John Gollings AM (OH 1962) & Professor Rod Hicks AM (OH 1976), OHA Medallists, 2023
Haileybury’s annual Founders Day celebration and assembly was an historic one today with two prominent Old Haileyburians being honoured with the prestigious OHA Medal. On the 16th awarding of the Medal, John Gollings AM (OH 1962) and Professor Rod Hicks AM (OH 1976) received the OHA’s highest honour in recognition and appreciation of exceptional achievement to the community beyond expectation in their field of endeavour. Both are leaders in their fields and it was wonderful to hear their Haileybury and life stories surrounded by family and friends, peers and the Haileybury school community.
John Gollings is a photographer specialising in the built environment including the documentation of both ancient and modern cities around the world. He made his first photographs and received darkroom tuition at age eleven. By 1967 John had begun work as a freelance advertising photographer specialising in fashion. This work gradually broadened into large scale location work and travel accounts. As his contemporaries in architecture developed their practices, so the amount of architectural photography increased. While still shooting for leading graphic designers and advertising agencies, he is considered one of the most interesting of Australia’s architectural documenters. Characterised by strong formal composition but with a didactic, and wider, contextual viewpoint. John brings the technical resources and craft skills of a very experienced photographer to a discipline which often lacks either a point of view or the ability to express it.
John holds a Masters of Architecture from RMIT University. He works in the Asia Pacific region as an architectural photographer, much of the work involving long term cultural projects especially in India, Cambodia, China, Libya and New Guinea. He specialises in the documentation of cities, old and new, a lot of it from the air. He has had a particular interest in the cyclic fires and floods which characterise the Australian landscape. These have been documented with aerial photography. A recent project involved the re-photography of his own 1973 documentation of all the major buildings in Surfers Paradise using the original cameras and vantage points. He was the cocreative director of the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale, 2010-12 The exhibition was called Now and When and compared the existing state of Australian cities, with their counterpoint in the mining holes of the west, to the possibility of a radical, new, paradigm city of the future. All photographed from a helicopter in 3D or rendered in 3D using his studio’s CGI techniques. In 2014, John was made adjunct professor in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT University.
Rod is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Melbourne and at Monash University. He attended Haileybury College from 1971-1976, serving proudly as a Prefect and House Captain of Berthon. Professionally, he trained in medicine and surgery (MB BS with Honours) at Monash University and the University of Michigan before receiving a post-graduate Doctorate of Medicine from the University of Melbourne. After 30 years at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, where he was the inaugural Director of Cancer Imaging, Rod recently founded a research and development company. Using his expertise in oncological positron emission tomography (PET) imaging and therapeutic nuclear medicine in which he is an internationally recognised pioneer, he will seek to develop new diagnostic and treatment approaches for human diseases. As a clinical and laboratory researcher, he has published over 600 peer-reviewed manuscripts and is one of the world’s most highly cited nuclear medicine specialists, leading to frequent invitations as a speaker at major international meetings. Rod is the Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Imaging and an International Associate Editor of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. He was inducted as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science in 2015 and was the recipient of the 2019 International Cancer Imaging Society Gold Medal for contributions to oncological imaging and 2021 Peter E. Valk Memorial Award of the Society of Nuclear Medicine for lifetime achievements in clinical PET. In June 2023, he received the Saul Hertz Award from the Society of Nuclear Medicine for his contribution to the field of therapeutic nuclear medicine. Rod was awarded an Order of Australia Membership (AM) in the General Division in the King’s Birthday Honours of 2023.
