Dame Margaret Scott AC DBE

Dame Margaret Scott AC DBE (1922-2019) ballerina and teacher, was scarred by her education in a Johannesburg convent boarding school and left her home on a Swaziland farm in 1939. In London, having auditioned for Ninette de Valois, she joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, but soon resigned, to join the more experimental, dashing Ballet Lambert. Through the Blitz she lived and danced in London and toured with the Rambert entertaining factory workers and soldiers. After the war she danced in Germany, and, feted by Russian officers, gained extraordinary insights into the ruins of Hitler’s Berlin. She arrived in Australia in 1947 as a principal dancer with the Ballet Rambert; during the company’s fifteen months here she met the arty types of the Merioola Group in Sydney and ‘lived in sin’ with young doctor Derek ‘Dick’ Denton in Melbourne. Following her return to England in early 1949, she became Ballet Mistress (assistant director) of the Ballet Lambert. Scott and Denton married in Cambridge in 1953, and, not without reluctance, she returned with him to Melbourne. She had two sons before becoming a key figure, promoted by Nugget Coombs, in the formation of the Australian Ballet in 1962. In 1964, in Melbourne, the Australian Ballet School opened under Scott’s direction. Directed by Scott until 1990, the School attracted advanced students from all over the country and was a ‘feeder’ for the Australian Ballet, furnishing many of its future stars. Having spotted the talent of Graeme Murphy when he was a puny fourteen-year-old, she appeared in his version of The Nutcracker in 1992, 1994 and 2000. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1981 and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2005. She and Derek Denton are one of only four married couples to have each been made a Companion; the others are Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge; Gordon and Marilyn Darling; and Marie Bashir and Nicholas Shehadie.