'Public intellectual' has become a tired, even debased term. It now too often describes someone who is adept at contriving appearances on television panel shows such as Q&A, rather than a person who has made a substantial and original contribution to the understanding of human beings and the world they have shaped.
But Paul Mees, who died last week from cancer at the age of 52, was a public intellectual in the best sense of the term. Paul was a scholar and teacher with an international reputation in the field of urban studies. He was an activist who never shrank from a fight, whether with politicians, bureaucrats, or academic hierarchies.
And he was also a man of deep faith, evidenced not least in his contributions over the years to Eureka Street, and before that to the defunct Catholic Worker.
Many who admired Paul ignored this last aspect of his life or regarded it as an eccentricity. 'The socialist with rosary beads' is an affectionate tag he acquired during his years as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne and as an industrial-relations lawyer in the 1980s.
Those who knew him best, however, understood that his faith was as much a part of who he was as his relentless campaigning for the improvement of public transport in Australia's sprawling cities.
But neither was he the sort of political Catholic whose attitude to involvement in public life was always to take his cue from the pronouncements of bishops, or to seek conformity in every respect between the teachings of the Church and secular law. Paul understood what was God's and what was Caesar's. Indeed, he insisted that the distinction between the two should not be blurred.
During the '90s Paul gave up practising law to complete a doctorate in urban transport planning at the University of Melbourne. His thesis, subsequently published as A Very Public Solution, challenged prevailing orthodoxies and laid the foundations of an academic career that took him briefly to ANU, then back to the University of Melbourne and ultimately to RMIT University.
Along the way his name became familiar to Victorian newspaper readers in his role as president of the Public Transport Users' Association, a position he held from 1992–2001. And he lived what he preached: Paul possessed a driver's licence because it was a useful form of ID, but never owned a car.
Paul was a gadfly who frequently annoyed and embarrassed transport and planning authorities