John Quick was born in Cornwall, England, and in 1854 migrated with his family to Australia. Quick's father died soon afterwards, and he left school to enter the workforce at the age of ten. Employed in various jobs in Bendigo, he learned shorthand in his spare time and became a junior newspaper reporter.
Quick completed the matriculation exams needed for university entry, and studied at the University of Melbourne with the help of scholarships (LLB 1877; LLD 1882). Working as a barrister and journalist, he was elected to the Victorian Parliament in 1880.
Federation of the Australian colonies was the goal that shaped much of Quick's political life. He was an advocate for the slowly growing movement from his early years in the Legislative Assembly. Though defeated in the election of 1889, he campaigned in the Bendigo area and beyond, rallying popular support after Federation seemed to have been shelved in 1892.
A key to the revival of the movement was a decision of the Corowa conference of pro-Federation groups in 1893: each colony would elect representatives to a federal convention, and voters would accept or reject the convention's draft constitution in a referendum. Quick was one of the drafters of this resolution, which became the road-map for framing the Australian Constitution.
Quick was elected to the federal convention that followed in 1897-8, and was a member of the committee that oversaw drafting of the Constitution. Appropriately, he was knighted for his services to Federation in January 1901, when the Constitution came into force.
With Robert Garran (secretary to the drafting committee, and founding secretary of the federal Attorney-General's Department), Quick wrote a monumental survey of Federation and the background to each section of the new constitution. Entitled The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, the book is still known to all constitutional lawyers as 'Quick and Garran'.
These efforts did not translate into political influence in the new Commonwealth Parliament, to Quick's disappointment. He was a member of the House of Representatives from 1901 to 1913, but never became a cabinet minister.
Quick returned to legal practice in Bendigo, writing and publishing on legal subjects, before serving as deputy president of the Commonwewalth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration (1922-30). He died in 1932 and was buried in Bendigo, where his rise as a national figure had made him a legend of perseverance against all difficulties.
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