Vale John Landy AC CVO MBE (M'48)
Monday, 28 February 2022
The Geelong Grammar School community remember John, who passed away on Thursday 24 February at his home in Castlemaine, fondly and gratefully as an exceptional student (1945-48), an inspirational staff member (Corio and Timbertop 1954-57), an active Old Geelong Grammarian (OGG Committee 1953-57) and Fellow of the Old Geelong Grammarians Association - its highest honour. We celebrate John’s remarkable career as an athlete, teacher, scientist and naturalist with a lifelong interest in beetles and butterflies.
 

John joined Geelong Grammar School in 1945 and was Captain of Manifold House in 1948. He served on the staff at Timbertop and Corio from 1954 to 1957. During that time he was also one of the world’s outstanding middle distance runners – he joined the Timbertop staff in September 1954, less than four months after becoming the second man to break the four-minute mile (in a world record time that stood for more than three years).

An avid naturalist who would later write books on natural history, John passed on his love of nature to Timbertop students, who developed a vast and varied insect collection, with rare specimens sent to the Museum of Victoria (John’s own butterfly collection of nearly 10,000 specimens was donated to the Australian Museum in Sydney last month). He hiked and ran crossies with the boys, using the mountainous terrain as a training ground for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, where he took the Olympic Oath on behalf of all competitors and won a bronze medal in the 1,500 metres. “Timbertop gave me a great sense of what can be done in terms of education; getting people to see things in a different light,” he said.

John's work as a naturalist resulted in the discovery of a butterfly, the book Close to Nature, and service on public bodies such as the Land Conservation Council and Greening Australia (as Victorian president) and as chairman of the Meat Research Corporation and the Wool Research and Development Corporation. In 2001, he became Victoria's 26th governor; a role he held until 2006.

In 2014, John was featured in the School's 100 Exceptional Stories project (video above) to coincide with 100 years of the Corio Campus. In his profile of John, author Anson Cameron (M'78) concluded "speaking to John Landy, one can't help but fear some rare evolutionary distillation of grace might ebb from the world with his passing.”