Colin Mackerras

Colin Patrick Mackerras was born in Sydney on 26 August 1939, the twin of Malcolm Mackerras, who became one of Australia's best known election analysts. The twins were the youngest of seven children of Alan Mackerras, an electrical engineer, and Catherine Mackerras (nee MacLaurin). The family had moved to semi-rural Turramurra on Sydney's North Shore in 1933 and was Catholic.

The siblings included the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras (1925-2010), the barrister and Democratic Labor Party activist Neil Mackerras (1930-1987), Alastair Mackerras, later headmaster of Sydney Grammar School, and sisters Joan and Elizabeth. Colin attended St Aloysius College and Sydney Grammar School. He later said a surgeon grandfather had left money for the children to be educated overseas, which helped make his Cambridge years possible.

Mackerras credited his mother with the decision that shaped his life. After he left school she heard of a scholarship to study Asian languages in Canberra and encouraged him to apply, telling him China would be very important to Australia's future. He learned Mandarin and graduated BA from the University of Melbourne in 1961 and BA with honours from the Australian National University in 1962.

He then followed an elder brother to the University of Cambridge, where he worked on the history of the Tang dynasty and took a Master of Letters in 1964. After his first stay in China he returned to the ANU and completed a PhD in 1970 on the social history of Peking opera, which he described as probably the first doctorate on Chinese opera awarded by an Australian university.

In August 1964, after a friend at Cambridge passed on his name, Mackerras was hired as a foreign expert teaching English at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute, now Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU). He and his wife Alyce lived at the Friendship Hotel, and their son Stephen was born in Beijing in February 1965. He remembered students from worker and peasant families who were hardworking and serious-minded, and a city with few cars, many bicycles and crowded buses. They left in September 1966 as the Cultural Revolution was beginning; many of his students became Red Guards.

From 1966 to 1973 he was a research scholar and research fellow in the Department of Far Eastern History at the ANU. When Griffith University was founded in Brisbane with a strong Asian studies mission, he was one of the first people approached, and on 1 January 1974 he became Foundation Professor of Modern Asian Studies. He chaired the School of Modern Asian Studies from 1979 to 1985, headed it in 1988-89 and again from 1996 to 2000, and co-directed the Key Centre for Asian Languages and Studies run by Griffith and the University of Queensland from 1988 to 1996. He retired in 2004 and became Professor Emeritus.

He returned to teach at BFSU many times (including 1986 and several stays between 2005 and 2012), was an honorary professor there from 2007, held a chair professorship at Renmin University of China in 2011-13, and directed Griffith's Tourism Confucius Institute from 2011 to 2013. He helped set up exchanges between BFSU and Griffith. He served as president of the Chinese Studies Association of Australia (1991-93) and of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (1992-95).

Mackerras wrote or edited more than 40 books and nearly 200 scholarly papers. His early work was on Chinese theatre, beginning with The Uighur Empire (744-840) according to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1968) and The Rise of the Peking Opera, 1770-1870 (1972), followed by The Chinese Theatre in Modern Times (1975), The Performing Arts in Contemporary China (1981), Chinese Theater: From Its Origins to the Present Day (1983), Chinese Drama: A Historical Survey (1990) and Peking Opera (1997). The theatre scholar Liu Siyuan, writing in Asian Theatre Journal in 2011, called him a founder of the field and a successor to A.C. Scott.

He was also a leading Western authority on China's ethnic minorities, with China's Minorities: Integration and Modernization in the Twentieth Century (1994), China's Minority Cultures (1995) and China's Ethnic Minorities and Globalisation (2003). On how the West sees China he wrote Western Images of China (revised edition 1999) and Sinophiles and Sinophobes (2000). He edited The New Cambridge Handbook of Contemporary China (2001) and Dictionary of the Politics of the People's Republic of China (1998), and co-wrote From Fear to Friendship, on Australian policy toward the People's Republic from 1966 to 1982. His book China in My Eyes was published in Chinese translation in Beijing in 2013.

Mackerras married Alyce, who went with him to Beijing in 1964 and was pregnant during their first stay; she was accompanied to hospital by their colleague Zhang Hanzhi, who later became a diplomat. Alyce Mackerras died in June 2021. The couple had five children. Their eldest son Stephen was born in Beijing in 1965, and a daughter, Veronica, learned Chinese and shared her father's interest in the country. By 2023 he had eleven grandchildren, and in 2019 he took two grandsons to Shanghai, Huangshan and Wuyishan. He lived in Brisbane, loved Chinese opera, and spoke fluent Mandarin into his eighties.

Mackerras believed that understanding China was essential for Australia and for world peace. He argued that sinology should cover modern as well as ancient China and its minorities, not only the Han. He liked to cite the Ming voyages of Zheng He as an example of exploration without conquest, and he called the idea of a China threat to Australia fundamentally wrong. He praised China's record on poverty reduction and said the leadership of the Communist Party of China had given the country stability that many others lacked.

He was critical of Western media coverage of China, which he said assumed it was all China's fault, and he described Australia's relations with China as damaged in part by excessive dependence on the United States. He was also, in his own words, still concerned about pollution and remaining poverty in parts of China.

In his later years Mackerras's public defence of Chinese government policy, especially on Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, made him a controversial figure in Australia. He dismissed allegations of genocide against the Uyghurs as nonsense after a 2018 visit to Kashgar and appeared in Chinese state media programmes rejecting human rights criticism over Tibet. Critics, including activists and other China watchers, accused him of being too close to the Chinese Communist Party and of acting as an apologist for it. Asked about this in 2023, he told Xinhua that he had been accused of being too pro-China, adding: "They haven't stopped me. I don't care really."

Gold Citation, Media Peace Prize, United Nations Association of Australia (1981). Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1999). Queensland State Finalist, Senior Australian of the Year (2005). Officer of the Order of Australia (AO), Queen's Birthday Honours (2007). Honorary professor, Beijing Foreign Studies University (2007). Chinese Government Friendship Award (2014). Special China Book Award (2015 or 2016; Chinese reports and Griffith list different years). He was mentioned by President Xi Jinping in his November 2014 address to a joint sitting of the Australian Parliament as a bridge between the Australian and Chinese peoples.

Mackerras was one of the founders of Asian studies at Griffith University and a central figure in building Chinese studies in Australia from the 1970s onward. The Australian of the Year citation praised him as a tireless advocate for Asian studies and languages in Australian schools and universities and a major inspiration for Australia's move towards Asia. His books on Peking opera and on China's minorities remain standard references, and generations of Australian students first met China through his teaching and textbooks. James Laurenceson of the Australia-China Relations Institute called his death a very sad day for Australia-China relations, for Australian studies in China and for Chinese studies in Australia. His legacy is also debated: admirers saw a bridge between two peoples, while critics saw an uncritical defender of Beijing.

Colin Mackerras died of illness in Brisbane on the evening of 8 October 2026, aged 87, according to China News Service, which said members of the Australia-China Friendship Society confirmed the news. His son Stephen told family and friends that his father had lived a wonderful life. Funeral arrangements were still being made at the time of the first reports. Only months earlier, on 6 June 2026, he had given a keynote address at the Australia-China Friendship Society's national conference and 75th anniversary celebration.