Vale - St. George's College

The Little Dragon
Vale Sam Battle Hammond (1937)
From beginnings in
WA tin shack to
Melbourne University
EMERITUS Professor Sam Hammond (1937), whose three decades
as an educator at Melbourne University included tenure as Dean
of the Faculty of Arts in the mid-1970s, has died of pneumonia
at Lorne Hospital. He was 91.
His time at the University, where he began as a lecturer and
progressed as reader, professor and fi nally dean, was marked
by his intellectual rigour, creativity, administrative skills and
diplomacy.
Hammond, who loved statistics, became President of the
Australian Psychological Society when it was established as a
separate entity from the British society. “I like to watch numbers
dance, literally,” he said. “I like to follow a trail of numbers and
look at a pattern of things.”
This led to his ground-breaking research with a longitudinal study
of males that spurned many studies across a range of disciplines.
One of fi ve siblings born to Sarah (nee Ashworth) and William
in Kelmscott, Perth, his mother was from the bush settlement of
Gingin, while his father was an Englishman who arrived in Australia
as a stowaway and shipwreck survivor.
William had been apprenticed to an undertaker but hated the work
and when a bloated cadaver burst open in front of him, he fl ed
and secreted himself on a ship. After jumping ship in Australia, he
eventually became a fettler, married and had children. The family
lived at Gunyidi, a tin shack settlement on the railway line that
runs from Perth to Geraldton.
There was not even a primary school, so the young Hammond
would run alongside passing trains begging newspapers from
passengers to further his reading. Later, he was sent to an
aunt in Armadale, south of Perth, for schooling. There was very
24 The Georgian | December 2010
little money, and when he was aged 13 his father was sent to a
sanatorium, where he died of tuberculosis a year later.
His mother scrimped and saved and took in ironing and with
the help of family and a scholarship, Hammond got an education.
His sisters did not have the same opportunity.
In 1936, Hammond began an Arts Degree at The University of
Western Australia on a Hackett bursary. He lived at St George’s
College for the 4 years of his degree. An honours student, he found
academic life easy and was confi dent of obtaining a scholarship
to Cambridge or Oxford when World War II began.
He spent the war years in Melbourne and Tasmania as a Captain
in the Army’s Psychology Corps, and on a weekend stay in Lorne
he met Marjorie Lochhead, a city girl who loved to dance.
They were married in 1943.
In 1946, with the war over, Hammond was asked back to the
University of Western Australia, but his stay was short-lived.
He was recruited to the new Psychology Department at Melbourne
University.
About that time, he and Marj bought his 14-year-old brother,
Theo, to live with them and complete his schooling.
On retirement in 1983, he and Marj engaged Theo, by then
an architect, to design the house they built in the heathland
overlooking the sea at Aireys Inlet.
A year after moving in, it was a smoking ruin, burnt to the
ground on Ash Wednesday 1983. All their possessions were
gone. Undaunted, they rebuilt and continued to live there, with
Hammond continuing to work on his research every morning.
Hammond's son, Robert, died in 1999, and he is survived by Marj,
their son Ian, daughter Barbara, and nine grandchildren, and two
great grandchildren.
KIM NEUBECKER
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE AGE NEWSPAPER, 23 AUGUST 2010
Vale
Don Aitken (1942)
James Buttsworth (1956)
John Clarke (1944)
James Davies (1946)
Samuel Hammond (1937)
Guy Neville (1938)