Dr Marie Reay - Infinite Women

Born: 1922, Australia
Died: 16 September 2004
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: NA

This biography is republished from The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia. Written by Sharon M. Harrison, The University of Melbourne. See below for full attribution.

Marie Reay was a leader in the anthropology profession, best known for her research in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, most notably among the Kuma. A pioneering ethnographer, Reay’s work was at the forefront of expanding fields in twentieth-century Australian anthropology, including the anthropology of women and the study of race relations in the small towns of north-western New South Wales (NSW).

Marie Olive Reay was born in Maitland, New South Wales, in 1922. She began her undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney during the Second World War, taking Anthropology in her second year after hearing A. P. Elkin debate the philosopher John Anderson. Reay continued her studies under the dictatorial Elkin, who inspired her interest in Indigenous Australians and directed her fieldwork among fringe-dwelling Aboriginal people in north-western NSW. In the mid-1940s Reay was the first anthropologist to study contemporary conditions among these peoples. Researching detribalised Aboriginal people, Reay spent four years working with Aboriginal communities in Walgett, Bourke, Moree, Coonabarabran and others-in six-month intervals. This fieldwork was an important strand of her research career which many years later extended to fieldwork with Indigenous communities to Borroloola in the Northern Territory. After completing her MA, Reay spent a year working as a Research Assistant at the London School of Economics where she studied the Malayan kinship system with Professor Raymond Firth. Shortly after her return from the Northern Territory, Reay presented a paper on Aboriginal women at the National Conference of Australian Women in October 1950.

From 1950 to 1951 Reay held an appointment as Lecturer at the Australian School of Pacific Administration in Sydney, where her colleagues included prominent ethnographers of Papua New Guinea Mick Read, Ian Hogbin and Camilla Wedgwood. In 1951 she travelled to Papua to study social change among the Orokaiva of Northern Province, under the supervision of her other Sydney mentor, Ian Hogbin. She embarked on what would become the second prominent strand in her research career, but was forced to abort this project after the eruption of Mount Lamington. After winning a scholarship to study at the Research School of Pacific Studies (now Pacific and Asian Studies) at the newly established Australian National University (ANU), Reay began research under the supervision of S. F. Nadel and W. E. Stanner. In the early 1950s, the Highlands were the new ethnographic frontier that Nadel was intent on opening up, bringing in research students from Britain and the United States. Reay returned to New Guinea, departing for the Wahgi Valley in the Central Highlands where she undertook pioneering fieldwork among the Kuma, the first female anthropologist to go to the region. Defying the White Woman’s Protection Law and the colonial god-administrator who disapproved of female anthropologists, Reay undertook her field work wearing shorts. She was treated by the Kuma as an honorary male, which even permitted her witnessing boys’ initiation rites (An innocent in the Garden of Eden). Reay’s in depth study of the position of women in the Highlands broke new ground, long before second-wave feminism brought interest in the position of women in society. Her work on women’s lives in Kuma was the beginning of a long debate on gender and male domination. As Reay began writing her doctoral thesis her relationship with her supervisors became strained. Returning to Canberra after spending fifteen months in the field with the Kuma, she wished to focus on the semantics of Kuma religion in her study; however, this was not acceptable to her supervisors who expected her to make an ethnography available to the discipline rather than focusing on a single aspect. She also had to ‘tone down’ her field reports on the Kuma because the findings of her research did not conform to her supervisors’ preconceptions (An innocent in the Garden of Eden, 157-158). Reay submitted her PhD in 1957 before returning to Sydney.

In 1959 Reay took up an appointment as a Research Fellow at Research School of Pacific Studies at ANU, where she remained as a member of the Department of Anthropology until her retirement in 1988 having been promoted to Fellow and later Senior Fellow. It was during this period that Reay began field work in Borroloola in the Northern Territory; however, after publishing a few articles, she largely abandoned the project. She was also closely associated with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra from the time of its establishment in the mid-1960s. Writing in the Canberra Times in 1966, she called for a ‘New Deal’ for Indigenous Australians. Critical of paternalistic solutions, Reay called for ‘a radical new approach that would emphasise incentive and enterprise rather than control and welfare’ (12 March 1966, 2). Despite increasing infirmity, She continued to visit the Kuma from the 1960s almost to the end of her life, maintaining a home at Minj.

Reay’s doctoral thesis was published as The Kuma: Freedom and Conformity in the New Guinea Highlands in 1959. Her edited works include: Aborigines now: new perspective in the study of Aboriginal communities (1964); The politics of dependence: Papua New Guinea 1968, with A.L. Epstein and R.S. Parker; and Metaphors of interpretation: essays in honour of W.E.H. Stanner, with Diane E. Barwick and Jeremy Beckett. She also wrote numerous articles. Reay was an accomplished poet, whose poetry was published in Australian anthologies. Was also actively involved in the Australian Anthropology Society and attended the founding meeting of the Australian branch of the Association of Social Anthropologists soon after her arrival at the ANU. She was the Secretary of the Association’s Australian branch in 1963 and a significant figure in the founding and growth of the Association of Social Anthropologists and its successor the Australian Anthropology Society (AAS) working tirelessly for the Society over many years. Her contribution to the Society was acknowledged by her peers when she was made the first life member of Society. Reay was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 1977 and was also a Justice of the Peace in Canberra.

Reay spent the early years of her retirement in Canberra, but towards the end of her life she had been living with her sister near Newcastle, NSW. She died, aged 82, on 16 September 2004 in Booragul, NSW, following some years of illness.