John Bradley Hirst, FASSA (9 July 1942 – 3 February 2016)[1][2] was an Australian historian and social commentator.

[3] He wrote widely on Australian history and society, publishing two well-received books about colonial New South Wales.

Abandoning an early desire to become a Methodist minister, in 1968 he was appointed a lecturer at Melbourne's new La Trobe University, where he remained until the end of his career.

[7] In retirement, he travelled regularly to Sydney to instruct, without remuneration, groups of post-graduate students in thesis writing.

Jeremy Sammut has described him as "an elegant and outstanding stylist, as adept at clarifying complex issues by reducing them to their essentials as he was at crafting the pithy line that eliminated all doubt his interpretation was true and correct".

In addition to those concerning Australian history, Hirst developed a pioneering course designed to inform students about Australia's European cultural heritage.

First published in 2009, the book has been translated into twelve languages (Italian,[12] Finnish, Swedish, Greek, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and Korean).

Jeremy Sammut has noted that Hirst was motivated by an independent mind and a distaste for unthinking conformity.

Sammut wrote Hirst was committed to "the rigorous pursuit of historical truth that drove him to explore the deeper patterns and meanings of the past, and the contemporary implications, that others had missed or misled us about".