Why is everyone dying

[unfrufru]

they dedicated gh 2 her last night

[unfrufru]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituarie...302562555.html


Laughter was a trip to a beach
August 31, 2005

Margaret Daphne Scott Poet, television personality, author and academic, 1934-2005



Most people knew Margaret Scott from ABC television debates or as a regular on its program Good News Week. A tiny woman with a magnificently smoky voice and an actor's delivery, she was usually to be seen looking about and bobbing with laughter at something she or someone else had said. She could have been at a bar, glass in one hand, cigarette in the other.

Scott made her television name during the Keating years when she affirmed that the Liberals would never return to power until they found a leader with a proper nose. Alexander Downer, their then leader, had hardly any nose at all, she declared. "You might as well be looking at a scone."

For a period, Scott was to topical humour what the Two Fat Ladies were to cooking. But she was so much more besides.

As a child in Bristol during World War II, she experienced the Blitz. She remembered looking out her window at night and seeing a huge orange glow emanating from the city centre. She also recalled Miss Ransom who lived alone in a large house at the end of the street. Miss Ransom invited young Margaret to tea, where they partook of that rarest of wartime treats - chocolate biscuits. One night soon afterwards, an aerial torpedo hit Miss Ransom's house. Scott remembered standing in front of the gaping black hole trying to understand where the beautiful room had gone and, with it, the stately old woman.


Surviving the Blitz, she said, was a matter of "remaining calm amid the chaos". More than 50 years later, as a long-time resident of Tasmania's Tasman Peninsula, she displayed precisely that character in the aftermath of the nearby Port Arthur massacre. What "enraged" her and motivated her to write a book on the subject was that the common heroism shown on the day was lost from sight.

With forensic detachment, she was capable of detailing instance after instance where people pushed loved ones away or stood between them and the killer's semi-automatic weapon. In the event, she believed the book ( Port Arthur: A Story of Strength and Courage, 1997) broke her health, destroying her immune system. A few years later, I asked her if she was glad she wrote it. "Yes," she replied, in a voice as rich as a ruby, "I think I am."

Scott always understood that her father, a Bristol watchmaker who belonged to an unusual religious sect called the British Israelites, was an orphan. Her novel, Family Album, was based on her discovery in the 1980s that her father knew his family and had contact with them but told his children nothing. She went to Cambridge University in 1953 and was in the same circle as Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

Indeed, Scott was present the night Plath met Hughes; Plath dramatically concluding their first embrace by biting his cheek until it bled. The girl who had accompanied Hughes to the party approached Scott, upset, and said, "Ted's just kissed that American girl", to which Scott replied: "Oh, don't worry, I'm sure it won't come to anything." Relating that story caused Scott to erupt with mirth. Not that she liked Plath, whom she considered self-absorbed and alarmingly ambitious.

Scott came to Australia in the early 1960s with her first husband, Michael Boddy, and became an English lecturer at the University of Tasmania. Her second husband, Michael Scott, was a law lecturer at the university; after his death in 1984, she wrote a series of elegies which combined candour with great tenderness and mature reflection. She had four children, three step-children and 10 grandchildren.

There was no snobbery whatsoever in Margaret Scott. For someone who could use words with such sparkle and command, she was a wonderful listener and there was great common sense in her views. She derided, for example, the contemporary belief in the virtue of selfishness. "Selfishness is a dead end," she said. "The paradox is that it doesn't end up giving you what it promised. We're on this lonely spaceship and if we don't look after each other there's no point coming home."

In a sense, her life was forged from opposites. At the age of 10, she opened a newspaper and saw photos of the concentration camps. "There were all these bundles on the ground that were dead people," she recalled. "Hundreds of living skeletons were found. I think those images haunted my generation."

She once described laughter as a beautiful, shining element in which we can all float and sport about and splash each other. "It's like one of those fantastic days at the beach when you're a kid."

Reading her poems is like standing in a bombed-out cathedral at midnight. The darkness they open onto is immense, but there is also a sense that life goes unstoppably on. What is conspicuously absent is fear.

It is a cliche in obituaries to describe someone as much-loved and say they will be missed, but of this magnificent woman who was wise, generous and such good company it is undoubtedly true.

Martin Flanagan

[hails]

what a brilliant tribute. i think she would've liked that quite a bit.

[Sllej]

This is the saddest thing that I've heard in a long while. I didn't find out until the end of The Glasshouse the other night and then I felt like crying. It's just not right. I kind of felt like unfrufru was saying. There's no way 10 should do a dodgy reunion specal now. Something will always be missing without Margaret.

[unfrufru]

Bob Denver aka Gilligan from Gilligans Island age 70

[Mythor]

Awwww.

I just watched an episode of Gilligan's Island the other day, too.

[pixieDAAS]

Originally Posted by unfrufru

Bob Denver aka Gilligan from Gilligans Island age 70

NO!!
I CAN'T BE, he looked so healthy, not too long ago!

[Mythor]

Don Adams, 82.

He played Maxwell Smart, "Agent 86", in the TV series "Get Smart", back in the 60's.

[Renee_Turner]

*sob*

I heard this on the radio this morning. Noooooooooo!

[Puppy]

He was also the voice of Inspector Gadget.


When mum told me "Maxwell Smart, died" this morning I had to think about it for a few moments, because she calls our neighbour Max 'Maxwell Smart' so took me awhile to realise who she meant... but awwww Don

[Renee_Turner]

He was also the voice of The Brain in the terrible Inspector Gadget movie.


I'm going to watch Inspector Gadget (the cartoon) when I get home.

[Moogie]

*sniffles* I loved Get Smart. RIP Don!

[SammySatine]

I liked Get Smart too.

So, Rest in Peace 86!

SS.

[Liquid]

the new Get Smart movie is coming up hopefully they do a better job than Inspector Gadget, they have to be more careful with Don Adams memory this time around. Steve Carell (US Office, Anchorman) is playing Max.

Sad to see he's gone.

[Renee_Turner]

This may earn me a Smacktard nomination, but R.I.P my cat, Lucifer.