James (Gerry) Gerrand, co-founder of the Australian Skeptics, died on October 12, aged 93.

Gerrand played a fundamental role in the setting-up and on-going activities of Australia Skeptics. The initial meetings to establish the Skeptics were held in 1980 at his home in Hawthorn, Melbourne, with lawyer Mark Plummer, who became the group’s founding president. (Plummer died last year.)

Gerrand had previously spent six years working for the United Nations agency ICAO in Montreal. Gerrand and Plummer had known each other as colleagues in the early 1970s when Plummer was the industrial officer for the Professional Officers Association (the union representing scientists, engineers and other professionals in the Commonwealth Public Service) and Gerrand was honorary editor-in-chief of the same group’s monthly journal. In his day job, Gerrand was the superintending airways engineer for the Victorian & Tasmanian Region in the Department of Civil Aviation.

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