Lee, Ida (1865–1943)

Australian historian. Name variations: Ida Marriott. Born on February 11, 1865, in Kelso, New South Wales; died on October 3, 1943; third of eight children of George Lee (a grazier) and Emily Louisa (Kite) Lee; married Charles John Bruce Marriott (a secretary of the Rugby Football Union), on October 14, 1891; children: one.

Born in 1865 into a pioneering family in New South Wales, Ida Lee grew up in Leeholme, Kelso, where she rode to school on horseback. In 1891, she married Charles Marriott, after which she made her home in England. Though known for her historical accounts, Lee's first work was a volume of poetry, The Bush Fire and Other Verses, published in 1897. She then developed an interest in history, haunting British libraries, particularly the Admiralty, where she became fascinated with log-books, journals, and disregarded charts. In 1906, under her maiden name, she published The Coming of the British to Australia 1788 to 1829, after which she turned her attention to the obscure navigator John Hayes, researching his life from letters, family records, and newspapers of the period. The resulting work, Commodore Sir John Hayes, His Voyage and Life, published in 1912, led to chronicles of other notable ocean voyages, including The Logbooks of the "Lady Nelson" (1915), Captain Bligh's Second Voyage to the South Sea (1920), Early Explorers in Australia (1925), and The Voyage of the Caroline (1927), her last book, although she continued to research through correspondence with various museums and libraries. In an article in the Geographical Journal (April 1934), Lee put forth the theory that the British first sighted Australia in 1682, a fact she discovered from an original letter (found in the India Office) from the captain of the ship Trial, which was grounded on the Tryal rocks off the West Australian coast. Cited for her original research, Lee was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London in 1913, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Australian Historical Society in 1918. She died on October 3, 1943.

sources:

Radi, Heather, ed. 200 Australian Women. NSW, Australia: Women's Redress Press, 1988.

Wilde, William H., Joy Horton, and Barry Andrews, eds. Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994.