Vale Margaret Isobel Fulton
She revolutionised the way we cooked, talked and thought about food and, as The Weekly’s former food director Lyndey Milan recalls, Margaret Fulton was as revered for her warmth and wanderlust as she was her timeless recipes.
SUZANNE GIBBS WAS HOLDING
her mother Margaret Fulton’s hands when she slipped away: “All through my childhood those hands meant so much to me … cooking, cutting, sewing. I treasured those hands … that … were so powerful”. Margaret’s hands influenced us all.
The loved youngest of a family of six, Margaret was born in 1924 in the Scottish Highlands and grew up in Glen Innes in country NSW during the Depression, learning the importance of the family meal, and how to shop, cook and think for herself. Eschewing university, she became an X-ray technologist, a secretary and then a cookery demonstrator at the Australian Gas Light Company, lighting the flame for her stellar gastronomic career.
She married a guitarist, Trevor
Price, and after that first marriage broke down, moved to the tiny community of Mooney Mooney on the Hawkesbury with her only child, Suzanne. Those hands then turned to making clothes, retail work at David Jones, advertising at J. Walter Thompson and to food writing for Woman magazine. She studied cookery at East Sydney Tech, which gave her an immense respect for the culinary classics, which she advised that everyone learn first and foremost. In 1960, Margaret joined Woman’s Day where extensive overseas travel broadened her (and our) culinary knowledge as she showed us how to cook in new and
exciting ways. Later she would also work for New Idea.
In the kitchens of Australia, 1968 was a year of revolution. While women’s libbers fled cooking’s drudgery, career woman Margaret Fulton embraced its joys. The Margaret Fulton Cookbook, with trusted recipes from pot roast to goulash, sold 1.5 million copies, firing the nation’s love affair with food. She released 25 cookbooks with global sales of more than four million, and she worked extensively with Suzanne, and later with her granddaughters, Louise and Kate.
Margaret had her challenges, economically and personally, with
another marriage ending before she met the love of her life, film producer Mike McKeag, who sadly died just eight years later. She was feisty, intelligent, cultured, a flirtatious party girl, and she filled her Balmain home with art and interesting people. Bohemian at heart, she supported Indigenous rights and Greenpeace, and opposed genetic engineering. Generous and encouraging, she did not suffer fools and had little time for style over substance. Awarded an OAM, declared a National Living Treasure and with her face on a stamp, she was Honorary Governor of the University of Sydney Nutrition Research Foundation, Vice-President of the Australian Native Dogs Conservation Society and the Food Media Club Australia.
Always a leader, thinker, never the follower nor stuck in a culinary rut, she declared: “I’ve had a fabulous life”.
How lucky we are to have known her.