Being (from) there : Antipodean reflections on feminist geography

While Jan Monk's professional career is distinguished by her internationalism, she remains in our eyes a quintessentially Australian geographer. As feminist geographers also hailing from Australia, we see in Jan's approach to scholarship, academia and professional conduct an Antipodean flavour of adventurousness, practicality and inclusivity that was both of her time and place and ahead of that time and place. Bringing these qualities to gender and feminist geography, as one of its founders, Jan helped other feminist geographers to flourish, gain legitimacy and make path-breaking contributions to the discipline and beyond. In this collaborative contribution we reflect on the insights offered to us by Jan across our careers, her intellectual contributions that informed our work and especially the practical principles she advanced that went way beyond the usual mentoring advice about which journals to publish in, or how many articles and research grants to aim for. Jan's advice about academic practice was grounded in a feminist reading of what constituted 'success' at work in post-secondary-school institutions and in her considerable research into how this played out in the biographies of individual women geographers. It was also grounded in her research in social and cultural geography and in her leadership of research partnerships and academic organisations involving researchers across many national borders. Jan drew on these parts of her own academic career to guide the careers of others, personally and persuasively, in diverse settings (often informal), including visits to her own home and field trips at conferences all over the world. Three guiding practical principles stand out when we think of Jan's influence on us: internationalism, inclusion and the practical importance of being there. We offer some examples of how these principles have informed our practice as feminist geographers over the last four decades.