AustLit

Marguerite Mahood was a writer, potter, printmaker, graphic artist and watercolourist, who studied painting at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, and ceramics at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She established herself as a professional artist, producing decorative drawings and watercolours, linocuts and oil paintings and often exhibited with the Victorian Artists Society. In the late 1920s she gave weekly broadcasts on design, its history and techniques in the visual arts on ABC radio.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Marguerite and her husband were active members of the Communist Party of Australia and Mahood assisted the cause by producing posters, leaflets, banners and other promotional material.

Mahood began working on animal drawings and produced an illustrated children's book, The Whispering Stone: An Australian Nature Fantasy (1944), and as 'Margot Mahood', she drew children's cartoons devoted to Australian animals and also produced a book in 1952, Drawing Australian Animals. Mahood returned to study in the late 1950s, gaining her Master of Arts degree, and her lifelong interest in cartoons culminated in a Ph.D. in history from the University of Melbourne on Australian political caricature. Her thesis was published as The Loaded Line: Australian Political Caricature 1788- 1901 (1973).

She contributed articles on colonial cartoonists for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and continued to hold several solo exhibitions at the Lyceum Club and Jim Alexanders Gallery, Melbourne.