Australian Dictionary of Biography

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Award of ADB Medal to Joyce Gibberd for long and distinguished service (2002)

Citation

Joyce Gibberd has served the Australian Dictionary of Biography for twenty-eight years.  Her contributions have been in three distinct capacities.  In September 1974 she became the ADB’s South Australian research assistant, and she has worked continuously as such ever since.  From 1978 she has been an ADB author.  In 1990 she joined the ADB’s South Australian Working Party, on which she still serves.

Joyce Gibberd has all the skills of the model researcher:  diligence, initiative, thoroughness and a commitment to accuracy.  She has also an exceptionally detailed and intimate knowledge of South Australians past and present, and of the history of her State, which has enabled her to enhance the quality of the research applied to South Australian entries.  As an author, Joyce has illuminated numerous facets of South Australian history with entries on 21 individuals, over one third of them women, and among them members of the medical fraternity, musicians and other artists, and charity and welfare workers.  As an active member of the South Australian Working Party she has given many hours of voluntarily work.  She has made hundreds of visits to the State Library and other repositories where she has examined a vast array of primary sources to assist the Working Party in its deliberations as to who should be included on the State list for each volume.  In all these capacities, Joyce Gibberd has shown an outstanding dedication and loyalty to the Australian Dictionary of Biography.