Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/9914
Title: 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
Contributor(s): Reilly, Robin (author); Ryan, John Sprott  (author)
Publication Date: 2011
Handle Link: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/9914
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.
Publication Type: Book Chapter
Source of Publication: New England Lives IV, p. 109-126
Publisher: University of New England
Place of Publication: Armidale, Australia
ISBN: 9781921597381
Fields of Research (FoR) 2008: 169999 Studies in Human Society not elsewhere classified
160506 Education Policy
160508 Health Policy
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2008: 920208 Health Policy Evaluation
920599 Specific Population Health (excl. Indigenous Health) not elsewhere classified
920203 Diagnostic Methods
HERDC Category Description: B1 Chapter in a Scholarly Book
Publisher/associated links: http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an48429801
Editor: Editor(s): John Sprott Ryan and Warren Newman
Appears in Collections:Book Chapter

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