Margaret Walkom was so formidably clever I sometimes wonder if even her parents weren’t sometimes intimidated by her. In December 1931 her photograph appeared in the Sydney Mail when she was dux and co-head prefect of Pymble Ladies’ College. It was customary to photograph school duxes with their prize books, and there is Margaret, a pile of books on one arm and a huge bouquet of flowers on the other.
Her gaze is calm and direct. She will enter the University of Sydney the following year, and it’s as if she already knows what triumphs await her there. Her long brown plaits are tied at the ends with oversized bows. Perhaps that morning she had shrugged off her mother’s offer to help her with them. “There’s no need Mother, I can manage by myself.” And so she could, all through her long life.
Her father was Arthur Bache Walkom, a paleobotanist, secretary of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, and from 1940 until his retirement in 1954 the director the Australian Museum in Sydney. He met his wife, Constance McLean, when they were fellow students at the University of Sydney, she studying arts, he science.
As Mrs Arthur Walkom, Constance apparently let go of any career aspirations she might have had, but her daughter had no intention of doing the same. Gifted, determined, independent: rarely has any woman leapt out of the historical record and demanded my attention as Margaret Walkom has done. Once I began to notice her achievements I became determined not to let her story slip through my fingers.
I encountered her first while researching a piece for Inside Story on the 1939 congress of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, or ANZAAS, in Canberra. I was startled to find that its report had been edited by one “Margaret Walkom, B.A.” It was unusual at that time, surely, for a woman to edit a scientific volume?
The report yields nothing personal about Margaret, but paging through it is enough to suggest she showed exceptional early talent as an editor. It consists of papers read at the congress, minutes of the association’s meetings, membership lists, financial statements, plates, graphs, diagrams, scientific formulae and an index: some 450 pages in all. All ANZAAS congress reports were complex publications and typically the editorship went to established scientists. Margaret undertook the work with no scientific qualifications at just twenty-five years of age.
By some kind of alchemy, the mere sight of her name on the title page transforms her — for me anyway — into a living, breathing person, or at least the possibility of one. The book is an unexciting object to look at, and yet there is someone there, quivering behind the static letters on the page, waiting for her story to be released.
Who was Margaret Walkom? The answer couldn’t be discovered by a Google search. I’d have to find out for myself.
When Margaret was born in 1914, her family was living in Brisbane while her father worked at the Queensland Museum. They returned to Sydney in 1919 and settled in Killara, in the prosperous suburbs of Sydney’s north shore. Nearby was Pymble Ladies’ College, a new school establishing a reputation for quality education for girls.
Pleasingly for Arthur, Pymble was strong in his own subject, geology. It was taught there by Katie Walker, who took her students on excursions to Long Reef at Collaroy to observe rock formations and collect fossils. Decades later a former student still remembered these words, taught to generations of Pymble girls: “The coral polyp delights in the dash and spray of the waves.” Why such delight? Presumably because the waves deliver the tiny organisms the polyp consumes as food. It’s a beautiful sentence and shows that Miss Walker understood the power of words to inspire curiosity. Perhaps her coral polyps lingered in Margaret’s mind as well. There and then, perhaps, a science communicator was born.
At Sydney University, though, Margaret chose arts over science and graduated in 1936 with first class honours in English and second class in French. She also took philosophy and Latin. Like her father she was a great one for clubs and committees, and was a member (and often an office bearer) of the Student Representative Council, the Women’s Undergraduates’ Association, the Women’s Union, the Women Graduates’ Association, the Business and Professional Women’s Association, and the Pymble Ex-Students’ Association. She also joined the Australian English Association, and contributed occasional reviews to its journal, Southerly.
In one ambition, Margaret was thwarted. In April 1937 she was elected president of the SRC, having been vice-president the previous year. She was the first woman in the role, and the Daily Telegraph announced slyly to its readers: “Gentlemen, she is not a blonde.”
