February, 2005

I first heard of Margaret Scott in 1967, when Michael Boddy told me her house had burned down in the Hobart fires of that year. My house burned down in 1993 and her Premaydena farmhouse -- one of the loveliest places I have ever visited -- in 2003. So I can say with truth I know about half of how she felt, but not all; never all.

One responds to fire in a primal way. It seems to be a judgement. It negates you. It removes your photographs, your memories, your remaining sense of importance, your will to go on. This is not so with Margaret. She has been tried in the fire, as the saying goes, and has not been found wanting.

For what she has done in her life is rooted, I think, in something much less flammable: the English language. She daily climbs it like a child an old loved tree. She knows its myriad branches and melodies by heart. In its writing she has what once was said of Robert Louis Stevenson, perfect pitch. Like Thoreau or Cardus or George Eliot she works the colloquial, and the common themes of humankind, into calm and lasting poetry. Her books, however recent, seem to have been with us a long time; her poems likewise fixed and everlasting.

Where this came from -- and her infinite capacity to make deft luminous jokes -- I can only guess at. It's possible some people are hooked into the race memory in a way that other people are not. It's possible some people are finer-tuned to the harmonies of sound and meaning that our sly language has hinted at from its beginnings, the extra shadings Tolkien found, and Keats, and Shakespeare, and Malory, in a syllable properly placed in a sequence. It's possible this special faculty is the same one that also makes jokes, and gets a big laugh that is just one syllable distant from a small laugh or none at all. To hear Margaret in debate, and in the delicate shuttlecock of wit in contest, is to hear the language anew.

Margaret is an original, a rare sweet off-shore island of thought, integrity and linguistic relish one visits with wonder, as one visits Tasmania itself. Like many great souls she thinks herself less grand than she should. She regards herself as a feature of the neighbourhood but not as what she is, the transformation of it. She is I guess the Poet Laureate of Tasmania by acclamation already, and all who know her know it, but she herself is uncertain she has yet made the grade. After evading as she inadvertently did all the glittering prizes of Oxbridge, the BBC and the dinner party set of Hampstead and Highgate, she may still feel there is a way to go to glory yet. She need not worry. Her glory is here, and now.