Margaret Knauerhase came to Australia with her family in 1920 at the age of six, when her father, Edward Sidney Kiek, came to be Principal of the Parkin theological college in Adelaide. She was educated at the Methodist Ladies' College and at the University of Adelaide (Bachelor of Arts), winning the Walter Scott Memorial Prize for an essay in her first year at the university. She taught at The Wilderness School. She married and had four daughters, then went back to teaching, this time at the Methodist Ladies' College.

Much of her writing has been for her church, including a series of devotional and ethical booklets. She has written several hymns, some because, as a Lay Preacher, she couldn't find any hymn in the hymn book which expressed what she wanted to say in her sermon, so she wrote her own. Friends have set them to music. For several years in the 1990s the Uniting Church offered an annual hymn-writing prize, and she has won it three times. She is the main contributor to a song book, Hymns for Fellowship, produced by the Uniting Church Synod of SA Committee for Fellowships.

Knauerhase has written a number of short plays of about 20 minutes' duration for use in church by the Uniting Church, and several pageants, including one for the golden jubilee of the Church Women's Association. Her plays were produced first at her local (Colonel Light Gardens) Uniting Church and many have been produced in other states and in the UK and the US. She contributed poems to The Chronicle and The Advertiser and to other local press, and won the State Centenary's competition for a commemorative centenary ode in 1936.

Other writing includes biographies of her father and of her mother, Winifred Kiek, the first woman to graduate with a Bachelor of Divinity from Melbourne College of Divinity and author of a book on child-rearing, and a history of the Uniting Church at Colonel Light Gardens.