(12.04.2025)
I have grown fond of my little routine: parking at Cope Hut and walking up with my camera, tripod and backpack to sit on the slope of Maisie’s Plots in Pretty Valley. Even though the fog has not returned, the various weather conditions and shades of light have given me ample opportunities to create photographs to take home with me, and continue to work with in the future.
Sitting perched on the rocks, or directly on the grasses, I have observed the smallest cricket, bird’s feather caught in the shrub, or fine moss starting to form again in a bare patch of earth. Birds have visited and the sun has kept me warm.
I have sat alone with my thoughts, to consider how the landscape has been shaped and shifted over time, and the people who have travelled here - from its traditional owners to the cattlemen, Maisie and now to me. Questions about how working in the 1940s along the Bogong High Plains would have been for Maisie arose. Reading her diary entries thanks to the efforts of her husband D. J. Carr who compiled them together with other notable documents, letters and findings in A Book for Maisie (2005), allowed me to imagine more readily, shaping my images of her in my head, and to picture her faintly on the Plots.
The phrase ‘women’s work’ was not what Maisie had come to do, rather she embarked on pioneering ecology work in a male-dominated area. Her legacy has been huge as her experimental plots are one the longest data sets on record. Unfortunately like so many women of her time (and perhaps one could see similarities still to this day), Maisie’s work while recognised was measured in relation to the more ‘authoritative’ work of male counterparts. And yet, it is her work that helped form the Alpine National Park we enjoy today.
It has been a privilege to spend time researching Maisie; learning so much about soil erosion, perennial grasses and mosses, hydro-power dams, and the daily life of mid-twentieth century living on the High Plains. I am grateful to have been able to bear witness to her work in Pretty Valley. Thank you Maisie.