VOL 6.2, 2001:   editorial   |   inasa   |   executive   |   essays   |   conferences   |   news   |   publications   Kay Daniels: Obituary Pioneer in Australian Studies Born Adelaide, 17 June 1941 Died Canberra 17 July 2001   The untimely death of Kay Daniels at the age of sixty, is a huge loss to Australian Studies. She championed the field at a time when it had no legitimacy and established the framework for changing the ways in which Australian universities and their academic employees could proudly consider themselves Australian. Kay Daniels was born into a Protestant working class family in the eastern suburbs of Adelaide. Her parents, starved by lack of access to formal education, encouraged Kay in her studies. At high school she showed promise in history and after attending Adelaide Teachers College gained a scholarship to the University of Adelaide where she gained first class honours in History in 1963 and won the George Murray Travelling Scholarship. She turned down a place at Oxford in favour of the University of Sussex because she was more interested in the latter's new social history program, run by Asa Briggs. Her decision paid off and, supervised jointly by Asa Briggs and the literary critic David Daitches, she wrote a groundbreaking thesis on literature and society in England in the 1890s, entitled New Grub Street 1890-1896. In 1967 Kay was appointed Lecturer in History at the University of Tasmania to teach British History, then the staple of the history curriculum in most Australian universities. Over the next 20 years she reorganised the British and Tasmanian history programs from a narrow political focus to a more broadly based social history approach including an interest in material culture. She campaigned for the recognition and importance of the Female Factory in Hobart, which she saved from destruction in 1975. I first met Kay in Hobart in 1971 and was instantly intimidated by her formidable intellect, acerbic wit and lashing tongue. Over the next thirty years I grew to admire and respect her scholarship and value her warm friendship. While she did not suffer fools gladly, she did recognise talented students and encouraged them enormously. In 1971 she offered the first class on women's history in any Australian university, using her postgraduate thesis as a basis to ask a range of questions about the place of the 'New Woman' in late 19th century Britain. Her students still speak about the impact of that course on their intellectual development, today. Kay came to the notice of a new generation of feminist historians with the publication of her article, 'Rejecting the New Woman. Problems with nineteenth century publishers', in the first issue of Refractory Girl in 1972/3. I remember how this article generated fierce discussion because most of us had no training in new social history and had few ideas about how to represent women in dominant historical discourse. Kay was also part of the Hobart collective, producing the magazine Liberaction, a hard-hitting contribution to Australian debates underlying Women's Liberation. In its pages, the comic Superfem by Jenny Coopes first appeared, based on Australia's first femocrat, Elizabeth Reid. Kay also introduced Liberaction readers to the feminist food guide, a critique of restaurants in Tasmania. Barbarian Sydney feminists like myself were enraged by this apparent celebration of bourgeois culture. But, as usual, Kay was ahead of her time. In the 1990s food is an integral part of the feminist cultural agenda. In International Women's Year, Kay's professional and political life moved into a new dimension when she was appointed by Elizabeth Reid to produce an annotated guide to records about women in Australia. The aim of the project was to locate and document sources relating to the study of women in Australia. The resulting publication, Women in Australia an annotated guide to records (1977), changed the face of women's history in Australia. Kay's extraordinary success in co-ordinating a vast army of research assistants in archives across Australia brought her to the attention of bureaucrats and scholars alike. She opened up new mines of source materials in women's history and made possible the development of 'women-centred history'. The appearance of the book of documents from this project Uphill all the Way, co-edited with Mary Murnane in 1980, and the later texts, So Much Hard Work (1984) on prostitution in Tasmania, Down Wapping (1989) on the lives of a working class community on the Hobart waterfront, and Convict Women (1998) on the most maligned group of white women in Australian history, consolidated her reputation as a leading exponent on the historical experiences of marginalised groups in Australian society. Kay's success as a coordinator and as a scholar attracted the attention of Susan Ryan when she became Commonwealth Minister for Education in 1983. Horrified by the paucity of Australian-based scholarship in Australian universities, she appointed Kay on 1 October 1984, to chair a committee to review Australian studies in tertiary education as part of the National Program of Projects and Events developed for the Bicentenary by the Australian Bicentennial Authority. The other committee members were Bruce Bennett and Humphrey McQueen. The terms of reference were to review the provision of Australian studies in tertiary education institutions covering universities, colleges of advanced education and TAFE; and to make recommendations for the development of Australian studies in tertiary education in Australia, and overseas. 'Australian studies' was defined as including all studies dealing with a distinctive Australian subject matter and not limited to those studies designated Australian studies with a capital 'S'. This was the first nation wide review of Australian studies and like the Women in Australia project; it traversed new ground and opened up new ideas and approaches to Australian studies. The report Windows onto worlds, was published in 1987, was far ahead of its time. The philosophy behind the report was 'the advancement of knowledge proceeds best from where you are and what you are doing', an approach that combines place with activity. The report made a compelling case for beginning all studies with the question 'who are we and where are we now', before moving in many intellectual directions. While many aspects of the report appear old hat today, they were certainly not so in 1988. Perhaps the most interesting and contentious part of the report was the section on the need for an Australian approach to the training and practice of hairdressing. It argued for an Australian technology and style. It would be interesting to see how far this part of the report has been implemented. The report also called for new work on Australia's relationship with the Asia-Pacific region, part of which have taken place through the establishment of Australian studies centres in the People's Republic of China. More significantly the report foreshadowed a sea change taking place within the tertiary education curriculum by pointing to the need for improved teaching quality in universities, and the implementation of new teaching knowledges. It also argued for the appointment of more Australian trained academics to Australian universities. Today many of these recommendations have been achieved. Kay Daniels applied for at least two chairs in Australian Studies during the 1980s but was not appointed to any. Nothing, however, could stop Kay, and she went in new directions. She joined the Commonwealth Department of Communications and the Arts in Canberra in 1989. She spent the next decade working on policies on intellectual property and copyright, including moral rights and Indigenous rights as well as on the problem of parallel imports of books and CDs. In all these areas she made an outstanding contribution to the preservation of Australian research, creativity and scholarship. Fading from academic view, her groundbreaking work in Australian Studies was soon overlooked. She was never invited to address an Australian studies conference and never invited to apply for the Visiting Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard or for the Director of the Australian Studies Centre in London. Undaunted Kay worked in her study at home every Sunday afternoon to produce in 1998 the definitive study of the history of convict women in Australia. She then proceeded to work on a history of the first twenty-five years of white settlement in Tasmania. Sadly this was never completed. In June this year, just before her sixtieth birthday, Kay was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. After the first treatment she had a stroke and died in Canberra a month later. On her deathbed, the University of Tasmania conferred on her an honorary doctor of letters in recognition of her outstanding contribution to research and scholarship in Tasmania. I would like to hope that Kay Daniels could also be remembered for her pioneering work in promoting Australian Studies. Kay Daniels is survived by her partner Mary Murnane; her brother Brian and his wife, Helen and their three children, Kathryn, Stephen and Geoffrey Lyndall Ryan Professor of Australian Studies University of Newcastle   Contents   |   Next Page