Chris Minns
Premier of New South Wales
STATE MEMORIAL FOR PROFESSOR RICHARD SCOLYER AO
SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE
MONDAY, 13 JULY 2026
Many of us were introduced to Richard Scolyer for the first time, while watching Australian Story back in 2023, just before he was awarded the prestigious honour of Australian of the Year.
Who was this brilliant, stoic man staring down cancer with a smile on his face, all while wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Game on, mole’?
Thankfully, in the years that followed, and to our great national joy, we got to know a lot more about Richard Scolyer, who this man was, and what he was doing for us.
In the words of Dorothea Mackellar, we live in a sunburnt country, and the truth is, we haven’t always been very smart about it.
There’s a section in Richard’s book, and I don’t need to add this was written by Australia’s premier melanoma specialist, where Richard talks about being a teenager on holiday, and rubbing baby oil on his skin to speed up the tanning process, and in the process become a genuine bronzed Aussie.
But the truth was we were literally cooking our skin at the beach like a charcoal chicken.
Back then, Richard was a Tassie boy, but he fell in love with medicine, made his way to Sydney, raised a beautiful family, and over the following decades, dedicated his life to slowly and doggedly turning that culture around.
At the RPA, where at the peak of his career he was the top melanoma pathologist in the world.
At Sydney Uni, where from all reports he was one of the most generous, unpretentious mentors you will find at the heights of academia.
And of course, at the incredible Melanoma Institute, where he changed the course of medical history in partnership with Georgina Long.
Many people, particularly those at the top of their game, tend to dwell on the legacy that they’ll leave, and that’s particularly the case as the end draws near.
But that’s something Richard never had to do.
When Richard died, the Melanoma Institute opened a tribute page where anyone in the country could leave a message. I can report to you that hundreds and hundreds of people did just that.
Here are just a few of them.
To Richard:
“I’m a 10-year survivor of stage four melanoma because of the institute’s work. The world is a better place because of you.”
To Richard:
“Stage four melanoma, 10 years ago, still going strong. At 84 years of age, I’m a keen golfer and a tennis player. How lucky am I?”
To Richard:
“I received the best news of the week this week from my oncologist here in Wollongong, when he advised me that the most recent scans show that I’m in the clear.”
And one more, a longer one, but this one’s from a father.
“In 2020”, the dad says, “our son was diagnosed with stage four melanoma”
He was given just months to live, but in a last throw of the dice, they arranged to try immunotherapy.
They were told it was just a 10% chance of success, and maybe even less than that.
Well, fast forward several months, multiple operations, multiple doses of the treatment, and then the dreaded follow-up scans.
And I’ll go back to quoting the dad, “I can still hear his oncologist’s shouting voice over the phone saying to my son, ‘It worked, it worked! You are going to live.’ My son is now cancer-free, married, living the life that we never thought he’d have.”
Friends, oncology comes from the Greek word that means onkos, which means a weight or a burden to carry.
And Richard must have carried that weight around through his adult life, either as a pathologist looking death in the eye day after day, case after case, or after his own diagnosis, knowing that time was running out.
But the thing about Richard was, you’d never have known it.
Instead, what we saw in Richard was that palpable, irresistible, overpowering love of life.
He reached the end knowing that his gift to the world would be more life and more time.
To Richard’s wife Katie, children Emily, Matthew, and Lucy, we’re so sorry. It’s not fair. It’s far too soon.
“Richard loved life, and in a fair world, he would have been given more of it in exchange for all the extra years he’d given to so many others.”
