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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-05-13 Daily Xml
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Simms, Prof. M.

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (16:01): Professor Marian Simms passed away in the last week of April. I thank and acknowledge Tabitha Lean for alerting me to this sad death via information from Professor Helen Sullivan, President of the Australian Political Studies Association, on behalf of her executive committee, and the following contribution also contains information from Marian's profile on the Australian Women's Register.

I was deeply saddened to hear of the death of Marian, one of the giants of Australian political science and a trailblazer for women as subjects and practitioners of political science. With Marian Sawer, she wrote the pioneering account of women in Australian politics, A Woman's Place in1984, with a second edition printed in 1993. A line from one of these books provided a snippet of information that encouraged me in the early days of my research on Muriel Matters.

Marian Simms was a deeply loved APSA colleague and friend to many. Her formidable experience and expertise was complemented by a fierce commitment to her profession and a wicked sense of humour. Marian was born in Canberra and lived nearby, attending a country primary school and then on to Lyneham High School in Canberra. She won a commonwealth university scholarship and one of the university scholarships awarded to the top 10 students in the ACT.

At the Australian National University in Canberra, Marian studied arts and law and graduated with an honours degree in history and political science. After graduation, Marian took up a teaching fellowship at the University of Adelaide, rather than taking up a PhD scholarship at the ANU. I am told she spent 12 very interesting months at the Adelaide politics department, and I know she would be fondly remembered by many there.

Soon after that posting, she accepted a postgraduate scholarship for a Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of Melbourne. She then moved her research to Latrobe University when offered a commonwealth scholarship for a PhD. Marian presented her postgraduate research at conferences in Australia and the United States and had papers published in the Women's Studies: International Quarterly,edited by Dale Spender, and Politics, the forerunner to the Australian Journal of Political Science.

Marian lectured part-time at the University of Melbourne, which provided her with valuable experience and a platform for subsequent appointments at the then Canberra College of Advanced Education. She returned to her undergraduate university, the ANU, in 1985 as Lecturer in Political Science and was promoted to Senior Lecturer and then Reader, acting as head of department in 1996-97.

Marian also enjoyed visiting fellowships to the Research School of the Social Sciences during this time to work on several projects, including the Ageing and the Family project part-time and then the Reshaping Australian Institutions project, where she worked on the future of Australian political parties.

Marian studied and worked at a range of Australasian universities throughout her career, in all cases leaving a legacy of innovative research, inclusive scholarship and inspiring teaching across a number of fields, including gender studies and political science, ethics governance and Indigenous research policy. She was an influential figure in the study of Australian political parties as author of A Liberal Nation in 1982, editor of The Paradox of Parties in 1997 and as co-editor of six of the volumes analysing Australian federal elections between 1996 and 2019.

As an early career academic at the ANU, Marian was part of a small group which established the first national survey of political candidates, including questions about attitudes to gender, among other things, being used in the US and the UK. Marian subsequently used the gender questions in a set of surveys administered to Australian party elites in the mid-1990s, funded by the ANU under the ARC's small grant scheme. The Hon. Joan Kirner cited some of this research in the Victorian parliament to illustrate why Labor Party conference and council delegates supported affirmative action as a gender equity strategy.

The work was published in Australian and international journals and edited collections. In collaboration with Pippa Norris in the US and Joni Lovenduski in the United Kingdom and others, Marian also examined candidate selection systems for their role in the political under-representation of women and minority groups. I will return to that point later.

Noted political psychologist Fred Greenstein's visit to Melbourne University brought Marian in contact with a group of influential US women scholars who invited her to present her work there. Several of this group were critical to the establishment of the Gender, Globalisation and Democratisation Committee of the International Social Science Council (ISSC) in 1998 and the Globalisation, Gender and Democratisation Research Committee of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) in 2002.

Professor Simms' academic career was marked by a series of firsts, perhaps most notably the first woman to serve as Chair in Political Studies and Head of Department at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 2002. As head, Marian was ambitious for the department and took considerable pride in the achievements of its academic staff as well as a significant expansion of student enrolments under her watch.

Marian was kind enough to invite me to attend and present to one of her seminars in Otago. I was particularly grateful for her kindness on that occasion, and on many others, as I came to know her over the years following my election in 1997. This was an election she took great interest in as a number of women entered the South Australian parliament, part of the previously mentioned international work she was undertaking. In 2003, she was awarded the Centenary Medal for her contribution to Australian society, specifically for her research on the 1901 election.

Marian was committed to finding ways of making gender visible. She initiated what are now firmly embedded practices of accounting for research grants and publications based on gender. My sympathy and condolences go to her family and friends in and out of academia. I was honoured to know her, I admired her greatly and she will be remembered.

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