'Stuart Hall was many things: public intellectual, academic leader, writer, editor, teacher, political activist, family man and friend. We write here of the two aspects we knew personally, writer and friend. Like so many of us engaged in the early formation of cultural and media studies, we both read and were seriously influenced by his work. John discussed Stuart Hall's work extensively in his PhD thesis on Australian literature of the 1890s in international contexts, and Stuart was one of his examiners. Ann read Stuart's work in the late 1970s, having just arrived to teach in the BA (Communication) degree at what was then the NSW Institute of Technology, ten years later to become University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). ...'