.

 

The late Associate Professor Philip Ayres OAM FAHA FRHistS (1944 – 2021) was recognised with a Medal of the Order of Australia, for his service to literature and to education.

Professor Ayres’ early work was in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period with editions of The Revenger’s Tragedy (1977), The English Roman Life by Anthony Munday (1980) and Ben Jonson’s political tragedy Sejanus (1990). It was as a biographer, however, that Ayres was best known, as “one of the best biographers this country has ever produced.”

Professor Ayres authored biographies of former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser; geologist and Antarctic explorer Sir Douglas Mawson; High Court Judge and diplomat Owen Dixon; former Archbishop of Sydney Patrick Francis Moran, among others.

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