Paper short abstract:

To know about animals, do we need to know animals? The case of naturalist Alice Manfield (1878-1960) suggests the ways in which women contributed to changing affinities with Australian native wildlife by claiming emotional intimacies with the animals they studied.

Paper long abstract:

Alice Manfield was a mountain guide, naturalist, and wildlife photographer who lived and worked on Mount Buffalo, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when initial colonial misgivings about freakish and unprofitable Australian wildlife would largely gave way to widespread affection and concern for their survival. After befriending a local lyrebird family, 'Guide Alice' was able to take the first known photographs of the notoriously shy male lyrebird, a feat enviously admired by other naturalists who had tried and failed to ‘bag’ similar animals. After publishing the ground-breaking photographs alongside descriptions of the individual animals’ personalities and behaviour, she offered to act as a guide to others who wanted to see this threatened species. I suggest that women naturalists like Alice, who lacked conventional experience in science or natural history, tended to assert their zoological and environmental expertise in terms of a long-term familiarity or emotional friendship with the animals they studied. Drawing primarily on her personal papers and published nature writing, this paper will highlight the ways in which she and other Australian naturalists contributed to radically changing settler affinities with, and understandings of, threatened native wildlife. Paying attention to women’s contributions to natural history in the early twentieth century, when access to universities remained rare, promises to expand our understanding of contested of animal ‘knowledge’ and the role of emotions in changing ideas about vulnerable species.