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SARA MAROSKE

Sophie Charlotte Anna Maria Henriette Dücker née von Klemperer

Baron Ferdinand von Mueller

Colonial women plant collectors

William Hall and Elizabeth Clare Lambert

SARA MAROSKE

Sophie Charlotte Anna Maria Henriette Dücker née von Klemperer

Baron Ferdinand von Mueller

Colonial women plant collectors

William Hall and Elizabeth Clare Lambert

Folder: projects

Sophie Charlotte Anna Maria Henriette Dücker née von Klemperer

Baron Ferdinand von Mueller

Colonial women plant collectors

William Hall and Elizabeth Clare Lambert

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Sara Maroske cross-written letter

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Thank you!

photograph, Michelle Leber

Michelle Leber, poet and collage artist, Western Port Bay, Victoria

‘Sara Maroske is a rare gem of a historian. She shines a light on those who need to be seen. Her vision to re-set the past from a female perspective has history overturned. Her early projects and current work continue to open my eyes to those often ignored or dismissed. She co-authored a biographical register of women who collected plants for Ferdinand Mueller – a register that became the prime resource for a poetry documentary I was writing. It kick-started my project into many welcomed directions and I soon found her name assigned to many other documents to the point where I risked reaching out to contact her. I was not the first poet to do so. She eagerly wrote back and before long I joined the many other creative writers and artists whom she encouraged. That was short of ten years ago, and I still sustain respect for her lifelong scholarship. She scratches at the surface to reveal the hidden signatures of women. Her revelations of many untold stories ensure women’s ground-breaking work can no longer be overlooked.’

Michelle Leber (2014) The yellow emperor: a mythography in verse, Five Islands Press, Parkville, Vic.

Libby Robin, Professor Emerita in Environmental History, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT

‘I had the privilege of reading Science by correspondence in 2005. At the time, I wrote of the originality and polish of the work. “Much more than biography”, I wrote, Maroske “uses the extraordinary life of Ferdinand Mueller to explore the power of letters in the nineteenth century, the Age of Correspondence. Sociologists have analysed many of the tools of science in creating scientific worlds, but their focus is almost always the formal apparatus of science, not the tools that non-scientists share.” In Mueller’s case, his extraordinary correspondence provided a rare fuller context for international scientific relationships, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that English was not his first language, but was the language of the majority of his letters, written and received. Maroske, with her writerly empathy, has b built an oeuvre that shows how letters (and sometimes the absence of them) shaped the nineteenth-century botanical sciences in Australia, and reveals the many “handmaidens” that contributed to Mueller’s international reputation, and the recognition this gave to Australian plants in nineteenth-century Europe and b beyond. Letters are revealing of emotional and psychological dimensions that laboratory reports and journal articles never acknowledge.

Since Science by correspondence, Maroske has further honed her fine-grained historical scholarship, adding the grit of feminist analysis and the warmth of women’s practical daily lives to her elegant writings about women scientists, particularly those who have been overlooked in the scientific power structures of their times because of their gender.’

Libby Robin (2023) What birds is that? A field guide to bird people, Melbourne University Press.