Colin Mackerras, an Australian scholar of China and a Lifetime Honorary Professor of Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) since 2007, died on Oct. 8 in Brisbane. He was 87. Mackerras was also a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a professor emeritus at Griffith University.
Colin Mackerras with BFSU students, 1964–1966.
Mackerras and his wife, Alyce, came from Cambridge in 1964 to teach for two years in the English Department of what was then the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute. Over the next six decades he returned to China more than 70 times, dozens of them to BFSU, where he taught, lectured, attended conferences, and supervised theses.
In the early 1980s, he and Professor Wang Zuoliang set up an exchange between BFSU and Griffith University, the first such program between China and Australia. Through it, dozens of Griffith students lived and studied in China, and more than 20 faculty from what is now the School of English and International Studies went to Australia as visiting scholars. With Professor Hu Wenzhong, Mackerras also founded BFSU’s Australian Studies Center, China’s first, where the field took root in the country.
Mackerras with colleagues from BFSU’s Australian Studies Center, 1997. Front row, from left: Du Xuezeng, Colin Mackerras, Hu Wenzhong, Xia Yuhe. Back row, from left: Yu Zhiyuan, Ronald Keith, Veronica Mackerras, Li Youwen, Wu Zhenfu.
Mackerras wrote or edited more than 40 books and nearly 200 articles on China-Australia relations, Western images of China, Chinese history, ethnic minorities, and Chinese theater, giving readers abroad a grounded account of China. He received the Friendship Award, China’s highest honor for foreign experts, in 2014, and in 2018 was named one of the most influential foreign experts of China’s four decades of reform and opening up. In 2019 he attended a reception for foreign experts marking the People’s Republic’s 70th anniversary and told the world how far the country had come. In 2024, BFSU celebrated 60 years since his arrival with a forum on China-Australia exchange and created the Colin Mackerras Chair in Australian Studies.
BFSU marks the 60th anniversary of Mackerras’s first teaching post in China, June 2024. From left: Sherman Xia, Caitlin Byrne, Sarah Todd, Colin Mackerras, Carolyn Evans, Jia Wenjian, Zhang Jian, Li Youwen, Li Maolin, Dou Wei.
Into his eighties, he never lost his attachment to BFSU. On each visit he urged young scholars to take up intercultural research and pushed for continued dialogue between Chinese and Australian academics. He worked until the final year of his life and stayed hopeful about China-Australia relations, convinced that mutual understanding and cooperation could change the world.
Mackerras at BFSU, where he lectured in June 2023. From left: Li Jianjun, Li Youwen, Sun Youzhong, Colin Mackerras, Michael Dutton, Chen Hong.
The BFSU community mourns his death and has sent condolences to his family. The bridge he built between China and Australia, through a lifetime of helping each understand the other, will not fade. BFSU will remember him and carry his work forward.
