Obituary of Margaret Bowman | Community

My mother, Margaret Bowman, who died at the age of 103, was a prominent Australian scholar and writer. She has written and edited many books on local government and communities. Reformers: Shaping Australian Society from the 60’s to the 80’s, Co-authored with journalist Michelle Grattan.

Born in Leeds, the youngest of two daughters to Flora (née Johnson) and Herbert Stanton, a teacher, Margaret attended Leeds Girls’ High School, studied home sciences and trained as a teacher at the Yorkshire Training College of Housecraft. I received While she was teaching her home sciences at Oxford High School, she met John Bowman at a political meeting in the city, where she was completing her doctorate. They married in 1944 and became a large family.

In 1959, John was appointed General Manager of a department. melbourne University and family moved to Australia from Leeds when their youngest son was still a baby. Margaret decided that the best way to learn about her new country was as a student.she won first class honors in political science He earned a master’s degree in art history from the University of Melbourne and in the late 1960s became a lecturer in political science at Monash University, also in Melbourne, specializing in urban politics, the subject of his first doctoral degree.

In the mid-1970s, when her father retired early due to health problems, her parents moved to Creswick, near Ballarat, and after attending Monash for a while Margaret took a position as a senior lecturer at the Ballarat College of Higher Education ( c1978-86). She was awarded the Order of Australia in 2011 for her services to local government.

Margaret always had projects on the go, despite her commitments to her family. After her retirement, she taught English to Vietnamese refugees, studied French, and studied Ancien, an art institution founded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 17th-century France. received his second Ph.D. Her love for France resulted from a school exchange to Lille in 1936. Her lifelong friendship with Gisele LeBlanc, whose family hosted Margaret on her travels, involved visiting the country regularly until she was in her late 80s.

Margaret joined the Melbourne Athenaeum Library in her eighties and wrote scholarly articles on the organization’s early development. In 2011, she was awarded the State Library of Victoria’s Prestigious Creative Fellowship, and she was one of the first secretaries of the Athenaeum, George She Alexander She studied the life and art of Gilbert, and as a result, she book has been published. cultural settler (2014).

2021, in an interview 100 projectsin a video series about centenarians and older, Margaret emphasized the importance of seniors being computer savvy and able to connect through social media.

John passed away in 2006. Margaret has her six children Anna, Sarah, Helen, Katie, Dina and David. Her daughter Mary died when she was young and her son Andrew died in 2017. Additionally, she has 17 grandchildren and her 10 great-grandchildren. , Australia, UK, France and Kenya.