A Little More by Margaret Scott

Author:Margaret Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

Peripatetic travels with Margaret

What can I possibly contribute to this tribute? Hasn’t everything been said?

What can I add to the legends swirling around the marvellous Margaret Scott?

So much of her extraordinary life is on the public record. But there may, perhaps, be a few scraps of her CV with which you’re unfamiliar.

I first met Margaret on the Ballarat goldfields in the lull before the storm of the Eureka Stockade. Though Margaret was dancing up a storm of her own. Her stage name, at the time, was Ruby Glitters and, night after night, she’d dance naked on the tabletops for debauched audiences of drunken diggers—who’d fling nuggets at her feet and sprinkle her glistening torso with gold dust.

After the insurrection she disappeared for a while, only to re-emerge as a double agent in some theatre of European conflict. As I recall, her pseudonym then was Mata Hari. There was the inevitable kerfuffle and Mata/Margaret was going to be martyred by firing squad … but at the last minute she slipped off into the darkness to re-emerge as a famous aviatrix who, yet again, would mysteriously vanish …

Margaret bobbed up again in Britain in a ménage with Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson. Appalled by their politics, she resumed her peripatetic existence and was sighted, variously, in Moscow, Washington, Buenos Aires, Peking and Paris … and in that romantic city formed yet another ménage with a European Resistance leader and an American drunk. Their story, later lightly fictionalised, was filmed as Casablanca, with Ingrid Bergman playing Margaret—though those of us who know and love Scott regard the impersonation by the Swedish actress as pallid and unconvincing.

More recently there was the sex scandal that helped bring down John Gorton and, of course, her subsequent affair with the late Jim Cairns. And all the time, Margaret was tossing off impeccable works of literature that should have won the Booker, the Vogel, the Franklin and the Nobel prizes, had it not been for the vicious interventions by the CIA.

Now Margaret is gracing Tasmania with her energetic and enigmatic presence and one awaits her next adventure with a mixture of awe and trepidation. But I, for one, will always remember her for a special, very personal reason … our rapturously romantic weekend in Venice during Carnivale in the early 1950…

Phillip Adams

Broadcaster, columnist

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