Obituary: Distinguished Professor Jamie Barrie Kirkpatrick PhD, DSc, AM (1946–2024)

Jamie (James) Kirkpatrick’s death on 21 October 2024, aged 78, is an irreplaceable loss for Australian geography. Jamie’s scholarly contributions sprawl from cities to wilderness, biogeography to culture, and ecology to politics. A recent Festschrift in this journal documents Jamie’s achievements (Turton, 2023). We thus touch on only a few highlights before offering a personal reflection on an intensely original life (Figure 1). Spanning 53 years at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) and over 400 academic publications, Jamie’s leadership in science, policy, and public debate has been recognised in numerous awards including, for his “energy, intellect and integrity,” the Eureka Prize for Environmental Research (1997), the Order of Australia (2003), the Gold Medal of the Ecological Society of Australia (2009), and the titles of Doctor of Science (2006) and Distinguished Professor (2009). He was elected by his peers as president of the Institute of Australian Geographers and of the Ecological Society of Australia. Jamie has left an indelible mark on conservation science. From the reserve optimisation method he designed (Pressey, 2002), to the scores of scientists and practitioners he trained, to the advisory boards on which he served, Jamie’s influence is embedded in Australia’s wild and world heritage landscapes. Jamie also helped lift the conservation gaze beyond protected areas to encompass farms, production forests, urban greenspace, and private gardens, even roadsides and cemeteries. Undergraduate teaching was, for Jamie, a seamless extension of his curiosity and love for nature, human, and otherwise. He designed a bespoke degree in conservation underpinned by his respect for geography’s interdisciplinarity. Allergic to fads in pedagogy, Jamie taught first year geography as well as his signature field-based units into his 70s, sparking young adult minds with an ease untroubled by age. Jamie’s passion, moral integrity, and indefatigable will were on remarkable display in the months before his death. In early 2024, Jamie declined last-ditch treatment for the cancer first diagnosed in his 60s, unwilling to become a radioactive danger to others. He then set on a plan to tie up a lifetime of writing, research, and teaching. To execute this plan, Jamie arrived early in the geography corridor each day until 2 weeks before his death. He stopped working on the first morning he needed help to climb the stairs to his office, a few days before a planned launch of three books. Arriving at the launch—dubbed weeks before a “pre-wake” by Jamie—in a wheelchair, Jamie addressed a multitude of past and present colleagues and students gathered from around the country in Hobart’s Queens Domain, a green space whose ecological renewal owed much to Jamie. Physically diminished and sheltered by an umbrella, as he often was in Tasmania’s wilderness, Jamie was compelling. His speech was a typically self-deprecating fusion of intelligence, wit, and love, punctuated with his inimitable laugh. I, as well as being a lover of the unmodified parts of the mountain, have a devotion to Australian rules football. … [M]odifications [to football] that might be construed as attractive to tourists, such as compulsory tongue kissing after goals, would destroy the spiritual essence of the game and subtract meaning from the lives of a substantial minority of Tasmanians … Whether the analogy … is perfect or not, our democratic processes rely for their continued existence on respect for the strong feelings of all large groups in the population, and there is no denying the strength and breadth of feeling against the cable car. (Kirkpatrick, 2024a, p. 39) Phantasms and the Family (Kirkpatrick, 2024b) is part autobiography and part confessional, centred on rare moments in which time and memory blur the line between life and death. Jamie’s motivation, he reported, was to leave the afterworld “as a bit of a surprise. Oh! Who would have thought? Beezlebub sits on the right hand of …” (Kirkpatrick, 2024d). Sightings of Jamie’s ghost in the UTAS geography corridor will be welcomed. Ecology Underfoot: The Fine Fabric of the Rest of Nature (Kirkpatrick, 2024c) is a photo-essay homage to the down-trodden worlds missing from usual depictions of nature. Jamie explained the book’s origin as an obsession that began at his kitchen table, where a William Morris print led him to Aboriginal paintings and the realisation that both are “plans of our landscape” as seen by a foot. An effort to communicate “that might lead to a bit more enthusiasm about … keeping nature on the planet” (Kirkpatrick, 2024d), Ecology Underfoot reflects Jamie’s lifelong suspicion that his love of life might be contagious. Another Renaissance man, John Ruskin, observed that “the highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.” Jamie has become immortal through his writings, his teaching, his example, and his inexhaustible generosity of spirit to those of us lucky enough to cross his path and to the rest of nature, big and small.

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