John Timlin moved through theatre, publishing, politics, football and friendship with generosity, wit and an extraordinary instinct for helping other people realise their ambitions.
John Timlin, who died earlier this month – at 88, but implausibly to his legion of friends, because he seemed indestructible – led a marvellously full and rich series of lives. There was Timlin the theatrical entrepreneur – the glue that held the Melbourne Pram Factory together, the architect with Max of the Gillies Report, and without whose capacity to calm backstage civil war some of our most memorable stage and screen experiences would never have been brought to life. There was Timlin the literary editor and agent – the most caring and indefatigable any aspiring writer could ask for.
There was Timlin the punter and pub-going raconteur with an ever-amused, Lionel Murphy-like taste for Runyonesque low-life. There was Timlin the legend in his own lunchtime – with a taste (much encouraged in the early days by his great friend Mick Young) for long, liquid and intellectually lively conversations with ever-changing cohorts of friends from all walks and stations in life – Tories with personality not excluded. There was Timlin the lifelong Bulldogs tragic, with a family cat named Bontempelli: you could take the boy out of Footscray, but never Footscray out of the boy. And there was Timlin the benign homebody – contentedly pottering in his garden, and loving and loved by his wonderful wife Bridget McDonnell, who supported him through an endless series of health crises, and by Michael, and by Andrew and Mary and an ever-growing army of grandchildren and in-laws.
My earliest recollection of John goes back more than half a century, to the early 1970s, when he was a supporter – generous, as always, to a fault with the proceeds of his family-inherited weighing-machine business – of the fledgling radical magazine Dissent, with which a number of us were hoping to change the world (and in which, incidentally, appeared my own first-ever published article, arguing for the browning of a then very pink-skinned Australia). I think this might actually have been the beginning of Timlin’s decades-long career as the Friedrich Engels of Carlton, drawing on his very capitalist heritage to support a whole series of alarmingly left-wing causes.
Our most memorable family collaboration around Dissent magazine was the organisation of a fundraising wine bottling in the Ormond College grounds, which resulted – as a consequence both of the lousy quality of the cheapish red we’d bulk-bought, and our profound ignorance of the corkage discipline needed on a hot summer’s day – in almost every bottle exploding in people’s cars on the way home.
A certain similarly confident indifference to the potential risks involved in ventures of various kinds was a recurring characteristic of Timlin’s later entrepreneurial career, regularly having to stare down or try to survive, as he did, defamation suits, obscenity prosecutions or commercial catastrophe. The most harrowing, heartbreaking and bank-busting of the risks which did not come off was no doubt the staging of Manning Clark’s History of Australia: The Musical, a gloriously optimistic, hugely imaginative enterprise, which just didn’t find the audience it deserved. Maybe, in retrospect, the show had about as much chance of commercial success as a staging of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica on Ice. But what a testimony to John’s heart and generosity that he tried so hard to make it a success, and coped with such grace and resilience with its failure.
It was in Timlin’s role as a literary editor and agent, which preoccupied and sustained him intellectually in the last decades of his professional life, that I think all the most admirable elements of John’s character, as well as his extraordinary competence, were on display.
I can personally testify how brilliant his editorial instincts were when he undertook in 2014, as a friend, to read and comment on the 30-year-old Cabinet diary manuscript I was contemplating trying to publish – all 350,000 words of it. By then he had forgotten more about writing and publishing than most of us have ever learned, and it was with impeccable judgement on what should stay, and go, that he advised me, as we worked to reduce the word count to a manageable, and ultimately accepted by MUP, 120,000. And in a later project which deserves to be better recognised, John’s work with Patrick McCaughey on Fred Williams, he did another spectacular job in bringing an equally garrulous diarist to heel.
But it was not just technical skills that Timlin brought to his literary role. The tributes posted on his memorial website in recent days, by a legion of those whom he helped get their work into print, speak for themselves. They speak of his caring and encouragement, his unflappability, the generosity with which he gave his time, the honesty with which he gave his advice, and the indefatigability with which he pursued his writers’ interests. Lex Bartlem, whose book A Diplomatic Odyssey will be launched later this month, perhaps captured it best when he wrote in an email to me that John “turned my dream into reality”. What better epitaph could any of us crave than that: he helped turn people’s dreams into reality.
Timlin was not only a consummate professional but a consummate friend. I know perfectly well that my own family experience was not unique: the number and intensity of genuine friendships that John accumulated over his lifetime remains legendary. But for the last 25 or so years – since my wife Merran and I returned to civilisation in Fitzroy after years living away – we have treasured the friendship we rekindled with John and Bridget. Eating and drinking, of course, but also movie-going and football-watching and book-swapping and lamenting the current state of the world and Australian politics, and just hanging out – often, I must say with deep sadness, in a kind of menage a cinque with our dear mutual friend and neighbour Hilary McPhee, who also, distressingly, left us just a few days ago.
One lasting testament to that friendship came from John’s passion for gardening, in which I have about as much interest as Tarot card and palm reading, but which he shares with Merran. And that was his gift to us a few years ago, inspired by the wonderfully evocative poem written by Clive James, as his own life was closing in upon him, of a Japanese maple plant. Watching it now through our living room window as the seasons change, James’s lines will forever resonate:
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame …
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.
John Timlin, the irrepressible, irreplaceable, indestructible Timlin so many of us have known and loved for so long, has gone and left us. But his memory will be a flood of colours that lives on.
*This is an edited version of the tribute delivered at a memorial celebration for John Timlin in Melbourne on 15 October 2026.
Gareth Evans was a Cabinet Minister throughout the Hawke-Keating governments, including as as Attorney-General from 1983-84 and Foreign Minister from 1988-96; led the Brussels-based International Crisis Group from 2000-09; and was Chancellor of the Australian National University from 2010-19, where he is now Distinguished Honorary Professor. He co-chaired major international commissions on mass atrocity crimes and nuclear weapons, and has written or edited fourteen books, most recently Good International Citizenship: The Case for Decency and Incorrigible Optimist: A Political Memoir.