Robert John Solomon (2.11.31–14.6.24)

Abstract

Bob Solomon (Figure 1) was a foundation member of the Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG). He taught and researched in human geography at the University of Tasmania for over a decade from the late 1950s before serving a term in the House of Representatives as the Liberal member for the Hobart seat of Denison. Thereafter he pursued a somewhat peripatetic career mainly in the private sector and pursued his interests in urban affairs and writing.

Solomon was born in Condobolin in central western New South Wales (NSW) and went to primary school in Rous near Lismore and Aberdeen in the lower Hunter Valley as the family moved following his father’s appointments as a headmaster. He was a boarder at Barker College on Sydney’s upper North Shore from 1943 and completed his Leaving Certificate in 1948.

With an interest in geography kindled at school, he undertook a BA at the University of Sydney and graduated with first class honours in 1954. Led by Professor James Macdonald Holmes, regional studies were a major concern of the human geography lecturers John Andrews, Ken Robinson and Jack Devery. Solomon did his thesis on Broken Hill “as a geographical entity rather than a geological wonder” under the “sustained assistance and advice” of Macdonald Holmes and Robinson (Solomon, 1953), the latter influentially working on his own historical geography of Sydney (Robinson, 1952). Solomon had older Jewish family connections in Broken Hill but was brought up the Methodist Church (Clarke, pers comm, 2024).

Solomon was a keen student and president of the student geographical society in 1953. His record-breaking athleticism also singled him out, as it had at school from the age of 15. As a middle-distance runner, he competed at the representative level and was captain of the University’s Athletics Club, honorary treasurer of the Sports Union and a sports editor of the student newspaper Honi Soit. In 1955 after completing a Diploma of Education, teaching at Sutherland Intermediate High School and joining the Council of the Geographical Society of NSW, he left for Oxford University midway through the year as the NSW Rhodes Scholar. He was reputedly only the second geographer globally after Chauncy Harris two decades earlier to have that honour (Solomon, 2014). He had been encouraged to apply by Professor of Physiology Frank Cotton whose innovative methods influenced his athletic training (Solomon, 2007). His ambition was to become a “geographer cum educationist” (Sydney Morning Herald, 1954). At Wadham College, he continued his running career with his specialty the 440 yards (quarter mile). Academically, his tutor was Martyn Webb, later Professor of Geography at the University of Western Australia (Ryan, 2021).

Passing on the opportunity to work with Erwin Gutkind on his International History of City Development at the University of Pennsylvania after a short visit to the United States (Solomon, 2014), Solomon returned to Australia in 1957, got married and with an academic career in mind scanned for openings. He unsuccessfully applied for a position at the University of Adelaide but soon picked up a lectureship in geography at the University of Tasmania where the programme was led by Professor Peter Scott. He was later promoted to senior lecturer, but in retrospect, he felt that Tasmania was not a great move because it was remote from the mainland centres of action and felt Scott was more rival than mentor (Solomon, 2024). He did apply for other positions during his tenure including one at the Australian National University in 1966. Nonetheless, through a 12 year stay, he established his reputation as “one of the better-known of the surprisingly small number of historians and historical geographers attracted during the 1950s and 1960s to the study of urbanization in Australia” (Powell, 1978, p. 325).

Solomon’s teaching responsibilities were expansive and his publications similarly ranged widely taking in historical, urban, economic and electoral geography. His first paper was mined from his undergraduate thesis to analyse “the historical development of Broken Hill against its geographical environment” (Solomon, 1959, p. 181). Following were studies on the national spatial distribution of economic activity (Solomon, 1962); the port of Hobart (Solomon, 1963a, 1963b); historic parliamentary voting patterns (Solomon, 1969a); and historic settlement structures, property values and townscapes (Solomon, 1966, 1967, 1969b; Solomon & Goodhand, 1965). Shorter notes (e.g., Solomon, 1963c on manufacturing in Tasmania; Solomon & Dell, 1967 on the Hobart bushfires) and book reviews (e.g., Solomon, 1969c) also appeared. A small monograph on Tasmania for secondary schools, published after he had moved on, distilled the information and insight gathered during his Hobart years (Solomon, 1972). A Carnegie Corporation Fellowship to visit various North American universities in 1963 enabled first hand reconnaissance of contemporary trends including the drive to research productivity and the so-called “quantitative revolution” in full swing (Solomon, 1965).

