Remembering Professor Emma Johnston AO University of Melbourne Commemoration

I suspect no one would have been more excited that this year’s Australian of the Year was an astronaut than Emma Johnston. 

Her stars weren’t in the sky, they were in the deep.  

But the thought of another young scientist being recognized by her country, I think that would have made Emma’s heart sing. 

And she had a big heart. 

Of course she was brilliant, but universities are full of brilliant people. 

What made her stand out for me was something more than that. 

The things that made her innately Emma. 

That infectious energy. 

That smile.  And the kindness and goodness that radiated from it. 

The super sized ambition. And the super small ego. 

The way she cared about others, including the students she mentored, and helped reach their own stars. 

The way she loved my friend Sam to bits. 

And the way none of the awards, none of the accolades changed her, and none of the titles meant as much to her as mum. 

Sam, Amelia, Antonin, her mum Jan and brother Sam, and the whole family, I can’t begin to imagine the emptiness you must be feeling. 

You must miss her like oxygen. 

Everyone who loved her has lost their irreplaceable Emma. 

For those of us lucky enough to have worked with her I suspect we will never really know just how much we have lost. 

That’s because Emma was something, someone, still in the making. 

We still hadn’t seen everything she was capable of.  Or that she would do. 

She was robbed of that. 

So are we. 

I have this memory, sitting around a camp fire with Emma and her team at Garma last year. 

It’s late, and I am telling her about ideas I had. 

What I remember is how in her own gentle way she helped me understand why I was wrong, and then how she gave me a better idea. 

I bet lots of us have stories like this. 

She wanted nothing less than to change the world.  And in the process she changed us. Made us better. 

That’s what real leaders do. 

And Emma Johnston was absolutely that. 

And so for so many of us, that is the legacy that she leaves and that we gather together to celebrate. 

The multitude of PhD students she supervised and inspired who will be better and do more because of her. 

The even greater number of Horizon Fellowship recipients who will never meet her, but who would never have had that opportunity but for her.  

And all of us who were so lucky just to know her. 

It will be impossible to look at the ocean again and not think of our restless, vast and beautiful friend.