Marjorie Tipping BA, MA, D.Litt., MBE, FRSHV

Marjorie Tipping, 1969. Photograph by Athol Shmith and John Cato.

 

Marjorie Tipping BA, MA, D.Litt., MBE, FRSHV, Art historian, author

Marjorie Jean Tipping (1917-2009), the daughter of John McCredie and his wife Florence Paterson, was educated at Presbyterian Ladies College and the University of Melbourne where she studied history and fine arts. While at university she was involved in various clubs and associations linked to pacifism and the arts. She wrote regular articles for the student newspaper Farrago and founded the Melbourne University Fine Arts Society with Zelman Cowan. In 1940 she edited the Melbourne University Magazine. She was also a part-time journalist for the Sun News Pictorial during this period.

In 1942 she married Herald journalist E.W. (Bill) Tipping, travelling to the United States with him and their three sons in 1951 where he held a Fellowship at Harvard. While there, Marjorie studied history at Harvard. Of this year abroad she wrote ‘There we began another life, recharged with a different voltage that was to direct the current of the years to come.’ (Double Time)

An art historian and author, she was a luminary of the RHSV. She joined the Society in 1958 at the urging of her friend Ian McLaren who was then RHSV President, and immediately made her mark. When she joined the Council in 1959, it was the Society’s 50th year, yet she was only its sixth woman councillor. She remained on Council from 1959 to 1968 and again from 1970 to 1985.

She later wrote in an article in the La Trobe Journal that the RHSV was then

temporarily housed in the [State] Library’s Palmer Hall [It was there from 1957 to 1962] and much of its valuable collection had been in storage for years. After a period in the doldrums the Society was beginning to expand with an increasing membership, including a few women… Tom Ramsay, who had become a very active President,    nominated me as the first woman Council member. (She was, in fact, the sixth woman councillor, but by far the most active.)

 

For more than twenty-five years Tipping provided leadership and direction and was at the forefront of many RHSV activities. She was the founder of the Affiliated Historical Societies. She convened the first two biennial conferences held in 1965 and 1968. She presented many papers and lectures on a wide variety of topics. She was the RHSV representative on external committees such as the Committee of Human Rights, Friends of the Baillieu Library and Friends of the La Trobe Library. She also recruited new members to the RHSV Council including Margaret Carnegie.

Marjorie Tipping handing over documents certified as public records that had been held in the RHSV Library to Harry Nunn, Archivist at the State Library.

 

The Society’s first woman vice president from 1966 to 1968, she became its first woman Fellow in 1968, around the time she joined her husband in the US where he was working as the Herald’s Washington correspondent. They returned to Australia when he became ill. He died in April 1970 and her children now adults, Tipping returned to the RHSV Council where she was greeted warmly as the ‘RHSV activist’. Not long afterwards, in 1972, she became first woman president, a position she held until 1975 when she resigned to concentrate on her writing and ‘other commitments’. (She was active in a huge range of arts and cultural organisations in Melbourne and nationally and for this she was awarded an MBE in 1981.)

Tipping wrote extensively on art history and the history of Melbourne. Her publications include Textile Treasures of the National Gallery (co-author 1961), How to write local and regional history (co-editor 1966), Eugene Von Guerard’s Australian Landscapes (1975), Ludwig Becker: Artist and Naturalist with the Burke and Wills Expedition (1978), Melbourne on the Yarra (1978) and Convicts Unbound: The Story of the Calcutta Convicts and Their Settlement in Australia (1988). She was a contributor to the Australian Dictionary of Biography and wrote regularly for the Victorian Historical Magazine. In recognition of her large body of published work she became the first woman to earn the degree of Doctor of Letters by examination from the University of Melbourne in 1990.

So many firsts. And in an era when women were becoming an increasingly insistent voice across the world. It seems appropriate, then, that in her first Presidential Address to the RHSV in September 1972, she chose to speak on the topic ‘Women’s Lib in mid-Victorian times’. 

So much could, and has, been said about Marjorie Tipping’s contribution to the Australian cultural landscape. At the RHSV she invigorated the cause of history, her approach summed up in the November 1981 issue of History News: ‘Mrs Tipping is one who has always been forward looking and insists that history must serve the present and that historians should look also to the future’. 

One of her final public appearances was at the RHSV’s Centenary Conference in May 2009 when she cut the Society’s 100th birthday cake. She died in September 2009 at the age of 92.

 

Cheryl Griffin

February 2022

 

Sources: 

RHSV Archives (including Council minutes, annual reports, conference papers)

RHSV manuscript collection, MS 000522. Box 150/12. Marjorie Tipping, ‘Resources of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria’.

RHSV newsletters, 1964 to 2009

Victorian Historical Journal, 1969 to 2009

La Trobe Journal, no 80, Spring 2007, p8. Marjorie Tipping, ‘A Circle of Learning: Personal Memories’.

Marjorie Tipping, ‘War and reconstruction’ in Double Time, eds Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1985.

Sydney Morning Herald, 10 November 2009.

Australian Dictionary of Biography entry for E.W. Tipping http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/tipping-edmond-william-bill-11868

Australian Women’s Register https://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/AWE0301b.htm

Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership http://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0422b.htm

 

Photo credits:

Marjorie Tipping, 1969. Photograph by Athol Shmith and John Cato. Victorian Historical Journal, vol. 40, issue 155-6, 1969, p.70.

Marjorie Tipping and Harry Nunn, 1973. RHSV images collection. Background information in RSHV newsletter, #67, May 1973, p.3.