In this blog, the Australian Women’s History Network remembers pioneering Australian historian Emeritus Professor Kay Saunders AO, FASSA, FRHistS (1947–2026).

Below, the Australian Women’s History network shares reflections about the remarkable life of pioneering Australian historian Kay Saunders from her colleagues, students, and contemporaries.

Dr Shirleene Robinson AM (University of Technology Sydney)

The recent passing of Kay Saunders is an enormous loss to the field of Australian history. It is also an immense loss to all of us who were lucky enough to know her as the brilliant, brave, considerate and incredibly witty person she was, always so full of life and fun.

Kay was an extraordinarily gifted historian, decades ahead of her time. She was able to traverse very diverse fields of study with ease, making groundbreaking contributions that are still highly influential today. There are very few people who change the course of your life, but Kay was certainly one of those people for me.

We first crossed paths when I was a first-year undergraduate student at The University of Queensland in 1995. Although very bright, neither of my parents had been able to attend university. Indeed, my Fijian mother had not been given the opportunity to finish primary school. Kay was one of those rare academics who looked beyond class and background and actively encouraged students who might never have imagined a scholarly life for themselves.

Initially, I signed up for a degree in journalism, deciding to take some history subjects as electives. The very first history course I undertook was HIST135: Australian History. Luckily for me, Kay, then an Associate Professor, was a lecturer in the course. She was one of those rare teachers who could captivate a lecture theatre, weaving encyclopaedic knowledge into a narrative that transformed everything you thought you knew about a topic.

It was Kay who suggested I might like to consider an Honours degree, and then later a PhD. The fact that such a brilliant scholar saw something in me was the encouragement I needed. She was a supportive mentor and friend right till the end.

Kay graduated with First Class Honours in Anthropology and Sociology at The University of Queensland before transferring to History, where she completed her PhD, Uncertain Bondage: An Analysis of Indentured Labour in Queensland to 1907, awarded in 1975.

While writing her thesis, Kay was already collaborating with long-time friend Raymond Evans, the father of her daughter, Dr Erin Evans. Despite all she accomplished in academic terms, Kay always thought of Erin as her proudest achievement.

Many will know of Kay, Raymond and Kathryn Cronin’s groundbreaking Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (1975). Kay worked on this book in mornings and her PhD in afternoons, while also caring for her toddler daughter. This book was trailblazing in documenting what First Nations Australians had long known, that Queensland was built on frontier wars and brutality, racial exclusion and some of the most oppressive forms of institutional oppression to exist anywhere on this continent.

In 1975, in Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen‘s Queensland, this research was not welcomed. Kay received death threats and was told she was a “race traitor” by a fellow academic. She was never intimidated. In 1978, after Bjelke-Petersen banned political street demonstrations, Kay marched without permits to defend the right to free speech. Kay was arrested and sent to the maximum-security Boggo Road Gaol because the watch houses had filled so rapidly with protesters. She later used a photograph of her in gaol in Gender Relations in Australia.

Among Kay’s many other works were Workers in Bondage: The Origins and Bases of Unfree Labour in Queensland 1824–1916 (1982), Indentured Labour in the British Empire 1834–1920 (1984) and Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation (edited with Raymond Evans, 1992).

Fifty years after its first publication, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination was reissued last year to a packed room of academics, former students, members of the Royal Queensland Historical Society and the many organisations Kay had devoted herself to, all bearing witness to how her work had transformed their understanding of Australian history.

It still doesn’t seem real that someone so vibrant, so full of future plans and projects, is gone. Kay’s legacy will live on through the fields she transformed, the scholars she mentored, and her insistence that Queensland’s history mattered, in this country and beyond. It will live on through her daughter Erin and her granddaughter.

I will miss Kay dearly. My thoughts go out to family, friends, former students and all those lucky enough to have known her as she was: brave, brilliant and absolutely unique.

