Tribute to Dr Jacqueline Fox (1974–2025)

Susan Bartie

Jaqueline Fox was an exemplary writer of Tasmanian lives. She viewed biography as a ‘portal into the past at a human scale’ and sought to create engaging narratives that are ‘historically sensitive but also emphasise our shared humanity with people from different times’.¹ Her monograph of Van Diemen’s Land’s first chief justice, Sir John Lewes Pedder, issued a challenge to legal biographers to adopt new interpretive frames and to interrogate, rather than accept, common caricatures of judges.² Pedder had been depicted as ‘the solitary ascetic, the hanging judge, the puppet of government and a champion of the island’s Aboriginal people’.³ Jac’s historical sensitivity, her meticulous and extensive approach to the archive, her engagement with criminal processes within the penal colony and her interrogation of how convenient narratives were created to suit political aspirations, challenged these caricatures.

What emerged was a sensitive treatment of Pedder that acknowledged both his duty as a judge and his humanity. For example, she recounted how he was often in tears as he pronounced the death penalty. Jac’s work demonstrates what is lost when legal biographers repeat rather than interrogate common tropes and limit their perspectives to internal developments, ignoring the significance of the lives of colonial judges and officers to understanding the history of a penal colony. Put simply, of the many judicial biographies I have read, Bound by Every Tie of Duty is by far the best biography of an Australian judge. It should be considered essential reading for anyone embarking on a judicial biography project.

I met Jac while she was working on the book manuscript of Pedder’s biography. We met at a seminar where early career researchers pitched proposals for future ARC applications. I loosely sketched a group biography project and anticipated scepticism from the audience. Happily, Jac voiced a strong vote of confidence, even offering to help with the project. This meeting led to a range of collaborations in both teaching and research in which I came to know Jac as an intellectual giant as well as a generous and loyal friend. Like many historians, she was a polymath and agile in her work. Her interest in people and biography led to studies in psychology. She had a fascination for languages and loved to travel. Her vocabulary was impressive, and her prose was laudable. She worked on research projects across many disciplines and undertook copyediting for scholars and PhD students, substantially improving their work and contributions.

Given the opportunity, Jac would, of course, have injected much more elegance into this tribute. And I have no doubt that she would have made some wry comments about the expansiveness of my praise. She was kind and direct, joyful and funny. She adored her husband Wayne Brookes and her cats Molly and Maple. I am grateful that law students at the University of Tasmania got to learn from her teachings on history and biography, and I was extremely pleased when, without my prompting, several ANU law students chose to write about her work in a new ‘Law’s History’ course that I taught this year. Sadly, she did not complete her biography of emancipist writer and entrepreneur, Thomas Wells. I hope that one day someone will complete this project, and I am sure that her scholarship will continue to inspire students and scholars.

1. 1 Jacqueline Fox, ‘Historian, Biographer, Descendant’, Writing Lives Symposium, 22–24 June 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQj-cC1taFc&list=PLRHmA9_2oontPlifeJ44ezd8HFP-WDE_J&index=12.

2. 2 Jacqueline Fox, Bound by Every Tie of Duty—John Lewes Pedder, Chief Justice of Van Diemen’s Land (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2018).

3. 3 Pamphlet for book launch of Bound by Every Tie of Duty (2018), on file with the author.