First Clare Burton Scholarship Awarded June 2002
The inaugural Clare Burton Memorial Scholarship has been awarded to Ms Sarah Wendt, a Ph D. Student at UniSA's Whyalla campus. Ms Wendt is completing research towards a PhD on Exploring the Impact of Rural Culture on Women's Experience, and Men's Perpetration, of Domestic Violence.
The Clare Burton scholarship will be awarded annually and can be taken up at any of the five universities of the Australian Technology Network (Curtin, QUT, RMIT University, UniSA or UTS). It was established by the ATN Universities and Dr Clare Burton's family to honour and continue the work of Dr Burton, a pioneering Australian researcher, activist and practitioner in the field of gender equity. The scholarship is for $10,000 and is available to either a commencing or continuing student enrolled in post graduate course work or in a research degree where the major piece of work is focused on gender equity.
Chair of the Scholarship Committee, Professor Eleanor Ramsay, said "The selection panel was impressed by both the quality and spread of the highly competitive field attracted by this important award. The strong field of fifteen applications, spread across all five states, included both PhD and Masters students from a range of disciplines. The range of their research topics was very wide and included employment issues, mining, sport, school choice, disability, young women, literature, EEO policy, maths and education, older women, long hours in employment, rural violence, and migrant women. Our inaugural scholarship winner, Sarah Wendt, was selected on the basis of both her strength and achievements as a researcher and also the significance of her research topic and its relevance to Clare's work."
Professor Meredith Edwards, sister of Dr Clare Burton, said "Our family are delighted to have Clare's work commemorated in such a tangible way. Clare, with her strong sense of social justice, would welcome the fact that the winner comes from a remote rural campus, and is working on such an important area. We are confident that Sarah will make a significant contribution to knowledge as well as develop answers by listening to both women and men."
Scholarship winner, Sarah Wendt, grew up on a farm and was educated in a small rural community. She said "I am proud to have gained this inaugural scholarship and to be in some way associated with such a highly respected researcher as Dr Clare Burton. She wrote extensively about cultures and I know would be sympathetic to my aim of investigating how the rural culture plays itself out in relationships between women and men, where domestic violence exists in their lives. I would like to thank the ATN Universities, the Burton family and all those friends and supporters of Clare's who contributed to the scholarship fund."