Dr Judith Smart AM, FRHSV

MAC.ROB student, 1964-1967
PORTRAIT GALLERY INDUCTEE, 2022
PhD History
HISTORIAN

Dr Judith Smart AM completed her education at Mac.Rob in 1967, then spent five exciting years at Monash University during a tumultuous era of student protest, graduating BA Hons I in History. She taught at RMIT (1975-2005) and gained a doctorate in 1992 (from Monash) about Melbourne during the Great War. She was the first woman ever appointed to edit Australian Historical Studies, the leading Australian history journal, from 1994 to 1999. She oversaw the redesign of the journal and edited a special issue examining feminist historians’ reinterpretations of Australia’s past. She then became editor of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria’s Victorian Historical Journal (2004-09) and published a special issue for the centenary of women’s suffrage in Victoria. She resumed the editorship, with Professor Richard Broome, in 2017, having also produced a special issue in 2015 on the Victorian home front in World War I.

Judith was delighted to participate in the centenary history of Mac.Rob through an Australian Research Council grant. This resulted in Pauline Parker’s book, The Making of Women: A History of The Mac.Robertson Girls’ High School, described as ‘a landmark history about one of the most remarkable schools in the history of Australian secondary education’. Judith has co-authored, with Marian Quartly, Respectable Radicals: A History of the National Council of Women of Australia, 1896–2006 (2015), and co-edited, with Shurlee Swain, The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth Century Australia.

Judith is a Royal Historical Society of Victoria Fellow, an adviser on Victorian women for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, a member of the Victorian board of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, and has been Deputy Chair (2009-19) of the History Council of Victoria and Vice-President of the Federation of Australian Historical Societies (2012-16). She was awarded an AM in January 2020.