Barry Owen Jones AO, FAA, FASSA, FAHA, FTSE, FACE (born 11 October 1932) is a writer, lawyer, social activist, quiz champion and former politician. He campaigned against the death penalty throughout the 1960s, particularly against the execution of Ronald Ryan, and remains against capital punishment. In 1998 he was named as one of Australia's "Great Minds". He is on the National Trust's list of Australian Living Treasures.
Barry Jones was born in Geelong, Victoria and educated at Melbourne High School and the University of Melbourne, where he studied arts and law. He began his career as a schoolteacher at Dandenong High School, where he taught for nine years, before becoming a household name as an Australian quiz champion in 1960 on Bob Dyer's Pick a Box, a radio show from 1948, televised from 1957. He was famous for taking issue with Dyer about certain expected answers, most famously in response to a question about "the first British Governor-General of India", where he pointed out that Warren Hastings was only technically Governor of Bengal. Barry Jones' appearances on Pick a Box lasted from 1960 to 1968.
Barry Jones also tried his hand at broadcasting on Melbourne radio, in the mid-1960s. He was one of the pioneers of talkback radio, working at 3DB in Melbourne. His show Talkback to Barry Jones and Mike Walsh's show on Sydney's 2SM were Australia's first talkback shows. Jones believes that modern talkback shows have a much narrower focus than the original shows did. He says "I was trying to convey to people a sense of what they didn't know rather than simply talk about football or pets. My emphasis was on using talkback as an instrument for exposing people to new ideas and challenging them, rather than just reinforcing the ideas they already held." Asked in an interview if he got nervous, Barry responded that he had taught school "... and those kids soon knocked any nervousness out of you".
A member of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) from 1950, Jones was a Federal candidate in 1955, 1958 and 1963, with a strong interest in education and civil liberties.
Jones' political career began in the Victorian Parliament where he represented the electorate of Melbourne as a Labor Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) from 1972 to 1977, when he resigned to go into federal politics.
In 1977, he was elected to the House of Representatives as the Labor member for the Federal seat of Lalor in Victoria, which he held until his retirement in 1998. He was Minister for Science in the Hawke government from 1983 to 1990, in which role he presided over the growth of organisations such as the CSIRO, the creation of the Australia Prize, Questacon and the Commission for the Future. Jones lost his place in the ministry when he failed to gain the backing of his centre-left faction.
In 1992, upon the resignation of Stephen Loosley, to whom he had lost the position in a split vote in 1991, he was elected National President of the ALP, serving until 2000. He became National President again in 2005—06.
Jones was the chief architect of the ALP's Knowledge Nation education concept, as chair of the Chifley Research Centre's Knowledge Nation Taskforce. During this time he was also a member of the Council of the National Library of Australia.
He was the Vice-President of the World Heritage Committee from 1995 to 1996 and a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO from 1991 until 1995.
Jones and Ian Sinclair served as co-chairs of the 1998 Constitutional Convention on an Australian republic.
Barry Jones attended the selective Melbourne High School in South Yarra before continuing on to and graduating from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Laws and Master of Arts. Jones holds the honorary degrees of Doctor of Letters from the University of Technology, Sydney and University of Wollongong, Doctor of Science from Macquarie University and Doctor of Laws from the University of Melbourne.
In 1999 he was appointed an Adjunct Professor at Monash University and became a Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne in 2005.
He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA); a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA); a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA); and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (FTSE): he was the first (and so far the only) person elected Fellow of all four Australian learned academies. In 1999 he was elected a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge.He is also a Fellow of the Australian College of Educators (FACE).
Jones chaired the Victorian Schools Innovation Commission from 2001 until 2005.
He now chairs the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority and serves on the boards of six medical research institutes.
On 31 October 2008, Jones was also appointed to serve on the board of the Victorian Opera.
He appears regularly as a member of the Brains Trust on the television quiz show The Einstein Factor. He mentioned on an episode of the show that he likes to watch his Wikipedia page grow.
Barry Jones Bay in the Australian Antarctic Territory and Yalkaparidon jonesi, an extinct marsupial, were named after him.
