Australian Dictionary of Biography

Marie Reay with her trunk

ANU Archives

Marie Olive Reay (1922–2004), anthropologist, was born on 1 July 1922 at Lorn, Maitland, New South Wales, second of four children of John Audley Reay, health inspector, and his wife Lila Margaret, née Logan, farm manager. From a young age, Marie displayed talent as a writer and thespian, attending the local performing arts school and submitting her poems and short stories to the children’s pages of newspapers. She was educated at West Maitland Superior Public and Maitland Girls’ High schools, where she was often the recipient of writing prizes. With her sister, Lila, she was also involved with a Girl Guide patrol.

After completing her Leaving certificate in 1939, Reay enrolled at the University of Sydney (BA Hons, 1944; MA, 1947). In her third year, after hearing a debate between the anthropologist A. P. Elkin and the philosopher John Anderson, she decided to enrol in anthropology against the advice of the university’s adviser to women students. Though Reay was inspired by the work of Ian Hogbin and Camilla Wedgwood, who ‘made New Guinea come alive’ for her, ‘the prospect of going there seemed remote’ (Reay 1992, 138). She briefly undertook research at Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls’ Training Home as an undergraduate student, before beginning a master’s degree in 1945, supervised by Elkin, on Aboriginal kinship and communities. Her fieldwork took her to the traditional lands of Aboriginal people in northern New South Wales, and around towns such as Walgett, Bourke, Moree, Brewarrina, and Coonabarabran. During these years, she also continued to write and publish poetry, with her ‘Poem from Brewarrina’ appearing in the sixth volume of Australian Poetry (1946).

In 1949 Reay travelled to Europe and spent a year as a research assistant at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she worked with the New Zealand anthropologist (Sir) Raymond Firth on Malayan kinship. Upon her return to Australia, she was appointed lecturer at the Australian School of Pacific Administration (ASOPA) and began fieldwork with the Orokaiva people at Waseta, Territory of Papua and New Guinea. However, the trip would last only two months owing to the eruption of Mount Lamington on 21 January 1951. The eruption, which killed thousands, was a traumatic experience for Reay, and she suffered a nervous breakdown after she was evacuated back to Australia. She was open about her mental health with her peers but admitted that ‘[w]hen I came back to work after being in hospital with clinical depression, I tried to find out from my friends how I had seemed to them… but all they would say was how nice that I was well again. I felt betrayed’ (ANUA 440-1137). Throughout her life she suffered from periods of clinical depression.

Two years after the eruption, Reay was awarded a PhD scholarship in the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University (PhD, 1957). In preparation for her fieldwork, she learned Pidgin (Tok Pisin) before travelling to the highlands of New Guinea, where she lived with the Kuma people (later known as the Minj Agamp) in the Wahgi Valley from December 1953 until March 1955. She was obliged to follow the strict directives of the local district administrator, who disapproved of female anthropologists, in particular her ‘extremely modest modified Bombay Bloomers’ (Reay 1992, 166). The Kugika clan regarded her as a daughter of a ‘big man,’ Wamdi; her position as a white-woman anthropologist granted her a unique social status that allowed her to observe many gendered aspects of Kuma society and culture. She later felt that her time in New Guinea had made her ‘the real thing, a dedicated researcher’ (Reay 1992, 147).

After reluctantly returning to Canberra when her request to stay longer was denied, Reay’s relationships with her supervisors, S. F. Nadel and W. E. H. Stanner, were at best strained. Throughout her postgraduate studies, she was in turn ‘exploited by Elkin, bullied by Nadel, and patronized by Stanner’ (Young 2005, 83). At one stage she was even instructed to tone down her field reports as they did not conform to her supervisors’ preconceived notions about the status of women and family life among the Kuma. On another occasion, despite her many and vivid depictions of violence against women, Nadel questioned the accuracy of her observations around the social conditions of ‘capturing’ brides in the Highlands. Reflecting much later, she stated that she was ‘persuaded to understate the degree of domestic violence. My advisers were convinced that marriage had to be reasonably amicable to survive. They did not consider physical violence … to be a major means of social control’ (Reay 1992, 159). She would later revise her position.

