He was born at St Ives in Cornwall, England, the son of John Sr and Mary Quick. His life changed when he was 2 when his family migrated to Australia in 1854, where his father, a farmer, began prospecting at the Bendigo goldfields but died a few months later of a fever. Quick was educated at a state school in Bendigo and at the age of 10, he went to work in an iron foundry at Long Gully. Quick later worked as an assistant at the Bendigo Evening News and then as a junior reporter at the Bendigo Independent. There, he gained skills in shorthand writing and improved his general education. In 1873, Quick moved to Melbourne, passing the University of Melbourne in 1877 with a Bachelor of Laws. Quick was called to the bar in June 1878, but instead continued as a journalist. Soon, he became the Parliament reporter at The Age.
Victoria politics
In 1880 Quick was elected the Member for Sandhurst in the Victorian Legislative Assembly. He was a supporter of the radical liberal leaderSir Graham Berry. He resigned from The Age and returned to live in Bendigo, where he practised as a solicitor. In 1882, Quick received a Doctor of Laws degree after an examination. In 1883, he married Catherine Harris. The couple did not have any children together. Quick was successful in parliament, and in 1886 was offered a ministerial portfolio by the then Premier of VictoriaDuncan Gillies. However, after an electoral redistribution, Quick lost his seat at the 1889 election. . He had become interested in the Australian Federation movement while in the Victorian Parliament, and in the early 1890s, he successfully persuaded the Australian Natives' Association to advocate Federation. In August 1893, Quick attended the first informal Constitutional Convention at Corowa and proposed that a formal national convention should be established, with each of the six Australian colonies to be represented by ten elected delegates. The proposal was agreed, and in November 1893 Quick drafted a bill, which formed the basis of the deliberation at formal convention held in 1897. Quick was elected to the Adelaide convention as second on the list of ten Victorian representatives. When Federation was inaugurated on 1 January 1901, he was knighted in recognition of his services to the federation movement. On the same day, Quick and Robert Garran published The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, which is widely regarded as one of the most authoritative works on the Australian Constitution.
Quick continued to be a prolific author. In 1904, along with Littleton Groom, Quick published The Judicial Power of the Commonwealth, and in 1919 published The Legislative Powers of the Commonwealth and the States of Australia. After retiring in 1930, he worked on a book, which he intended to call The Book of Australian Authors, a bibliographical survey of various Australian authors, poets and playwrights. However, he died before he could complete the work. Professor E Morris Miller continued the work, which was published in 1940 as Australian Literature from its beginnings to 1935.
Legacy
La Trobe University Bendigo established the annual Sir John Quick Bendigo Lecture in 1994 in recognition of Quick's contribution to Federation and his election as Bendigo's first Federal Member of Parliament. He also helped start the Australian federation.
