When Island artist Maggie Sinclair died of cancer last week many people felt the loss. For this writer it was the loss of a particularly charming, perceptive and infectiously bouyant friend. We met when I interviewed her for a Magnetic Times' Community Close-up in 2000 which follows. Maggie's ashes will be scattered at 9.30am this Saturday 14 February at Picnic Bay. Her family have invited all who wish to remember her to attend a celebratory wake on the beach. The only request is that everybody bring frangipani flowers - Maggie's favourite.

Maggie Sinclair: You'll never make a dancer

Maggie Sinclair, a third and final-time returned resident of Magnetic Island, is a woman of surprises. For starters you'd swear she was, at most, a tad over fifty. Maggie is 66. Her past is more remarkable - not just for the artistic heights she's scaled as a ballerina with London's Royal Ballet but also the breadth of her life experiences in a multitude of activities which followed.

"You'll never make a dancer" were the teacher's words Maggie Lee Andrews relayed to her mum when she was 14 years old. "No" said her mother. "I've paid all this money and you will go on with it!"

It doesn't sound like the most hopeful of beginnings for a young dancer but it worked. This bright kid who regularly topped her class won a coveted scholarship to travel to England and study at the, then, Sadler's Wells - later to become the Royal Ballet School.

"I was a good dancer" says Maggie with a warm smile. "But I wasn't a Margot Fonteyn".

Nevertheless Maggie Lee, who dropped Andrews as another dancer went by that name, was greeted in her first professional solo appearance, as a slave girl in the opera ballet Aida, at Covent Garden, by another, then unknown Australian, Joan Sutherland, who was delighted to be performing with "another Aussie".

Despite the stifling English class system and its down-the-nose view of "colonials", Maggie was one of seven Australians in the company. "I think we were accepted because of what appeared to be our boundless energy". She was offered a further scholarship and asked to join the Royal Ballet Company in the following year.

Once a member of this world famous company, Maggie was jettisoned into a star-studded orbit and although she worked extremely hard and endured great physical strain in performances it was a glittering life. "We were young and glamorous. The public loved us and when we toured we were often treated like royalty. I remember a Spanish traffic policeman who spotted three of us, fresh from rehearsal on a street corner. He stopped the traffic in every direction, stepped down from his platform and bowed magnificently to us, beckoning us to cross the road. We responded in the middle of the street with an equally generous curtsey to the cheers and appreciation of the horn blowing motorists".

Maggie (left) shares the stage with Edward Millar
in Coppelia from 1955

The glamour came, nonetheless, at a price. "Once I danced on pointe for so long rehearsing the lead in Coppelia that my toes bled to the point where I was ordered to change my shoes because the blood would cause the others to slip".

Maggie reflects that, apart from the necessary physical attributes, to be a successful dancer one really needs an extremely vivid and sharp memory. "You have to remember all the movements perfectly and you need a very visual and spatially orientated memory as well as a keen ear. It's an incredible training for life".

In the mid 1950s Maggie toured with the Royal Ballet throughout the British Islaes, Europe and South Africa. In 1958/59 the Company came to Australia and New Zealand with Robert Helpmann as one of the guest artists.

"He was a famous dancer but when I was on stage with him performing the Tango in Facade he would play little tricks such as turning me just far enough to allow himself to face the audience while they saw the back of my head. I played the same trick back later when I turned a little further to face the audience myself and made sure that my head-dress obscured his face altogether" Maggie laughs.

But Maggie's brilliant career was sadly about to come to a painful end. "I injured my left ankle very badly but didn't let on. I strapped it up and continued to perform but about six weeks later I was onstage and after going up on pointe found my ankle locked in place and I couldn't move it back. I hobbled off stage and it brought the whole show to a halt. That was the end of my dancing days.

Maggie had however, become engaged to an American physicist, Rolf Sinclair. They married after the Australian tour and moved to Princeton in the United States. There she gave birth to their two children: Elizabeth and Caisley.

Rolf was involved in pure research and even though these experiments were being conducted at the height of the cold war, this area was, amazingly, seen as somewhere both Russians and Americans could cooperate. After several attempts the Princeton lab was able to host a party of visiting Russian physicists and Maggie cooked them a welcoming dinner. "I made it all traditional Russian cuisine and there were one or two damp eyes." said Maggie.

