Gordon Smith was a modest man whose life revolved around his family, his church and occupational medicine. He was born in the Sydney suburb of Mosman of partly English and partly Scottish ancestry – the son of Horace Alexander Smith, and Ivy Isabel née Beattie. He was aged just 15 years when his father, who was New South Wales Government Statistician and sometime editor of The Official Year Book of New South Wales, died. Despite this early setback, only two days after the funeral, he sat for a scholarship examination in which he achieved a near maximum pass. This enabled him to complete his education at Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore) and Sydney University. After undertaking his Residency, he was appointed as Assistant Pathologist at Sydney Hospital. Whilst there he met and married Ruth Anschütz, a nursing sister in the Pathology Department, whose father had been a pre-World War I German consular officer in Sydney. They embarked on a life of mutual support and empathy, which was to continue unblemished until her death some fifty-five years later.

After a brief spell as a pathologist in Tamworth, Smith returned to Sydney to join the New South Wales Department of Public Health, becoming Director of the Department of Industrial Hygiene in 1944 in succession to Dr Charles Badham whose work on pneumoconiosis he greatly admired. In 1949, he moved to Sydney University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine where he was appointed as foundation Director of the Department of Occupational Medicine. He held the title of Senior Lecturer, for many years occupying the only academic position in that discipline in Australia and continuing in his university role until his retirement in 1975. Throughout that period, he taught courses for undergraduates and postgraduates, establishing the course for the University’s Diploma of Occupational Health. He undertook research in several areas of occupational health, including pneumoconiosis, toxicology, ergonomics, mental health and radiation. One issue that particularly concerned him, however, and which he emphasised for several decades in his lectures, was the hazardous nature of asbestos mining. For long he seemed to be preaching to the deaf on this topic. Eventually his efforts bore fruit when, towards the end of his career, his contentions received widespread acceptance. Thereafter he found that his services were in regular demand to give evidence on behalf of damaged employees, in the court cases that they launched against their previous employers.

His administrative career was as full as were his clinical and teaching ones. In 1943, he commenced a remarkable 33-year-long term as a member of the Occupational Health Committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council, fulfilling the roles of secretary for 20 years and chairman for six. He also served on the Safety Standards Board of the Standards Association of Australia for 28 years. In 1948, the NSW Joint Coal Board Medical Bureau was established in consequence of work that Badham and he had started. In 1952, he was foundation secretary, and later president, of the Section of Industrial Medicine of the New South Wales Branch of the British Medical Association, from which the Australian (later Australian and new Zealand) Society of Occupational Medicine developed with his encouragement in 1969. In 1953 he was appointed as medical officer at the Emu site in Central Australia when atomic weapons testing was undertaken. As such, he wrote the Radiological Safety Orders and the Instructions for Protection of Personnel working in Contaminated Areas Following Explosion of Atomic Weapons for the Woomera experiments. In effect, his task was to oversee the safety of the British arrangements on the Australian Government’s behalf. As such, he was in the first party to enter the site following the detonations. From 1959 to 1973, he was the Australian Government Delegate to the International Labour Organisation at its annual meetings in Geneva, and also served on the Expert Advisory Panel of the WHO for a period of 25 years, travelling widely internationally. In 1967, he was appointed as Consultant in Occupational Health to the RAAF, with the rank of Group Captain. In 1984, The Australian College of Occupational Medicine granted him an Honorary Fellowship at its inaugural meeting, and, in May 1994 at the age of 83 years, he was admitted as an Honorary Fellow of The Australasian Faculty of Occupational medicine of the RACP.

Active as were his interests in medicine, few who knew him there were aware of the depth of his other involvements. Upon returning to Sydney from Tamworth, he commissioned the architect, John Brogan, to design a Tudor-style home. He had this built in Bushlands Avenue, Gordon. There, he and his family (his wife; his son, Warwick – a surgeon; and his daughter, Elizabeth – a medical records librarian) lived among gardens in which he enjoyed pottering until his vision failed a year before his death. Indoors, he devoted himself to music. As a boy, he had learned to play the organ in his school chapel. Thereafter, he regularly played the fine piano that he had inherited from his mother, displaying a talent for improvisation that served him well even in his final state of severe blindness. His knowledge of classical music was profound and this he turned to practical purpose in the encouragement of the musical life of St John’s (Anglican) Church, Gordon. He was responsible for the adoption of several beautiful musical settings for services at the church. For many years, he served a churchwarden, as a parochial nominator, and as a member of Synod. Perhaps almost in reaction to the Presbyterian aspects of his ancestry, his churchmanship was quite a bit higher that was then fashionable for Sydney Anglicanism – a tendency that gave him a certain devilish delight. His knowledge of ecclesiastical garments, architecture, and practices matched his knowledge of church music. He made several generous commemorative gifts to beautify the church and enhance the ceremony.

Gordon Smith was a humble man, a person who achieved quietly, loving his home and family, seeking to benefit people by promoting safety in their workplaces, and to enhance their enjoyment of life by promoting beauty in the church services that they attended. He combined the precision of mind of his statistician father, with the balance fairness of his Scottish ancestors, and a love of decorous behaviour, such that throughout his life, ‘those who knew him best liked him best’.