In Memoriam: Margaret Diesendorf

Abstract

Australia has been immeasurably enriched by men and women whose dates and record of birth and death are like those of Margaret Diesendorf. Margaret is one of a generation whose work for Australia may one day be recorded as a distinctive thread in the text of Australian cultural history, along with the convicts, pastoralists, drovers, city builders, politicians, armed forces, capitalists, sports leaders, artists and the rest of us. Margaret is one of the Europeans who left a country and culture in which they were so deeply rooted and whose languages they respected and loved so honestly that it came with them inseparably from their physical presence. People like Margaret are never migrants; they belong naturally to every part of the world because they have an essential understanding of what culture is, a knowledge that is as instinctive to them as the knowledge of breathing is to most of us. In Mexico, South Africa or the Philippines, Margaret would have worked exactly as she did in Australia, and given her unconditional love to the people and their arts.