It is with great sadness and a sense of loss that Tinteán marks the passing of Professor Elizabeth Malcolm on 19 May 2026 following a long illness, which took her out of circulation but did not in any way detract from her commitment to scholarship. A woman of great energy, on 13 March 2026, we were honoured to have her offer Tinteán a series of five profiles on nineteenth-century (and early twentieth-century) Irish-born women writers in Australia. Copy for the first two articles arrived immediately.
The first contribution we published in April this year was on Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, and her extraordinary, humane and politically radical advocacy of the victims of the Myall Massacre of 1838. What Elizabeth brought to the task was her deep knowledge of Irish history, her ability to read Irish political genealogies at the end of the c18 in the aftermath of 1798, and her lived experience of nascent second-wave feminism of the 1970s while she was in Dublin and Belfast. She gave due weight to Eliza’s wide reading, and to her much-anthologised and loved poem, ‘The Aboriginal Mother’. The second piece, published just last month in Tinteán just a few days before her death, dealt with Anna Maria Bunn, who has the distinction of having published the first woman-authored novel in Australia, The Guardian, also in 1838. Unhappily, Elizabeth did not live long enough to despatch a contribution on the prolific and widely read crime-writer, Mary Fortune, or contributions on other writers who were clearly in her sights – notably, Henry Handel Richardson and Miles Franklin, both Irish by descent, and with an international reputation.
Elizabeth was a generous, warm and supportive colleague, and offered the sharpest critique of historical papers and very proactive support, especially of young scholars. In addition, amongst the editors of the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, she was the finest copy-editor, and unofficially a competition to pick up what she missed. We rarely did!
Tinteán has begun the process of commissioning an Obituary notice by a fellow historian to properly mark the death of one who made an immense contribution to Irish and Irish-Australian Studies at a critical time in its history. Watch this space.
Tinteán 