Atkinson, Louisa (1834-1872), was the first female novelist born and brought up in Australia. She was also a botanist and zoologist and writer on various aspects of natural history and geology.
Caroline Louisa Waring Atkinson was born at her parents’ property on Feb. 25, 1834, in Oldbury, near Berrima, New South Wales. Her father, James Atkinson, was the first Australian to write about agricultural matters. Her mother, Charlotte Waring Atkinson, was a former teacher with an interest in natural history. Louisa was educated privately by her mother, from whom she inherited her love of nature.
In 1841, Charlotte Atkinson, Louisa’s mother, completed A Mother’s Offering to Her Children, the first children’s book by an Australian writer. It inspired Louisa to become a writer herself. As a young woman in the 1850’s, she began writing articles on natural history that appeared in various Sydney journals. She drew her inspiration for these articles from the forests surrounding Fernhurst, in Kurrajong Heights, west of Sydney.
Atkinson’s first novel, Gertrude the Emigrant: A Tale of Colonial Life (1857), was published in Sydney in weekly parts. It dealt with life in the bush as seen from the point of view of a newly arrived woman. Written in a simple, moralistic style, Gertrude provided an alternative to the exciting adventure stories that Australian men were producing at the time. It was followed by Cowanda, the Veteran’s Grant (1859), a novel written in a similar style. The newspapers the Sydney Mail and The Sydney Morning Herald serialized four other novels between 1861 and 1872. Of these, only Tom Hellicar’s Children has been published as a single book, appearing in 1983.
In 1869, Louisa married the explorer James Snowden Calvert (1825-1884), but she died on April 28, 1872, shortly after giving birth to a daughter. Her natural history articles were collected and published in two volumes more than a century later, as A Voice from the Country (1978) and Excursions from Berrima (1980). Her name is commemorated in the botanical Latin names of several kinds of Australian plants, such as the mistletoelike plant genus Atkinsonia.
