In memoriam Rosie Scott

Very sad news from Australia – New Zealand-born novelist and literary activist Rosie Scott has died. She was a fine writer, great fun to be with and a force for good in her lucky adopted country. Condolences to Danny, Josie and Bella.

Here is the Australian Society of Authors obituary:

17.05.17

We were saddened to learn that Rosie Scott passed away on 4th May as she has been so important to the organisation, having served on our board and executive for ten years, during which time she was elected Chair. In 2005, she was appointed to a permanent honorary position on the ASA Council.

Author and activist, Rosie was a greatly respected and admired member of the ASA community. While she was Chair she helped instigate and then continued to champion our mentoring program, working as a professional mentor for over a decade. In her position on the Council, she was also part of the committee that selected the first 200 books for Copyright Agency's Reading Australia venture.

Her first published work was a 1984 volume of poetry Flesh and Blood, followed by the play Say Thank You to the Lady, for which she won the prestigious Bruce Mason Award in 1986 in New Zealand. In 1988 she published her first novel, Glory Days, which was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards and published internationally in Australia, Germany, UK and the US. Rosie went on to publish five more novels, a short story collection and a collection of essays.

In 2013 Rosie co-edited an anthology on asylum seekers with Tom Keneally, A Country Too Far. She later started the group We’re Better than This, a movement dedicated to fighting against the detention of refugee children.

On Australia Day in 2016, she was awarded Member (AM) in the General Division of The Order of Australia Honour, not only for her service to literature, but also for her work in human rights and inter-cultural understanding. Later that year she was also the recipient of the NSW Premier’s Special Award for her “significant service to literature as an author”.

As if this weren't achievement enough, Rosie also completed a Diploma in Counselling and a Doctorate at the University of Western Sydney, taught creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney and continued to mentor and inspire young and novice writers.

Current ASA CEO Juliet Rogers said, “Rosie will long be remembered and honoured within the ASA family, not only for her celebrated career as a writer of standing in both New Zealand and Australia, but also for her passionate activism, caring advocacy and thoughtful mentorship to so many. Rosie left her mark on this organisation and our thriving mentorship program is just one manifestation of this. We were very fortunate to have had more than a decade of her leadership, care and support and we will miss her. We send much love to her family at this difficult time."

Close friend and ASA colleague Robert Pullan remembers Rosie:

“When she limped out of her last ASA board meeting everyone clapped, not because Rosie was leaving — hobbling after a hip reconstruction — but because she was as always the real thing, going because she had to, going because she had reached the end of a small sentence — the ASA one — in the immense Rosie narrative.

“On the wide wooden verandah in the country retreat we shared for a few magical years in Buladelah, overlooking grassed hills that stretched into morning cloud, Rosie radiated a calm that eluded some of us in the collective, including me. She was our still centre, smiling in greeting as the city latecomers emerged in the evening from the three-hour drive from Sydney.

“‘I go through with all my characters in a pretty visceral and intuitive way,’ she wrote in Movie Dreams, saying her struggle to acquire a male character’s voice was ‘easily the most painful and difficult process I have ever gone through writing a novel’.

“None of us knows ourselves entirely. How could we, with the multitudes we contain? But conversation with Rosie always contained the possibility of change and always left out hierarchical errors of reasoning that sometimes stunted fellow humanists. If she was tormented by the question whether writing changes things, I never heard her say it. She believed in political action. And in her work on behalf of refugees she pushed against evil in its most menacing visage in Australia and the contemporary world. Her loss leaves a space we cannot fill but — I can hear Rosie saying it — we must get on with it.”

Rosie’s family would like to extend an invitation to all those who knew Rosie at the ASA, to her memorial service which will be held this Sunday (21st May 2017) at 2 pm at the  Marrickville Town Hall.

 And here is Rob O’Neill’s interview with Rosie from the August 1996 issue of Quote Unquote, in which she comes out against malice and in favour of sex and exuberance. So Rosie.