Shirley Stott Despoja

In November 2018, she was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame.

In the 2017 Australia Day Honours, she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM), for service to the print media as a journalist.

Stott Despoja was inducted into the South Australian Media Awards Hall of Fame in 2013.

In 2008, Stott Despoja returned to the media, writing a column titled "The Third Age" for the Adelaide Review.

Their daughter, Natasha Stott Despoja, was a Senator for South Australia from 1995 to 2008, and leader of the Australian Democrats from 2001 to 2002.

In 1988, Stott Despoja took sick leave, and in January 1989 filed a claim for worker's compensation for work-related stress. The Australian Journalists Association took the case to the Industrial Relations Commission seeking her return to work for five days a week on full pay. The AJA's South Australian secretary told an IRC hearing that Stott Despoja's stress was caused by an incident arising over a disagreement with the editor of The Advertiser, Piers Akerman, over the placement of a column, and which the AJA alleged resulted in Akerman threatening Stott Despoja with violence. The dispute went to the Supreme Court of South Australia, where the Advertiser's appeal against the claim was dismissed. Stott Despoja retired from the paper in 1992.

In 1963, Stott interviewed Croatian migrant Mario Despoja for The Advertiser about his success on the quiz show Coles £3000 Question. They married ten months later, but divorced after twelve years.

Shirley Margaret Stott Despoja OAM (born 1936) is an Australian journalist. She was the first female journalist in the general newsroom of The Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide, and was the paper's first arts editor.