Uproar. A woman was “not a suitable person” to be president, it was said (although by whom it was unclear). The meeting at which she had been elected was declared unconstitutional, and the SRC met again to invite outgoing president, law graduate Kevin Ellis, to reconsider an earlier decision not to stand again (because he had insufficient time, he’d said). He agreed, and Margaret was deposed after just a week.
Still enjoying the story, the Daily Telegraph interviewed the university’s celebrated professor of philosophy, John Anderson (Margaret had probably studied under him), who declared the reasons for her ousting were “pretty thin” and predicted “righteous indignation” among women students. No doubt there was, but it made no difference.
All Margaret could do was make a gracious statement to the SRC newspaper, Honi Soit, wishing Ellis every success. Her humiliation might have been too much even for her normally indomitable spirit. She was enrolled in an MA at the time but never completed it.
Margaret was no novice editor when she took on the 1939 ANZAAS report. She had been sub-editor and, in 1936, editor of Hermes, Sydney University’s literary magazine — only the second woman since 1886 to hold the position, after Kathleen Commins (later a prominent Sydney journalist) in 1931. She was in talented company: her immediate successors as editor included James McAuley in 1937, Dorothy Auchterlonie (later Dorothy Auchterlonie Green) in 1938, and Edward Gough Whitlam in 1939. Judith Wright is thought to have published five poems pseudonymously in Hermes in the three issues Margaret edited.
Meanwhile, Arthur Walkom was introducing his daughter into scientific circles. As ANZAAS’s honorary general secretary, he took Margaret to the 1932 congress in Sydney as his “unofficial secretary.” Aged only eighteen, she already had sufficient poise to accompany her parents to the garden party held at Government House for the six hundred congress delegates. The Sydney Morning Herald spotted her among the crowd in a dress of bottle-green marcain (sometimes spelled marocain, a kind of crêpe) and matching coat. These were the days when no report of a social event was complete without a detailed account of what the women wore.
In 1934, and undoubtedly through her father’s influence, she gained a paid part-time job at ANZAAS headquarters in Sydney, and in 1938 she began editing the newly established Australian Journal of Science, issued six times a year. It was a natural step, then, to take on the editorship of the 1939 congress papers.
By a twist of fate, Arthur became ill with tonsilitis just before the congress began, and a typist was injured in an accident. Covering their jobs as well as her own, Margaret travelled to Canberra ahead of her father, in that searingly hot summer in January 1939, to work with the local organising committee finalising the last-minute arrangements.
Journalists were fascinated by dauntless efficiency with which Miss Walkom undertook the work of three people. Photographers snapped her at the congress venue, calmly dealing with paperwork and taking telephone calls. Cyril Pearl interviewed her for the Daily Telegraph and noted her enthusiasm for the congress’s star speaker, H.G. Wells. The relationship between science and society would be a theme of the congress, she told Pearl, and Wells had done much to make science understandable to everyone. For a garden party in the Senate rose garden she chose a black-and-white checked frock and a white hat.
No ANZAAS congresses were held during the war but they began again, in Melbourne, in 1946. This time Margaret went as an observer for the ABC, where she had been working since 1941. At a congress reception at the National Gallery of Victoria she was seen in “two shades of petunia under a long fur coat.” By 1949 she was working at the Radio Physics Division of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, or CSIR, and attended the ANZAAS congress in Hobart in that capacity.
What she wore to the reception that time was not recorded, but nevertheless she was noticed. And this is how I learned the most remarkable thing about Margaret Walkom: she was disabled. Beautiful and glamourous as she was, she had a disability which would have been obvious to everyone who met her and yet somehow, remarkably, she persuaded most journalists not to mention it.
One who got under her guard was Winifred Moore, writing for the Brisbane Courier Mail about the “distinguished women” attending the 1949 Hobart congress. Moore was struck by how Margaret’s “gravely sweet face bore the impress of suffering she had endured.” This was because, as a girl, Margaret had had a leg amputated after an accident. She had “triumphed” over her disability, Moore wrote, and although reliant on crutches, could drive a car and lead an “ordinary active life.”
