18 Mar Vale Elizabeth Morrison
Elizabeth Morrison, a member of ASAL and great contributor to Australian cultural history, died in her sleep early on Sunday morning, 1 March. Liz became an expert on the journals and newspapers of nineteenth-century Australia, working on new editions of lost novels and writing biographies of significant newspaper figures. She was a thorough and tenacious scholar, always generous in helping other researchers, and a kind and loyal friend.
She attended Melbourne University in the 1950s and became a librarian, travelling and
working in Canada and other places. While teaching librarianship at Monash University she undertook a PhD in Australian history, discovering the wealth of material hidden in the widely-circulated newspapers of the nineteenth century. Her findings were published in her book, Engines of Influence: newspapers of country Victoria 1840-1890 (2005). She decided to leave librarianship to devote herself to these discoveries, becoming a research fellow in Australian studies at Monash, then project officer on the Academy Editions series.
I first met Liz when she came to the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra in the late 1980s to work on her Colonial Text Series edition of Ada Cambridge’s A Woman’s Friendship. This little masterpiece of a novel had been lost in the files, published only as a newspaper serial and probably rejected by book publishers because of its satirical edge.
Liz’s research placed it in the context of its moment, the 1880 Exhibition in Melbourne, and her work on the edition opened its humour up to new readers–though Liz wryly commented that she had spent more time editing the novel than Cambridge, working to weekly newspaper deadlines, spent writing it. She became a Cambridge expert, later editing a new edition of A Marked Man under its original title of A Black Sheep. She also retrieved another of Cambridge’s subversive stories, The Perversity of Human Nature which had been buried in the files of the Illustrated Australian News.
Liz worked with Paul Eggert’s team on the Academy Editions project, and became friendly with the archaeologist John Mulvaney, then honorary Secretary of the Academy of Humanities. Liz later married the widowed John and spend a happy decade with him,
bringing John along to our Hobart and Port Phillip ASALvet gatherings. She continued to work on her biography of the influential editor of the Melbourne Age, David Syme, David Syme: man of The Age (2014).
After John’s death, Liz kept up her involvement in Canberra reading groups and discussions at ANU. In 2023 she published her biography of the little-known writer and politician, Donald Cameron, A man of no mean talent: Donald Cameron and Australian colonial newspaper fiction. Six months ago, Liz had a health crisis and moved to a Melbourne care home near her son’s family. There she kept up her reading of Australian and contemporary literature, regularly walking to the local public library for more books—my last email from her was about Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy. A few months ago, she read the manuscript of my biography of A.D. Hope and gave me advice, and I’m disappointed that she could not see it in its final form.
She was generous to all her friends and always ready to pass on her extensive knowledge of Australian culture.
Her family plan a celebration of Liz’s life on 28 March.
Susan Lever (on behalf of the ASAL community)