Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to pay tribute to the life of Dr John Mark Beaton, who passed away in his sleep on 6 November 2018, at the age of 74. A successful anthropologist, John joined the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2001. As others have noted, he has not just been at the academy but was the academy. In my own experience with him, he was gentle and generous, warm and funny—somebody who brought life to an institution that could otherwise have been terribly stuffy.

At the memorial service for him at the Shine Dome, Bruce Chapman spoke about the fact that he was that rarest of men, an American who had fallen in love with cricket, as it happened when he walked passed the nets at the South Oval in the 1970s, when he was at the Australian National University doing his PhD. Glenn Withers acknowledged John with a posthumous honorary membership as a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. I imagine it was an honour that John would have treasured almost as much as his 2014 life membership at the ANU Cricket Club. He'll be missed dearly not only by us, his friends, but also by his children, Laura Beaton and Daniel Beaton, and his house-wolves, Rusty, Walter and Odie.

Vale, John Beaton.

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