Margaret Elizabeth Rothschild (née Wainwright)

Heavitree

Margaret Elizabeth Wainwright was born on 14 February 1956 at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital in Exeter, the third of four children of Robert William Wainwright and Lillian Rose Wainwright née Bennett. Her father, born in 1923, had served as a mechanic with the Royal Air Force during the war and afterwards opened a small garage on the Honiton Road, where he repaired the cars and vans of half the neighbourhood and was paid by some of them. Her mother, born in 1925, was a seamstress who took in alterations and fine embroidery at the kitchen table and was known across Heavitree for the quality of her work.

The family lived in a terraced house in Heavitree, on the eastern side of the city, within earshot of the bells of St Michael and All Angels. Margaret had two elder brothers, Jonathan Peter and Benjamin Robert, and a younger sister, Eleanor Jane. The house was small, crowded and loud, and money was always short. Nobody in the family had stayed at school past fifteen, and success meant a steady trade and a clean front step.

Margaret was the quiet one. She drew from the time she could hold a pencil, using stubs her father brought home from the garage, and she spent long afternoons in the lanes, allotments and hedgerows on the edge of the city drawing what she found there: leaves, seed heads, a dead wren, the underside of a fern. Her drawings were small, exact and patient. She did not draw people, and she disliked being asked to.

The Grammar School

She went to the local primary school in Heavitree and in 1967 passed the eleven-plus to a girls' grammar school in the city. It was the first time anyone in the family had done so, and her parents were proud of it and slightly afraid of it. She was not a natural fit. The other girls were mostly the daughters of solicitors, clergy and doctors, and Margaret, with her mother's homemade uniform and her father's garage, was conscious of the difference every day for seven years.

She did well in art, biology and English and found a refuge in the school library and the art room. At fourteen she read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and it changed how she looked at the things she drew. The hedgerows and meadows of the Devon countryside were being sprayed, grubbed out and ploughed as she watched, and her drawings began to feel to her less like pictures than like records of things that were disappearing.

Her parents wanted her to leave school at sixteen and train as a secretary. Her art teacher came to the house and talked to her father in the front room for an hour, and Margaret stayed on. In 1973 she won a place at the Exeter College of Art and Design, where she studied illustration for three years under an elderly botanical artist named Arthur Maycroft. He taught her watercolour, patience and the discipline of drawing a plant until she understood how it was built. She finished her diploma in 1976 with a portfolio of Devon wildflowers that he told her was the best he had seen from a student in twenty years.

The Assisted Passage

Britain in the mid-1970s offered an art school graduate from a garage family very little. The economy was in recession, jobs were scarce, and the country seemed to Margaret to be closing in. Her mother's nephew, Thomas Sidney Bennett, had emigrated to Tasmania in 1971 and set up as a landscape gardener near Kingston, south of Hobart, and his letters home described an island of mountains, forests and wildflowers that no one in England had heard of.

Margaret applied for an assisted passage to Australia in her final year of college. Her parents were dismayed and did not try to stop her. She flew out of London in January 1976, a month short of her twentieth birthday, with one suitcase, a portfolio and a sketchbook she filled on the flight with drawings of the clouds over the Indian Ocean. She arrived in Hobart in the height of summer. The light shocked her. She had never seen colours so hard and clear.

She lived with Thomas and his family in their weatherboard house near Kingston for her first year. Within a month she had found work as a teaching assistant in the art department at Ogilvie High School, the girls' high school in New Town, and in 1977 she was taken on as an art teacher. She spent her weekends on the mountain and in the bush with a sketchbook, drawing the native plants she could not yet name. She learned their names from a secondhand flora she bought in a Hobart bookshop and carried until it fell apart.

Richard

In late 1978 she went to a fundraiser in Hobart for a children's literacy programme, mainly because the children's drawings were on display and she wanted to see them. A young history teacher named Richard Alan Rothschild was standing beside her, looking at the same drawings. They talked for most of the evening about the colony's early naturalists, and he asked her to dinner. She found him earnest, shy and funny in a way she did not expect, and she liked that he asked questions and listened to the answers.

They married in December 1979. Her parents could not afford the fare from England, and her side of the church was filled by Thomas and his family. Richard's mother, Helena Rothschild, was disappointed that it was not a Catholic wedding and that her son was marrying an English garage owner's daughter with no family in Tasmania, and she was cool towards Margaret for several years. Margaret, who had been the outsider at grammar school, recognised the tone and waited it out. Helena warmed to her slowly, mostly through the grandchildren.

The couple rented a flat in Battery Point. Margaret kept teaching, moving to Taroona High School in 1982, and painted at the kitchen table in the evenings while Richard marked essays at the other end. She wrote home every week and telephoned on birthdays, when they could afford the call. She was homesick in a way she had not expected, most of all in the Hobart winters, which were grey and damp in the same way as Devon's and made the distance worse.

Sandy Bay

Their first child, Amelia Margaret Rothschild, was born on 15 March 1983 at the Royal Hobart Hospital. Samuel Edward Rothschild followed in 1985 and Clara Anne Rothschild in 1987. In 1984 the family bought an old Victorian house in upper Sandy Bay with high ceilings, bad plumbing and a large, neglected garden, and Margaret spent the next decade turning the garden into a working collection of Tasmanian native plants that she drew, season by season, for the rest of her life.

In 1985 she gave up teaching to work full time as a botanical artist. It was a risk on a single teacher's salary with two small children, and the family felt it for years. Richard took private tutoring in the evenings, and Margaret took commissions she did not want, illustrating seed catalogues and council brochures, to pay for the ones she did. There were years when they argued about money more than about anything else.

