Daniels obit

KAY DANIELS, 1941-2001[1]

[Obituary reproduced with permission, Australian Historical Studies (April 2002).]

Dr Kay Daniels, historian and public servant, died in Canberra on Tuesday 17 July 2001, shortly after her sixtieth birthday and less than five weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It was a death too soon. Friends and colleagues from near and far attended a memorial service held in the Great Hall of University House the following Monday; and since that time, numerous obituaries have appeared honouring her life and work. [2]

Historians will not need to be reminded of the particular challenge presented to the living by sudden death. Kay was characteristically clear and brave in this regard. From Calvary Hospital and the Clare Holland Hospice in Canberra where she spent the last days, she prepared the Order of Service and accompanying biographical material; and she was a good historian to the end. The quotation from poet Emily Dickinson she chose for the cover came from a well-stocked historical mind : 'How much may come/And how much may go/ and yet abideth the World'.

Any assessment of Kay Daniels's contribution to history in Australia must begin in South Australia. She was born in Adelaide on 17 June 1941, first child (of two) and only daughter of Norman Daniels, tramways worker and his wife Jean (previously Fulwood), a skilled dress-maker; and she was reared in a comfortable working class culture dominated by sport and methodism. This was at a time of rising educational expectations and opportunity in South Australia as elsewhere. Whereas Norm Daniels had been denied tertiary education by the Depression, for his clever daughter the ladder of educational opportunity extended through St Morris Primary and Norwood High schools to Adelaide Teachers' College and Adelaide University (BA Hons in History, 1963) as far as the University of Sussex (D Phil, 1966) and academic employment.

Kay's academic ability was early recognised. She was dux of St Morris Primary (not just the girls, the whole school, it has been pointed out), and at Norwood High she excelled in both studies and sport (tennis and hockey). At Norwood High she was taught history by the colourful Ellen Curnow, whose own Honours thesis had been on a strike at Port Adelaide in the late 1920s. In 1957 Kay won the Annie Montgomery Martin Medal and Prize for Modern History in the Leaving Certificate examinations (as would be announced in the Adelaide Advertiser for all to appreciate). She went on to experience the glory days of the History Department at the University of Adelaide, where she was taught by Ken Inglis, Peter Phillips, Ian Turner, George Rude and the then Head of Department, Hugh Stretton (but not as it happened either of the only two women on the staff, both outstanding, Kath Woodroofe and Lottie Glow, later Mulligan). Student life in the 1960s was similarly stimulating, and it was the aim of Kay's circle to never leave our table in the old Refectory unattended.

After a brief stint teaching at Clare High School in 1963, Kay tok up the University of Adelaide's prestigious George Murray Travelling Scholarship, leaving mid-year for England. Most people chose Oxford, but possibly on the always progressive Hugh Stretton's advice, she went to Sussex, then a new university. There, living first in student digs in Brighton and later Hampstead in London, she wrote an innovative thesis on literature and society in England in the 1890s entitled '"New Grub Street" 1890-96; Publication of Novels', supervised by Asa (now Lord) Briggs and David Daiches and examined by the great cultural studies scholar, Raymond Williams at Cambridge. Like many PhD theses, it remained unpublished, but at least one article ensued, 'Rejecting the New Woman' in the first issue of Refractory Girl 1972/73, and it is planned to publish another 'Emma Brooke: Fabian and feminist' in the Women's History Review in 2002. Certainly, it provided a sound and forward-looking basis for the teaching of modern British history and stood her in good stead when it came to the shaping of cultural policy in Canberra in the 1990s.