Professor Ann McGrath AM (Australian National University)

Dr Kay Saunders AO was a woman of great courage who believed in the power of history, often at high personal cost. She never stopped researching and publishing beautifully written articles, books and lectures, each of which offered newly unearthed material and high quality, fresh analyses. Completing a PhD on Pacific Islanders in Queensland based in the anthropology department, she was a cultural historian before the term had cache.

Kay was a pathbreaker. Along with her life partner Raymond Evans, at The University of Queensland, she taught an innovative course on race relations, and published the astonishing book Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination – a collaborative effort with Kathryn Cronin that laid out colonial Queensland’s history of racism against Aboriginal Australians, Pacific Islanders and Asians. No mincing words, this work was a revelation. In black and white, supported by rigorous archival work and the latest race theory, they exposed the hidden history which laid the foundation of the world in which we all lived.

As an honours student at The University of Queensland amidst the repressive Bjelke-Petersen era, Raymond Evans and Kay Saunders were my supervisors and intellectual mentors. What a dynamic duo. I was terrified of most academics, but these two treated me as a friend; they not only had faith in my ability, their work and their home opened up a new world for me – one of deep learning and political commitment. Visiting for a supervision session, I recall seeing the piles of books arriving on their Bardon doorstep all the way from America – one was R.A. Schermerhorn’s Comparative Ethnic Relations: A Framework for Theory and Research (1970) – all so exotic to me from a home more familiar with the Readers Digest.Kay had no hesitation in drawing upon new theoretical works and sociology to inform a strong politics of what we would now term truth-telling.

When Kay asked me whether I liked some designer dresses that had just arrived from Paris, I recall being speechless. Clearly, she had not noticed my style was more St Vinnies than St Tropez! And in another meeting about my honours thesis – they were such devoted teachers – she was supervising her young daughter Erin’s craftwork at the same time as making me a delicious souffle – a dish I’d never even heard of. Via Kay, both Paris and the American academy, with its civil rights activism, had landed in the sleepy suburb of Bardon.

Kay continued her support for me throughout my career. She came to events where I was speaking. She opened doors. She recommended to the editor of feminist journal Hecate, Carole Ferrier, that she ask me to submit my first article, which was about Aboriginal women’s work in the cattle industry. Kay was always on my side. She invited me to celebrity events – like an Australia Day ceremony on the Shoalhaven where Prime Minister Paul Keating awarded Arthur Boyd Australian of the Year. With another historian she mentored, the wonderful Jackie Huggins, we co-edited the first edition of Labour History to feature Aboriginal workers, which was relaunched for its 25th anniversary in 2020.

Kay was a brilliant networker. And she was always on my side, opening new doors and showering me with new opportunities. She loved bringing her feminist history darlings together. Kay introduced me to the wonderful work of Shirleene Robinson; and after many years of my living away from Queensland, Kay organised a scholarly reunion with Jackie Huggins, where Kay prepared a delicious meal. This meeting led to valuable outcomes for the Deep History Laureate program, enriching the Marking Country website, delivering school course materials, and to our recent edited collection, Deep History: Country and Sovereignty (2025).

Kay loved my dad, who did all the plumbing for their house in Bardon. She often said: “He is a very good man.” Which could not have been more appropriate. Kay was the only fellow academic who came to his funeral, which meant so much to me, even if she did push in to the bathroom queue! Kay was imperious, she dressed to kill, but she was always on my side. She was furious about anyone who undermined or attacked my work. She did anger well. She listened well. And she stood up for me through thick and thin.

Sharp as a tack, how I will miss you being on my side Kay. How you changed my life. How you made my life what it came to be.

Professor Jackie Huggins AM, FAHA (The University of Queensland)

When Kay Saunders entered my life she came in like a hurricane – fast and furious. I just had to keep up! That was about 40 years ago. She was unlike any other person I had ever met – the ever elegant, flashy Leo, confident yet so vulnerable. She was my kinda person and I knew I’d want to learn more and grow from her. 