I was far into my research on Margaret by the time I read this, and never had I detected any hint of struggle. I’d read about frocks and hats but not crutches. Always when photographed in public — which was often — she was either seated or had managed to hide her dependence on crutches. She was quite at ease with being looked at (anyone wearing “two shades of petunia” is not trying to fade into the background), except by the camera.
I’ve not located any personal records left by Margaret so I’m stitching together this story from snippets on the public record, and I acknowledge that there are gaps. I don’t know where she found her inspiration and strength, or what she did with anger, pain and frustration, or how her parents might have urged her on or held her back. I don’t even know how and when her accident occurred. Most likely it was a road or railway accident, which normally would have been reported in the press. Not this time apparently.
In 1941 Margaret left her job with ANZAAS for a position with the Australian Broadcasting Commission, working at first in public relations, and, from 1944, as a researcher with its Talks Department. The departure of many male staff for war offered opportunities for women to gain positions and promotion, and some stepped up from office jobs to sit behind the microphone as announcers.
The Talks Department covered an enormous range of subjects, from international affairs to philosophy to gardening during wartime. Margaret worked on literary programming and would have had contact with some of the prominent thinkers and writers of the time, notably Vance and Nettie Palmer, who were regulars on the ABC then. Occasionally Margaret herself gave a broadcast of a talk, a book review or a reading. She also wrote for the ABC’s magazine, ABC Listen, and in 1946 wrote a charming recollection of lunching with H.G. Wells in Canberra in 1939.
She was still often noticed by the press. She advocated for the extension of the Rhodes scholarship to women, for a uniform basic wage payable to women as well as men, and for ex-service women studying under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme to receive the same financial support as ex-servicemen.
In March 1946 she married Major Francis Hutley, a Sydney University economics and law graduate then serving with the Australian Army Legal Department. A social columnist calling herself “Althea,” who regularly reported “city gossip” for a newspaper in Dubbo, picked up that the wedding had taken place “quietly” the previous week at St Stephen’s church in Macquarie Street.
“Althea” also noted that the bride had lost a leg at the age of sixteen as a result of an accident. This is the only other reference to Margaret’s disability I have seen mentioned in the press. The reported age of sixteen could be wrong; “Althea” certainly had Margaret’s age wrong (she was thirty-two, not thirty).
The couple had been students together in the early 1930s; Margaret had even published a couple of Frank’s commentaries on modern poetry in Hermes. After the wedding they set up house together in Wollstonecraft but almost immediately, in April 1946, Frank was posted to the occupation force in Japan. In his absence Margaret’s life continued much as it had before. She kept her job with the ABC (somehow evading the marriage bar) and even kept her own surname.
Returning in December 1946, Frank was discharged from the army and took up a lectureship at the university’s law school. In the ensuing twelve months, Margaret and Frank’s marriage fell apart. Frank returned from a brief holiday at Mount Kosciuszko in December 1947 to find a note from Margaret saying she was leaving him. She’d told housekeeper, Mary Heap, that she was unhappy, and was driven back to Killara by her parents.
Frank wrote begging her return. He could not understand why she had left. “If it was because you feared you might have to give up work and curtail your social activities, I withdraw my objections and promise not to raise them again.” Christmas and New Year would be lonely without her, he said, adding that “the house was large place to live in with only Miss Heap.”
Margaret was having none of that. “Dear Frank,” she wrote back, “I do not want to seem stubborn and unreasonable, but my mind is quite made up. It is no good going over our differences on any particular point. Our marriage was a failure and I know now it could not have been anything else. Any further approach could only occasion bitterness, for which there is no necessity. Yours sincerely, Margaret.”
And that was that. The couple divorced in May 1949 and in July Frank married Leila Walshe, a solicitor. They had four children, a large house in Mosman and a family retreat in Mount Wilson in the Blue Mountains where Frank, appointed to the NSW Supreme Court in 1972, is said to have indulged his passion for gardening and acrimonious disputes with neighbours. If, in a moment of clarity, Margaret had perceived this kind of existence in her future, she rejected it. She had other plans.
