The Pioneer Writer

This is the first biography of Louisa Atkinson who, during her short life in the mid nineteenth century, became the first Australian-born woman novelist, a noted naturalist and one of the country's earliest women journalists.

Louisa Atkinson was born at Olbury in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Although born into a land-owning family with talented parents (both authors), her childhood after her father's death was spent in a disturbed household dominated by a violent alcoholic stepfather. During her lifetime she witnessed the end of the convict era and the start of the mass arrival of free settlers, the enormous social changes of the gold rushes and the effects of the free selection land acts.

The novels written by Louisa Atkinson are among the earliest works to draw upon the lives of ordinary men and women who were turning a frontier into a settled society. When she moved to Kurrajong Heights she was inspired by the plants, animals and birds and the beauty of the Blue Mountains to begin a long-running series of nature columns called 'A Voice from the Country' for the Sydney Morning Herald. She became a renowned writer on natural science, the forerunner of today's writers on the environment. Her botanical finds were praised by Baron von Mueller and other botanists and several plants were named in her honour.

Louisa Atkinson's appealing character and her achievements in writing and in science in an age when the usual role of women was entirely domestic, are depicted against a rich social mosaic of nineteenth-century Australia. Her life was peopled by fascinating and intriguing characters including powerful landowners, geologists, botanists and explorers, one of whom became her husband in a marriage that was tragically curtailed.

Pioneer Writer will appeal to historians and readers interested in the characters who pioneered Australia and the complex social fabric they created.