Dr Andrew Lemon, VRC Historian

Rotary Melbourne Podcast

Andrew Lemon, LittD, MA, BA Hons (Melb), FRHSV Historian With the 2008 completion of his trilogy The History of Australian Thoroughbred Racing, Andrew Lemon is acknowledged as the foremost expert on the history of racing in this country. Andrew has enjoyed a long career as a professional historian, has published books on topics ranging from schools, sport and shipwrecks to biography and local history, and has won national literary awards. He is consultant historian to the Victoria Racing Club. For his body of published work, the University of Melbourne awarded him the degree of Doctor of Letters in 2005. He has served on Victoria’s Heritage Council and the State Library of Victoria Board, and is immediate past-president of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. He edited the Victorian Historical Journal throughout the 1990s. Andrew in television consulted for and appeared on the 2000 ABC series, The Track and more recently on episodes of Who Do You Think You Are for SBS. Andrew was a major contributor to such works as The Story of the Melbourne Cup, They’re Racing, The Australian Dictionary of Biography, The Oxford Companion to Australian Sport, Encyclopedia of Melbourne and Sport in Victoria. Andrew was awarded a John H. Daniels Fellowship to the National Sporting Library and Museum in Virginia USA in 2012. His latest book, The Master Gardener, (Hardie Grant Books 2018) is a major biography of T.R. Garnett, headmaster, Age nature writer, creator of the renowned Garden of St Erth. The book was recently longlisted for the 2018 Waverley (NSW) Nib Literary Award.