Her first solo exhibition, Flora Tasmanica, opened at the Salamanca Arts Centre in 1988 and sold out in a week. It established her reputation. Over the following decade she illustrated a widely used field guide to the wildflowers of south-west Tasmania, published in 1992, and worked with the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens on teaching material for schools. In 1996 she had her first exhibition on the mainland, at a gallery in Melbourne, and she exhibited in Victoria regularly after that.

Her method did not change much over forty years. She worked from living plants, never from photographs or pressed specimens, and she would return to the same plant over several weeks to draw it in bud, in flower and in seed. She kept every preparatory sketch in numbered boxes in the spare room, and she refused commissions that asked her to work faster than the plant allowed. Botanists at the herbarium in Sandy Bay came to trust her drawings as records, which mattered more to her than any review. She was never comfortable at her own openings. Richard did the talking, and she stood near the door.

The Children

The house in Sandy Bay was full and noisy, and it was always short of money and never short of books, paint or music. Margaret drew at the kitchen table while the children did their homework around her, and she taught each of them to draw a plant properly before they were ten. Only Clara kept it up. Amelia took to the violin from the age of seven and later to the viola, and Margaret drove her to lessons, rehearsals and competitions for fifteen years. Samuel took after his father and argued about history from the time he could talk.

Margaret was a patient mother and a reserved one. She did not raise her voice and did not often say what she felt, and her children learned to read her by what she drew. When Richard fell into a deep depression in his early forties, and his sister Rebecca died suddenly in 1995, Margaret held the household together. She persuaded Richard to see a doctor, kept the children fed and at school, and kept painting, because the commissions paid the mortgage. She later said that 1995 and 1996 were the only years of her life she could not remember drawing anything she was proud of.

Her father died in Exeter in 1991. She could not afford to fly home for the funeral, and she sat in the garden in Sandy Bay on the day of it and drew the camellias, which had been his favourite. Her mother lived on alone in the house in Heavitree, cared for by Eleanor, and died in 2006. Margaret did not make it home for that funeral either. The flights were expensive, the notice was short, and she had a commission due. She never entirely forgave herself.

Exeter Again

In 2007 Margaret and Richard flew to London to visit Amelia, who was studying at the Royal Academy of Music. It was Margaret's first time back in England in thirty-one years. Afterwards they took the train to Exeter, and she showed Richard the house in Heavitree, the garage on the Honiton Road, by then a car wash, and the lanes where she had drawn as a child, most of which had become housing estates. She stood at her mother's grave for a long time and did not say much.

Her brother Benjamin died suddenly of a heart attack in 2009, at fifty-six. Margaret flew home for his funeral, the only one of her family's funerals she attended. She stayed with Eleanor for two weeks and spent most of them drawing the Exe estuary in the rain. Her brother Jonathan, the eldest, drove her to the airport and told her on the way that their mother had kept every letter she had ever sent from Tasmania, in date order, in a biscuit tin.

The paintings she made after that visit were different from her earlier work. They were larger, looser and sadder. Several of them paired a Tasmanian plant with a Devon one on the same sheet, the wattle beside the gorse, the native heath beside the heather. They were exhibited in Hobart in 2011 under the title Two Countries, and they were the best-reviewed work of her career.

Carer

Richard was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2011. Within two years Margaret, by then in her late fifties, developed rheumatoid arthritis in her hands. The disease came on just as Richard began to need her hands most: to lift, to dress, to feed. For seven years she was his principal carer while her own fingers swelled and stiffened, and there were months when neither of them slept properly.

The children took turns. Samuel came most evenings, Amelia spent much of 2016 at the house, and Clara drove down from her studio on weekends. It was not always gentle. Margaret was exhausted and proud and reluctant to accept help, and the family argued, more than once and not kindly, about whether Richard should move to a hospice. She would not allow it. He died at home in Sandy Bay on 17 September 2018, with Margaret and their three children in the room.

Those years cost her more than she admitted. She stopped exhibiting between 2013 and 2017 and took only small commissions she could finish at the kitchen table in the hours when Richard slept. She learned to use the hoist, the feeding pump and the eye-gaze screen through which he wrote and spoke in his last years, and she learned to sleep in two-hour stretches. Her own doctor told her more than once that she was neglecting her hands. She said she would deal with them afterwards, and she did, though by then much of the damage was done.

She chose St David's Cathedral for his funeral, in part because it was the church she had gone to as a young migrant, and in part because she thought he would have found it funny. She sat in the front pew with Amelia's daughter, Elowen, on her lap, and did not cry until the end.

The Study

The years after Richard's death were the hardest of her life. She kept his study as he had left it, with the eye-gaze screen still on the desk, and could not bring herself to go into it for months. She painted very little in 2019. Her hands were worse, and she found that she had lost the fine control she had built over fifty years. A hand therapist at the Royal Hobart fitted her with splints and thick-handled brushes, and she learned, slowly and with great frustration, to paint with them.

The work changed again. It was broader and less exact, and she minded that at first and then stopped minding. She began to paint the garden in Sandy Bay as a whole, rather than plant by plant, and in 2022 she exhibited a small set of these paintings at the Salamanca Arts Centre, thirty-four years after her first show there. The same year she gave Richard's papers to the state archives, and cleared the study, and turned it into a studio.

By 2026 Margaret Rothschild was seventy and still lived in the Victorian house in upper Sandy Bay, with a garden that had grown beyond anything she could manage alone. Samuel helped with the heavy work. Clara came down on weekends and painted with her. Elowen, by then eleven, spent Saturday afternoons at her grandmother's kitchen table drawing leaves, and Margaret taught her, as she had taught her own children, to draw a plant until she understood how it was built. Eleanor telephoned from Exeter on Sunday evenings. Margaret still kept a sketchbook in her coat pocket, though she could no longer draw in it for long.