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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 47| October 2000


Kenneth Myer Lecture, 2000

A man with a long vision, a man whose tragic death in an aeroplane accident left Australia very much poorer; a curious and ambitious man’. This is how Australian of the Year 2000, Sir Gustav Nossal, described the friend who gave his name to the National Library’s series of Kenneth Myer Lectures.

In delivering the seventh in the series, after such notables as Gough Whitlam, ‘Nugget’ Coombs, Elizabeth Reid, Professor John Mulvaney, Dr Davis McCaughey (who was in this year’s audience) and Jillian Broadbent, Sir Gustav eased into his three main topics—Aboriginal Reconciliation, the development of Australian regional health and global immunisation—via anecdotes about his lobbying days with Kenneth Myer on behalf of Australian medical research. Towards the end of the lecture he returned to anecdotes to show how it was possible to lobby effectively for an amalgam of government and corporate funds on a global scale in the fight against communicable disease.

Sir Gustav Nossal

As the Deputy Chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Sir Gustav’s views on the topic are well known. Perhaps less well-known, and seldom reported, is his view that Aboriginal people must reach into their own communities for leadership in formulating bold new solutions to entrenched problems like substance abuse and sexual violence. It is his belief that Aboriginal people themselves recognise and want this and he cites the efforts of Dr Evelyn Scott, the Chair of the Council, to empower senior Aboriginal women as community arbiters and educators.

While recognising the worrying, well-known health statistics for Indigenous Australians, Sir Gustav also referred to several initiatives taken over the last five years by the Federal Minister for Health, Dr Michael Wooldridge, in an attempt to reverse those statistics. ‘There are good news stories. They deserve equal time to the bad news stories, though they will not get it in the media,’ he said.

At the Kenneth Myer lecture

In the third and final part of his lecture, Sir Gustav outlined the aims of GAVI—the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation. The main public sector partners currently are the UN Agencies, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, and the World Bank; the private sector partner is chiefly the Gates Foundation—with Melinda and Bill Gates at the helm—which has contributed a generous A$2 million to the alliance. This public sector–private sector combination has attracted the attention and support of Rotary International and a further flow-on effect has ensured donations from the governments of countries such as Norway, Sweden, Holland and the United States.

The Kenneth Myer Lecture this year was arranged by the Friends of the National Library and held in conjunction with the State Library of Victoria at the Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne on 30 August. The event, which was followed by a reception, was booked out well in advance and attracted members of the Myer family, the general public and the National Library’s Victorian Friends.

A full transcript of the lecture will soon be available on the National Library’s web site.
—Lee Kirwan

Above left: Sir Gustav Nossal delivers the Kenneth Myer lecture

Bottom left: Pictured at the Kenneth Myer lecture are (from left) Bruce Miller, Meg Paul (NLA Council), Chris Awcock, Fran Awcock (Chief Executive Officer and State Librarian, State Library of Victoria), Sir Gustav Nossal, Jan Fullerton (Director-General of the National Library), Yvonne Cramer (Chair of the Friends of the NLA)

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