vale Susan Kaldor

[Margaret Florey]

by Alan Dench, Linguistics, University of Western Australia (sent on from
ALS Newsletter)

It is with great sadness that I write to let you know that Susan Kaldor
passed away, peacefully, on Thursday night (30 April).

As many of you will know, Susan was one of the founders of ALS and was one
of the pioneers of Australian sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. She
moved from her native Hungary in 1948. After moving from Sydney to Perth in
1957, she found work teaching linguistics at UWA, first in the Classics
Department (in 1960) and then in Anthropology. She retired - compulsorily -
in 1988 by which time Linguistics was a thriving major at UWA. In her
full-time retirement she steered the Applied Linguistics program in UWA's
Graduate School of Education, as an Honorary Research Fellow, before
retiring for the second time in 2001! Susan moved from Perth to Sydney soon
after her second retirement to join her sons Peter, John and Michael, and of
course her grandchildren.

Members will recall her important work in language policy. She was a member
of the Australian Ethnic Affairs Council and chaired its Multicultural
Education Committee from 1977-1981. She also co-chaired the Ministerial
Working Party on the Development of a Policy for the teaching of LOTE in
Western Australian Schools, in 1987-1988. Through her research she drew
attention to the educational needs of Aboriginal children speaking a
non-standard dialect of English and was a strong campaigner for bilingual
education programs in indigenous and migrant communities. In the later part
of her career she turned her attention to the special needs of non-English
speaking background students in an increasingly English-medium academic
world.

Susan's quiet, modest and unassuming approach meant that despite her
important contributions to linguistics and to the Australian community she
was rarely in the public eye, but her influence was strong and enduring. Her
students loved her, and many of us were inspired by her love of language and
of linguistics, and her belief that linguistics is a discipline that has an
important role to play in the wider community, and that should be
communicated to the widest possible audience. A number of us went on to make
our careers in linguistics and/or in language and communication studies more
generally and we count ourselves very lucky to have had such a wise teacher.

For anyone who is in Sydney and would like to attend, the funeral will be
held at 2.30pm on Thursday 7 May in the East Chapel, Northern Suburbs
Crematorium, 199 Delhi Road, North Ryde. Contact Joseph Medcalf Funeral
Services, Redfern on (02) 9698 2644 for further details.


-- 
Margaret Florey
Margaret.Florey at gmail.com
Ph: +61 (0)4 3186-3727 (mob.)
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