My mother, Margaret Bowman, who has died aged 103, was a distinguished Australian academic and writer. She wrote and edited many books about local government and communities, and is best known for Reformers: Shaping Australian Society from the 60s to the 80s, co-written with the journalist Michelle Grattan.
Born in Leeds, the youngest of two daughters of Flora (nee Johnson) and Herbert Stanton, a teacher, Margaret went to Leeds girls high school, then studied domestic science and trained as a teacher at the Yorkshire Training College of Housecraft. While teaching domestic science at Oxford high school, she met John Bowman at a political meeting in the city, where he was undertaking a DPhil. They were married in 1944 and went on to have a large family.
In 1959, John was appointed chair of a department at Melbourne University, and the family, with the youngest still a baby, moved from Leeds to Australia. Margaret decided the best way to learn about her new country was as a student. She gained first-class honours in political science and an MA in art history from Melbourne University, then, in the late 1960s, became lecturer in politics at Monash University, also in Melbourne, specialising in urban politics, the subject of her first PhD.
In the mid-70s, when my father’s ill heath led to his early retirement, my parents moved to Creswick, near Ballarat, and, after a period of commuting to Monash, Margaret took a job as principal lecturer at Ballarat College of Advanced Education (c1978-86). In 2011, she was awarded the Order of Australia medal for services to local government.
Margaret always had a project on the go, despite her family commitments. After retirement she taught English to Vietnamese refugees, studied French and completed a second PhD, Painters and Politics in the Ancien Regime, a study of some of the artistic institutions established by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 17th-century France. Her love of France was the result of a 1936 school exchange to Lille. Her lifelong friendship with Gisele Leblanc, whose family hosted Margaret on the trip, involved regular visits to the country until she was in her late 80s.
Margaret joined the Melbourne Athenaeum Library in her 80s, and wrote scholarly articles about the organisation’s early development. In 2011, she was awarded an honorary State Library of Victoria creative fellowship to study the life and art of George Alexander Gilbert, one of the Athenaeum’s early secretaries, resulting in her book Cultured Colonists (2014).
In 2021, in an interview for the 100 Project, a video series on centenarians, Margaret stressed the importance of older people being computer literate and able to connect through social media.
John died in 2006. Margaret is survived by six children, Anna, Sara, Helen, Katy, Dina and David – a daughter, Mary, died in infancy and a son, Andrew, died in 2017 – plus 17 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, based in Australia, the UK, France and Kenya.
