Margaret Eleanor Ashby (née Barwick)

Early Life and Family Dynamics (1829–1841)

The last child of Francis Edward Barwick and Elizabeth Mary Sinclair arrived on 17 July 1829 at the Murray Street residence in Hobart, entering a household already stretched by three sons whose education and prospects dominated the family's resources and attention. Her birth, coming when her mother was twenty-eight and her father fifty-six, occurred during a tense period in Francis's career — his investigations increasingly frustrated by political interference, his health beginning the decline that would culminate twelve years later. Margaret's position as the youngest child by nearly a year, and the only daughter, created a particular kind of solitude within the household — not neglected but peripheral, present at family scenes whose principal actors were her father's moral severity and her brothers' competing ambitions.

Her earliest memories centred upon contrasts. Her father's study was forbidden territory, a room where justice was pursued through meticulous documentation and where silence was not merely preferred but required. Her mother's domain operated by different principles — Scottish ballads mixed with account ledgers in practical harmony, warmth deployed as strategy, and influence exercised through suggestions so gentle that their objects rarely recognised they had been redirected. Unlike her brothers, who received formal instruction in Latin and law, Margaret learned through observation, absorbing the household's dynamics with an attentiveness that Elizabeth recognised early and cultivated with deliberate care.

At the age of six, Elizabeth discovered her daughter arranging dolls in what appeared to be a court session — one doll prosecuting another for "stealing ribbons," whilst a third, positioned prominently between the antagonists, appeared to be whispering to both sides. When Elizabeth asked about this arrangement, Margaret explained that the whispering doll was "the one who really decides things." The observation, delivered with the unselfconsciousness of childhood, described with uncomfortable precision the methodology that Margaret would refine and deploy for the next seven decades.

Her grandfather William Sinclair's death in 1831, when Margaret was barely two, meant she never knew the Aberdeen merchant whose business acumen had provided her mother's independent resources. Yet his influence persisted through the account books that Elizabeth taught Margaret to read by the age of seven — not the simplified primers her brothers had used, but actual commercial documents in which numbers told stories of success and failure, trust and betrayal, and in which the ability to detect what the figures concealed was as valuable as understanding what they displayed.

Francis Edward Barwick's death on 8 August 1841 struck twelve-year-old Margaret differently from how it affected her brothers. Where Jonathan, Henry, and Edward lost a father and moral exemplar whose standards they would spend their lives either fulfilling or escaping, Margaret lost the figure against whom she had defined herself through contrast — the embodiment of direct, visible authority whose limitations she had already begun to identify. His funeral, attended by a complex congregation of admirers, relieved officials, and former adversaries, provided her first comprehensive view of how reputation operated as currency in colonial society — who attended, who wept, who merely performed grief, and whose absence communicated more eloquently than any eulogy. It was an education she absorbed completely and would apply for the remainder of her life.

The years following Francis's death saw Margaret assume increasing responsibility for the household's social obligations whilst Elizabeth managed the family's finances. By fifteen, she was effectively directing the social calendar, arranging visits that appeared casual but that actually facilitated her brothers' commercial ventures — ensuring that the right wives encountered the right merchants at the right moments, creating the conditions for business conversations without appearing to have initiated them. Her skill at this invisible orchestration went largely unrecognised, credited to Elizabeth's wisdom rather than Margaret's strategic thinking — an attribution that Margaret, already understanding the relationship between invisibility and power, did not trouble herself to correct.

Education and Social Apprenticeship (1836–1847)

Margaret's formal education, conducted by Miss Adelaide Thornton from 1836 to 1844, covered the conventional accomplishments expected of colonial daughters: French, which she spoke with a deliberately retained Scottish inflection that simultaneously amused and disarmed; pianoforte, at which she achieved competence without distinction; and watercolours, where she displayed a surprising aptitude for portraiture that captured psychological accuracy rather than physical resemblance. These accomplishments served their intended purpose — establishing her credentials as a young woman of appropriate cultivation — whilst her actual education continued in Hobart's drawing rooms, where she accompanied Elizabeth on social calls from the age of ten.

These visits revealed colonial society's hidden architecture with a clarity that formal instruction could never have provided. She observed how a wife's casual remark about wool prices could influence her husband's judicial decisions, how the strategic mention of shipping schedules during afternoon tea could redirect commercial ventures, and how the placement of guests at dinner parties created business partnerships more durable than any legal contract. Elizabeth, recognising her daughter's aptitude for these observations, began deliberately including her in more significant gatherings, teaching through example how to plant ideas that would germinate in others' minds as apparently original thoughts.

