Against the Tide: A Biography of Dr. Marie Olive Reay

Abstract

Dr. Marie Olive Reay (1922-2004) was a pioneering anthropologist and a leading contributor to Australian and Pacific anthropology. She was the first to study contemporary conditions of Aboriginal communities in rural NSW, as well as the first woman to conduct extensive fieldwork in the Highlands region of PNG. However, she often expressed in her personal wrings, that her work in the male dominated field of anthropology was undervalued and over-managed as a direct result of her gender. Drawing primarily from her substantial collection of unpublished writings, correspondence and field notes, this thesis seeks to produce a feminist biography of Reay that captures her contribution to the discipline of anthropology, her tremendous spirit, as well as her defiance of and critical outlook towards the societal expectations of women during her lifetime. Through the methodology of feminist biography, the research draws upon theory from the fields of anthropology, feminism, gender relations, and queer studies in order to analyse the impacts of gender and power upon Reay's career. This will be illustrated not only by the ways in which Reay was acted upon by others, but also by how Reay chose to navigate her positionality as a queer, female anthropologist in a male dominated discipline. Using the framework of the scholarly persona, with Reay's life as a medium, the ensuing narrative navigates within and between the personal and the professional in order to articulate the complicated position of a female academic in Australia in the mid-late twentieth century. The research will illustrate not only the lasting importance of Reay's work to the historical record, but also contextualise the highly toxic environment in which she completed it. What emerges are reoccurring patterns of sexism and misogyny, the consequences of which had a long-term deleterious effect on Reay's mental health. While Reay herself is the subject of this thesis, her story as an individual helps to illuminate the much larger system of structural discrimination and disadvantage leveraged against her and other early female scholars during the mid to late twentieth century.