The urban history publications were incremental markers towards Solomon’s major academic work—a doctoral dissertation on the historical geography of Hobart (Solomon, 1968). Solomon later translated the thesis into a popular-styled book, encouraged by examiner Professor Jim Rose from Macquarie University and with “constructive discussion” along the way with Ken Robinson and Martyn Webb. Its major intent was to describe and explain the evolution of Hobart to the mid-twentieth century through “the relationships of form, fabric and function, and the implications of their interplay for the future” (Solomon, 1976, p. viii). The result was a well-illustrated reworking and reordering of the PhD, although some chapters remain substantially intact and new components worked their way in, including an application of Kevin Lynch’s (1960) conceptualisation of mental maps. While a substantive resource, the focus remained physicalist rather than societal and tough going for a general readership (Powell, 1978).

Solomon was invited to join the IAG as a foundation member in 1958. He appears to have given his first conference presentation at an IAG Conference in Brisbane in May 1961, being allotted 50 min for presentation and discussion, which was “rather shorter than for some other papers” for the times. There was also no escaping the obligation imposed on all speakers to personally pre-distribute 100 copies of the “cyclostyled” paper on foolscap paper to all geography departments! This paper on the “Relative Concentration on the Australian Work Force” later appeared in Economic Geography (Solomon, 1962). In 1965, he was elected to one of the two vacant seats on the IAG Council, and the following year took over from Ted Chapman (who had completed his master’s degree as Sydney University during Solomon’s time) as Honorary Secretary. His major task was to administer a series of constitutional changes in 1968 “to obviate inconsistencies in nomenclature and to improve terminology” as well as overhaul financial arrangements and indeed amend the very processes for amending the Constitution. At the end of his term in 1969, his managerial efficiency and “guiding role in the Institute’s affairs” were formally acknowledged.

At the University of Tasmania Solomon maintained his involvement in sport. He won a University Blue but retired from athletics after captaining the Tasmanian team at the 1959 Australian Championships in Hobart. He kept playing rugby union as a winger and captained the university senior grade XV although his religious beliefs saw him opposed to Sunday competition. The 1962 Annual Report of the university’s rugby club described him as “still fastest man in the club and bears watching by any opposition; uses guile and speed to match his breaks.” He also became involved in administration of the club. In 1961, he captained a Hobart metropolitan rugby team to the Tasmanian state championship. In later life, he would return with a vengeance to veterans’ athletics and win both Australian (1992) and world masters titles (1994) for the M60 division at various distances.

Active in University governance and elected to Council representing sub-professorial staff, Solomon ineluctably became involved in the controversial Sydney Sparkes Orr case. Orr was dismissed by the University following revelations of an affair with a young female student. This was a hugely contentious case, already well under way before he arrived. Solomon got involved on behalf of the sub-professorial staff in petitioning the state governor for a “visitation” to help resolve the drawn-out saga. His position, qualified by acknowledging Orr’s personality, reputation and misjudgements, revolved around the University’s procedures depriving Orr of natural justice (Polya & Solomon, 1996; Solomon, 1994). It was not the most comfortable time for him personally within the University and the Geography department, with Scott also a designated negotiator in the Orr case (Kirkpatrick, 2003). His retelling based on institutional and personality politics is very different from Cassandra Pybus’s better known account (1993).

Solomon was also being drawn deeper into party political circles in Hobart. While his family background with its Broken Hill lineage was left of centre, he become involved in the Liberal Party probably while at Sydney University through his girlfriend and first wife Gillian Kirkland, who was a product of the elite girls school Kambala in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and a fellow geography student (Clarke, 2024). In Hobart, he became a member of the Liberal Party State Executive from 1961, a vice-president for the Liberal Party Denison Branch from 1965 and a member of the Liberal Party Federal Council from 1966. One motivation was a sense of Tasmania missing out on federal government expenditure compared to the mainland states (Solomon, 2024).

Married, 37 years old and with two daughters, Solomon successfully sought preselection at the national election in October 1969. It was a closely fought three-cornered race with a Labour and unendorsed Liberal candidate running for the seat of Denison, effectively half of Hobart west of the Derwent River. It was the only Tasmanian lower house seat not held by Labour. A campaign advertisement spruiked his credentials as “a young, energetic family man with ideal qualifications to represent you in Canberra … a Tasmanian you can trust, a man with vision and real understanding of what Tasmania needs” (Mercury, 1969). One of a handful of new Liberal MPs, he spent the next 3 years commuting to Canberra and residing at the Hotel Kurrajong in Barton during which he claims to have given more parliamentary speeches than any other member of the House of Representatives.

