Professor Janet McCalman - Honours List

Professor Janet McCalman has been conferred the high honour of Companion in the Order of Australia (AC) in the 2018 Australia Day Honours List, announced last Friday. Janet is an eminent scholar in her field of Australian social history, with particular expertise and reputation in the history of health and medicine.  She is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of the University, and Professor of History in the Centre for Health Equity within the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health.

Janet is a superb communicator and scholar whose most notable accomplishments have been in making the richness of Australia’s social history accessible to other scholars, students of history and of the philosophy of science, medical students and postgraduate students of population health, and to the community at large.

Professor McCalman is highly regarded by our students.  She is well known for her almost charismatic enthusing of them in the lessons of history and their real importance for future practice in medicine and public health.

Over the last decade, with leading scholars from around the country, Janet has instigated a large and unique historical cohort study tracing the origins of Victoria and Tasmania’s earliest settlers and their later outcomes.  More recently, Janet and her colleagues have conceived an ambitious plan, in collaboration with the Victorian Registrar for Births, Deaths and Marriages, to computerise the entire Victorian record from the register since the colony was established, to make it available for researchers aiming to learn from Victoria’s rich history, through linkage to other sources of data.