Eric Lowson Marson (24^th October 1933 – 3^rd November 2019) was a long-serving Professor of German at UNE, having been appointed in 1968 and remaining in that position until he retired in 1993. Eric was an outstanding teacher of literature and an innovator in foreign language distance education. He served on many University committees and was active at the national level in a number of fields related to foreign language teaching. He was made an Emeritus Professor of the University on his retirement.

His early years were spent on a dairy farm in Humpybong on the Redcliffe Peninsular in Brisbane, where he went to Primary School. His secondary education was at Brisbane State High School,  where he was in the same year as Bill Hayden, and from where he won a Queensland State Government Fellowship to study Medicine at the University of Queensland. He was active in school cadets achieving the rank of Lieutenant, and served in the Army during National Service. As a result of his army experience he was a skilled marksman and a keen collector of fire-arms. He left medical studies in second year, but had already established a reputation for skilled anatomical dissection, skills he later used to make meticulous models of aircraft and motor vehicles.  At this point he joined Dunlop Rubber holding a variety of positions, including Storeman/Packer. At the same time, he started a part-time Arts degree at the University of Queensland which culminated in 1961 with a First Class Honours Degree in German and the University Medal. He was awarded a Commonwealth Postgraduate Research Award for a PhD on the German novelist Franz Kafka. His research was jointly supervised by the University of Queensland and the Eberhard-Karls-Universität, Tübingen in southern Germany, where he spent the years 1962-64. His thesis, An Analytic Interpretation of Kafka’s Der Prozeß, was later published as a book by the University of Queensland Press (Kafka’s Trial: The Case Against Josef K, Brisbane: 1975). In 1964 he was appointed as Lecturer in German at the University of Newcastle, NSW, which was followed by a similar appointment to the University of Queensland in 1966. Professor Zelman Cowan, then Vice-Chancellor of UNE, invited him to apply for the vacant Chair of German at UNE, to which he was appointed in late 1967. His first few years were used to consolidate his Department while serving on numerous University committees. He always taught at least 75% of the average teaching load and supervised most of the Department’s Honours and Post-Graduate students. Also during this period he was one of the three founders of the Australian/Canadian academic journal Seminar, A Journal of Germanic Studies, and co-editor from 1965 to 1978. His Inaugural Lecture was published by UNE as Literature and Its Study in a University Context, (UNE, Armidale: 1969). Another book followed on the novelist Thomas Mann (The Ascetic Artist: Prefigurations in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig, Peter Lang, Berne: 1979) and articles on Kafka, Kleist, and Trakl.

Many students and colleagues have remarked on the lasting impression of his lectures. He was passionate textual critic and his skills were applied to a wide range of German literary history, from Walther von der Volgelweide to Ingeborg Bachmann and Christa Wolf. He was a charismatic presence in tutorials and lectures, with an intense personal delivery and compelling arguments, but willing to listen and encourage others. He was also known as ‘the bikie Professor’ because his daily transport was usually a powerful motor bike, a passion which started in the late 1950s with a Vincent Rapide. In the field of University administration he was very effective, playing a leading role in the introduction of Music, Theatre Studies and Linguistics at UNE. A Festschrift published for his retirement, Unravelling the Labyrinth: Decoding Text and Language (Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main: 1997), was edited by colleagues Kerry Dunne and Ian Campbell and launched by the German Ambassador, Dr Klaus Zeller.

He was married three times, to Mary Neylan (deceased), Linda Lilley, and Patricia Hale. He is survived by five children: Richard, Rosemary, Eve, Sylvia, and Marion, and eight grand-children.

Julian Croft
Emeritus Professor of English