Paper short abstract:

To know about animals, do we need to know animals? The case of Alice Manfield (1878-1960), who influentially 'befriended' a family of lyrebirds, suggests the ways in which women could found their claims to environmental knowledge on an emotional intimacy with the animals and habitats they studied.

Paper long abstract:

Alice Manfield was a mountain guide, naturalist, and wildlife photographer who lived and worked on Mount Buffalo, Australia, at the beginning of the twentieth century. 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 poster will highlight the ways in which she and other Australian women contributed to new settler affinities with, and understandings of, animals and their habitats. 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.