She came from what I’d call a sophisticated and privileged background and recall it was the first time I recognised what class was. The most incredible part of our relationship is how she and my Mother Rita adored each other. It was a sight to see. I would absent myself while they talked for hours.

In the 1980’s so began my full time university studies at The University of Queensland. Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans were my history lecturers who taught me everything I didn’t know. How lucky was I to have been taught by them both. I struck gold. Both of them took me under their wing and I flourished to the point where I actually loved university and in particular their friendship.

They encouraged me and made studies seamless after previously being discouraged to every succeed as an Aboriginal student. Kay made me believe in myself and defy all the racist stereotypes abounding about why my people would never prosper due to our race. 

It was at university that I began to write in a serious way. Kay thought I was a good writer, after she diligently corrected my spelling, grammar and footnotes. And was she ever the footnote queen! Throughout my career, she has assisted me with the many publications and books I have produced. Footnotes withstanding. She insisted I write a chapter in her Gender Relations In Australia book and others, including Aboriginal Workers with Ann McGrath. She celebrated my successes and it was reciprocal.

Kay, Ray and Kathryn Cronin’s legendary Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination remains a class in history literature. It was way ahead of its time. This truth telling book is still relevant and compelling.

I was introduced to many fine academics and historians whilst in her presence like Lyndall Ryan, Heather Goodall, Henry Reynolds, Ann Curthoys, and Peter Read, to name a few.

Fast forward to 2019 when I invited her to write a Queensland History section of the “Path To Treaty” report. It was a short turn around time, and she did so with gusto and purpose as she did with all her work. Such a perfectionist. Of course it remains a splendid piece.

She remains a kind, generous, quirky soul who accomplished so much in her life. An amazing woman. My mentor and friend. I will miss her.

Associate Professor Zora Simic (University of New South Wales)

I first got to know Kay Saunders through her work, specifically her pathbreaking Historical Studies article on domestic violence in Queensland, published in 1984. Along with Judith Allen, Kay was one of the first historians in Australia to provide historical evidence and analysis of an enduring problem which back then had only recently been named as “domestic violence.” As Kay later reflected, she did not set out looking for DV cases – she was conducting post-doctoral research on indentured labourers in the Queensland State Archives when she noticed in the Supreme and local court records many assault and battery cases where a husband attacked his wife.

Over thirty years later, Ann Curthoys, Catherine Kevin and I set out to write the first overarching history of domestic violence in Australia. To begin, I read everything hitherto published by historians on the topic and presented a historiographical paper at the 2018 Australian Historical Association Conference (later a book chapter in Alana Piper and Ana Stevenson’s 2019 edited collection Gender Violence in Australia: Historical Perspectives). I celebrated Kay’s work, in particular her framing of domestic violence within wider patterns of colonial violence; and her recognition that it was also a special kind of violence, easily obscured in the historical record – unless you knew where to look. Shirleene Robinson sent word about my paper to Kay, and a short time later we met for dinner at a Lebanese restaurant in Sydney where we were the first to arrive and the last to leave.

Kay – or “Katy” as she signed off her emails and texts – was fabulous company. She was interested in everything – history, clothes, books, TV shows, politics, people, animals. Her opinions were firm and could come off as contrarian, but while we didn’t always agree, this was no impediment to becoming friends. Our long conversations on the phone and in person – when she came to Sydney, or me to Brisbane – were gossipy and fun, but also deep and intellectually stimulating. While she could be withering in her assessments, to me Kay was kind and generous. We gave each other gifts. Mostly I sent her books I thought she might enjoy, but she sent me all sorts of things – suffrage memorabilia, Australiania, animal figurines and, most memorably, a sexy fireman calendar.

Kay was always working on something, and was always keen to know what I was working on. When students of mine discovered her work, I enjoyed passing those details on because I wanted her to know what an extraordinary, wide-ranging impact her work has had in so many corners of Australian history. I sensed she sometimes felt under- or not properly appreciated, and that she suspected that this neglect had something to do with coming from Queensland. If this was ever so, it was perhaps because Kay – including in collaboration with Raymond Evans – was ahead of her time.

