Dr Gabor Major, who helped establish rheumatology as a recognised medical specialty in Australia, has been awarded an OAM in the 2026 King’s Birthday Honours.
The Newcastle-based senior staff specialist was among more than 700 Australians recognised in the latest round, receiving a Medal of the Order of Australia in the General Division for service to rheumatology.
Dr Major arrived in Australia in 1957, speaking no English, as part of the wave of Hungarian refugees who fled the bloody revolution sweeping the country. He went on to train in Sydney and Perth, where he became a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, before securing a position with the Medical Research Council in England.
Dr Gabor Major
When he returned, the specialty he had chosen was still finding its feet. “Rheumatology as a discipline here in Australia was still struggling to be recognised,” he told the limbic. He and peers of his generation worked to build the specialty into what it has become: today, one of the most sought after and competitive fields in internal medicine.
Dr Major settled in Newcastle, NSW partly for family reasons and partly for the opportunity to build something from scratch. He established the Rheumatology Unit at Royal Newcastle Hospital in 1984 and has led the Department of Rheumatology at John Hunter Hospital since 2005.
His interest in rheumatology was sparked during a registrar rotation. “It gave clinical bedside exposure to immunology, which was the underlying scientific field that I was interested in,” he said. “It was practical bedside immunology that I really enjoyed.”
The contrast with the specialty’s early days is stark. During training, Dr Major recalled, the outlook for patients was grim and the conversation often centred on managing disability rather than altering disease course. That has since changed fundamentally. “We have the opportunity to try and sort out the problem,” he said. “We actually do something effective about it.”
Dr Major remains active across multiple roles. As well as serving as Director of Rheumatology and Head of the Department of Rheumatology at John Hunter Hospital, he coordinates the osteoporotic refracture prevention service there and is a Conjoint Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle’s School of Medicine and Public Health, a position he has held since 1978.
He has been a member of the Australian Rheumatology Association for more than 50 years, serving as a former Executive Member and Head of the NSW/ACT branch.
Asked what keeps him practicing, he pointed to the intellectual demands of the job. “Every day I enjoy the clinical challenge, in particular,” he said. “One of the attractions of rheumatology is often there’s a fair bit of complexity to the clinical problems.”
He also credited the people around him. “It has been very rewarding to work with such excellent colleagues over the years,” he said, citing both doctors and nurses.