page_title: Louisa Atkinson
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Louisa Atkinson / Life
caption_attribution_description: Cowanda
context_page_description: Caroline Louisa Waring Atkinson best known as Louisa Atkinson, was an early Australian writer, botanist and illustrator. While she was well known for her fiction during her lifetime, her long-term significance rests on her botanical work. She 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.
context_section_description: Louisa, as she was generally known, was born on her parents' property "Oldbury", Sutton Forest, about 3 mi (4.8 km) from Berrima, New South Wales, and was their fourth child. Her father, James Atkinson, was the author of an early Australian book, An Account of the State of Agriculture and Grazing in New South Wales, published in 1826. He died in 1834, when Louisa was only 8 weeks old. Louisa 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.
  Her 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".
  She lived most of her life in Kurrajong Heights in a home called Fernhurst that was built by her mother. Prior to that she had lived briefly in Shoalhaven and Sydney. She 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. She also organised and taught in the district's first Sunday School. Louisa and her mother returned to "Oldbury" in 1865, with her mother dying there in 1868. On 11 March 1869, she married James Snowden Calvert (1825–84), a survivor of Leichhardt's expedition of 1844–5 and also interested in botany. He was, at the time, manager of Cavan station at Wee Jasper near Yass. She died at Swanton, near "Oldbury", in 1872, 18 days after the birth of her daughter, Louise Snowden Annie. She was buried in the Atkinson family vault at All Saints' Church, Sutton Forest. Her obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald described her as: "This excellent lady, who has been cut down like a flower in the midst of her days, was highly distinguished for her literary and artistic attainments, as well as for the Christian principles and expansive charity which marked her career".
  According to Chisholm, she is also credited with being "something of a pioneer in dress reform: the long skirts of the period were simply a nuisance in scrubby areas and so this woman used, both when rambling and pony riding, attire [trousers] which is said to have aroused 'some twitterings in the ranks of the colonial Mrs Grundy'." Clarke writes that she was joined in this behaviour by Mrs Selkirk, a local doctor's wife.
caption: Cowanda
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