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 Australian Aborigines in her writings and her encouragement of conservation. In another claim to fame, Louisa is credited as the first Australian-born woman to have a novel published in Australia, Gertrude the Emigrant (1857), for which she used the name "An Australian woman". She was 23 years old.
