Settler penetration and appropriation are gendered: Christie Harner, ‘Louisa Anne Meredith, Ethel Pedley, and Gendered Ecological Knowledge of the Australian Bush’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 22, 1, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler penetration and appropriation are gendered: Christie Harner, ‘Louisa Anne Meredith, Ethel Pedley, and Gendered Ecological Knowledge of the Australian Bush’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 22, 1, 2026

11Jul26

Abstract: Writing in to The Bulletin in 1892, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson participated in what Manu Samriti Chander has called a “poetry war” and “literary debate” about the Australian bushlands (74).(1) The men were well-known contributors to the newspaper, including for Lawson’s “A Song of the Republic” (1887) and Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” (1890). Ostensibly, the poetic debate is over the nature of the bushlands, the “region of farms, forests, mines, and provincial towns and villages that supports Australia’s primary and export industries” (Lawrence 212). The apparent disagreement rests on the harshness of bush life. In a poem initially titled “Borderland,” in the July 9 Bulletin, Lawson writes of the “burning wastes of barren soil and sand / With their everlasting fences stretching out across the land!” (21). Two weeks later, Paterson’s poetic response sings of the land’s “moods and changes, as the seasons rise and fall / And the men who know the bush-land—they are loyal through it all” (15). On August 6, in a poem titled “In Answer to ‘Banjo,’ and otherwise,” later retitled “The City Bushman,” Lawson emphasizes the inhumanity of a barren landscape, even as he admits a yearning to affiliate himself with the mythic bush, “to feel once more a little like a native of the land” (5). Paterson, by contrast, highlights the humanity of those who live and work in the bush, their camaraderie, traditions, and capacity to endure. Despite their disagreement, the men share a distinctive vocabulary that casts the bush as a masculine, distinctly Australian space. Both strive to associate the bush with a new, emergent national identity within and against other versions of bush ecology. Whether or not they wrote for money or increased readership, Paterson and Lawson also wrote into being a “demonstrably non-British iconography at a time when Australian nationalism was burgeoning” (Lawrence 212). Australian literature of the 1890s, in the decade leading up to Federation (January 1, 1901), or the joining of the separate states, is almost exclusively read in this way: male, anti-authoritarian, and allied to an uncanny bush landscape that refused understanding by outsiders. As Susan Lawrence has argued, Paterson and Lawson, alongside other writers and visual artists, were “responding to, even rebelling against, a colonial, British past,” and so “seeking distinctive and unique attributes from which to form a new identity” (221). Their works asserted what Jason Rudy has described as “an almost ontological relationship between Australia’s distinct landscape and emerging nationalist sentiment,” between the stark, phantasmagoric imagery of the bush and masculinist independence from domestic life (174). To the extent that Paterson’s and Lawson’s poems repeatedly invoke ecological motifs—topological formations, species’ names, weather patterns—they do so to emphasize the absolute singularity of the bush landscape: an ecology without peer, impervious to comprehension by a non-initiate, an outsider, or, pointedly, someone British. My aim in this essay is to offer a counterpoint, to analyze how two women writers of the “Federation decade” complicate late nineteenth-century formulations of a masculine bush ecology, and to argue that women’s writing of the 1890s offers an alternative view of human-ecological bonds. Louisa Anne Meredith’s 1891 Last Series. Bush Friends in Tasmania, an illustrated guide to local species, and Ethel Pedley’s 1899 children’s novel Dot and the Kangaroo use representations of the native landscape to challenge conventional readings of Australian identity formation. I put them in dialogue because they use two distinct genres often associated with nineteenth-century women’s science writing—the botanical guide and the children’s text—and because they are both invested in a specific ecological pedagogy. Unlike earlier ecological and naturalist texts, including Meredith’s own mid-century volumes, these 1890s works refute logics that either completely align the settler colony with Britain or segregate emergent colonial knowledge from existing British “leadership in these observational sciences” (A. Johnston 216). Rather, Meredith and Pedley’s 1890s texts model modes of ecological thinking that emphasize interconnection and entanglement. In what follows, after a brief introduction to both authors and texts, I will highlight three components of Meredith’s and Pedley’s engagement with Australian ecology: species naming conventions, visual illustrations, and patterns of economic exchange. The first two hinge on paratextual elements and the volumes’ print format, linking ecological content to multi-scalar form and invoking broader, more expansive readings of bush ecosystems. References to economic exchange exist explicitly on the level of content and, implicitly, in the global circulation of both authors and texts. Together, the three components offer a reading of 1890s Australian ecology that foregrounds interconnectedness rather than isolationism: a feminized alternative to the masculine logic of settler nationalism.

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