In late 1947, during Frank’s little holiday, she had applied for a job with the Commonwealth Department of Education. She was unsuccessful, even with a glowing reference from Sir David Rivett, chairman of the CSIR, whom Margaret knew from her ANZAAS days. The renewed contact might have opened up a new opportunity for her, though, because in 1948 she took up a position with CSIR’s Division of Radio Physics in Sydney.
She didn’t stay long in the Sydney office. CSIR was transforming itself into the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, and in 1947 an editorial and publications section was established at its headquarters, then in Melbourne. Margaret transferred there in April 1949.
She gave up her Sydney life entirely: her family, her literary friends, her committees and causes, her social life, everything. She could have stayed with the ABC and perhaps transitioned into arts journalism. Or she could have sought an academic career as a literary scholar and critic. The right opportunities might not have presented themselves at the right time, but another explanation is that Margaret needed a complete change after the breakdown of her marriage. The reaction of her family and friends might have been even harder to deal with than her own regrets. Better to make a clean break.
The “dissemination of scientific and technical knowledge” was a requirement under CSIRO’s Act and was achieved by a diverse and expanding publications program. Margaret’s job involved a return to her first career, scientific editing (and with that, perhaps, a memory of Miss Walker’s delighted coral polyps). Without scientific qualifications she couldn’t work on CSIRO’s specialist journals, so she edited publications for general readers, including monographs, annual reports, newsletters, circulars and magazines.
The editorial and publishing section was based at CSIRO’s head office at 314 Albert Street, East Melbourne, until 1963 when it moved to the sixth floor of a new office building at 372 Albert Street. (That building must have had a lift. How Margaret had managed access to the buildings she’d previously worked in is a mystery.) A printery was established in a former paint factory at 19 Rokeby Street Collingwood in 1960. In 1976 CSIRO proudly declared itself the largest publisher of scientific material in Australia.
By then Margaret was one of a team of sixteen editors. Most if not all her work was uncredited, but a title I know she worked on was Industrial Research News, an illustrated bimonthly magazine published in a heroically long run from 1957 to 1975. In its later years the magazine’s content was written by Andrew Bell, a young science writer based at CSIRO in Canberra. Andrew is the only person I have managed to locate who remembers Margaret.
Despite rarely meeting in person, the pair established a long-lasting friendship. The first time they did meet, at Margaret’s office in Albert Street, Andrew was astonished to see her emerging from behind her desk on crutches. Until then he’d had no idea she was disabled.
In 1975 CSIRO’s staff newspaper Coresearch did a short profile on Margaret noting how she achieved a “marriage between science and aesthetics” in the publications she worked on. Editing is an art-cum-science, she told the paper; it required “considerable intellectual nimbleness” to be working on publications dealing with soil analysis, botanical taxonomy and astrophysics all in the same day. Her colleagues said she was one of the few editors who managed to preserve the confidence of authors, the respect of printers and the friendship of graphic designers.
In Sydney Margaret had probably lived in households with domestic help, but in Melbourne she was on her own. (Again, I wonder how managed, especially with the heavy housework and grocery shopping.) For many years she lived in flats in East Melbourne but by 1977 she’d bought an apartment in Murphy Street, South Yarra, and lived there for the rest of her life.
After 1949 she slips from view, possibly because the newspapers and magazines I’d been chasing her through are not digitised after 1954 but also because her social circle was much reduced. Her work was useful, important (and secure, which matters for a single woman) but decidedly humdrum compared to her former life. I wonder how she felt about that? Did she keep a little cutting book of her earlier social successes, and did she page through it occasionally, remembering?
Let’s imagine she did, and that we can watch over her shoulder. There’s a photograph of her chatting to the American consul-general at a cocktail party at the Feminist Club in 1949. And there’s a report of the party she attended at the Sydney Town Hall in honour of Jessie Street in 1945. A few pages back she might pause at a clipping about the undergraduates’ ball she’d organised at the Trocadero in 1936. “Rich purple taffeta cut on simple lines and ruched over the shoulders was chosen by Miss Walkom, who fastened a spray of silver leaves and berries in her hair.”
