 1931 - 2001 (70 years)
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| Name |
Judith ALLEN |
| Birth |
1931 |
Melbourne  |
| Gender |
Female |
| Death |
2001 |
The Sydney Morning Herald
Historian who loved to swim in the deep end
Author: Chips Mackinolty. Chips Mackinolty is Judy's son.
Date: 12/09/2001
Words: 1049
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Section: News And Features
Page: 34
Judy Mackinolty, Historian, teacher and, sportswoman, 1931-2001.
Two childhood experiences coloured the life of Judy Mackinolty, who has died in Sydney after a short illness. The first was being placed by herself on a train from Melbourne, as a three-year-old, to stay with her grandparents at Yanco in country NSW. Times were hard during the Depression, and this temporary break-up of her family remained a vivid memory. The second was to spend a couple of years at a Melbourne State school that had the unlikely luxury in the 1930s of a swimming pool.
The former led to her producing Australia's first social history of the Depression. The latter led to her swimming for the Victorian State team, including a State championship, and a life-long passion for the sport. Both were engaged in with an enthusiasm that marked all her activities as a historian and teacher.
Her father, Les Allen, was an old-style pharmacist and never one for making and saving money, so her mother, Mary, often had to make do. When World War II broke out, Les lied and lowered his age to join the 2/23 Battalion as a medical orderly at Tobruk, among other theatres of the Middle East.
The family income on a private's wage meant at times living with relatives; Judy sharing a double bed in a back room with her mother while older sister Elizabeth slept on a small bed at its foot. It was a childhood of moving houses and schools, on two occasions on scholarships, which led her to attending the selective MacRobertson Girl's High from which she matriculated to Melbourne University in 1949.
It was, nevertheless, a childhood of swimming, listening to Dad and Dave and The Shadow of Fu Manchu on radio, and a love of reading; of dinners at Jimmy Richardson's Hotel in Spencer Street and nights, after paternal jokes about losing tickets, of theatre. She remembered the relief of VE Day, with her father still overseas, though prevented from attending the celebrations as she was recovering from meningitis.
Her swimming prowess gave her a sporting reputation across her many schools which, she used to say, helped while trying to make new friends. In 1947 she was the Victorian junior backstroke age champion in the 110 yards. She later represented Victoria and Melbourne University at interstate events. Her reluctance to leave home for full-time training camps perhaps prevented her from continued competitive success.
Judy enrolled at university as an arts student, graduating with majors in English and history, with a particular interest in Australian history. She was active in university revues and served on the students' representative council. In 1953 she married John Mackinolty, a Gippsland country solicitor who many years later became the dean of the Sydney University Law School. They were to co-write a centenary history of the faculty. Two children later, in 1959, she found herself as a history and English teacher at Northmead High School. Northmead was a revelation to her and the many students she taught. In particular, she was a guide and mentor to students of the Masonic Boys Home at Seven Hills. A number of them still remember attending honours history seminars at her home in Baulkham Hills, which allowed them to sneak back well after hours to an institution that was less than perfect. In 1966 she taught partially sighted children in the East End of London, sharing with 15-year-olds a first outing on the underground to visit the Tower.
Between 1970 and 1973 she was history master at Doonside High. Mackinolty was active on groups that led to the establishment of the Parramatta swimming pool in the early 1960s. She stood for the local Hills Shire Council on the issue of a swimming pool in the district, was unsuccessful in gaining office, but achieved a pool by monstering every other candidate into supporting its construction in the late 1960s.
In the midst of teaching which included French, swimming and lifesaving as well as school Gilbert and Sullivan productionsMackinolty commenced a history Master's degree which resulted, in 1972, in Sugar Bag Days Sydney Workers and the Challenge of the 1930s Depression. It was a seminal piece of research in Australian social history.
Publications followed, largely around the Depression, but also on World War II propaganda, women and the law, local and oral history and the immigrant experience. In 1981, in a successful battle for a book she edited, she resisted the argument that the words ``Aboriginal" and ``civilisation" could not appear in the same book title. She was successively president of the NSW and Australian History Teachers' associations. She lectured in history and teacher education at UNSW and Macquarie in the 1970s, as well as holding a research fellowship at Sydney University in 1981-82 on a national project on learning through the historical environment. Her last formal work was as a project officer with the NSW Bicentennial Council. It involved a deal of travel and some confrontation: her suggestions that communities around the site of the Myall Creek Massacre acknowledge this event were met with hostility. In the last months of her life she was enormously heartened that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people had met together to create a memorial to that tragedy.
Over the last decade of nominal retirement she continued work, particularly in editorial and proof reading. This included work on the proceedings of the 1994 Stolen Generations conference in Darwin, as well as Wisenet, a publication focused on the work of women in science. In the last six months of her life, she worked on Jill Jolliffe's forthcoming book on East Timor and the deaths of the Balibo Five.
Swimming was never far away from her thoughts. She treasured a photograph of her granddaughter with butterfly champion Susie O'Neill. Mackinolty was the unofficial patron of the ``early morning swimmers" at the Sydney University pool, swimming 1,500 metres a day until the day before her final illness. Judy is survived by her husband John, son Chips, daughter Ann, sister Elizabeth, and grand-daughter Chiara.
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| Notes |
- An ALP candidate whose other life as a historian and teacher was distinguished. Judith Mackinolty was a candidate for the Hills Shire Council elections in c.1962 and in the 1973 New South Wales Legislative Assembly elections for the Hills.
Judith Mackinolty was born in Melbourne in 1931, the daughter of a pharmacist, Les Allen and his wife Mary. She won a scholarship to MacRobertson Girls' High School, from which she matriculated to Melbourne University in 1949. By this time she had also been a member of the Victorian state swimming team and had won a state backstroke championship in 1947. She represented Melbourne University and Victoria in interstate competitions and remained a life long swimmer.
She graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BA, then MA with majors in English and history, with a particular interest in Australian history. In 1953, she married John Macinolty, then a country solicitor in Gippsland, later Dean of the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney. They had two children.
Judy Macinolty taught at Northmead and Doonside High Schools, and was Head Teacher History at Doonside 1970-73. In 1972 she began a Master's degree, her thesis being published as Sugar Bag Days; Sydney workers and the challenge of the 1930s depression. She was President of the NSW and Australian History Teachers' Associations. During the 1970s and 1980s she lectured at the Macquarie and NSW universities and held a research fellowship at the University of Sydney.
Her last formal work was as a project officer with the NSW Bicentennial Council. She was associated with many activities concerned with reconciliation, and worked to achieve agreement between white and Aboriginal communities around Myall Creek which resulted in a memorial acknowledging the massacre there.
View the full record at:-
http://trove.nla.gov.au/goto?i=people&w=765090&d=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.womenaustralia.info%2Fbiogs%2FAWE1896b.htm
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| Person ID |
I713 |
Mills/Rushton Family History |
| Last Modified |
27 Feb 2014 |
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