Appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for her service to education, particularly in the field of history, on 26 January 1989, Kathleen Fitzpatrick was the first woman council member of the National Library of Australia, and a foundation member of the Australian Humanities Research Council (later the Australian Academy of Humanities).
Fitzpatrick was educated at Loreto Convents (Albert Park and Portland), Presentation Convent (Windsor) and Lauriston Girls’ School (Melbourne) before attending the University of Melbourne. Following completion of her honours degree, in 1926, Fitzpatrick went to Oxford to complete another undergraduate degree - a common practice at the time. Returning to Australia she found employment at the University of Sydney before becoming a tutor in the English department at the University of Melbourne in 1930. Upon marriage, in 1932, to journalist (later historian) Brian Fitzpatrick, she had to resign her position at the University.
Following the failure of her marriage, Fitzpatrick was advised by the University Appointments Board that ‘the only demand for female workers was for good secretaries'. It was recommended that she become proficient in typewriting and shorthand if she wanted to find employment. She enrolled at the Melbourne Technical School (now the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), completed the required subjects and became a teacher of Shorthand and Commercial English at the school. In 1938 Fitzpatrick was offered her old position at the University of Melbourne. Before retiring in 1962 she held positions of lecturer, senior lecturer and associate professor of history.
During World War II Fitzpatrick was president of the Council for Women in War. She negotiated with employers on behalf of University of Melbourne women students working at Shepparton under Manpower regulations. In her retirement Fitzpatrick concentrated on research and writing and was disappointed in not being able to find a publisher for her magnum opus, a book on the novelist Henry James.
Former student, professional historian and close friend Manning Clark read the eulogy at the Requiem Mass for Kathleen Fitzpatrick held at St Thomas Aquinas, South Yarra on Friday 31 August 1990.
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FITZPATRICK, KATHLEEN ELIZABETH (1905-1990), historian, was born on 7 September 1905 at Omeo, Victoria, second of four children of Victorian-born parents Henry Arthur Pitt, civil servant, and his wife Gertrude Augusta, née Buxton. The family maintained social contact only with close relatives; Kathleen grew up shy and lacking self-confidence but resolutely feminist. She recalled that her education—at Loreto Convent (Albert Park and Portland), Presentation Convent (Windsor) and Lauriston Girls’ School—largely lacked stimulus. At the University of Melbourne (BA Hons, 1926) she studied English and history. As taught by (Sir) Ernest Scott, history enlarged her imagination and academic ambitions. She also became an editor of the new student newspaper Farrago, and was active in student societies ranging from the Literature to the Melbourne University Labor clubs. Pitt proceeded to the University of Oxford (BA, 1928; MA, 1934). Disaster followed: she felt her fellow-students were snobbish and contemptuous of women, and she miscalculated the effort involved in completing a second degree in two years instead of three. She emerged exhausted, the predicted first-class result reduced to a creditable second. She was forever convinced that this meant that she was no academic. Scott disagreed, and found her a stopgap lectureship at the University of Sydney (1929). There followed a tutorship in English at Melbourne, from which she resigned to marry Brian Fitzpatrick at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, on 27 August 1932. The marriage was over by 1935 and they were divorced in 1939. She began a business course at Melbourne Technical School and was soon teaching typing and commercial English there.
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