Dr. Margaret Spencer, OAM, M.Sc. (Syd.), Ph.D. (Qld.), FACTM, (1916-2010) and Dr. Terence Spencer, M.B. Ch.B., (1917-2002): A supportive and selfless team, pioneering public health workers and remarkable community educationalists - two New Englanders ever serving whole communities, both here and around the South West Pacific

Abstract

When Dora Margaret Spencer (née Cumpston) was born in Armadale, Melbourne, in 1916, the concepts of lifelong learning and distance education were still unformulated, let alone it being possible for women scientists to spend months in isolated fieldwork in the Pacific Islands. In fact, access for all to public school education had only been achieved for New South Wales some fifty years earlier. Nevertheless, Dr. Margaret Spencer, by training an entomologist - and ever working alongside her medical husband - would achieve remarkable scholarly outcomes in a number of fields for a woman of her generation, including, at the age of 82, the completion of her Doctor of Philosophy. She was ever the living embodiment of the social contributions to that can be made by someone with a finely honed intelligence and the resolve to serve the peoples around her 'all her days', as Delderfield would have said. Margaret Spencer herself always attributed her own achievements to 'propinquity and opportunity'. Her husband, Terence Spencer, with limited early education, and once a mature age student at the New England University College, and then his years as a wartime radar technical R.A.A.F. nco, would change fields to become a medical doctor working in unusual places and far beyond the normal frontiers.