Vale Prof Tracey Bretag

Juliet Fuller, SA Division Organiser

Juliet Fuller, SA Division OrganiserTracey Bretag, Professor at the University of South Australia, passed away on 7 October following a battle with cancer.

Tracey was a long serving NTEU member, a passionate teacher and researcher, an engaged volunteer social justice advocate, and a friend.

Tracey will be remembered by the international university community as a leading expert on academic integrity: she literally wrote the handbook on it. Tracey was the former Chair and Founding Member of the Asia-Pacific Forum on Educational Integrity and a former President of the Executive Board to the International Centre for Academic Integrity (ICAI).

Times Higher Education named her as one of the 'People of the year: Who mattered in Higher Education in 2019'. She was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by European Network of Academic Integrity (ENAI) in April this year.

Tracey’s passion for academic integrity was born from her passion for fairness in all things. She advocated that while universities were catching hundreds of students plagiarising each year, it didn’t always come from intention but rather from a lack of understanding what was expected of them. She felt that if children were educated better about referencing in schools, instead of just cutting and pasting from the internet and that being okay, that it would prevent them getting stuck at university.

Tracey’s friends remember her as an exciting, energetic and enthusiastic individual with a love of advocacy. She couldn’t resist volunteering to help out whenever she could, be it filling in for a friend's netball team (until she returned home with a broken arm), calling the Union to find out how to fix the conditions of her research assistants, or supporting cancer research charities.

Tracey was a strident supporter of refugee associations. In 2002, when a group of refugees in detention entered into a suicide pact, she drove out to the Woomera Detention Centre to hold up a hand written sign that said 'You are not alone'. Tracey was arrested (broadcast live on TV news) for trespass that day and returned two days later to her university work as an early career academic very concerned she would be reprimanded – but instead she received a standing ovation from her students.

Tracey’s family remember her as a fun, caring, funny, determined and fiercely loyal force of nature with a love of literature and all things musical. At her memorial, amongst all of the jokes about plagiarising poets to memorialise her, friends were instructed (not invited) to take a book home and to promise to read it – each had been signed 'Love, Tracey 2020' and came with a bookmark bearing her picture.

Friends remembered a woman who used to trawl through the newspapers in her early twenties looking for things of interest to write about, who then wrote herself into a job as a regular opinion piece writer in the Advertiser simply because she really did have an opinion on almost everything. We marvelled at the insanity of a woman who sailed across an ocean in a 37 foot catamaran while 6 months pregnant, and then another ocean while nursing a 6 week old baby, because she didn’t like to sit still. We laughed through our tears as we were serenaded by her favourite musical tune (that she had instructed be played) 'Hasa Diga Eebowai' from the Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon.

At the risk of plagiarising, I’ll paraphrase one of her friends who noted at her memorial service that the world will never be the same without Tracey, but it is a whole lot better for having had her in it for 58 years. ◆