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Cate Morriss earns Chancellor’s Medal
A Caboolture woman who tentatively ventured into tertiary study the day her first grandchild was born five years ago has earned the University of the Sunshine Coast’s highest academic award for 2007.
Cate Morriss, 45, will receive the Chancellor’s Medal when she graduates with First Class Honours in Politics at the USC graduation ceremony this Friday night (18 May).
The medal will be awarded in recognition of Cate’s excellence in academic performance, University governance, community service and student welfare.
Cate, who aspires to an academic career specialising in gender equity issues and Australia’s relationships with Pacific island nations, said becoming a grandmother had been a defining moment in her life.
“I decided that I was simply too young to stay at home and be a grandmother, so I opted to reinvent myself,” she said.
Cate said she experienced cold feet at the prospect of studying but soon revelled in the challenges of university life.
“The first day I came to this University and sat in a welcome from the Dean at Orientation, I felt sick with fear. I didn’t think I could do it. I thought it was too far out of my reach,” she said.
“Then one of the lecturers, Phil Mahnken, got up and tried to sell his Indonesian language course and he was so funny and warm that I felt better. It was that personal touch from a lecturer that said something about the University and I didn’t feel it would be such a struggle then.
“The first semester was challenging. I found huge gaps in my knowledge, but it was exciting to do that learning.”
Cate started studying a Bachelor of Arts in Community Service but quickly changed to a combined Bachelor of Arts in Politics and International Relations and a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from which she graduated last year.
“By the end of first semester, I found all of my previous background seemed to fit into political science,” she said. “I’ve always been an advocate of marginalised youth and women.”
Her enjoyment of study simply blossomed and she has since published numerous academic papers, wrote two children’s books and made presentations at academic conferences.
“I just so loved my university life that I couldn’t get enough of it,” she said. “I decided that I wouldn’t put my family under this kind of pressure unless I was going to make it really worthwhile and I was going to put 100% into it.”
Her sheer enthusiasm for study resulted in her receiving numerous bursaries, scholarships and invitations to attend major national and international conferences.
In her second year at USC in 2004, Cate was a mentor for first-year students and joined the Pacific Islands Political Studies Association, of which she is still the Queensland branch secretary.
She also attended a “Securing a Peaceful Pacific” conference in Christchurch, New Zealand that year and, in 2005, spent eight weeks on scholarship with the Gender Relations Centre at The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.
In 2006, she presented papers at ANU’s Asia Pacific Week conference, the Australasian Political Science Association conference in Newcastle, and was a delegate at the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations annual conference, ‘Redefining Asia’, in Singapore.
“The chance to go to Singapore was a highlight. It was the biggest graduate and post-graduate conference in Asia and it was run by Harvard with about 500 students,” she said. “It had the best of the best students from around the world.”
At the final forum of the conference, Cate pointed out that the issue of gender balance had not been addressed and she called for a discussion on the topic.
“It changed the whole tone of the forum,” she said. “We looked at the voice that women have in security issues and started to talk about the things women did underground or behind the scenes.”
Cate currently is studying under scholarship at Queensland University of Technology’s Centre for Social Change Research at Carseldine where her thesis is on “The Pacific Plan: Gender and Security”.
“I’m analysing the way the Pacific Plan was developed up to its implementation in 2005 and asking if it addressed issues such as gender balance,” she said.
“I’ll be finishing my thesis in 2009 and I know that what I find will be presented to a review process of the Pacific Plan in 2010. So, hopefully, it will have an impact.”