Institutions made enduringly better by his contribution

ROBERT (BOB) JOHN GARLICK AM October 21, 1937-February 3, 2023

The death of Bob Garlick AM marks the passing of an iconic Melbourne figure and personality whose influence reached across a wide spectrum of interests over 45 years from 1957.

Nourishing the two decades of Bob’s “retirement” years were his deep family commitments, his love of life, music, the cultural circles of Melbourne, his home-away-from-home in Paris, and the hospitalities of fly-fishing Eucumbene Cove.

Bob was born at Henty Private Hospital, Caulfield, in 1937 to Lou and Rosa Garlick (nee McLean), each of whom became a significant presence in political and educational circles. The eldest of three, Bob’s early childhood from 1940 to 1949 was in the arid Mallee country, around Mildura, at Meringur, 25 kilometres from the South Australian border.

Upon the family getting back to Melbourne, he secured a path to University High. By his final year there, 1955, from Form 6A, consecutive year UHS hockey team selection, he came under notice as a champion schoolboy athlete. (UHS record breaker over the mile, in the era of Ron Clark and John Landy.)

National service at Puckapunyal occupied much of 1956 before he started law at the University of Melbourne. Relishing undergraduate opportunities less exhausting than interval training for middle distance athletics, Bob became a founder, guiding influence in the Melbourne University Film Society, developing into a recognised voice in historical narratives covering the revival of Australian cinema in the 1960s.

He graduated in law, 1961, was admitted to legal practice 1964. After a stint in the Victorian Public Solicitor’s Office, Bob worked in London in an executive role campaigning for UK entry to the European Common Market, a cause with which he remained vociferously identified as a pan-European anti-Brexiteer, for the rest of his life.

Back in Australia in 1968, Bob was appointed executive officer of the Civil Air Operations Officers Association, the white-collar union representing air traffic controllers, a demanding, at times turbulent but productive leadership role for those he represented. In that capacity, Bob, as vice-president of the peak public sector Council of Australian Government Employees, also was a prominent figure in public sector union movement policy development and campaigns.

Not least was his fostering of trade union training initiatives, before during and after the Whitlam administration. After almost a decade in those roles, Bob was appointed as executive secretary of the Victorian Teachers Union, where he served until appointed as a commissioner of the Victorian Industrial Relations Commission in 1981.

A singular distinction attests to the significance and value of Bob’s contribution to the work of that tribunal, and related constructive inputs to regular conferences of commonwealth and state heads of industrial tribunals he occasionally attended. He was reappointed, by different political administrations, twice more to successors of the VIRC before finally going from office upon the final abolition of the VERC in 1996.