Jeff was my lovely Uncle. Over the last few years, we had become very close. I still can't believe that he has gone, but I wanted to let his friends know that I have adopted Jess and she is being spoiled rotten, so there is no need to worry about her. She's my dog now and I love her. She's not fretting, for which I am very grateful and I think it is because she is so used to me being around and looking after her. I have uploaded the photo of Jeffrey that was on the order of service from the funeral. I think it is terrific photo of him and was taken at my 40th birthday party. Thank you to everyone for your kind wishes and words about Jeff. He was a really special person and we will always miss him. But I am sure he is in heaven now being castigated by my grandmother for letting her garden into such a state!!!! - Nikki

How many afternoons did we share in the the tea room at Vision Australia laughing over our books, both the ridiculous and the sublime, sharing dog stories, equally ridiculous and me. Jeffrey was always good humoured and unpretentious, but I never had any doubt as to his talent. He was continually employed at Vision Australia in a role demanding great versatility,skill, focus and intelligence. ( I can feel him wince at this description. "Me? I just hope no-one realises I haven't got a clue what I'm doing.") But he most definitely did, and like all of us, enjoyed narrating greatly and felt the loss of it keenly when it came to an end in 2009. We, the sub group of actors who are book narrators will mourn the loss of one of our own. Vale Jeffrey- Your books will live on and give people enjoyment for years to come. Jenny Seedsman.

I worked with Jeffery at Vision Australia as a producer, in the last few years of his time there. For two or three extremely pleasant afternoons each week, Jeffrey and I would be in the studio recording one of the many, usually epic, books he was narrating. He was a popular narrator by all accounts and we would joke about what his fan club would do if he ever stopped narrating. It was very enjoyable to work with Jeffrey on a book. He was very self-deprecating and would stop reading from time to time and declare ‘ You hated that didn’t you?’, and go on to tell me that ‘there was a pause in there you could have driven a tractor through’. Or once, ‘There was a gurgle in that sentence that had very little to do with the plot’! He entertained me frequently with his ruses to finish work early. Whenever there was a computer glitch on my side, he would feign disappointment and suggest (quickly) that we’d have to go home early. Once he claimed, on returning from a bathroom break, that security guards had stopped him from leaving the building! But it was all in jest because he was always reliable and only ever jolly and cheerful to work with. Our afternoons in the studio took us to many different places. We struggled to stay enthralled with yet another instalment of a 700 page epic saga about Japanese tribal warriors. When we started a book about cannibals in Van Deimens Land, Jeffrey warned me it was gruesome and said we’d need a lot of biscuits at tea break to get us through. He was extremely pleased when we started what was to be his last book, A Bitter Harvest, because it was a gentle novel set in the considerably more pleasant setting of the Adelaide Hills. Last month I drove through the Adelaide Hills, and passed the town where that book was set, while moving from Melbourne to the Central Desert. After I’d passed it I thought about Jeffrey as I drove, and wondered what he was doing and how he was. I had hoped to bump into him again one day, and was genuinely sad a few weeks later to hear that he had died. I liked Jeffrey enormously, and my thoughts go to his family and friends and Jess at this time.

Like Robert, I also well remember the wide-eyed, cheeky 'Oh!'. Not to mention his cheeky insistence that any throat clearing or rustling caught on the recordings were sound effects made on purpose! I worked with Jeffrey a lot when learning the ropes at Vision Australia. Jeffrey would, with his characteristic wry humour, very graciously allow me to believe that he was being ‘produced’ instead of training up the novice producer. After a great debate over the pronunciation a word he knew perfectly well, he would concede with a tolerant 'Very well, Madame Producer, you can go and look it up!' And he’d be right, of course! Jeffrey will be warmly remembered indeed.

I first met Jeffrey Hodgson when I began working as an audio producer at South Yarra’s Braille and Talking Book Library in 1989. Jeffrey had already been a book narrator there since the early ‘80s – he’d joined as a volunteer reader (after decades of performing in TV shows, theatre productions and radio plays) and was now being paid to narrate a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction titles for the vision-impaired borrowers that the library serviced. Over the years I came to appreciate just how skilful Jeffrey was in this role. The fact that he was a talented, versatile and efficient reader - and almost always able to fill in for cancelled recording sessions at short notice – ensured a steady stream of titles for him to narrate. (Admittedly, there were times early on when he hadn’t carefully read the book he was to narrate – he used to laughingly recall the instance of discovering, at the end of one book, that the character he’d read with a neutral accent actually had a ‘Texas drawl’!) And he was the favourite of many of our borrowers, who lauded his “excellent narration” and “brilliant dramatisation”. One borrower wrote: “If Jeffrey Hodgson does any Stephen King or any others of that ilk, I will choose the audio over the Braille – and I am a Braille nut!” Along with his talents as a narrator, Jeffrey was also a pleasure to work with. Generally patient and accommodating within the studio, he was also friendly and unpretentious in his dealings with the Library’s staff. He was fond, however, of ribbing those he knew well; he would throw out a playful insult, immediately followed by an “Oh!” and a look of wide-eyed surprise that anyone could say something so ‘offensive’. But we gave as good as we got. In fact, it was tradition with Jeffrey to suggest, at the end of a book’s final session, that that was his last book and we would meet him at the local pub for farewell drinks. Jeffrey would moan that the loss of his book-narrating income would leave him penniless, fighting his dog Jess for food to eat. And then, a few weeks later, I’d be on the phone to offer him another title, and listening to Jess barking in the background…. Jeffrey continued to work for us after we merged with a number of other blindness agencies, to form what ultimately became Vision Australia. By that time we’d moved to our premises in Kooyong, and Jeffrey was as busy as ever with his book narration. However, his steady stream of work came to an end in the first half of 2009, when (due to the impact of the GFC) management made the decision to drop the use of paid narrators for our audio books. Jeffrey’s final recording was Peter Yeldham’s ‘A Bitter Harvest’, completed in April that year. I saw him again at a gathering of narrators a few months later, and I hoped that circumstances would again allow me to work with him in the studio, but it wasn’t to be. Hearing the news of his sudden passing away was a shock to all at Vision Australia who knew him. Still, the books he has brought to life – over 150 of them – will live on, circulating amongst grateful borrowers for many years to come. And the rest of us have our memories of Jeffrey that will undoubtedly live on as well. - Robert De Graauw