Alive to Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam’s pitch to urban voters on the hustings, Solomon started with Prime Minister John Gorton in urging the Liberal Party to take the initiative in government. He has recollected these efforts in two published papers (Solomon, 1982, 1988a). In 1972, he was pushing for “a national overview of population distribution, an economic assessment of metropolitan growth trends, an enquiry (preferably public) into the feasibility of alternative forms and locations of urban development, and an inclination to sustain established regional centres.” The target in the main should be “the national urban system” (quoted in Dawkins, 1972). He secured Gorton’s support for appointment of a Select Committee to consider the likely future pattern of urbanisation in Australia, but this lapsed when Gorton lost the Prime Ministership to William McMahon. However, as a member of the Liberal Party’s national subcommittee on urban development, he co-authored a report that recommended a new commission to investigate the feasibility of broader metropolitan and regional initiatives including expanded regional centres. This helped lead to the establishment of the National Urban and Regional Development Authority in the closing months of the Liberal Government’s 23 continuous years in office although McMahon most heavily relied for advice on Sir John Overall of the National Capital Development Commission.

At the federal election on 2 December 1972, Solomon lost his seat to his Labour rival, another University of Tasmania academic who brought a new focus on environmental concerns. A survey of Denison voters in the lead up to the election had uncomfortably revealed that the incumbent Solomon was less well-known in the electorate than his rival (Wood & Hunt, 1972). Attracting well-known senior colleagues on the campaign trail (Chipp, Fraser, Gorton, Snedden and Wentworth), the result came as a shock. He felt confident of recognition of his diligent work as a “useful sitting member” and blamed the loss somewhat facetiously on “dissident capitalists and fearless youth” (Solomon, 1973, p. 133) but more realistically on just being swept aside as part of the national “It’s Time” swing to Labour.

Post parliament, Solomon kept his Liberal Party contacts and had terms on both the NSW state executive alongside John Howard (a cool relationship with many policy disagreements) and Federal council. In 1978, he was mooted as a possible Senate candidate, but this never eventuated. In 1972, having resigned from the University and unemployed, he had to get a job and moved his family back to Sydney where his connection with the geographer-planner Tony Winter came good. He became a Director of Plant Location International (PLI), a leading consultancy of the time, where he remained until 1975. He retained a connection with PLI between 1978 and 1984 as Principal of R.J. Solomon Consultants (“adviser in politics and urban affairs”) overlapping between 1981 and 1984 as Managing Director of PLI. Also intertwined in these years was his time as a newly minted Barrister based in the prestigious Windeyer Chambers in Sydney’s Macquarie Street from 1983 to 1986. However, he had difficulty finding clients and candidly admitted this was not a major success due to not having full command of the legal ins and outs (Solomon, 2024).

In the late 1970s and 1980s, respectively, came two senior positions that took his skills of organisation, communication and networking in new directions. From 1975 to 1977, he served as executive director of the Advertising Federation of Australia and from 1987 to 1991 as the inaugural Director of Development at the University of NSW to lead and coordinate major fundraising efforts. This second immersion in University governance convinced him that the convention of academic-managers resulted in “perhaps even more venality than is typical of the public service” (Solomon, 1996, p. 215). Solomon’s recollections of both these positions were of unrealised potential checked by unadventurous high level leadership (Solomon, 2024).

Publications continued through these years. The early association with PLI produced a published report on industrial land use (Solomon, 1975). His own project Urbanisation based on his PhD appeared the following year (Solomon, 1976). A commissioned history for Broken Hill City Council, The Richest Lode, picked up where his BA thesis left off over three decades earlier. Written at the University of NSW in less than a year to meet the Council’s deadline for celebration of its centenary, it adopted a thematic rather than seamless comprehensive account (Solomon, 1988b). With a busy interplay of text, image and caption typical of Hale and Iremonger local histories of this era, the book also integrates three chapter-length contributions from specialist authors. Reviews were mixed and critical of an uneven and uncritical treatment, but historian Sandy Yarwood declared that “coming to local history via the study of geography, the author is particularly satisfying in his evocation of the spirit and texture of Broken Hill,” which prospered “in the face of environmental difficulty and government neglect” (Yarwood, 1988).

In 1992 at age 61, and beyond the age where he might have been able to snare an academic appointment, Solomon did not so much retire as spread his energies across various paid and unpaid roles: teaching geography at Higher School Certificate level for a time, consultancy on projects involving “the economic and political aspects of urban development,” committee work, private research and creative and opinion writing. There were two more books, both self-published. One, appearing in the lead up to the Sydney Olympics, compiled biographical studies of seven leading athletes whom he “knew and admired” as well as noting his own achievements (Solomon, 2000). The second, co-written with his son David, was an expression of exasperation at the inconvenience and complications of local traffic calming, starting with his own street in the inner Sydney suburb of Erskineville (Solomon & Solomon, 2005).