Her mother Elizabeth's death on 7 September 1864 — Margaret was thirty-five by then, married, and the mother of four children — removed the woman who had been both her model and her most perceptive audience. Elizabeth's final words to Margaret, delivered in the Scottish Gaelic she had not spoken in decades, carried the intimacy of a shared language, and her deathbed counsel — "Power wielded silently is power wielded twice" — articulated the principle that Margaret had absorbed through years of observation but that she had never heard expressed so directly. Whether Elizabeth intended the formulation as endorsement, warning, or both, Margaret interpreted it as permission.

The Ashby Courtship and Marriage (1846–1848)

Charles Benedict Ashby first encountered Margaret at a Government House reception in March 1846, though she had been aware of him for months through careful intelligence gathering conducted via the social networks she had spent years cultivating. The Anglo-Irish landowner, recently established in northern Tasmania after inheriting his father's estates in County Cork, represented precisely the alliance that the Barwick family's position required — land wealth to complement their commercial ventures, agricultural production to supply their shipping operations, and social standing that derived from property rather than government appointment. Margaret assessed these advantages with the analytical precision her father had applied to investigation evidence, though the conclusions she drew were strategic rather than prosecutorial.

The courtship that developed over the following year appeared conventional to outside observers: chaperoned walks through the Botanical Gardens, attendance at musical evenings, properly managed correspondence whose tone progressed from formal to familiar at the approved pace. Yet Margaret orchestrated each encounter to reveal specific aspects of her character in a sequence calculated to build Charles's interest — her understanding of wool grades during a warehouse visit, her grasp of land management during a discussion of Irish agricultural methods, her capacity to navigate delicate social situations when mediating between quarrelling hostesses at a charity function. Each revelation was timed to coincide with a moment when Charles was most receptive to its implications.

Charles, for his part, believed he was pursuing a beautiful and accomplished young woman from a respected family. He did not suspect that Margaret had researched his business dealings, understood his ambitions more clearly than he articulated them himself, and positioned herself as the ideal partner for their achievement. Her response to his proposal on 15 June 1847 was calibrated with the precision of a commercial negotiation — sufficient hesitation to preserve propriety, adequate delight to gratify his confidence, with acceptance timed to coincide with the announcement of a major wool contract whose terms would benefit from the Barwick shipping connections that the marriage would secure.

Their wedding at St. John's Church, Launceston, on 3 September 1847, was deliberately grand — a statement of dynastic ambition that announced the Ashby-Barwick alliance as a commercial force requiring recognition. Margaret wore ivory silk that had arrived on one of Henry's ships, with Scottish lace from her grandmother's wedding dress incorporated into the bodice — a gesture toward both family heritage and the mercantile networks that had transported the fabric. The guest list, which she had personally composed, created new connections through proximity at the reception alone, the seating arrangements generating business conversations and social alliances whose origins the participants would never trace to Margaret's careful planning.

Motherhood and Consolidation (1848–1870)

The early years of marriage at the Ashby estate near Launceston tested Margaret's adaptability in ways that the drawing rooms of Hobart had not prepared her for. Charles expected a conventional wife who would manage his household whilst he directed business affairs. Instead, he found that his decisions mysteriously improved after discussing them with his wife at breakfast, that his negotiations succeeded more frequently after Margaret's tea parties with the relevant merchants' wives, and that his political influence expanded through connections he could not quite recall having made himself. Margaret allowed him to believe that his judgement was simply maturing with experience, understanding that the effectiveness of her influence depended upon its invisibility.

Benedict Francis arrived on 22 October 1848, a breech delivery that lasted thirty-six hours and nearly killed Margaret. The experience introduced laudanum into her life — initially prescribed for the pain of recovery but continuing as a resource during periods when the demands of maintaining simultaneous public and private performances exceeded what unaided composure could sustain. She controlled the dependency with the same discipline she applied to everything, never permitting it to impair the functions upon which her influence depended, though Charles would occasionally notice a strange distance in her evening conversations, her responses arriving as though they had travelled from somewhere far away.

Eleanor Margaret followed on 4 March 1851, an easier birth whose aftermath was complicated not by physical difficulty but by Benedict's jealousy of the attention his sister received. Margaret managed this by involving the boy in his sister's care, teaching him that the protection of family was a man's primary obligation — a lesson whose simplicity concealed the strategic thinking behind it and that would shape Benedict's later approach to business. Charles William arrived on 18 November 1854, completing what many considered an ideal family, though Margaret had absorbed from her mother's experience the understanding that three children left a family vulnerable to the losses that colonial mortality imposed without warning.

