Isobel Mary White (1912–1997) was an English-Australian anthropologist whose publications beginning in the 1960s concentrated on the role of women in Aboriginal societies in Australia.
[1] Isobel Mary Lunn, known to her friends as Sally, was born and grew up in Harrow, Middlesex (now part of London), until the family moved to Birmingham so her father could accept an appointment as a headmaster there.
After the war, the family moved to the United States so Michael could pursue his career and Sally could begin to explore her new interest in anthropology, which grew from her research in Canada.
To do so she studied desert groups, conducting major fieldwork in the late 1960s and 1970s with the collaboration of linguist Luise Hercus and musicologists Catherine Ellis and Helen Payne.
She was a reviewer there for many years and co-edited with Judith Wilson and Isabel McBryde two special volumes (numbers 11 and 12) honouring their Canadian colleague Diane Barwick.