From January 1956 until May 1958, Reay held a senior research fellowship at the University of Sydney. At a time when women occupied a small minority of academic positions, she was made a lecturer at the ANU, and in 1959 published The Kuma: Freedom and Conformity in the New Guinea Highlands, an ethnography based on her doctoral fieldwork. In the early 1960s she returned to her research on Aboriginal communities, undertaking fieldwork at Borroloola and the Roper River mission (Ngukurr) in the Northern Territory in 1959-60. In 1964 she edited Aborigines Now, a collection that featured the work of emerging anthropologists. Six of the thirteen contributors were women, an unusually high proportion for the time. She also made significant use of film photography throughout her lengthy career.

Once described by her colleague Jeremy Beckett as ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Fieldwork’ (Strathern, in Reay 2014, 5), Reay returned to Minj and the Middle Wahgi many times over four decades, publishing widely on gender, religion, and political and social change in New Guinea. Her research often focused on the difference between premarital sexual freedom and the severe constraints and inequalities experienced by married women in Kuma society. She foregrounded how women felt about marriage and came to argue that many were the victims of domestic violence, which they resented and were traumatised by.

The discrimination Reay faced as a postgraduate student continued throughout her academic career. She felt her research was overmanaged and undervalued, especially by the departmental head Derek Freeman, who ‘publicly bullied and verbally abused her’ (Macintyre 2018), and at one stage tried to deny her the right to supervise students. According to Reay, ‘Canberra anthropology was then much more authoritarian than Sydney had been… [and] the male ethnographers of the Highlands appeared to form a club to which I was not admitted’ (Reay 1992, 159).

Others recognised Reay’s work and contribution as pioneering. The British anthropologist Marilyn Strathern referred to the ethnographic richness of her accounts as having ‘spectacular detail’ (Strathern, in Reay 2014, 45) where traditional analysis and theory remained secondary priorities. Reay’s contributions to the subject of gender relations arose from her observations and reactions to the ways in which women were treated. Stoutly refusing to use the word feminist in reference to herself, she explained: ‘My own study has emphasized the position of women simply because this happens to be crucial to Kuma society, not because of the sex of the investigator or any special interest of my own’ (Reay 2014, 56). She was meticulous in articulating the centrality of women to Kuma society, lest her findings be perceived in any way as relating to her own gender.

Female anthropologists were, at that time, ‘under intense pressure’ (ANUA 440-135) to circumscribe the parameters of their research to issues only concerning women. Given that Reay was mentored by the men who created and upheld the standards of the anthropological discipline in the early years of her career, she would have felt pressure to conform to contemporary norms within the discipline or risk repercussions from supervisors. Once her position and reputation were better established, she became more willing to challenge convention. She was actively involved in the Australian branch of the Association of Social Anthropologists, and from 1973 its successor organisation the Australian Anthropological Society, where she was appointed as its first life member. In 1977 she was elected fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. In addition, she served as president of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science.

Reay retired in 1988 and relocated to live with her sister on the New South Wales north coast. Though Reay never married, it was common knowledge that she had a female partner. Following lengthy health struggles, Reay died on 16 September 2004 at Booragul, Lake Macquarie. Though her friends in Minj had hoped that she would one day be buried in the Wahgi Valley, Reay was laid to rest in Toronto cemetery at Lake Macquarie. Her second monograph, a major ethnographic study of women in the New Guinea highlands, which she revised extensively throughout the 1960s, was published posthumously as Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society (2014).

Even as a young scholar, Reay was known as a ‘remarkably lucid’ anthropologist who was in ‘confident command of her discipline.’ She ‘did not suffer fools gladly and disposed of those placed in that category with a devastating sardonic wit’ (Wootten, in Glick and Beckett 2004, 394–95). Her extensive research papers were eventually donated to the ANU Archives. The university subsequently established the Marie Reay prize (2016) and named a new teaching centre in its Kambri precinct in her honour (2019). In 2022 an exhibition about her fieldwork in New Guinea between 1953 and 1955 was held at the ANU’s Menzies Library to celebrate the centenary of her birth.