Barbara Falk
1910 - 2008
Barbara Falk was a pioneer in social justice, in multi-culturalism, and above all in education. Through her work at Mercer House and the University of Melbourne, she advanced teaching in Victoria at both secondary and tertiary levels. She wrote major reports on multi-culturalism in education, several historical studies and a short memoir of her childhood (in The Half-Open Door: sixteen modern Australian women look at professional life and achievement, edited by Pat Grimshaw and Lynne Strahan [1982]).
Daughter of the Hon Harold Edward and Freda Cohen, she won a non- resident scholarship to Janet Clarke Hall in 1929. She was proud to have studied with Sir Ernest Scott at the University of Melbourne School of History, where she wrote an Honours Thesis on the “History of Utopian Thought:” Sir Ernest was unfazed at a project which would normally require several PhDs! Barbara took first!class Honours in History and was awarded the Dwight Prize in history and political science.
She left for the UK in 1933. As a scion of a distinguished Melbourne family, she satisfied her family’s expectation by being presented at court. As an ardent believer in social justice, she satisfied her conscience by working at the East End Settlement House run by the legendary Anglican priest, Father John Groser.
Barbara was enrolled at Girton College, Cambridge, but in the face of social injustice and of Hitler’s coming to power, she could not remain in what seemed an ivory tower. She transferred to the London School of Economics to undertake a PhD on utopian thought with Harold Laski, the great Labour political theorist.
At the LSE, she met her husband to be, the philosopher Werner David Falk, one of many German Jewish scholars forced to take refuge in the UK. In 1937, he accepted a position as Lecturer in Philosophy at New College, Oxford, and Barbara followed him, abandoning her PhD. At Oxford, she involved herself in the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (now the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics), formed to support German refugee scholars. She later wrote a fine study of the Society (and of her own role in it): Caught in a snare: Hitler's refugee academics, 1933-1949 (Melbourne History Department, 1998).
At Oxford, she completed a Diploma of Education and worked as a psychotherapist while a student in the Department of Psychology. In the summer of 1940, she found herself taking a group of Oxford children to haven in North America, dodging torpedoes and keeping up morale. She profited from her stay in the US to study at the Gesell Clinic of Child Development at Yale. On her return to Oxford, she taught at the Oxford Child Guidance Clinic.
In 1950, David Falk accepted a Readership in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. The couple came to Melbourne and Barbara became Principal of Mercer House, the independent schools’ centre for teacher training. In 1960 she was appointed Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Melbourne and, in 1968, Foundation Chairman (later Director) of the University’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education. In 1976, after retiring from the Centre, she began a new career as a Principal Fellow at the University of Melbourne School of History. That new career lasted thirty years and led to several historical studies.
No other home: an Anglo-Jewish story 1833-1987 (Penguin, 1988) presented an intertwined narrative of her grandparents’ four families, asking about identity and inclusion: her great grandfather, the Victorian MP Edward Cohen, was a leading supporter of the Education Act of 1872. She made his creed her own: “Let us,” he argued, “send all our children to the same schools, irrespective of creed or country, and let them be brought up in that creed of kindliness and friendliness which will make them forget that their other creeds divide them.”
Her last book D.J.: Dorothy Jean Ross 1891-1982 (Melbourne University Press, 2000), studied the charismatic headmistress of Merton Hall, whose progressivism and life with another woman led to tensions in the conservative Australia of the 1950s. Barbara had provided a refuge for Miss Ross at Mercer House after she left Merton Hall.
In 1980 Barbara received the first doctorate of education (honoris causa) awarded by the University of Melbourne. In 1981 she was appointed a member of the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs. In 2005, she was elected a Fellow of Janet Clarke Hall in recognition of contribution to education.
Barbara Falk had three children: her daughter Dr Anne Lloyd Thomas, who lives in England; elder son John Falk, who died in 2007; and younger son Professor James (Jim) Falk, who is Director of the University of Melbourne Centre for Science, Innovation and Society. She was a long-standing Parkville resident and founder of the Parkville Association.
Throughout her life, Barbara drew strength from the social teachings of Judaism, the silence of Quakerism, and the liturgy of the Anglican Church. The ritual of the Anglo-Catholic Mass and the quiet of the Quaker Meeting were both ways to “take one beyond self,” she said. It is thus fitting that her funeral service was uniquely ecumenical: held at St Carthage’s Catholic Church in Parkville, presided over by Catholic priest Michael Elligate, it was largely secular in nature, but ended with a committal by Anglican priest James Brady, using the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
-Charles Sowerwine.