In 1967 Kay was appointed lecturer in history at the University of Tasmania, where she excercised an ever-widening influence. She taught and developed the insights of the new British social history; she was a force for renewal in Tasmanian history; and she made a significant contribution to preserving the material culture, notably Hobart's Cascade Female Factory and the forgotten wharf-side district of Wapping. Her students included writers Amanda Lohrey and Richard Flanagan, historian Vicki Pearce, and town planner Greg Young. Marilyn Lake too was part of Kay's Hobart feminist history circle in the early seventies which produced the radical feminist newsletter Liberaction, with Kay and Shirley Castley as editors. Jenny Coopes's early cartoon 'Superfem', based on - directed at? - the first Women's Adviser Elizabeth Reid (who is said to have enjoyed it) first appeared in Liberaction. Among Kay's achievements during those years were an early women's history course, a new Master of Humanities degree, and as co-founder, the now very productive Centre of Tasmanian Historical Studies. How fitting that the University rallied to confer an Honorary D. Litt., which she was happy to receive shortly before she died.

At the Canberra ceremony, Ann Curthoys outlined Kay Daniels's substantial contribution to Australian history, especially women's history, during those years and subsequently. Two generations of students will know the books: Women In Australia: an annotated guide to the records (2 volumes, 1977), a landmark International Women's Year project and comprehensive answer to those who said you couldn't write women's history because there were no sources; Uphill All the Way (1980, with Mary Murnane, recently reissued by UQP in 1989 as Australia's Women. A Documentary History of Women in Australia); So Much Hard Work. Women and Prostitution in Australia (1984), a pioneering sampling of new work which again encouraged younger scholars; and the authoritative and accessible Convict Women (1998), notable especially for its insight into gender-specific administrative regimes and its grip on both the NSW and Tasmanian experience over the whole period of convictism.

Kay's entry in Who's Who of Australian Women (1982) includes a personal statement on her approach to the past at the time. It reads, in part : 'As a historian also concerned with present social issues I'm interested in being able to use history and historical analysis to understand the present and making the past (and therefore its relationship to the present) more accessible to people outside the history profession...'. This idealist and activist stance, first apparent in the IWY project, led her in new directions in the 1980s. In October 1984 she was appointed by the then Minister of Education, Senator Susan Ryan as full-time chair of the Committee to Review Australian Studies in Tertiary Education (CRASTE). (The other members were Bruce Bennett and and Humphrey McQueen.) This first nation-wide survey was conducted 1985-1987, and the resulting report (Windows onto Worlds, 1987) is still in some respects a radical document, highlighting the importance of Australian content across the curriculum, rather then as another specialisation. It was matter of 'Australian studies' not 'Australian Studies', she would insist.

In 1989 Kay Daniels moved permanently to Canberra, and to a new life in the Public Service. Appointed by Cathy Santamaria to a senior position in the Department of Communications and the Arts, she provided vital intellectual leadership in cutting edge areas such as cultural policy and intellectual property and copyright, including moral rights and indigenous rights, all matters of vital importance to Australian culture. She also worked hard on the problem of parallel imports (books and CDs). She was natural networker, and by all accounts a good boss in the PS.

As others have intimated she would have been a good professor too, but it was not to be until too late. At her death she was working on a history of the first twenty-five years of Tasmania, and she had been offered an Adjunct Professorship at Macquarie University, to take effect in March 2002. She was ready to return to history, and sad when she realised that this work would now never be done. She was not even well enough to prepare an invited entry on ex-convict entrepreneur Maria Lord for the Australian Dictionary of Biography Supplement. She had also had in mind two other books, one on cultural policy-making in Australia and the other relating to her thesis area. Although these books will now never been written and the historical profession has lost a valuable elder, it is planned to honour her achievements as an historian by means of an occasional award sponsored jointly by the Australian Historical Association and the University of Tasmania. (Details and appeal will be made through AHA auspices early in the New Year.)

It still seems hard to believe that we may no longer enjoy Kay's incisive thoughts, her sharp wit, or her unflagging and very Adelaidian enthusiam for food and drink and the humanist way of life. But her versatility shows what history and historians can do, even in hard and discouraging times, and the struggle for a viable Australian culture in the digital age to which she devoted the last decade of her life must continue.

Kay is survived by her companion and partner Mary Murnane, and by her brother Brian and his wife Helen and their three children, Kathryn, Stephen and Geoffrey.

Macquarie University JILL ROE