Henry Sinclair's birth on 7 January 1857 proved this caution justified when Charles William developed scarlet fever at the age of four. The boy survived, but the illness left him with weakened hearing in one ear — a disability that Margaret helped him to conceal through strategic positioning in social situations and subtle signals during conversations that guided his attention to speakers he might otherwise have missed. This shared management of a hidden vulnerability created a bond between mother and son that would manifest in Charles William's later legal career, where his apparent capacity to perceive what remained unspoken made him an unexpectedly formidable magistrate.

Amelia Jane, arriving on 23 September 1860 when Margaret was thirty-one, was unplanned but welcomed as further security against the losses that colonial families learned to anticipate. The child's birth coincided with a financial crisis that threatened several Barwick ventures, requiring Margaret to liquidate personal investments she had concealed from Charles in order to provide emergency capital to her brothers. The deception was successful — the ventures were saved, the family's commercial position stabilised — but it introduced into the marriage a permanent element of concealment whose weight Margaret bore with increasing difficulty, the laudanum doses rising during Amelia Jane's early years in response to a guilt that she could neither resolve nor discuss.

The Power Behind Power (1860–1888)

The 1860s established Margaret as colonial society's most influential hostess, though she maintained with scrupulous care the appearance that Charles directed their social activities. Her Thursday afternoon teas at the Ashby estate became legendary for their capacity to resolve disputes that had resisted formal legal intervention — the Hendricks-Morrison land dispute settled over cucumber sandwiches, the Tasmanian Shipping Association's rate war concluded during a discussion of orchid cultivation, and Judge Whitmore's potentially ruinous gambling debts neutralised through a private conversation about the comparative merits of charitable donation. Each resolution appeared to emerge naturally from social interaction, the participants departing with the impression that consensus had been reached through goodwill rather than manipulation.

Her methods were sufficiently refined that their objects frequently expressed gratitude rather than resentment. When she wished to undermine a merchant who had defrauded Henry, she did not spread gossip but instead praised the man's honesty so extravagantly that everyone who heard her immediately suspected him of concealing something. When she wished to promote an alliance between Jeffries and Ashby commercial interests, she appeared to oppose it with precisely the degree of resistance that would unite both families in the determination to overcome her reluctance.

Eleanor's marriage to Edwin Jeffries in 1873 represented years of careful preparation, with Margaret applying reverse psychology so skilfully that Edwin pursued Eleanor with the determination of a man convinced he was defying Margaret's wishes rather than fulfilling them. Benedict's marriage to Victoria Campbell required a three-month expedition to Sydney in 1875, during which Margaret established herself in the city's social circles before engineering a series of encounters between the young couple whose apparently accidental nature withstood even the scrutiny of Victoria's suspicious mother.

The death of her brother Edward in Singapore on 23 May 1874 revealed the extent of Margaret's involvement in the family's commercial affairs. Edward's widow Amelia had died two years earlier, and his daughter Jane — now married to William Jeffries III — was consumed by the demands of her own household and young children. It fell to Margaret, in conjunction with the family's solicitor, to untangle Edward's estate. She not only interpreted financial documents that others found impenetrable but identified irregularities suggesting that Edward's business manager had been embezzling from the enterprise. Rather than pursuing legal action that would have damaged the family's reputation — and that her father would have insisted upon, a reflection she noted without sentimentality — Margaret arranged for the manager to receive a business opportunity in Western Australia that carried the unmistakable implication of permanent departure. Most of the misappropriated funds were recovered through channels she never documented.

Managing Charles's Decline (1880–1888)

Charles's health began deteriorating in 1880, though he insisted upon maintaining his public schedule with the stubbornness that Margaret had learned to manage early in their marriage. She assumed his responsibilities whilst constructing elaborate fictions to preserve his dignity — business meetings rescheduled to accommodate his "hunting trips," which were actually periods of enforced rest; decisions presented as his ideas despite originating from her analysis; his increasing irascibility explained to associates as eccentricity rather than the early manifestation of the dementia that Margaret privately recognised and that she managed with the same invisible competence she applied to everything.

