A lawyer, journalist, politician and author, John Quick was the federal Member of Parliament for Bendigo from 1901 to 1913 and a leading delegate to the constitutional conventions of the 1890s. Quick was knighted on 1 January 1901 for his outstanding contribution to Federation.
A prolific author, Quick collaborated with Littleton Groom on The Judicial Power of the Commonwealth (1904) 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. He died before he could complete the work, however. Professor E. Morris Miller continued his work, and the book was published in 1940 as Australian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1935 : A Descriptive and Bibliographical Survey of Books by Australian Authors in Poetry, Drama, Fiction, Criticism and Anthology with Subsidiary Entries to 1938 1940.
