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My first scheduled meeting with June ended up with my not meeting her at all! But the circumstances of this occasion do provide the opportunity to give a flavour of this extraordinarily talented woman that we have sadly lost. It was August 1993 and I was an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she spent the last seven years of her busy and highly successful life. She was at this time on the staff of Victoria University in Wellington. I was invited to present a paper to the Department and gladly accepted since this would have given me an opportunity to meet June who had first come to my attention through her work on developing a theoretical framework for public sector accounting (Pallot, 1992). On my arrival in Wellington I received a note from June to say that sadly, and with immense regret, she couldn't be at the seminar since she had to attend an important meeting with the Auditor General of New Zealand, which, despite her wish to meet me, was a commitment she just couldn't avoid. In fact, as I discovered, she had just started a two-year secondment to the New Zealand Audit Office reporting directly to the Auditor General with a major policy brief that transpired to be highly influential to New Zealand Government thinking.
It is possible to read into this brief encounter with June in 1993 a great deal about her as a person and her diverse and immense contribution to theory, policy and practice. She was, above all else, intent on engaging with and making an active contribution to not only academic debates about accounting and management in the public services but also to policy formation and practice. Her decision to meet with the Auditor General, rather than myself, in 1993 was typical of the strains and difficult decisions that have to be made when anyone is trying to cover such diverse sets of activities and interests. June was always very practical about this - despite her very best efforts sometimes not even she could do everything - as was the case with my seminar and our planned meeting. However, of all the academics I have ever met, June tried harder than...