Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and The

9 ‘Then came the high unpromising forests, and miles of loneliness’: Louisa Atkinson’s recasting of the Australian landscape Grace Moore A botanist, journalist, taxidermist, and fiction-writer, Louisa Atkinson (1834–72) was the first Australian-born woman to publish a novel, and a stern critic of violence in the name of progress. Gertrude the Emigrant (1857) appeared when its author was only twenty-three, but by then Atkin- son was already an accomplished nature writer and a highly respected botanical illustrator.1 She had also begun to pen short stories for the local newspapers, and went on to publish five more novels (an additional novel, Tressa’s Resolve, was published posthumously). Atkinson’s works are remarkable for the sensitivity and wonder with which they depict the Aus- tralian landscape and its plant-life, while her fiction is closely attentive to European settlement’s devastating impact upon the land. She was a prolific columnist who published regularly in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Mail from the early 1860s until her death at the age of thirty-eight. In addition to providing rich descriptions of the flora and fauna she encoun- tered on her many excursions into the bush, her columns also – because they ran over such a long period – mapped the changes wrought by settlers on the New South Wales countryside. Atkinson was a regular contributor to the Horticultural Magazine, and her work was admired by botanists including Ferdinand von Mueller and William Woolls. Her name appears regularly in the proceedings of the Hor- ticultural Society of New South Wales as, for instance, on 6 July 1864 when, at its Annual General Meeting, the society’s honorary secretary distributed edible tubers supplied by ‘Miss Atkinson of the Kurrajong’, who was keen for the members to taste them and to understand how Indigenous Austra- lians used them as food.2 This example typifies Atkinson’s immersive and experiential interest in plant-life: she once sent a jar of ‘native cranberry’ jam to the Sydney Horticultural Society to allow its members to taste a fruit about which she had written.3 She celebrated native plants and wildlife, Grace Moore - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 01:34:51PM via free access ‘Then came the high unpromising forests, and miles of loneliness’ 197 learning about them from the Indigenous men and women she knew. She even attempted to introduce a ‘Native Arts’ column to the Illustrated Sydney News in the early 1850s that would deal with Indigenous Australian culture. The feature ran twice before it was discontinued, although Atkinson wrote as though it was to have been a long-term venture. Reflecting her great passion for Australian flora, Atkinson’s writing is notable for its rejection of European aesthetic conventions, offering a cor- rective to the settler novel’s picturesque and sublime framings of the out- back as though it were an English vista.4 That she lived entirely in Australia is of undoubted significance in Atkinson’s advocacy for the distinctiveness and importance of Australian wildlife. Her upbringing was highly uncon- ventional, and she spent much more time out of doors, observing plants and animals, than was usual for a middle-class girl.5 Unlike many of her contemporaries, she strove to capture the extraordinary beauty and difference of New South Wales and Queensland, while at the same time recording the rapidity with which change was being imposed upon the regions. Fascinated by Indigenous culture, Atkinson attempted to promote an understanding of the land’s traditional custodians and to highlight their more nuanced and reciprocal relationships with the natural world, although her racial politics oscillated between affectionate respect for the Indigenous men and women she knew personally and what Elizabeth Lawson identifies as ‘overt rac- ism’.6 She also, as this chapter demonstrates, explored the destruction to the human and nonhuman worlds by settlers, whose attempts to make a home away from home failed to respect and understand Australia’s carefully bal- anced ecology and the people who had successfully managed it for many generations. Louisa Atkinson’s country was Kurrajong, north-west of Sydney, which is also the Indigenous name given by the people of the Darug, or Dharug, nation for the types of trees (also known as the bottle tree) that once grew there. In discussing and using the term ‘country’ in this chapter, I take my definition from Deborah Bird Rose, who beautifully encapsulates the ineffa- ble pervasiveness of country, and the mutual care and cross-species depen- dency that it envelops: Country in Aboriginal English is not only a common noun, but also a proper noun. People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person … People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy … country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life.7 Atkinson’s sensibility towards