sketcher and diarist, was the daughter of Katherine Rose Beale (nee Young) and Major Anthony Beale. A former British guard for Napoleon on Saint Helena, Anthony conferred the name of the island on their Port Phillip (Victoria) property. Margaret’s surviving diary of her daily life at St Helena Park in 1839 (LT) is illustrated with crude, schematic ink narrative sketches. Her world rarely extended beyond the family, then comprising five children, and even when it did her view was domestically-oriented. For instance, the Beales were among the earliest visitors to Superintendent C.J. La Trobe 's prefabricated residence, Jolimont, in Melbourne, on 28 December 1839 and afterwards Margaret wrote in her diary: 'Papa, Bessie and I called on Mrs La Trobe and found her a very pleasant person’.
Other entries and sketches in the diary record ladies visiting, the family dining, the children and the baby. Her view of dinner being served (by her) in their very simple cottage shows Anthony and the four children seated at the table with 'Margaret bring along your chops’ issuing from her husband’s mouth and 'Yes pa – with gravy to it’ from hers. 16 crude outline figures in one drawing are shown eating and drinking, preparing food, collecting firewood, cooking and relaxing outdoors. It records the day when: 'All hands jogged away to the Picnic and were comfortably accommodated in the Cart… When arrived a fire was made… [the baby’s] milk was warmed in a bottle, afterwards a pot of potatoes was boiled.’ It seems to be Australia’s first recorded family picnic!
Katherine Beale predeceased her husband. After her death Major Beale erected Rose Chapel on his property in her memory (subsequently the local parish church).
Despite its lack of any redeeming aesthetic feature, Margaret Beale’s verbal and visual record of the most pedestrian details of a woman’s life in early Victoria is a unique social document.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
fishel
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2013
