With the passing of Anne Elizabeth McLaren on 6 March this year, the Academy of Humanities lost an esteemed member. A distinguished scholar, committed educator and tireless contributor to the field of Chinese studies, Anne was variously colleague, mentor and friend to many of us over a long period of time. Those who had the privilege of working with her will probably all retain the same vivid impression of her: her quick way of talking, her strong and strongly defended opinions, her fearlessness, her high standards in scholarship, teaching, and workplace ethics, her conscientiousness and capacity for compassion in the pastoral care she extended to her students. She was seventy-three years old but seemed not at all old in herself. Cancer came on silently and took her quickly, leaving her family shocked and grieving. Her scholarly productivity was maintained until the end, with a chapter about women’s grievances as expressed in Chinese Women’s Script (nüshu) under preparation not long before her death.
The study of Chinese was not an obvious destiny for Anne. Born in 1952, she was the eldest of seven children in a Catholic family that was still close to its Irish roots. Her second name, Elizabeth, links her to both her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Trant, born and raised Listellick, near Tralee; and to her mother, Betty Fitzgerald, who grew up in an Irish-Catholic enclave in the Sydney suburb of Tempe. When she was seven years old she went with her family to Ireland and met there with the family that had remained behind. Her surname tied her to another part of the Celtic world, the town of Balquhidder, in Perthshire, Scotland. She laid claim to both these ancestries, in which she took a growing interest in her later life.
Unusually among her schoolfellows, she was the daughter of a university graduate. Her father, Keith McLaren, was a scientist who spent most of his career at the Atomic Energy Commission at Lucas Heights. In 1959 Keith was seconded to work at Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge University and the whole family moved to England. For Anne this meant schooling for a period in Cambridge, as well as the holiday visit to Ireland. She did not follow in her father’s footsteps: her intellectual interests lay elsewhere. But this early exposure to the wide world left a deep impression on her.
She and her siblings were part of the post-war baby boom. Through primary school at St Declan’s in Penshurst and high school at St Ursula’s College Kingsgrove, she sat in packed classrooms. It was an era of upward mobility for Catholics in Australia. Education was exacting and competitive, academic streaming normative. Most parents still expected of daughters that they would marry and stay at home to raise children, but at St Ursula’s College one in four girls stayed the course to complete Year 12. Anne was in this minority.
The school was socially homogenous, providing no preparation for the multicultural society that would emerge in Australia during her years at university and no hint of any early exposure to Chinese culture. In her Year 7 classroom there was one Hungarian girl and one German, along with two Maltese from Egypt, the children of families expelled during the Suez Crisis of 1956. That constituted the sum of diversity in a class of around fifty students until they were joined by a Chinese girl from Hong Kong in Year 8, the only student of Asian ethnicity in the whole school at that time. There was slightly greater diversity among her teachers. The French teacher was Hungarian, the German teacher was Dutch Indonesian, the English teacher was South African and the science teacher was Lebanese. Anne took German and French as electives and science because it was compulsory.
A love of reading provided her with the foundations for early academic success. At home she retreated from the noise of brothers and sisters into the wonderful world of fiction. Her mother’s eldest brother, Tom Fitzgerald, was her godfather. A distinguished economist and founder of The Nation magazine, Tom was not a religious man but he fostered her spiritually in another way by providing her with books. One day he arrived at the McLaren home with a whole suitcase of them, all for her.
Her academic brilliance was evident to all when she topped the state in history in the 1970 Higher School Certificate, achieving a high honours in English. This stellar performance won her a National Asian Studies Scholarship that took her to the ANU. Her father encouraged her to take Japanese, imagining that it would equip her to be a secretary for a Japanese company. Instead she chose Chinese, accidentally anticipating the rise of interest in China that would follow the establishment of diplomatic relations between Australia and China at the end of 1972. Over the next decade she completed a BA with First Class Honours in Classical Chinese and a PhD under the supervision of noted scholar Liu Ts’un-yen. Her periods of study at the ANU were interleaved with language study in Taiwan and China.
Her time at ANU set her destiny in another significant respect. It was there that she met her future husband, agricultural scientist Lawrence Dooley, a Victorian, whom on completion of her doctorate she followed to live on a blueberry farm in The Patch, in the Dandenong Ranges. From this unlikely base she commenced carving out a career path that through the 1980s followed a tortuous route to a tenured academic position at La Trobe University, where she taught for nine years before taking up a lectureship at the School of Asian Studies at the University of Melbourne in the year 2000. At the time of her retirement in 2020, she was a professor in Chinese studies in this same school.
