For Australians, the fundamental values seem to be sport, a fair go and mateship and they may be more closely intertwined than we commonly realise.  It is a paradox, therefore, that whereas the players are household names - and, increasingly, their coaches, too - the sports physicians and scientists are unknown and unvalued.  Yet those people are just as passionate and disciplined as the stars in their care.  David Garlick, quiet and publicity-shy though he was, fits the pattern entirely: dedicated to physical fitness, to the education of sports physicians and to the quintessential fair go - and a reflective, cultured man to boot.  A paradox in Australia.

He was born in Sydney in 1933 into a staunchly Salvation Army family.  A tendency to speak out against injustice had forced his officer grandfather to leave the British division of the Army and come to Australia via Canada.  David inherited this philosophy, together with a strong disposition towards physical endurance and self-demand.  His journalist sister, Grace, recalled that, soon after the family's move to Brisbane, she forced her 2-year-old brother to undertake his first marathon - a walk across the Victoria Bridge, from the city to West End.

After matriculating from the egalitarian Brisbane State High School, he began an Arts degree at Sydney University with music as a major subject - after all, following his years in Army bands playing and proselytising, he was an accomplished cornettist.  The next year he switched to Medicine (in his brother Frank's footsteps) but remained an enthusiastic member of the Evangelical Union which not even a mid-course Honours year in Pharmacology shook.  After graduation and a year's internship at Parramatta Hospital, in 1960 he went to Colin Courtice's world-renowned laboratory of experimental pathology at the Australian National University and residency in University House.  There his education really began, not just as a scientist but through an increasing association with the Libertarians, including intellectuals such as Barbara Gillam and Graham Pont in the Humanities School, for whom he became honorary medical consultant.  He remained, for many, the doctor to the anthropologists as he dealt with the real and imagined ailments of intense young scholars.  At University House he came under the intellectual and cultural influence of the Master, the redoubtable classical scholar Dale Trendall, whom he called Daley-boy and whose conversation at High Table he likened to a viva voce examination.

In 1963, his PhD work completed, he went to Prince Henry Hospital (Sydney) as Pathology Registrar, ironically promising an admonitory friend that he would be kind to his fellow medicos by pointing out when they are wrong or weak-headed. He quickly moved to a lectureship in pathology in the new faculty at the University of NSW, from 1964-66 before taking an ANU Travelling Fellowship, first to Duke University (USA) and then to the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), where he performed several elegant and important studies in capillary function, before returning to the school of Physiology & Pharmacology, UNSW, in 1970.

David Garlick's life changed radically in 1973 when he read Nikolaas Tinbergen's Nobel Prize Oration on Ethology and Stress Diseases.  At this point, his personal love of exercise - especially distance running and cycling - and his physiological researches had been converging and this encounter with Tinbergen's thought pushed him to study the remedial muscular techniques of the Australian pioneer, FM Alexander, whose methods had been praised by George Bernard Shaw and numerous others (including Tinbergen).  Before long - at a time of increasing professionalism and training demands in sport - Garlick realised the extent to which the treatment of sporting injuries had been neglected and, in 1984, with the participation of a diverse group of experts, he initiated a series of intensive week-long courses for medical practitioners.  These were enormously successful and drove his decision to expand them into a fully-fledged Masters Degree for clinicians.  Garlick threw himself unsparingly into these enthusiasms (and a later undergraduate degree in Health and Sports Science), travelling the world promoting his courses and attending specialist conferences.

He was just as committed to the extra-curricular activities of the University Staff Club and the Academic Staff Association (at local and national levels).  In 1992, when he was part of a picket line in a strike at UNSW, an obstreperous Dean called the police and Garlick was one of a group - later known as the Kensington Three - to be arrested.  He was proud of that as he was of his frenetic cycling with the paediatrician, Ferry Grunseit, and the legendary (or notorious) ophthalmologist-agitator, Fred Hollows - the Randwick Three.

Hollows used to tease him as the cat-strangler from the sheltered workshop but there was nothing sheltered about the way David Garlick lived his life and - quietly undaunted by adversity - denounced injustice.  Survived by his ex-wife, Marina, their daughter Mia and his long-term partner, Gwen Harrigan, he was, in the words of one of his ANU colleagues, the philosopher David Dockrill, the "best of men" who once said that the most useful advice that he ever received (from his PhD supervisor) was, Don't answer the telephone. Advice which David Garlick habitually ignored, to the advantage of innumerable others.

Associate Professor John Carmody
Friend and colleague of David Garlick