AustLit

Born in the front bedroom of a small farm house not far from Kingston, SA, Margaret was the second to last child in a family of eleven. She was given the job of looking after the cows and the other animals. At ten years of age she played the guitar and the banjo and tap danced, appearing in amateur concerts in the South East.

Her schooling ended when she was thirteen, when she went to work for the local policeman's wife. At sixteen she married, had seven children in ten years, and was divorced at 27. She raised the children on her own and in 1973 moved to the Northern territory where she was one of the three first women to be employed as a sample preparer at the Peko Mine. By the time she retired from Peko ten years later she was a supervisor. She says that she considers these to have been the most enjoyable and informative years of her life. She travelled extensively through the top half of Australia, and it was while she was in Townsville that her writing life began.

Later, in Port Lincoln, she took a course in Creative Writing at the TAFE, and her first story was published in the Pt Lincoln anthology, Coasting. She now lives at Victor Harbor.