Obituaries Australia

When Doris McRae died at age 96 on October 9 this year, a friend, Margaret McGarvin, paid the following tribute in the Melbourne Age:

"Doris McRae was a woman who knew peace and human rights could be achieved throughout the world. She never ceased to play her part. She will be sadly missed."

Doris was a Victorian High School principal in the 1940s when less than a dozen women held such positions.

For many years she was a vice-president of the Victorian Teachers Union (VTU). She was a key person in establishing the VTU Social Questions Committee in the 1930s. This group campaigned for free milk and school meals and discussed slum abolition, supervised playgrounds, and pre-school education and many other important issues of the day.

Recently, Doris described how this forum helped bring unity among teachers.

"Men versus women, primary versus secondary, country versus city were only some of the divisions in the VTU, but these were greatly reduced when teachers came face to face with some of the pressing social issues of the '30s," she said.

Doris joined a pacifist organisation when she was at Melbourne University, before the Great War. In the 1930s, she helped to bring teachers from both private and public schools together in the Teachers Peace Group.

In 1937, Doris was elected a delegate from the Australian Teachers Federation to attend the first Pan Pacific Women's Peace Conference in Vancouver.

Doris was a founding member of the Union of Australian Women (UAW) in 1950 and contributed to working out UAW policy on women's rights, equal pay, economic justice and peace.

In her nineties, Doris continued to help the UAW and CICD by reading documents and summarising them for reproduction in newsletters and other publications.

It was entirely in character that, right to the end of her life, she used the skills that were left to her to contribute according to her ability to the causes she held dear.

The UAW will hold a tribute to Doris on November 10 at 2.30 pm at Coburg High School Library in Bell Street, Coburg (where she used to teach). Joan Kirner, the Victorian Education Minister will make a contribution.