RICHARD FLANAGAN:

If Margaret’s life teaches us anything it is to take courage from the love we have and the love we give in our everyday life and to stand up to those she would name as bullies, no matter how feeble and frail you feel yourself to be. Few came feebler and frailer than Margaret at the end of her life, few manifested more power simply by the example of speaking truth to power, uttering words of love.

IN ONE of her very earliest published poems Margaret wrote of how she was a child of her time, born in 1934, ten nights before Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives. She wrote of how as the German government calls tenders for crematoria, she is wheeled proudly to high street shops. How as Mosley’s Blackshirted Fascist thugs run rampant in London’s east end and throw a four year old through a window, Margaret, a toddler unaware of the coming apocalypse, bounces her legs in her pusher in the park.

Auden described the thirties as “a low dishonest decade”, a description that could apply equally to our present times.

In the course of the last decade, as Margaret sickened, so too, once more, did our world: globally, nationally, locally. For the beast is back, slouching once more toward Bethlehem, in the world, in Australia, and even here in our own island.

If the measure of a nation is its ability and its determination to help its weakest members Australia seemed no longer a nation but a mockery of a nation and Margaret grieved the meanness of our nation’s policies, refusing to believe that they were true to the spirit of the Australian people.

Our Tasmania in recent years grew brutish and thuggish. People who loved the island were destroyed with accusations and innuendo, with lies and with threats. Margaret hated that too, and mourned how at the same time the place, its people, its riches were given over to powerful corporations, and how this revealed many people not as good or bad, but simply as weak, giving into their own fears and lacking the courage to stand shoulder to shoulder with truth.

She didn’t accept that Tasmania ought be less

And perhaps all this explains why a small frail woman, dying of emphysema, came to mean so much to so many Tasmanians. She didn’t accept that we were as a society mean and selfish. She didn’t accept that we couldn’t be a better place; she didn’t accept that Tasmania ought be less and that being Tasmanian meant you were mediocre. She didn’t understand why we allowed the rampant destruction of so much of our unique and irreplaceable glory to sate greed and appease power. She was shaken by what she saw around her, but this did not make her feel alone.

Rather, she believed many felt similarly and she drew strength from this solidarity of the shaken. She believed that when she spoke, she spoke not for one, but for the many.

She reminded us that in dark times it mattered to laugh and to take joy in what we had around us: our families, our homes, our gardens, our place.

Friendship, civility, grace mattered to Margaret. She found solace and wisdom not in large ideologies and great philosophies, but in the small things and daily practice of family and friendship.

Take courage from love

If Margaret’s life teaches us anything it is to take courage from the love we have and the love we give in our everyday life and to stand up to those she would name as bullies, no matter how feeble and frail you feel yourself to be. Few came feebler and frailer than Margaret at the end of her life, few manifested more power simply by the example of speaking truth to power, uttering words of love.

Margaret was a joyous person with a melancholic, dark rim to her soul, but it was a beautiful soul and it is here with us today, cackling, recounting, listening, pondering, and eye rolling.

How lucky we were to have her; how good, how good it was to know her.

Margaret was frail and in many ways ordinary. She had failings, some of which grieved her deeply. She was beset by adversity and felt she had in ways fundamental failed in the things in which she most wanted to achieve. She was mortal, believed herself guilty of certain sins.

But she was to me as she was to so many, utterly beautiful.

It is true that reputations, memories, are the shuddering of a bell too soon stilled. Time’s fever burns away beauty and wit, joy and achievement; the grave proves everything to which we aspire but windborne dust. But souls are boundless. Sometimes they take flight in unexpected ways and join with others to make something large and enduring. As we stand here by the banks of the glorious Derwent, in this place created by a refugee fleeing Italian fascism, such a marvel is with us. It is the legacy of Margaret Scott, the overflowing bounty of a life lived in the service of love.

Goodbye Margaret, goodbye.

Text of a speech made by Richard Flanagan in memory of Margaret Scott, Moorilla, 11 September 2005.