AustLit

The only daughter and middle child in an art/music family (her mother is Marjorie Hann, q.v.), Marguerite attended St Peters Girls Collegiate School. She believed herself invisible, she says, until she found her confusion articulated in a Women's Studies course in the mid-1980s. She travelled Europe at the age of 22 and married at 25. They moved to the Adelaide Hills with their two children in the late 70s, and in 1983, when she was pregnant with her third child, they lost everything in the Ash Wednesday fires.

She enrolled at Flinders University that year, and in 1984 began studies in French, Politics and Sociology, later going on to do Women's Studies. She was "dazed and confused" from the fires and the loss when she started her studies, and she left the same way. With the family in a state of shock and grief they moved house seven times in 18 months. Her father became ill and died as Marguerite was completing her Honours thesis. In a personal communication she says of this period, "Undiagnosed emotional/mental collapse followed completion of Honours in 1990. Went under a rock. Came out writing."

She found not only her voice, but also something worth commenting on. She has had public readings, been workshop facilitator and had various speaking engagements for community groups, and has had residencies at Varuna Retreat, Katoomba (1994) and Carrick Hill (inaugural writer-in-residence, 1995). Over recent years she has produced a series of art tutorial videos with her mother, Marjorie Hann, and a number of videographies. These include a series, "Portrait of an Artist", for the Adelaide Art Society, and video portraits of writers for the SA Writers' Centre. She has also documented musical rehearsals and performances. She has had stories broadcast on Radio 5UV. She was given two Quick Response grants (1994, 1995) by the Dept of Arts and Cultural Development, and in 1997 she was given an ArtsSA grant to write "Welcome to Phantasma" (as yet unpublished) . She did part of a Graduate Certificate of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide in 1998, and was a Board member of the Writers' Centre and of Dance Excentrix Inc. Her unpublished story "Woodley" was Commended, Auswrite 1997.