Margaret Bolster, helped popularise the art of the Pacific in Australia
Margaret Camilla Bolster, who has died aged 83, helped popularise the art of Asia and the Pacific in Australia and had a significant second career as a leading environmental activist.
She was formerly director of the Aladdin Gallery in Elizabeth Bay, which she opened with her husband, Thomas L. Bolster jnr, in 1964. It was among the first to introduce Asian crafts to Sydney, and also encouraged Australian craftspeople providing a venue for exhibitions and sales.
Margaret Bolster became an environmental activist later in her life.
Contemporary artists such as Marea Gazzard, Col Levy, Jeff Mincham and Hossein Valamanesh had exhibitions there. The couple also hosted displays of folk art collected from Papua New Guinea's Sepik River, the Swat Valley in Pakistan and Tibet. Some artefacts sold at the gallery now form part of the collection at institutions such as the Powerhouse Museum.
Bolster was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1932. Her parents were George W. N. Schilling and his wife, Margaret Chubb. She attended Takapuna Grammar School and graduated from Auckland Teachers College in 1950. Five years later she married Bruce Eady, the founder of Jansen, the first manufacturer of electric guitars in New Zealand.
This marriage failed and she subsequently moved to Sydney with Mr Bolster, an American writer wholeft the US permanently after being denounced as a Communist. The couple married in 1978 and had one daughter, Camilla.
She left Sydney, albeit briefly, in the late 70s in order to allow her husband to write the book that was to be his magnum opus, an account of the history of Asian art, in the Himalayan hill-station of Mussoorie.
At the urging of Don Dunstan, former Premier of South Australia, Bolster and her husband moved to the Adelaide Hills in 1982.
Bolster, motivated by the devastation of the Ash Wednesday bushfires she had witnessed shortly after arriving in South Australia, had by then been elected as president of the Mount Lofty Ranges Conservation Association and president of the Conservation Council of South Australia.
In 1993, Bolster helped found the Environment SA magazine, which she edited between 1995 and 2003.
A passionate advocate for the interests of indigenous Australians, Bolster was a founding member of the Environmentalist and Aboriginal Reconciliation Action Group in 1994. She was an outspoken opponent of development on Hindmarsh Island and was named as a defendant in a defamation case related to the controversy that made it all the way to the High Court. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for service to conservation and the environment in 2003.
She moved to Sydney in order to live with family and died in Armidale. She is survived by children, Brent, Frances and Camilla and eight grandchildren.