23 Facts About Louisa Atkinson

Caroline Louisa Waring Calvert was an early Australian writer, botanist and illustrator.

Louisa Atkinson is regarded as a ground-breaker for Australian women in journalism and natural science, and is significant in her time for her sympathetic references to Aboriginal Australians in her writings and her encouragement of conservation.

Louisa Atkinson died in 1834, when Louisa was only 8 weeks old.

Louisa Atkinson was a somewhat frail child with a heart defect, and so was educated by her mother, Charlotte Barton, herself the author of Australia's first children's book, A Mother's Offering to her Children.

Louisa Atkinson's mother remarried, but this second husband, George Barton, a family friend, "became violently and irrevocably insane not long after the marriage" resulting in the family needing to leave "Oldbury".

Louisa Atkinson lived most of her life in Kurrajong Heights in a home called Fernhurst that was built by her mother.

Louisa Atkinson became an active member of the community, operating as an unpaid scribe for the unlettered people of the district, a confidante of children, and a helper of the old and the sick.

Louisa Atkinson organised and taught in the district's first Sunday School.

Louisa Atkinson was, at the time, manager of Cavan station at Wee Jasper near Yass.

Louisa Atkinson died at Swanton, near "Oldbury", in 1872,18 days after the birth of her daughter, Louise Snowden Annie.

Louisa Atkinson was buried in the Atkinson family vault at All Saints' Church, Sutton Forest.

Louisa Atkinson is acknowledged as a leading botanist who discovered new plant species in the Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands region of New South Wales, and she championed the cause of conservation during a period of rapid land-clearing.

Louisa Atkinson undertook botanical excursions in areas remote from where she lived, such as the Illawarra, but she became particularly well informed on the flora in Kurrajong and environs, such as the Grose Valley, Mt Tomah and Springwood, where she spent much of her life.

Louisa Atkinson collected specimens extensively for Rev Dr William Woolls, a well-known teacher and amateur botanist, and Ferdinand von Mueller.

Lawson writes that von Mueller's work was aided by many amateur naturalists in Australia, but that Louisa Atkinson's contribution is worthy of particular note "for the quality of its information, its scholarly commitment, its enthusiasm and persistence over time, its geographical range, its local depth, its robustness and liveliness of descriptive record, its sense of primary exploration, its sheer inventiveness".

Louisa Atkinson is commemorated in the Loranthaceous genus Atkinsonia, and in the species Erechtites atkinsoniae, Epacris calvertiana, Helichrysum calvertianum, Xanthosia atkinsoniana and Doodia atkinsonii.

Louisa Atkinson wrote about this on several occasions, making such statements as "It needs no fertile imagination to foresee that in, say, half-a-century's time, tracts of hundreds of miles will be treeless".

Louisa Atkinson is well regarded as a botanical artist, was interested in zoology and was a competent taxidermist.

Louisa Atkinson popularised science and wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald and the Horticultural Magazine.

Louisa Atkinson was the first author to illustrate her own work.

Louisa Atkinson was deeply religious and her fiction, which can generally be described as "Victorian romance-melodrama", conveyed simple moral messages through "intrusive explicit moralising".

Lawson argues that, through her personal experience, Louisa Atkinson is able to record in her fiction "a female perspective on an infant white Australia, both in its rushed ad hoc urban development and its equally ad hoc muddled pastoral growth".

Louisa Atkinson was the first woman in Australia to have a long-running series of articles published in a major newspaper.