There were two other outlets for his creativity. Between 1995 and 2019, he was an occasional writer for the conservative public affairs journal Quadrant on the subject of badly written English (poor grammar, jargon, Americanisms, etc.). Always extracting humour from a haughty crankiness he recorded a litany of abuses from “people paid to use words as writers, broadcasters or commentators, but who don’t think or care about sloppy usage, the loss of shades of meaning, the wrong sound, and the increase of clichés as the range of vocabulary declines” (Solomon, 2019, p. 28). From 1997 to 2009, he was editor of Federal Gallery, the journal of the Association of Former Members of the Parliament of Australia. This pro bono position provided a platform for his editorialising on diverse subjects and contributing numerous topical articles, book reviews and obituaries for former members both Liberal and Labour. His interests ranged widely from corporate largesse to climate change scepticism, APEC to the Palestine crisis, Aboriginal rights to election advertising. There are reports on his travels around the world that convey a keen landscape sensibility and overlap with some of his contemporaneous talks to the Geographical Society of NSW’s Travellers Club which he convened for a number of years.

The most enduring capacity in which he sustained his interest in geography, planning and development was in supporting the activities of the Australian Institute of Urban Studies (AIUS). AIUS was established in 1967 as an independent forum and research funder supported by the Commonwealth Government and organised as a federation of state divisions. It captured the rising national interest in urban affairs at the time and pressing issues such as congestion, sprawl, energy, open space, housing, infrastructure and regional development (Freestone et al., 2017). Solomon’s involvement with AIUS spanned nearly half a century with his busiest time federally being in the 1980s serving as Chairman and for a time Acting Director. Institute finances were a constant problem, and increasingly so as state governments wound back their contributions, and after two decades, the Hawke Government eliminated the federal subsidy. Solomon (2024) felt that if he had not put in the time to keep it going, it would have folded earlier. The remaining State Divisions soldiered on for a time, but only the NSW operation is still functioning and that in no small way is due to Solomon’s enthusiasm, which had seen him at various times since the late 1970s serve variously as Chairman, Treasurer and Secretary up until suffering a debilitating stroke in 2021.

Bob Solomon had numerous callings. He was an academic geographer publishing in top-grade journals who joined a very small club of geographer-parliamentarians lending authority to his incursions into electoral geography (Spate & Jennings, 1972). He was a more than handy sportsman who ran and ran, breaking state records in senior athletics and earning the sobriquet of “the flying doctor” (Uniken, 1988). He was an inveterate writer with an extensive footprint. He was an organiser and doer involved in numerous community and professional organisations including the Institute of Australian Geographers and the Geographical Society of NSW. He was once described by a journalist as “rather suave, aloof and dour to those who don’t know him” (Solomon, 1973, p. 135). His correspondence and manner were often sharp and to the point leaving the impression of a pragmatist who did not suffer fools gladly.

Solomon’s political ideology was centre moderate with longstanding aspirations for a better society. He saw himself as a mix of conservativism and radicalism, valuing individualism over bureaucracy and admiring heroism be it in war, sport, culture, business or politics. He believed that “the right of individuals to benefit from their efforts” was “limited only by the need to protect the welfare of others” but was long discouraged by “the excesses of capitalism” (Solomon, 2009a, p. 2). His critiques were not on party lines, and he admitted to not being “a big fan” of Liberal Prime Minister John Howard’s government (1996–2007) with its divisive stances on Iraq, refugees, asylum seekers and universities (Solomon, 2009b).

Solomon perhaps found himself on the wrong side of the chamber when he entered parliament in the early 1970s with his interest in urban affairs, only to depart just before Whitlam’s expansive initiatives took flight. Regardless, he hoped for more parliamentarians of any political complexion committed to urban policy. “Continuity,” he concluded will likely only be assured “if there are people in the parliamentary decision-making process who understand the nature of urbanism and planning and are able to persuade others of the need for its political adoption. Only then will there be a better political understanding of how to organise the distribution of urban dwellers, functions and artifacts” (Solomon, 1988a, p. 29). Bob Solomon was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2010 “for service to urban affairs, particularly through research, public discussion and policy development by the Australian Institute of Urban Studies, to the Association of Former Members of Parliament, and to athletics.” Underpinning and surfacing through all of this was the imagination of a kid who first and foremost had “enjoyed geography at school” (Solomon, 2014).