Ian Templeman
Born   October 10, 1938: died   November 3, 2015
Ian Templeman, who has died in Canberra aged 77, made a far-reaching contribution to Australian cultural life.
He left an indelible mark on Australian literature by encouraging, mentoring and publishing many writers, some of whom gained national and international reputations. He was an athlete who achieved success as a hurdler at a state level in Western Australia and an accomplished poet.
Ian was born in Perth, where he trained as a painter and art teacher. In 1972 he was appointed as the first director of Fremantle Arts Centre. Over the next 17 years he turned it into a vibrant and creative multi-arts venue, establishing support programs for artists of many disciplines ranging from painters to potters and sculptors. Many of the programs are still in place today. 
In 1975 he founded Fremantle Arts Centre Press which achieved national prominence for discovering and publishing outstanding WA writers, including Elizabeth Jolley, Nicholas Hasluck , Albert Facey and Sally Morgan. He was a member of the Australia Council during the 1980s, and in 1989, the year he left the Press, was made a member of the Order of Australia for his services to art and literature.
Ian moved to Canberra in 1990 to take up the position of Assistant Director-General, Public Programs at the National Library of Australia. Immediately he set out to make Australians aware of what a magnificent cultural asset the library was.
He was instrumental in redesigning the library's ground floor visitor areas and in establishing many new Library programs, bringing writers, historians and other experts to the institution for conferences, seminars and events about literature, arts and society.
He was closely involved in establishing the first iteration of the National Portrait Gallery in Old Parliament House. He diversified the library's in-house and travelling exhibition programs and developed an ambitious publishing program focused on many of the library's often overlooked treasures.
A new monthly magazine, The National Library of Australia News, publicised the library's startling and often colourful holdings. In a more literary format he established the illustrated quarterly, Voices, which featured articles, fiction, poetry and reviews by local and international writers.
By the mid-1990s Ian had staked as distinctive a claim on Canberra's cultural landscape as he had earlier staked in the West, but was itching to do more.
In 1997 he founded Molonglo Press as a business, extending a private publishing activity begun in the early 1990s. In 1998, with funding from the Australia Council and the sponsorship of John and Heather Seymour of Canberra, he published a series of six pocket books by Canberra writers. They featured on their covers original paintings by the talented artist Romola Templeman, Ian's wife.
Ian left the National Library in 1998 to devote his energies to Molonglo Press, guiding the press through a second series of pocket books and other publications. During that time he was pivotal in the creation of a writers' group that is still active today.
In 1999 he took a position with the Australian National University as director of publications for the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. Over seven years he established a lively range of publications including the research-focused RSPAS Quarterly Bulletin, and a literary journal, Conversations, connecting the creative output of the School's staff to the broader literary community.
He created a book-publishing arm of the press, Pandanus Books, releasing books such as Colin McPhedran's extraordinary tale of survival as a child in Burma, White Butterflies, and Alastair Morrison's memoir of his early life in South America and China, The Bird Fancier.
In 2002 Ian was appointed Chair of the ACT Cultural Council and in 2004 was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2007 the University of Western Australia conferred upon him an honorary doctor of letters degree for his contribution to the arts.
Ian was a member of the ACT Chief Minister's Public Art Advisory Panel from 2006 to 2011, during a period of unprecedented government investment in public art across the capital. In 2009 he was invited to be a judge for the 2010 National Biography Award administered by the State Library of New South Wales, to be the mentor for the Mick Dark Watermark Fellowship, and to join the adjudication panel for the Eric Rolls Watermark National History Writing Prize.
With an impeccable eye for beauty and design, Ian turned after retirement to garden and landscape design, creating a number of extraordinary gardens for Canberra clients.
Ian's poetry appeared in Australian literary journals, magazines and newspapers over many decades. His first collection, Poems, was published in WA in 1979 and his second, These Glimpsed Interiors, came out in Canberra in 1997. It was shortlisted for the 1998 ACT Book of the Year Award and the Western Australian Premier's Literary Awards. In 2000 his collection An Incomplete Memoir was published in the Molonglo Pocket Poetry Series and shortlisted for the 2001 WA Premier's Literary Awards.
In 2013 The Watchmaker's Imprint: Selected Poems was published, but by the time of its launch in   April he was gravely ill with cancer. 
However, he received newly accessible medical treatment that resulted in a remarkable resurgence of energy and creativity over the next two years.
Returning to his early love - visual arts - he produced a series of abstract paintings that are remarkable for their dazzling colour and vibrancy, as well as writing dozens of poems that sparkle with an unrestrained exuberance and illuminate an interior mindset that has come to terms with approaching death. Recently he was organising a new collection of poems from that late creative flowering.
Ian was a great encourager with an extraordinary talent for generously developing and nurturing the talents of others. As the novelist Sara Dowse said of him, "He was one of life's great enthusiasts. He gave so much."
He is survived by his wife Romola, sons Paul and Nicholas, daughter Amelia, and their families. 
 - Robert Hefner, Penelope Layland and Paul Hetherington