In an academic career spanning over three decades, Anne became a very considerable scholar with an international reputation for research that ranged across a period of around seven centuries of Chinese history. She worked in linguistically and conceptually challenging areas of Chinese studies. One was the interface between oral and written traditions, entailing painstaking work on early texts in genres of fiction and drama. She was interested in intertextuality, which establishes the relationship between printed works and through which changes over time can be observed; and also in the listening, performative and reading practices of ordinary people, who preferred stories of derring-do to the Confucian classics.
These interests lie at the heart of major contributions she has made to the history of print culture in China: her 1995 article, ‘Ming Audiences and Vernacular Hermeneutics: The Uses of “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms”’, published in the leading European journal of sinology, T’oung Pao; and her 1998 monograph, Chinese Popular Culture & Ming Chantefables, – ‘an exemplary monograph,’ in the words of Victor Mair; ‘sophisticated, nuanced, and detailed… [showing how] studies on archeologically and archivally recovered materials are not only reshaping but completely transforming our understanding of the nature and development of Chinese civilization.’
An interest in oral traditions led to another significant body of research, this time entailing interviews of rural women in the Lower Yangzi county of Nanhui about the practice of bridal laments. She probed the laments themselves for what they have to say about social life, marriage, and gender relations in a now barely remembered past. With Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China (2008), she put her stamp on the study of prosimetric forms in popular culture, laying the ground for later work on oral narratives in the Lower Yangzi Delta. In a late, deeply scholarly work, Memory Making in Folk Epics of China: The Intimate and Local in Chinese Regional Literature (2022), her disciplinary breadth, contribution to the field of knowledge and literary prowess are on full display.
Anne worked at the frontier of knowledge, going way out into the remote regions of inquiry, but she was interested in everything China-related. Her very first article was based on her patient transcription of innumerable big-character posters put up during the democracy movement of 1979. It was published in the Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs in 1979, among the world’s leading journals of contemporary Chinese affairs. This article was an early harbinger of her 2020 book, Slow Train to Democracy: Memoirs of Life in Shanghai, 1978 to 1979, which is not only a personal memoir but a significant documentary record of a pivotal year in the history of the people’s republic.
An independent scholar who produced a unique corpus of work, she was also a willing and generous collaborator. A year spent at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies provided the basis for collaborations with American scholars working in related areas of pre-modern literature. As co-editor of Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture (1999), and editor of Chinese Women Living and Working (2004), she facilitated the publication of research by both emerging and established scholars in Australia, including PhD students and early career scholars.
In her commitment to teaching and learning, Anne was indefatigable. She was the acknowledged authority on national data on tertiary enrolments in Chinese, which she tracked over many years, contributing her knowledge and insights to committees and reports, most recently to the Australian Academy of Humanities 2023 Australia’s China Knowledge Capability Report. The decline of honours enrolments at universities across the country and of teaching in Chinese literature and the classics were matters that deeply concerned her, not least because of their implications for the maintenance of national expertise in China-related affairs. She contributed time and energy to numerous editorial boards, national and international, and to the key national professional associations relevant to her field, the Chinese Studies Association of Australian (CSAA) and the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA). In 2021, she was awarded Lifetime Membership of the ASAA and in December 2025 she received the CSAA’s inaugural award for the Promotion of Chinese Studies in Australia.
At the University of Melbourne, Anne was a hardworking member of the School and Faculty, accumulating immense experience across a range of portfolios, committed to promoting Chinese studies at the national as well as local levels, passionately interested and involved in language teaching. Her intellectual breadth and range of interest gave her great flexibility in teaching programs and as a PhD supervisor. She understood her position at the university in terms of the gendered structure of the workforce. She was deeply feminist. As Associate Dean for Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workforce during a period of huge institutional change, she was a strong advocate for women facing retrenchment. In scholarship as in everyday life, she became increasingly involved in gender issues. Not everyone doing forensic analysis on early Ming texts saw the women in the picture, but Anne did. Her publications from the 1990s onward reflect a growing preoccupation with gender and women’s culture.
She has left a significant legacy: a body of scholarship that will have a long shelf-life, and a daughter and three grandchildren, living testimony to her own life. The relationship between oral and print traditions that she researched for so many years finds poignant expression in a book written for her grandchildren in which she brought to print the stories of their shared family history. To her peers she has left a less tangible legacy, which is the courage that she showed in facing what we all face in the end. She had a clear-eyed understanding and acceptance of what was coming, and in the time left to her she insisted on engaging with life to the full.
Antonia Finnane FAHA
University of Melbourne