In 1970 Rolf was appointed to be a Program Director of the National Science Foundation in Washington DC. He was responsible for approving science grants across the United States and, as such, Maggie moved into some very influential circles.

"We rented a home in Georgetown, which was in Washington's most exclusive, older residential area but I couldn't simply allow myself to sit back and be a Washington wife".

During this period Maggie took up many activities including: the setting up of the Washington Ecology Centre; taught the history of dance at Maryland University; studied design, pottery and sculpture; sat on the Maryland Dance Advisory Panel; edited a monthly dance publication and even began an interior design business with a friend.

She also managed to visit Russia with Rolf and although she found Moscow a very tense, nervous and crowded city she developed a warm affection for the Russians she met.

This all came to an end however when Maggie's marriage to Rolf fell apart in 1977.

She now needed a full-time job and updated her business skills. An opening appeared with an insurance company and Maggie became a staff writer for the company's in-house publication but after five years grew tired of the role and at the urging of her now-grown children, decided she would return to Australia.

"I had a strange feeling I was about to have a great adventure and with my one-way ticket decided that I would stop at every Island I could on my way across the Pacific".

This led her to Tahiti's island of Bora Bora and Maggie just loved it. "I was invited to live with a local family at the end of a beautiful beach. There I realised there was more to life than money and corporate ladders. It sank in very deeply that the way I really wanted to live was not the way I had been taught to live".

Maggie relates a story of her own contribution to that community, "Every morning the grandfather of the clan, who'd completely ignored me, would rise early and walk into the lagoon to pray to his deity. I had noticed that the families had left a lot of rubbish on their beach. I thought "I can't stand this", and went early the next morning to begin cleaning it up. After three mornings there was no rubbish left. I did this before the others woke and said nothing about it. When the beach was clean the old man appeared and greeted me saying, 'Iorana wahine popa Maggie' or 'Good morning European woman Maggie'- I was now officially accepted. The rest of the family were embarrassed at what they had done to their beach and proceeded to keep it clean from then on".

Maggie was also on Bora Bora when cyclone Lisa struck with winds over 200kph. "Before it hit there were teams of men going from house to house to tie down the roofs with ropes. We had plenty of supplies but when the storm hit we couldn't hear ourselves shout at eachother. The hens blew away and then the pig. Later the coconut trees were angled parallel to the ground and literally vibrating as they were gradually torn from their roots. There was only one fatality, a man electrocuted by a fallen wire".

Without residency Maggie had to leave Bora Bora and arrived in Brisbane in 1983. She soon heard about the predicament of a Townsville modern dance company (now Dance North). With minimal funding they needed a PR person to organise their Christmas season and raise sponsorship. Maggie leapt at the chance to help and soon had a benefit show organised. From this a job with the company followed.

Someone at the time told her "You look like you should live on an island" Maggie agreed and soon after found a unit on Magnetic Island.

Her first impressions of the rocky headlands, the likes of which she'd never seen elsewhere in the world, and "the colour of the sea became quickly very close to my heart".

But a friend in Tahiti urged her to return which she did for eight months but with visa problems she returned to MI where she resided in a cottage at Dunoon and painted and sold sarongs. "The costs of my art supplies became too much and I just couldn't support myself on the Island", said Maggie, "and with deep regret moved back to Brisbane to find a job".

Maggie lived on in the South-east corner for another 14 years. She worked at the Relaxation Centre of Queensland, commuting at weekends to the Buddhist teaching centre, where she rented a small cottage.

With the death of her mother and in search of a different path Maggie planned her return to MI. She arrived back expecting everything to have changed but "As I passed the headland coming into Picnic all my hairs stood on end. I was 'home'! There was my friend Gillian May offering me a taxi ride, and it seemed the Island had actually gotten better. I bought a house in Nelly Bay three days later!

That was in 1999 and Maggie has since become a member of the MI Arts Coop, and conducts monthly silk-painting workshops at Pavilion Laguna in Nelly Bay. She has definite plans never to move away again.

Maggie in her garden at Nelly Bay, 2000

Story: George Hirst
Top photo: Maggie in costume as La Favourita in the 1958 ballet Veneziana