Margaret Morris
Margaret Morris, one of Australia’s first environmentalists and a pioneer of native flora landscaping, was better known in her lifetime as a botanical illustrator and for being the wife of the more famous Broken Hill naturalist, Albert Morris.
By the 1920s, decades of grazing and timber felling that fuelled mining operations had disrupted the natural ecology of the Darling River region around Broken Hill. Towering dust storms were regular and devastating, burying fences and gardens and blowing under doors and through cracks.
Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Margaret and Albert Morris became self-taught botanists and experts on native flora, and then on regeneration. They built their own herbarium and Margaret collected hundreds of native seeds and specimens, photographed them and, given that this was the era of black and white film, hand-coloured each glass slide creating an invaluable archive of native flora. When the Zinc Corporation, one of the three big mining concerns in Broken Hill, agreed to the Morris’s idea to fence off an area on the south-west outskirts of the city, and to plant red river gum and saltbush to stabilise the soil for a new mining enterprise, it was the beginnings of a regeneration project that became one of the first of its kind in the world. It is still, today, protecting Broken Hill from the worst of the desert winds.
By the time Albert died in 1938, Broken Hill was partly-surrounded by regeneration zones. Margaret continued the work of setting up new reserves on her own, planting hundreds of species of native flora, and landscaping. She also continued to grow the Barrier Fields Naturalists Club which she and Albert had established. She wrote many articles on native botanicals, occasionally assisting academics from the University of Sydney with their research into the recovery of indigenous flora. She tirelessly promoted and publicised the success of the regeneration area, which withstood the drought that hit the region in 1940.
Margaret Morris was a quiet achiever who preferred to get on with the work rather than take credit for it. The stunning flora of the Barrier Ranges and the regeneration areas can now be visited at the Riddiford Arboretum in Galena Street. And if you are lucky enough to visit Broken Hill in the spring or summer when native wildflowers cover the ground, you are witnessing the blossoming of her life’s work.
Audio transcript available.