The Australian Women's Register

5 digital audio tapes (ca. 308 min.) Ryan speaks of her childhood as the youngest child of feminist Edna Ryan, how she spent her adolescence largely alone with her mother as both her elder siblings had left home and her mother was recently widowed; the influences on her growing up in a politically active household including the impact on her of her mother’s political involvements and the emotional expectations imposed on her as a daughter; her current project in writing a biography of her mother, her education including her participation in the burgeoning cultural life of Sydney in the 1960s, her move to Canberra in the late 1960s where she was employed as a Manning Clark’s research assistant which motivated her pursuit of postgraduate studies in Canberra and Sydney; her doctoral thesis on Tasmanian Aborigines lead to groundbreaking work though her thesis remained uncompleted when she returned to Canberra soon after the election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972, her involvement in the Priorities Review Staff report on child care. Ryan speaks of her subsequent work in the Secretariat for the Interim Committee for the Children’s Commission and in the Women’s Affairs Section, which was then a branch of the Dept. of Prime Minister and Cabinet; her resignation from the Commonwealth Public Service in the mid-1970s in order to pursue her academic career; following appointments in Canberra, Brisbane and Adelaide, she currently holds the Chair in Australian Studies at the University of Newcastle and heads the School of Humanities at its Ourimbah Campus; her philosophy of education; her hopes for her students as citizens of an Australian democracy.