Australian Dictionary of Biography

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Award of ADB Medal to Jill Roe for long and distinguished service (2016)

Citation

When Geoff Serle wrote to Jill Roe in February 1985 asking if she would be willing to join the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, he indicated that the board was meeting the need for younger members, more women members and people interested in the twentieth-century. He got all that and more when Jill accepted. Her exceptional intellectual and leadership qualities were formally recognised in 1996 when, following the retirement of Ken Inglis, Jill became the fourth person, the only woman and the only non-ANU-professor, to chair that board.  She served two five-year terms (1996-2006). In the second her strong support for the online development of the ADB was crucial. Equally important was her resolute advocacy in support for the dictionary in the uncertain times that followed the premature retirement of John Ritchie as General Editor, ensuring the eventual appointment of Di Langmore to succeed him.  After standing down as chair, Jill has remained an active and influential member.

Jill’s association with the ADB dated back to her undergraduate days at the University of Adelaide, where Douglas Pike had been a teacher, before he took up the general editorship in 1962.  Her first article for the ADB, on the writer Ada Cambridge, was published in 1969 in volume 3, when she was teaching history at Macquarie University. Since then she has written another nineteen articles on a wide range of characters. Two resulted in published books: George Sydney Arundel (vol. 7) led to Jill’s Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939 (1986), while her entry on Miles Franklin (1981) grew more than twenty years later into her monumental, prize-winning, Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography (2008).  In addition Jill published scholarly editions of Franklin’s correspondence, My Congenials (1993), and topical writings, A Gregarious Culture (2001). Franklin promoted ‘Australian culture’ as opposed to ‘culture in Australia’, and by herself emphasizing this distinction, Professor Roe has justifiably claimed her own place in scholarship charting the emergence of Australian national identity. It is more than fitting that the farmer’s daughter from Tumby Bay, in South Australia, who became an inspiring teacher and outstanding administrator at the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University (since its foundation in 1967), has recently completed her personal history of the Eyre Peninsula, Our Fathers Cleared the Bush.

As an active member of the ADB’s New South Wales Working Party from 1988, Jill has exercised exemplary committee skills in what is often a vigorous debating process. In 2001, as chief investigators, Jill, Stephen Garton and Beverley Kingston successfully applied for an Australian Research Council grant to produce the ADB Supplement, which was published in 2005. She was a significant member of a dedicated team which oversaw the project, and which included her insightful gem of an article on Olaf (Mick) Sawtell, “Socialist agitator and Emersonian”.

Jill Roe’s long and distinguished connection with the ADB makes her a worthy recipient of the ADB medal.