Louisa Anne Meredith

Louisa Anne Meredith (20 July 1812 – 21 October 1895), also known as Louisa Anne Twamley, was an Anglo-Australian writer, illustrator and possibly one of Australia's earliest photographers.

Biography Louisa Anne Twamley was born in Birmingham, England, the daughter of Thomas Twamley and Louisa Ann née Meredith. Severe economic depression in New South Wales caused their loss of 'all we owned in that colony.' Charles was appointed the Port Sorell police magistrate in 1844 by Lieutenant-Governor Eardley-Wilmot, after which the family, now with three sons, returned in 1848 to live on part of Charles' father's Cambria.

Commentator and activist Her husband Charles was a member of the Tasmanian Legislative Council for several terms between the mid-1850s until just before his death in 1881. She was an early member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and influenced her husband to legislate for preservation of native wildlife and scenery.

Photographer Hall and Mather suggest that Meredith, nine years her senior, may have preceded Louisa Elizabeth How as the first woman photographer in Australia. Vivienne Rae-Ellis cites the subtitle of Meredith's 1861 Over the Straits; With Illustrations from Photographs, and the Author's Sketches., to note that photographs she made documenting her travels in Victoria in the 1850s were copied for the drawings, alongside her freehand sketches, reproduced for engravings that illustrate the book, as was usual in days before photomechanical reproduction.

Meredith recorded, in her 1839 diary, her attendance at a daguerreotype demonstration in Hobart and was certainly interested in the medium. She was a friend of Tasmanian John Watt Beattie in the 1880s and he records her giving him assistance as a photographer, and of her showing him the "many specimens of both her own and the Bishop Nixon's photographic work in those early days of the very black art," and that she had been "instrumental in having the last remnant of the Tasmanian Aboriginals photographed for the purposes of science." However, though there are records of her making them, not one of Meredith's photographs survives.