country could not approximate this kind of Indigenous connection, but her location was quite literally defined by wood- land, and she embraced that connection in much of her writing, even as she Grace Moore - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 01:34:51PM via free access 198 Acculturation/Transculturation grieved for its violent removal. A keen observer of her surroundings, Atkin- son was particularly interested in the failures of settler colonisation, which were frequently associated with violence of one kind or another, including violence against the land. In this chapter I examine Atkinson’s representations of the massive land clearances that became a hallmark of settler interactions with country throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. I also examine Atkinson’s use of the bushfire as a trope to critique settler understandings of the Aus- tralian natural world. Focusing on her fire stories, I consider how her depic- tions of fire-setting and fire-fighting are distinct from those of her contemporaries (for instance Mary Theresa Vidal and Ellen Clacy) and how her writings sought to promote respect for the bush, both reconfigur- ing the forest as an imaginative space in settler culture, and reassessing contemporary debates about land clearance and the bush as a ‘resource’ to be plundered. Pastoralism, land clearance, and bushfire stories Atkinson’s position in relation to land clearance is interesting, given her background. Her father, James Atkinson, was a successful pastoralist who, when he died, owned more than 3,000 sheep and 200 cattle. He was a respected civil servant and the author of a prize-winning book, An Account of the State of Agriculture & Grazing in New South Wales (1826), which, as T. M. Perry tells us in James’ entry in the Australian Dictionary of National Biography, ‘was an important work’, emphasising ‘the problems of adapting European plants, animals and farming methods to a strange environment’.8 James Atkinson’s work is not cheerful reading for the modern environmen- talist. It is clear that he saw forests as ‘obstacles’, to use Robert Pogue Har- rison’s characterisation of them, and much of the book recounts in copious and painful detail the most efficient processes for eradicating trees:9 Some persons have preferred digging a deep hole on one side, and by throwing the stump down into it, have succeeded in burying it out of the reach of the plough; others have taken off a belt of bark all round the tree, and killed it while standing, afterwards clearing the land by grubbing or stump-failing. This is attended with some benefit, as the tree is then ready for burning as soon as it is down, but then the wood gets hard and dry, and is much more difficult to cut up. Some have barked the trees, and set fire to them standing; many will completely burn down, but a great many stumps and fragments will remain, and require as much or more trouble to be got rid of, than the whole tree would in the first instance; and it does not appear that much benefit arises from the system.10 Grace Moore - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 01:34:51PM via free access ‘Then came the high unpromising forests, and miles of loneliness’ 199 There is something quite devastating about reading this volume of apparently endless suggestions for wiping out native forests. With his talk of stump burial, tree and grass burning, ring-barking, and killing trees while standing, this ‘management’ of the land reads today as nothing short of ecological vandalism. Yet within its context, Atkinson’s advocacy of ecocide was regarded as the height of effective land management. James Atkinson was far from unique in his beliefs. Rose reminds us of the disturbance to the ecological equilibrium caused by settlers to country when she notes that ‘[s]ettlers laid waste to land as they worked it; their land use practices meant that they were always hungry for more land … They took with them their disregard for life-support systems.’11 With their European aesthetic and their sense of Australia as a disorderly space to be ransacked into submission, many settlers were challenged by the uncanny appearance of the twisty, sprawling eucalypt forests. Yet at the same time, they were quick to invest them with pecuniary value, so that often when we look at early histories of colonial ‘progress’, sections which appear to be devoted to trees are actually accounts of timber prices and market values. John Ste- phens in his emigrants’ guide, The History of the Rise and Progress of the New British Province of South Australia (1839), wrote of the stringy bark: ‘it is estimated that, if twenty thousand persons emigrated to the Australian shores every year, for the next century, there would be enough for them all’.12 Trees here are simply resources, and if Stephens is thinking about their expendability, it is only to the degree that he wants there to be enough to go around.

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