MARGARET

• Born Margaret Humphreys. 3 August 1836, St Alphage, Greenwich, England

• Died Margaret Bertaux, aged 73 on 21 December 1914, at her daughter’s residence, 144 Mount’s Bay Road, Perth, Western Australia

• Buried Karrakatta Cemetary – Roman Catholic, Perth, Western Australia

Margaret was Jean Emile Serisier’s wife, then widow. Hers is a quiet story behind the very public, well recorded and noted life of her spouse but it’s not difficult to imagine how challenging it must have been, as a woman in the 19th century, married to a Man of Mark, living beyond the Limits of Location, outside the 19 counties of the British colony of New South Wales, on the very known edge of the Old World whose claimed boundaries were etched on map, to demarkate the known from the unknown, the New.

It would have been a world of opportunity for change, renewal, discovery, adventure, and perhaps she tolerated it with a stiff upper lip, or embraced it, did her duty but emersed herself as a new world resident, then a new Australian, whose early life in the bush would see her brush up against another intriguing world so old and indistinguishable from Nature, that her structured, perhaps stifling British Society upbringing, and ideas, would be transformed.

England

She was eight years old when her father died in 1844, and possibly due to a smallpox epidemic sweeping London at the time, her 10-year-old sister Eliza Jones Humphreys died the same year too. It’s easy to look back at the 19th century when death seemed so prevalent to be mundane, but these two deaths were the first known to her in her family and, like any 8-year-old, Margaret’s response would have been universal. Loss, grief, confusion, growth.

In 1844 London around 30,000 people were falling off the perch every quarter but Margaret’s loss must surely have been profound. Perhaps her father was an absent figure, a solicitor absorbed in the affairs of men, but she was the baby of the family, and with many older siblings, perhaps he had warmed to the idea of having something to do with the raising of this child.

So close in age to Eliza, were they thick as thieves? Was Eliza’s sudden absence the cause of profound loneliness? Were they enemies? Either way, Margaret’s tiny heart would have been broken in 1944, with her father dead in June and nearest sister in age, buried just six days before Christmas.

Her next nearest siblings, Sarah Baxendine Humphreys, 13, Emma Amelia, 15, Louisa, 18, Charles 20, Mary Ann, 22, John Henry, 25, Thomas, 26, and half-siblings, Elizabeth, 31, Ann Matilda, 33, and Jane, 35, would have been a comfort but the half-siblings had already immigrated to Australia, one of them, Elizabeth getting married in Sydney, the year Margaret was born.

these childhood moments would have shaped her character, and prepared her for wearing mourning dresses many times in the years to come.