When I received the awful news that Kay had died, I had not spoken to her in some months, but expected we could pick up the conversation at any time. I planned to tell her that I’d cited her work again recently and that I had re-read one of my favourite pieces of hers, the paper she and Jackie Huggins presented at the now-infamous 1992 Lilith Dealing With Difference Conference, published in Lilith: A Feminist History Journal a year later as “Defying the Ethnographic Ventriloquists: Race, Gender and The Legacies of Colonialism.”

Together, Kay and Jackie “joined forces as a white woman and a Black woman to refute claims that all women are the same”. Rejecting the mantle of white woman speaking for all women, Kay spoke as herself – the “only bona fide WASP” presenting at the conference, descended from conservative, anti-labour Queenslanders, among them feminists. She spoke too as a historian of race relations and frontier violence, calling out feminist historians who “have resolutely persisted in denying that white women were the equally the dispossessors and the invaders”. In dialogue with Jackie, and in advance of the rise of whiteness studies, Kay owned her own “angloality” and insisted that histories of gender could not be separated from histories of colonialism, race and class. The book she edited with Raymond Evans, Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, modelled exactly this approach and remains an essential text to this day.

More than once, I asked Kay to tell me what it was like presenting this paper and it was a story she loved to tell. Among the allegedly fashionable Melbournians, she recalled that she was the best dressed, defying stereotypes about Queenslanders.

Vale Kay Saunders, a true Queensland original. You will be so missed.

Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch (University of Divinity)

I met Kay in 2017 just as I commenced my role as Head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at The University of Queensland. I was new to Brisbane and was very grateful that Kay reached out to introduce herself and welcome me to the city.

We had the first of a few convivial meetings at a private club in Brisbane, where I learnt that Kay was not only a senior academic, but a force of nature in the Brisbane community, involved in all sorts of ways with all sorts of causes and people. She was hilarious and passionate in her likes and dislikes, sometimes acerbic but always driven by a strong sense of justice. She knew the power of storytelling and narrative and, as one of the first very senior women in the History discipline at UQ, was also committed to having a voice where she thought it really mattered, including in formal settings like the University Senate, and in personal contexts when she wanted to speak up.

Her experience at UQ was not always happy, although she was rightly proud of her Professorial status and her long association with the University (starting in 1965, when she enrolled as an undergraduate). She was a proud Brisbanite, too, regaling me with information about who was who, and where I should buy a place in the city (Ascot was the best suburb, she said!).

When I left UQ during the Covid pandemic to return to Melbourne, Kay was one of the last people I saw, over dinner at Saint Lucy café on a warm Queensland evening, the river just visible in the distance and fairy lights twinkling in the twilight. I’ll remember her with fondness and gratitude. She was a smart, strong, supportive woman, and a trailblazer at a time and in a place where those things were truly needed.

Celebrating the Life of Kay Saunders AO

Celebration of Life: Professor Kay Saunders, AO

Emeritus Professor Kay Saunders: Select Bibliography

Evans, Raymond, Kay Saunders, and Kathryn Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (Sydney: Australia and New Zealand Book Co., 1975).

McGrath, Ann and Kay Saunders, with Jackie Huggins, eds., Special Issue: “Aboriginal Workers,” Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History 69 (1995): 1-230.

Saunders, Kay and Raymond Evans, eds. Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation (Marrickville: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992).

Saunders, Kay, Deadly Australian Women: Stories of the women who broke society’s greatest taboo (Sydney: ABC Books, 2013).

Saunders, Kay, ed. Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834-1920 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1984, 2018).

Saunders, Kay, War on the Homefront: State intervention in Queensland 1938-1948 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993).

Saunders, Kay, Workers in Bondage: The origins and bases of unfree labour in Queensland 1824–1916 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982).

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