Obituary: Professor Margot Prior Hansen

Professor Margot Prior Hansen, 1937–2020

As children, I am not sure that any of us fully understood what our mother did at work. For many years, while she was studying, my siblings and I did our homework or went to sleep to the sound of her giving piano and oboe lessons.

Sometimes we attended orchestral concerts she played in. The work she did at her desk or at the university, though, remained fairly mysterious. In retrospect, it is very hard to imagine how she juggled parenting, studying, teaching and working as a freelance musician, but she was never less than fully present in any of these spheres. As we have grown up, and following her death in August last year, we have come to reflect on and understand how the complex counterpoint between these melody lines constituted and informed her rich creative and intellectual life.

Margot first trained as a musician and teacher at Melbourne University, picking up the oboe with astonishing rapidity when it turned out there was an over-supply of pianists. She met our father, Glen Prior, while she was studying music, and by 1964 they had burgeoning careers as orchestral musicians, and were married with three children: Yoni, David and Sian. Tragically, in November of that year, Glen drowned while saving two fellow Queensland Symphony Orchestra musicians from the surf at Fingal Head in northern NSW.

Margot, now a widow with three children under 5 years old, returned to Melbourne and to study, retraining as a psychologist. Her Masters and doctoral degrees addressed a condition about which little was then known, autism, and she published the first Australian journal article on the condition now known as Autism Spectrum Disorder.

She moved rapidly from a tutorship at Monash University to a lectureship at La Trobe University, where she apprenticed as a clinical psychologist while expanding her research interests in child developmental psychology to include ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, Child Behaviour Problems, Developmental Neuropsychology and Temperament.

Throughout her career there were many ‘firsts’, and many awards. Margot designed and launched the Australian Temperament Study, the first longitudinal study of its kind which continues to this day, and established the first Clinical Psychology Doctoral program in the country. She became the first female Professor of Clinical Psychology in Australia (1989).

Her ground-breaking work and advocacy were recognised in the awards of an OAM in 2004 and Victorian Senior Australian of the Year in 2006. A Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences, she was awarded Doctor of Science (honoris causa) for her contributions to scientific and clinical knowledge and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Autism Research. The Margot Prior Wing of the La Trobe University Community Children’s Centre is named in her honour.

Margot used her experience and this recognition as a platform to become, as Professor Cheryl Dissanayake observes, 'a prominent voice for child welfare, peace and social justice initiatives.' (The Age, October 9, 2020). She was a clear-eyed, hard-headed pragmatist, impatient to see evidence-based research applied for the betterment of the lives of real people facing real problems.

A skilled communicator who often expressed frustration at the jargon-laden density of academic writing she wrote newspaper columns and was a prominent media commentator, with the aim of raising the level of public understanding about child development, education, peace-making, the arts and the environment.

She co-founded Psychologists for the Prevention of War (now Psychologists for Peace), co-established the La Trobe Institute for Peace Research and was also a co-founder of the Parenting Research Centre. From 2005 – 2007, she chaired the Social and Human Sciences Network for UNESCO, and travelled to places like India and Vietnam to train clinicians to support children with developmental challenges.

She volunteered in an inner-city Aboriginal Health Service for many years and campaigned for The Greens out of a deep concern for the environment and the effects of climate change.

Margot married John Hansen in 1969 and they formed a large, loving, sometimes chaotic blended family with seven children. In later years she and John travelled widely across Australia and internationally, and they shared a deep love of the natural world and a concern for the environment. To her enduring sadness, the rise of her career as a scholar pushed her career as a musician progressively to the margins, though she continued to play for pleasure, and to accompany her children and grandchildren, almost to the end of her life.

She was also a lover of art and literature and an artist, though pathologically modest and inclined to attribute her achievements in all things, though particularly as a musician and a writer, to mere 'hard work'.

She certainly worked hard – indeed continued to work until ill-health made it impossible. She taught, learned from, and collaborated with others, and her work made a difference to many people’s lives. The counterpoint between the melody lines of her life was not always easy to sustain, but her capacity to harmonise them testifies to her understanding that human beings need chords – family, fellowship, meaningful work, communion with nature, and art – in order to flourish. And working conditions that allow this.

Her lifelong union membership aligned with her deep belief in the critical importance of providing scholars (and all workers) with a context in which they could do their best work, serve others and live productive lives. She frequently expressed deep gratitude for the education and mentoring she received from other scholars through her career, and returned that in spades in her collaborations with, and mentoring of, other scholars.

Her three children have all gone on to work in universities and she commiserated with us often over the incremental erosion of resources for teaching and research and the corporatisation of the sector. Reflecting on her early years as a scholar, and what those gentler conditions and the generous encouragement of her mentors and colleagues helped her to achieve, she would say, 'We need time to think!' ◆

Dr Yoni Prior is a Honorary Senior Fellow (Theatre) in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne, and Margot Prior Hansen's daughter.