Progress Versus the Picturesque: White Women and the Aesthetics of Environmentalism in Colonial Australia 1820-1860
Author(s)
Jordan, Caroline
Abstract
In 19th-century Australia, a number of middle-class women who had emigrated from England, and were artists, sought to preserve the environment, which represented the picturesque, from rampant destruction by capitalist colonialism. Two Tasmanian artists, Louisa Anne Meredith and Mary Morton Allport, decried the spoliation of the countryside in the name of progress but were more ambivalent about the need to displace Aboriginal peoples. Although marginalized by their class and more so by their gender, the female voices did contribute to a growing environmentalist cause, albeit a cause muted by masculine desires to conquer the often inhospitable surroundings of Australia.
