Vale Lise Summers (1959-2019)
Lise was President of the History Council of WA from 2011 to 2015. An archivist as well as an historian she was knowledgeable and passionate about both. She will be greatly missed.
Joining the State Records Office in 1998, becoming its Senior Archivist and Convenor of the Western Australian branch of the Australian Society of Archivists, she won the Mollie Lukis Award in 2018 for her ‘outstanding contribution to any aspect of appraising, collecting, arranging, preserving and making available materials which reflect the cultural heritage of Western Australia.’
Lise took a broad view of her role as an archivist. She was an innovator. In his obituary for the West Australian, Patrick Cornish quoted Leigh Hays, her line manager for many years, who said she was ‘a real dynamo, deeply involved in modern archives theory…engaged with the fact that in the 21st century an archivist must deal with parchment, paper and pixels’.
Born in Sydney on December 18, 1959, Lise was educated at Penrhos College in Como. She grew up in a house full of books. Popular music only entered the scene in 1967 when to much excitement her father brought home a long-playing record of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Two years later, her father rented a television for a month so the family could watch the Moon landing. With such a background, Lise was endowed with a life-long love of books, especially fantasy fiction, so much so that she would sometimes cook one-handed or walk down the stairs reading a book.
She became local studies librarian at the City of South Perth. Then, after joining SRO, she gained a Graduate Diploma and then a Masters degree in Local History. Lise then embarked on a long-distance PhD thesis — ‘From wasteland to parkland: a history of designed public open space in the City of Perth, Western Australia, 1829-1965’ — from the University of Melbourne. She mined the SRO records for this superb thesis.
From then on, her work straddled the archives and history. At UWA, she gave guest lectures and taught a unit in WA history for a semester but, more frequently, taught part time in archives and preservation at Curtin University. Becoming President of the History Council of Western Australia, she took an active role in the debate over the development of Elizabeth Quay.
The scope of her interests is reflected in a blog she wrote https://inthemailbox.wordpress.com/. Largely about archives, history pops up from time to time.
For the rest – I am still President of the History Council of WA and have attended a strategic planning meeting and a general council meeting this month, as well as a lecture on Richard III from the local Richard III Society (If you are in Perth – our AGM is on August 27, and Winthrop Professor Peter Veth will be speaking on our theme of evidence. We’d love to see you). I have prepared and submitted a witness statement for my property court case, and I’ve bought some lovely alpaca wool and started the fox mittens. I’ve finished marking. (June 30, 2014)
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, she was fortunate to have long periods of remission. She took full advantage of times of remission, enjoying travel with her family and absorbed in her work, before she died on August 9, 2019. She is survived by her husband, Jay Plester, and their daughters Elin, Alexandra and Madeleine.
Lise could be prickly, firm in her views, and willing to defend them. A family death notice described her rightly as ‘a woman of letters’. She was a wonderful writer who cared deeply about the world of archives and history. I like to think of Lise, as she once wrote in her blog, sitting ‘in front of a heater and hav[ing] my legs kneaded by a slightly damp cat, while enjoying the wintery grey sunshine and the much-needed rain…’ (June 21, 2014)
Jenny Gregory