In this paper, absolute stability condition is investigated when a hysteresis nonlinearity is connected to a linear subsystem via positive feedback in Lur'e system framework. In particular, the nonlinearity is considered to belong to the time-invariant slope-restricted counter-clockwise hysteresis class. An absolute stability criterion is proposed in terms of the negative-imaginary system properties. In effect, the stability condition requires the linear subsystem to belong to the strongly strict negative-imaginary (SSNI) system class along with satisfying a matrix condition involving the DC-gain of the linear subsystem and the slope-upper-bounds of the nonlinearities. Compliance to the conditions guarantees asymptotic convergence of state-trajectories to an equilibrium set. Invoking the stability result and exploiting the relaxed minimality assumption of SSNI systems, a static state-feedback synthesis method is proposed to ensure absolute stability for such hysteretic systems. Tractable conditions in the form of linear matrix inequalities can be solved to obtain a stabilising state-feedback gain matrix. Finally, a numerical example of multi-input–multi-output system is presented to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed results.