McArthur Fellowship
by Professor Stuart Mcintyre
The University has received a major new bequest that will support postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities and social sciences.
The late Annie Margaret McArthur Oliver bequeathed property to the University, and an amount in excess of $3 million came from her estate to support these fellowships. In awarding the fellowships preference will be given to female candidates and researchers in anthropology.
The fellowship fund is named after her parents, Thomas and Ruth McArthur. The McArthur family has long associations with the Victorian town of Ararat, where Margaret was born in 1919. She began her school studies there and completed them in Geelong. Entering the University of Melbourne in 1938, she completed a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Biochemistry.
From 1943 to 1945 Margaret McArthur worked for the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and was involved in the development of waterproof containers to transport food to troops in the Pacific theatre of the war. She then undertook a postgraduate course in nutrition and worked in the New Guinea Nutrition Research Unit of the Commonwealth Department of Health.
Involvement as a nutritionist in the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land in 1948–9 sparked an interest in anthropology, and she completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Social Anthropology at the University of London. That was followed by fieldwork among the Kunimaipa people of Papua, research that she submitted for her PhD at the Australian National University (ANU).
Her expertise in nutrition and anthropology brought work as a consultant for the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. She also taught at Manchester and London before taking up a lectureship in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.
Margaret McArthur’s teaching and research paid particular attention to the contribution of women to the food supply in Aboriginal Australia as well as Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. Though capable of incisive criticism of the interpretations of better-known male anthropologists, she did not seek their celebrity, but gave freely of her expertise to improve the lives of the peoples of the region. Her own research was characterised by painstaking attention to detail and a capacity for rigorous analysis.
In 1976 she left Sydney to marry Douglas Oliver, formerly the Professor of Anthropology at Harvard, and they subsequently lived in Honolulu. Following her death in 2002 Douglas Oliver was anxious to shape the bequest to reflect her interests.
As the former supervisor of Emeritus Professor Greg Dening and a friend of Bernard Smith, a professorial fellow in art history and the doyen of studies of European art in the Pacific, Professor Oliver contributed substantially to the final establishment of these fellowships.
Margaret McArthur was widely admired for her accomplishments. An unusual breadth of specialist knowledge and an ability to work across the boundaries of culture, gender and age made her a superb fieldworker. Her encouragement of students and insistence that they apply themselves to their studies marked her teaching. Her remarkable generosity in endowing these fellowships testifies to the purpose of her scholarship.
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