EDITH DICKENSON: An Australian Emily Hobhouse?

Abstract

Edith Dickenson was Australia’s first-ever female war correspondent, representing the Adelaide Advertiser of South Australia. As such she wrote stinging reports on a number of the so-called ‘refugee’ camps of the South African War. Much of her more controversial material was suppressed by military censors, but copies of the outtakes reached Emily Hobhouse who featured them in her book The Brunt of the War and Where It Fell. Emily repeatedly described Edith as ‘the Australian Mrs Dickenson,’ which suggests they never met. Had they done so Emily would have realised that like herself, Edith was from a privileged and well-connected English background. Edith was born into a distinguished military family but lost her father when she was seven. Following her mother’s remarriage she became stepdaughter of the 2nd Earl of Stradbroke and grew up in a stately home in Suffolk. At 19 she married a local clergyman many years her senior. Fifteen years and five children later she ran off to Australia to join a married doctor, Augustus Newton Dickenson. Her journalistic career started in 1898 when she visited a son in the Indian army and wrote a series of highly entertaining articles on India, Burma, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Arriving back in Australia she heard that two of her sons were besieged in Ladysmith. She determined to join them and the owner of the Advertiser appointed her ‘special correspondent’ to cover the war ‘from a woman’s standpoint.’ The articles she wrote are full of charm and she told her stories with wry good humour. She was also a photographer of note. Sadly, early in 1902 she was diagnosed with cancer and at the same time lost Gus. Eventually unable to bear the pain, she ended her life by taking an overdose of morphine. She was 52.