That was the year she was vice-president of Sydney University’s SRC and Kevin Ellis was president. They had greeted guests together, she in her purple taffeta and he in his… well, dinner suit, one supposes. Purple is associated with female empowerment but little good that did her the following year when the treacherous Ellis reclaimed the presidency of the SRC.
Was it treachery? Or was he just doing what many men do, which is to accept power as their natural right? Ellis went on to practice as a solicitor in Sydney before embarking on a long career in New South Wales politics. He had a wife and two children and a home in Point Piper, enjoyed fishing and playing bowls, and in 1969 was appointed KBE and became Sir Kevin Ellis.
As she sat alone with her cutting books and photograph albums, I wonder how Margaret might have told to herself the story of her life as a single woman building a career in fields that could never bring the fortune and glory enjoyed by many of her male contemporaries. Quite possibly she had some classic texts lined up on her shelves: English writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, the Brontës, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. She could have read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in the original French.
By 1960s there were new feminist authors to consider: Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Anne Summers. Beauvoir had much to say, in The Second Sex, about women and clothing. “[Woman] dresses to display herself; she displays herself to make herself be. She thus submits herself to painful dependence.” Elegance, Beauvoir thought, is servitude.
But what of the disabled woman? Clearly, Margaret had no interest in dependence and servitude, and her disability in no way prevented her from claiming the same right as any woman to enjoy being appreciated for her clothes. She could have reasoned that few men would be sexually interested in a woman on crutches, so she might as well dress as she liked. Or she may have felt especially vulnerable to the unwanted attentions of men, and used clothing as means of asserting power. Whatever her thinking, she was surely just as desirous of emotional and sexual fulfilment as anyone else.
This is a sensitive area. It is challenging to historicise the experience of people with disabilities. In addition to getting into the mind of a person from the past, a biographer must also try to understand how their subject lived inside their bodies.
Margaret’s mother died in 1975 and her father in 1976. She retired in 1977 aged sixty-three. Ill-health was the stated reason but a financial legacy from her father might have made the decision easier. Sadly though, her sight began to fail and by 1988 she was completely blind. Still living alone in her South Yarra apartment, with no family nearby, her days must have been lonely indeed. Reading had been her life, but now that was all gone. The radio might have been her only companion during many empty hours. It was a medium she knew well.
She did have a small community of supporters: neighbours in her apartment building, a part-time cleaner-housekeeper Narda Barkas, and a longstanding colleague from CSIRO, John Lenaghan (a fellow editor), who helped her with shopping, paying bills and banking. Andrew Bell telephoned regularly from Canberra, and visited her once in South Yarra for dinner, bringing cheese, fruit and flowers. She was blind by then, but he remembers a beautifully laid table and Margaret in a pale green dress and jewellery, her hair freshly done. An enjoyable evening, he told me; just the two of them sharing time together.
Margaret died in a private hospital in October 1994. She had invested her father’s legacy and her estate was valued for probate at $2,117,000. After generous bequests to friends and two remaining relatives (a cousin and a niece), she directed that the rest of her estate be dedicated to medical research. Today the Margaret Walkom Bequest is worth more than five million dollars, and in 2024 made nearly $200,000 available in research grants.
Margaret’s life falls into two periods: Sydney until 1949, and Melbourne after that. In Sydney her life was active and vibrant; in Melbourne she seems to disappear behind the institutional walls of the CSIRO. Her isolated old age might have been the exact fate from which her parents had hoped marriage would save her.
Despite the many “perhapses” and “maybes” in her story, one thing we can say with certainty is that Margaret went her own way, always grappling with the double disadvantage of being a woman and having a disability. Even with her privileged background there was no established career trajectory for her to follow, whereas the men of her world had merely to work hard and follow the paths laid out for them. Margaret had her father’s scientific connections to get her started but after that, her only path was the one she created for herself. •
For assistance in preparing this article the author would like to thank Kate Murray (College Archivist, Pymble Ladies’ College), Dr Andrew Bell, and Kylee Nicholls (Archivist, The Women’s College, University of Sydney).
