On a personal note

O n a personal note I like to think that the first time I saw Audrey was when as a scruffy school girl I hung in envy over the excavations going on at Canterbury in the holes thoughtfully provided by a would-be invading Hitier. Certainly she was there— already clear on her interests and career—when I was filled only with boundless unfocussed ambition. I actually met her for the first time years later, when she was efficiendy juggling a career and twins and able, somehow, to find the time and energy for the wider interests of medieval studies in Australia. She had the breadth of vision to appreciate that the discipline boundaries which kept the Anglo-Saxon scholar apart from the historian, the French medievalist from the German, and both from the Archaeologist and Fine Arts specialist or musician were artificial and constricting and that in the developing academia of the 1960s in Australia w e could pioneer a new approach. So were bom, in rapid succession, the local Sydney Medieval and Renaissance Group (SMRG), for scholars and students, and then, through her contacts with the wider world of scholarship, a national—no, for it included N e w Zealand—an international body, the Australian and N e w Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies ( A N Z A M R S ) . With characteristic modesty, she recognized the need to have more well-known names and influential patrons as the foundation president and secretary, but it was her drive and commitment which saw the fledgling association off the ground and kept it going through the shoals of personality conflicts and debates over objectives. A vivid flashback shows m e the two of us, both heavily pregnant discussing the prospects for medieval studies in the quad at Sydney University when the jacaranda was in bloom in 1964. Audrey originally cametoAustralia in 1959, after a first degree in English at Oxford and a P h D in Anglo-Saxon and Celtic studies at Cambridge,toa position in the English Department at the University of N e w England (NSW), but moved in the interests of her marriage to Sydney. After temporary appointments at Sydney University she eventually held a tenured position at Macquarie from 1968. As one of the early appointments to what was then, for Australia, a new form of academic structure, with schools rather than disciplines, Audrey helped establish the teaching of Anglo-Saxon and early English on a sound scholarly footing. Generations of students benefitted from Audrey's unique mixture of personal kindness and interest and requirement of a high level of scholarly accuracy. As the climate for universities deteriorated and the increasing demand for 'relevance' and 'training' as the touchstone for choice ofteachingsubjects grew in the late 1970s and 1980s, Audrey had to watch an area of international significance which she had done so much to nurture in the course of her career come under increasing threat Positions and courses disappeared. That AngloPARERGON ns 10.2, December 1992 10 s -Jack Saxon studies are still taught at all is in many ways a tribute to the deep roots which she helped foster. With a family and a heavy responsibility for teaching in a new institution many people might have allowed their research to vegetate but not Audrey. Her reputation had been secured by the meticulous and time-consuming gazetteer of Anglo-Saxon burial sites in England, which appeared in 1964. It became, ironically, a bible for treasure hunters, a use which might justify the work for the 'Waste Watch' committee but was a source of alarm for scholars. Too distant to be able to make much further contribution on this front, Audrey broadened her interests to include a detailed study ofritualobjects. In another vignette, I remember, on a very hot day, walking with Audrey through the trackless bush (or so it seemed to me) north of Sydney, while she expounded her vision for a work on amulets and talismans, their form, nature, source, and significance. She continued her passion for digging—referring frequently to the withdrawal symptoms which developed without an annual 'fix'—and so on her various visits to Britain she would go with...