"A Few Good Seasons Will Restore Prosperity to the Land": Louisa Atkinson's Depictions of Drought

Abstract

"A Few Good Seasons Will Restore Prosperity to the Land":Louisa Atkinson's Depictions of Drought Grace Moore (bio) drought has always been a way of life in Australia, but the importation of European farming techniques and animals exacerbated the land's aridity in the nineteenth century and continues to do so today.1 The 1860s were, as the state's official statistician, T.A. Coghlan, expressed it, a period of "distress and acute suffering" in New South Wales (448). A La Niña event between 1860 and 1864 saw the weather oscillate between periods of extreme dryness and flooding, with New South Wales hit particularly badly. As climate historian Julia Miller notes, the period from 1855 to 1870 was particularly cool and mild, and this enabled a significant agricultural expansion (23). Looking back at the end of the century, Coghlan remarked that "truly remarkable vicissitudes of climate were very great, and the destruction of property was in many instances accompanied by loss of life" (448). These climatic extremes formed a backdrop to much of Australian novelist Louisa Atkinson's writing, which captures the unsettled conditions of life in New South Wales and Queensland in the 1860s and early 1870s. A novelist, nature writer, illustrator, taxidermist, and botanist, Atkinson was the first Australian-born woman to publish a novel, Gertrude the Emigrant (1857), a work remarkable for its attentiveness to the landscape and climate. In addition to her fiction, Atkinson was renowned in her lifetime for her botanical discoveries and writing. She penned a weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald from 1860 until her death in 1872, and her work offers an affective and insightful understanding of the interactions between settler land management and weather systems in her home state of New South Wales. Biographer Patricia Clarke notes that from a very early age, Atkinson was both curious and knowledgeable regarding the plant and animal life of the Australian bush (25–35). As her newspaper columns demonstrate, Atkinson held Indigenous knowledge in high regard, and she learned a great deal about her surroundings from the Indigenous men and women she knew personally.2 She would certainly have understood that the seasons in Australia do not divide neatly into four, as they do in the northern hemisphere, but rather into six. As Deborah Bird Rose observes, "the very act of mapping seasons suggests a standard or norm" to which the Australian climate was resistant (38). Rose comments that Indigenous meteorology works by making connections between weather, creatures, and environment, and she notes the "simultaneity" of seasonal events, remarking "When the march flies start biting, the crocodiles are laying their eggs. When the Jangarla tree … flowers, the barramundi are biting" (39). We can see something of this interconnectedness, or, as Rose puts it, "sequence and co-occurrence," (38) in Atkinson's accounts of drought, which are sensitive to the responses of birds [End Page 5] who relocate their nesting sites in response to extreme temperatures (see L.C. Atkinson).3 While many settler families struggled to contend with the intense heat of Australian summers and the strangeness of their new country's flora and fauna, Atkinson was much more accepting. Having been born and raised in New South Wales, she resists settler nostalgia for the green fields of England and takes delight in introducing readers to the difference of their environment. As the historian Jill Ker Conway notes, the British colonial experience "represents life in Australia as a battle with harsh elements" (52). Atkinson's fiction follows this pattern to a degree, although she emphasizes that lack of climatic understanding is all too often the root cause of settler struggles. Whether narrating the catastrophic consequences of a careless gold digger leaving a campfire in the bush to smoulder, as in her short story "The Burning Forest" (1853), or describing the "sultry season" that leads to fire on the "parched" land of Gertrude the Emigrant, Atkinson sought to educate her readers regarding the dangers of a dry landscape.4 It is in her newspaper columns that Atkinson was most outspoken about colonial culture's effect on the land. She begins an article, "Hanging Rock on the Great Southern Road" (1871), with a...