sketcher, was the youngest of the ten children of Dr Robert Charles Lindsay and Jane Elizabeth, nèe Williams, of Creswick, Victoria. By the time she was born, her brother Lionel had left home to be a cartoonist in Melbourne, Percy was learning painting and playing cricket, Robert was working in a bank, Norman was producing the Boomerang for Creswick Grammar School, her sister Mary had been drafted into household duties and her other siblings were all at school.
The first reference to Isabel is in a letter from Norman to Lionel written about 1896, accompanied by a drawing with the information: 'This is a sketch of “Goo” who is at present shrieking herself into a blue fit’. The baby name stayed with Isabel well into her childhood. From the start her presence was resented by Mary and Robert, neither of whom liked to think of their parents enjoying conjugal relations. Years later Mary described her as 'this unfortunate failure of our mother’, while Robert described her as 'that damnable last result got between waking and sleeping … the most damnably malicious bitch ever come across’. By the time Isabel was in adolescence the family was in financial crisis, the only regular income being contributions from Lionel, Norman, Daryl and, until his death, Reg. Mary aided Ruby Lindsay 's escape to Melbourne, where she became an artist, but there was no help for Isabel who remained close to her mother.
After the death of Dr Lindsay in 1915, followed swiftly by the death of Reg Lindsay at the Somme in 1916 and the suicide of Pearl Lindsay’s husband, Colin McPhee, the situation deteriorated further. Isabel had few supporters either within or outside the family, although she was later befriended by Daryl’s wife, the writer Joan Lindsay, who respected her difference and her eccentricity. In later years she was crippled by arthritis; she spent her last years in the Queen Elizabeth Nursing Home, Ballarat.
- Writers:
- Mendelssohn, Joanna
- Date written:
- Last updated:
