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CAROLYN [ROBERTSON] RASMUSSEN

Carolyn Robertson attended Coburg High from 1961 and was dux in her final year 1966.
She was described by a fellow student as "Possessing a towering intellect, with which none of us could compete"
She has had a highly successful career as an academic, auth0r and historian.


 Carolyn Rasmussen was educated at Coburg High School and the University of Melbourne. After some years teaching in Victorian technical and secondary schools she returned to the University of Melbourne to complete an MA and PhD in labour history and the peace movement (published as The Lesser Evil? Opposition to War and Fascism in Australia 1920-1941).

 Following the publication of an HSC textbook on early colonial Australia she embarked on a career as a public historian which has ranged over the history of Victorian public institutions, the history of science and technology, education history, the involvement of women in all of the above, and biography. Her major publications include Poor Man's University: Seventy Five Years of Technical Education in Footscray; Vital Connections: Melbourne and its Board of Works 1891 to 1991, (with Tony Dingle); A Place Apart, The University of Melbourne: Decades of Challenge (with John Poynter); a chapter on women scientists, in F. Kelly (ed.), On the Edge of Discovery: Australian Women in Science; Lauriston: 150  Years of Educating Girls; A Museum for the People: A history of Museum Victoria and its predecessors, 1854-2000, which was judged best print publication, Victorian Community History Awards, 2002; a short history of the Science Faculty at the University of Melbourne; Increasing Momentum: Engineering at the University of Melbourne 1861-2004; and ‘A Whole New World’ 100 years of Education at University High School.

She has been a member of the Victorian Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography project since 1998 and chair , to which she has contributed fourteen entries, and in 2011 was appointed to the National Editorial Board, and chair of the Victorian Working Party in 2016. In 2004 she received a State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship to further her joint biography of the radical political and social activists, Maurice and Doris Blackburn. More recently an Australia Council Literature Board grant has enabled significant further progress on this work. Other biographical publications include chapters in M. Lake & F. Kelly (eds), Double Time: Women in Victoria - 150 years; Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1940s, which she co-edited with Sheila Fitzpatrick, and ‘Double Helix, Double Joy’: David Danks the Father of Clinical Genetics in Australia.

She was an executive member of the History Institute of Victoria and is a foundation member of the Professional Historians Association. She has been an honorary fellow/senior fellow in History at the University of Melbourne since 1990 and an active member of the History of Melbourne University Unit since its inception in 1995. From 2013-2016 she held a position Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow charged with preparing an up-dated history of the University of Melbourne from 1975-2015.