Charles William's pursuit of a legal career initially disappointed his father, who had expected his namesake to continue the agricultural enterprises. Margaret mediated the conflict by persuading Charles that a magistrate in the family would serve their commercial interests — an argument that appealed to the pragmatism Charles still possessed even as other faculties diminished — whilst privately ensuring that Charles William understood his success would depend upon maintaining the absolute integrity that his grandfather Francis had embodied. The tension between commercial advantage and judicial independence that this dual instruction created would shape Charles William's career until his premature death in 1899 — a consequence that Margaret, for all her strategic foresight, had not anticipated and that she would not forgive herself for failing to prevent.

Charles Benedict Ashby died on 15 December 1888. The funeral drew the Governor and tributes from across Tasmania's commercial and political establishment. Margaret's mourning was precisely calibrated — deep enough to appear genuine, controlled enough to maintain dignity, with recovery timed to avoid seeming either callous or excessively sentimental. The reading of the will revealed that Charles had granted Margaret unprecedented control over the estate until her own death, rather than the conventional arrangement of passing authority immediately to Benedict. Charles had added this provision years earlier at Margaret's suggestion, believing the idea was his own — a final demonstration of the influence that had operated throughout their forty-one-year marriage without Charles ever recognising its mechanism or its extent.

Widowhood and Revealed Authority (1889–1905)

The seventeen years of Margaret's widowhood brought official authority to capacities that had previously operated without formal sanction. She restructured the agricultural operations to emphasise quality over quantity, negotiated shipping rates that favoured Ashby wool whilst appearing to benefit all producers, and invested in urban development projects that would transform Launceston's commercial landscape. When Benedict questioned her decisions — as eldest son, he considered the estate his by right if not yet by law — Margaret deferred to his "superior masculine judgement" whilst presenting information that led him, with the inevitability she had perfected over decades, to her predetermined conclusion.

The Jeffries scandal of 1893, in which Edwin was accused of financial impropriety, tested Margaret's influence to its limits. She spent six months orchestrating a defence that involved suppressing compromising evidence, constructing alternative explanations for suspicious transactions, and applying pressure through channels so indirect that their origin could not be traced. Edwin was exonerated and his accusers discredited — a resolution that preserved the family alliance Margaret had spent two decades building. The effort, however, consumed whatever reserves of energy her ageing constitution retained. She never fully recovered, though she continued public appearances for another decade with the determination that had characterised everything she had undertaken since childhood.

Jonathan's death on 12 November 1890 and Henry's on 12 November 1898 — the coincidence of dates an irony that Margaret noted without comment — left her the last surviving child of Francis Edward Barwick. The position brought reflection she had previously avoided. She began but never completed a memoir, the surviving fragments suggesting a woman increasingly uncertain whether her life's work — the careful, invisible manipulation of colonial society — had produced anything whose value outlasted the immediate problems it solved.

Her correspondence with her youngest daughter Amelia Jane during these final years revealed a gradual softening, though the intimacy it approached was never quite achieved. She offered advice about educational reform that displayed surprising progressive convictions, supported women's suffrage privately whilst maintaining the public neutrality her position demanded, and suggested on at least one occasion that Amelia Jane's direct methods might be superior to her own indirect ones — though the admission arrived wrapped in sufficient qualifications to leave its sincerity open to interpretation.

Death (1905)

The stroke that partially paralysed Margaret's left side on 14 March 1905 ended her public life but not her influence. From her bed she continued directing family affairs through Benedict and Eleanor, her mind retaining the acuity that her body could no longer match. Her final successful manoeuvre came three days before her death, when she convinced the attending physician to increase her laudanum dose for the management of pain — understanding, with the analytical clarity that had governed every significant decision of her life, that the dosage she requested would provide the peaceful conclusion she had determined to arrange for herself.

Margaret Eleanor Barwick Ashby died at 3:45 in the morning on 21 September 1905. Her last words — "The accounts are settled" — carried the ambiguity that had characterised everything she said and did: an apparent reference to financial matters that might equally have described the complex web of social obligations, family debts, and personal reckonings she had managed for seven decades.

She was buried beside Charles in the Ashby family plot at Launceston Cemetery, her headstone bearing only the conventional inscription she had chosen: "Beloved Wife and Mother." The simplicity was itself a final act of concealment — the modest description obscuring the reality of a woman who had shaped Tasmania's commercial and political development through methods so refined that even those she had directed most thoroughly never recognised the hand that guided them. Her father had pursued truth through evidence and prosecution; her mother had wielded influence through warmth and pragmatism. Margaret had learned from both and surpassed both, creating a form of power that left no evidence because it required none — operating not through confrontation or persuasion but through the arrangement of circumstances in which the outcomes she desired became, for everyone involved, the only outcomes that appeared possible.