Mary E.B. Howitt (1867-1936)

Mary Edith Boothby Howitt came from a well known family of early Victorian colonists. She was the daughter of natural scientist, anthropologist and explorer Alfred William Howitt and his wife Mary Boothby. In his time, her father was a pre-eminent authority on Aboriginal culture in south-eastern Australia. A skilled bushman, he led the expedition to Cooper’s Creek to find the men of the Burke and Wills expedition and brought back the sole survivor, King before returning to retrieve the bodies of Burke and Wills. Later he was the Police Magistrate of the Omeo district in Gippsland. He was also a student of the geology of Gippsland and wrote many scholarly works on his various scientific and anthropological interests. Former RHSV President Professort Bill Russell wrote of this ‘colossus’ that he was ‘both the maker and chronicler of some of the most evocative passages in our 19^th century history.’

Working alongside A.W. Howitt was his daughter Mary, his assistant, secretary and the keeper of the family legacy. Her correspondence with the HSV dates from 1912, just four years after her father’s death. An authority on her father’s work, it also reveals her intimate knowledge of her family’s activities in the early days of white settlement. Her paper ‘The Howitts in Australia’ was read before the HSV’s Annual Meeting in July 1912 and reproduced in the September 1913 issue of the Society’s journal. Hers was the first presentation by a woman, read on her behalf as she had not made the long journey to Melbourne from her home ‘Eastwood’ at Lucknow, near Bairnsdale.

Mary E.B. Howitt’s own literary output was confined to a few travel pieces in the Leader newspaper. She wrote one short story, ‘The Lost White Woman’, published in the Australasian in 1897 and although her version of the story is not well known today, the matter of a reputed lost white woman as told by Mary Howitt, became the focus of Julie Carr’s 1997 book The captive woman of Gipps Land and is still debated today.

Kaleidoscope exhibition text by Cheryl Griffin, February 2022. Full entry to follow.