From small town boy to significant contributor – The Age

Completing teacher training at Melbourne Teachers College and Melbourne University with TPTC, BEd and later BA, his first appointments were at Yea and Seymour.

His fledgling career however, suffered successive setbacks. In 1953, on a holiday in Europe Mac was hospitalised in Bern, the Swiss capital, with TB and quickly repatriated back to Australia and into the Melbourne Sanatorium. He spent most of 1954 recovering in Tallangatta.

Malcolm 'Mac' Ronan.

In 1957 while a teacher at Macleod High School and driving home from school one day, he was involved in a head-on collision with a truck that left him comatose for the two weeks, resulting in hampered mobility and a permanent limp. The truck driver was jailed for drunken and dangerous driving.

In 1955, he was appointed teacher at his childhood Tallangatta school, the year before the planned relocation of the town. The school was transported to its new location over the Christmas period, and Mac found himself teaching in the same classrooms two months later but five miles away. He cherished that experience.

With loyalty, tact and resourcefulness, Macs outstanding qualities of scholarship, and leadership, augmented his professional skills as a teacher. His gentle disposition and adaptability saw him through often trying situations.

By the time he joined the Victorian Institute of Colleges in 1969, he had taught for 20 years with the Victorian Education Department, administering in English, history, and mathematics. He served as senior master and as acting principal on several occasions.

Mac had become aware his teaching was increasingly infused with current social issues, and also aware of the new discipline sociology, common in the US. He took a teaching position with the Victorian Institute of Colleges and set his goal of graduate studies. The college also felt a need for growth in the social sciences and made possible Macs travel and enrolment in a masters sociology program at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the US.

He graduated MA in 1971 and continued into doctoral studies in sociology for two more years, graduating as PhD in 1974. This culminated in his appointment at Caulfield Institute of Technology as head of department of applied sociology, later absorbed by Monash University.

Under his 10-year guidance the department attracted and trained able and well-qualified staff, developed a wide range of innovative courses and gained a highly regarded reputation for applied social research.

Macs principled and compassionate nature led him to play a prominent role in the evolution and betterment of Melbournes gay community with his founding of a grassroots organisation that helped in the subsequent gains of the gay minority.

Minorities had been his main area of focus in his academic pursuits, just as the gay rights movement was emerging in the 1970s. Macs embrace for minorities and, in the case of the gay community, led to the important social and support organisation he founded in 1980 ALSO (Alternative Life Style Organisation). The goal was to encourage the use of resources to improve prospects for gay people. He believed in gay people taking charge of their own futures and not as second-class citizens.

With his dulcet tones, Macs friendliness had a certain magnetic quality that drew people to him enabling a competent team of which he was president for 10 years.

ALSO was instrumental in the establishment and development of a wide range of gay organisations including the Victorian AIDS Council (Thorne Harbour Health), Radio Joy Melbourne, the Gay and Lesbian Switchboard (Switchboard Victoria), the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, and Midsumma Festival. He was proud that ALSO helped a lot of people find a place in the sun.

A rationalist and proud Australian, he was delighted when secular Australia voted decidedly on the plebiscite of 2017 and that justice was done in the court of public opinion.

Mac paid tribute to his forebears who had risked all and made audacious, often treacherous journeys to the other end of the world, to become pioneers of this country, with two award-winning family histories, Across The Threshold (1993) A Ronan Family History, from Kilkenny to Victoria, and Up and Down the River (1998) the Butlers from Benenden.

He honoured his hometown with the celebrated Old Tallangatta a Town to Remember (1995). Seeking to recapture the flavour of the first 100 years, when Tallangatta had its exciting day in the sun, through the daily lives of the people who lived far from the citys crowds in the lush valleys of the Mitta River and the Tallangatta Creek.

Two more hometown tributes are Hearts in Stone the saga of Tallangattas war memorials (2000) and The Century Book Old & New Tallangatta (2001, with Harold Craig).

A fine pianist, he shared with partner Geoff a love of music, the cinema, stage musicals and travel. He propagated and raised peppercorn seedlings for tree lovers, created cryptic crosswords and puzzles, for The Senior and Coast and Country and in later years taught English to adult migrants at local community centres.

Meeting Geoff at the Princess Theatre, in 1948, while attending The Skin of our Teeth was the beginning of a devoted 72-year partnership and they were still together, in shared accommodation at their Kew nursing home.

Peter Jacovou was a friend of Mac Ronan and is executor of his estate.

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From small town boy to significant contributor - The Age