Patricia Gill, Denmark Bulletin

“Moderation in everything,” Mary Cartwright says is the key to living 100 years, a milestone she will reach on May 28.

“I’ve never driven a car so walk everywhere and keep my mind active – knitting, crocheting and reading,” she says.

“I’ve read all the classics. My greatest love is reading – I read and knit.”

Apart from the English classics – she lists Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene – Mary has delved into the Russians – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov – the German and French writers – Balzac, for example, but she wants to complete Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

“I’ve never done it and think I will before I die,” she says.

All this from the Yorkshire, Leeds-born woman who left school at 13, denies being an exceptional student but enjoyed English.

She attended Pittmans Business College and still retains the art of shorthand, giving herself private messages on the kitchen calendar filling in date squares in shorthand.

Lately, Mary reads Alexander McCall Smith, the author of The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency.

“He’s got a terrific sense of humour – they are very light and easy to read,” Mary says.

“But I’d read the label on a sauce bottle.”

Art and literature a life long gift for Cartwrights

Mary’s also a fan of crime novelist Ruth Rendell and works under the author’s pseudonym, Barbara Vine, in a less aggressive, less analytical narrative voice.

These days Mary likes to potter in her garden but admits that after half an hour or so she needs a rest.

Mary was the third child of postal worker Harry Lister and his wife Annie.

Her husband, artist Arthur Cartwright, died 20 years ago though ‘I haven’t been without him, he’s always here – a very good man’.

Arthur Cartwright and Mary Lister met as 19-year-olds at a dance in Leeds and married when they were both 22.

Arthur lived close by to Mary, served in the Army and was posted to India before they married in 1948 after keeping in touch by letters in the interim.

The couple and their two sons, John, born in 1950, and Michael, 1954, migrated to Australia as ‘ten-pound Poms’ landing in Fremantle in 1966 which Mary says was ‘the best thing we ever did’.

“We had a lovely cruise and settled down famously,” she said.

“You can’t grumble, we didn’t have to pay for the kids because they were under 15.”

They left behind the hardships of England where Arthur had struggled to find work doing ‘awful jobs’.

Despite her husband and two sons being artists, Mary says she ‘can’t draw a square box’.

“But, of course, he introduced me to the art world,” she says.

In Australia Mary went out to work while her husband got busy preparing a portfolio to present to commercial art studios.

“He said he would clean brushes and sweep the floors just to get in,” Mary said.

Arthur’s first job in artwork was at Falcon Studios drawing and painting men’s and women’s fashions.

Later he taught drawing and painting at Perth Technical College.

In 1983, the couple moved to Denmark from Kalamunda seeking the cooler climate.

“We were used to the cold and snow and for Poms the heat was awful in The Hills,” she said.

“We visited all the places up and down the coast and ended up in Denmark and said ‘what’s wrong with this?’

“You can’t beat Denmark, can you?”

From her two sons, Mary has seven grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren.

She acknowledges that this is a good result considering the Australian Government wanted to increase the population at the time of the family’s migration.

Michael Cartwright has worked in the art world in Denmark and John in Perth, following in their father’s footsteps.

This article appeared in Denmark Bulletin, 26 March 2026.