Unknown to all for many years, Margaret Minney was mildly deaf. As a result she was a child who watched, analysed and read a lot, a teenager who observed rather than participated, and an adult who loved nature and all things creative. The six year old child wrote poems, the twelve year old one puzzled over the number of words needed to convey a story, and the intensive teenager fell in love with words in every respect. She spent a year in the outback as a governess, which broadened her experiences and gave her some knowledge of outback Aboriginal people.
Margaret graduated from the University of Adelaide with a Bachelor of Laws in 1967 and married John Minney the same year. She worked in a small Adelaide practice until mid-term with her first pregnancy then became a home mother for twelve years. She had three daughters. She returned to legal practice which, as a vehicle for justice and order in people's lives, has become her passion. After being associate to two Supreme Court judges for a year each (the second being her father), and working for ten years in a large firm, she set up a practice in her own home. Her husband was Mayor of Payneham 1987-1991, and this involved her in a number of social and community responsibilities. Girl Guiding was an interest for 35 years, and she was awarded the senior State service award and took a term as senior vice-president.
Margaret is a pianist, and played for amateur theatre groups' musicals for about eight years in the 1980s. She has a black belt in Kung Fu, a fact which, she claims in a personal communication, got her her first mature-age legal job, because the judge who took her on as an associate had been receiving death threats. She is a committed commuter cyclist.
In 1977 she wrote three Humphrey B. Bear scripts, which went to air in Australia and in Hong Kong. In 1980-1 she edited the Parents' Broadsheet of the East Adelaide Primary School Welfare Club. She has written historical articles for the Police Journal South Australia and the Mt Barker Courier.
