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PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies Vol. 4, no. 1 January 2007 
ISSN: 1449-2490 
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal 
 

                                                

 
 
 
 
 
 
Footprints, Imprints: Seeing Environmentalist and Buddhist 

Marie Byles as an Eastern Australian 
 
Allison Jane Cadzow, University of Technology, Sydney 

 

 

This paper is a response to a challenge posed to me: to find ways of thinking of 

Australia as Asian, rather than an island culture tenaciously clinging to British ancestry 

and identification despite indigenous and Eastern influences. What different 

understandings of Australian lives and subjectivities might emerge when Australian 

lives are seen as Asian also? It seemed appropriate to undertake this experiment in 

thinking within the context of the life story of a figure who challenged easy definitions, 

spent much of her life between Asia and Australia and belongs to the histories of many 

places in the region and relationships between them. This paper uses historical, cultural 

and textual analysis to explore the life of Marie Byles, a significant conservationist and 

Buddhist, as simultaneously Eastern1 and Australian through her travel writing, her 

interpretations of Buddhist texts for English reading audiences, and her 

environmentalism. 

 

Background 

Marie Byles (1900-1979) is usually introduced with a string of roles trailing behind her 

name: pioneer feminist, early woman solicitor of 1920s, explorer and lone female 

traveller in late 1920s. It is often mentioned that she was an environmentalist, and, from 
 

1 The terms ‘east’ and ‘eastern’ are used in this essay to indicate a European-derived cultural perspective 
of an imagined ‘Other’ contrasting with the ‘west,’ rather than as literal, geographical descriptions. 



Cadzow         Footprints, Imprints 

the 1940s onwards, a Buddhist. She helped to promote a similar version of herself in 

her unpublished autobiographical work, Many Lives in One. Born in England, she 

moved to a bushy area of northern Sydney, Australia with her parents and two brothers 

at the age of eleven, was raised by Unitarian and unorthodox parents. Her mother was a 

suffragette and artist, who encouraged her to be economically independent and to 

pursue her education, while her father was a Fabian socialist railway engineer who 

delivered criticism of private property, encouraging his children from a young age to 

chant ‘Down with the blasted landowners!’ (Byles 1944, 2). 

 

This brief background does not do justice to the connections between these elements of 

her life or her simultaneously international and Australian outlook. Although she was 

born in England in 1900 and lived in Australia for most of her life, Byles travelled 

through China, Burma and northern Vietnam in the 1930s, India in the 1950s, and 

Japan in 1960s, forming ongoing connections with these places. Her perspectives on the 

environment were profoundly shaped by Buddhist philosophy as well as by her 

experiences of Australian landscapes. Given that she was among the instigators behind 

the establishment of several national parks in Australia and a contributor to 

international debates on Buddhism and Gandhian thought, it seems important to value 

the relationship between place and ideas that animated her life and work.  

 

Some studies of Byles’s life broach her relationships with the region and Buddhist ideas. 

The documentary film by Gillian Coote, A Singular Woman (1985), has done much to 

arouse interest in her life and addresses her spirituality. Byles was celebrated in an 

exhibition at The National Trust of Australia (NSW) in conjunction with its 60th 

anniversary.2 She appeared in an anthology of Australian writing about the East, albeit 

briefly (Gerster 1995, 176-9), and in Paul Croucher’s epic history of Buddhism in 

Australia. These testimonies are invaluable in showing the richness of Byles’s life and 

work, but there is certainly room for more thinking about her as at once Eastern and 

                                                 
2 The exhibition Marie Byles: A Spirited Life was curated by Julie Peterson and drew heavily upon the 
research of myself, Gillian Coote and Julie Peterson as well as the contributions of numerous relatives 
and friends of Marie Byles. The exhibition toured Sydney, the N.S.W. Central Coast and Bathurst. 
<http://www.nationaltrust.org.au/properties/ahmisa/default.asp> 

 
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Australian, and about her ongoing relationship with Asia and its influence on her 

thinking.  

 

In this paper I canvas one way of understanding the influence of spirituality, 

particularly on Byles’s approach to the environment, by focusing on her life as an 

Eastern Australian. This term suggests her primary location for most of her life on the 

Eastern Australian seaboard, and also hints at differences within Australia due to its 

different environments, histories and communities interacting over time. Reflecting on 

Eastern Australian identities can encourage us to consider Australia in Asia, Australia 

as Asian, connections across oceans and time, looser groupings, and identifications that 

allow for movement. The term draws attention to the value of looking at how place is 

made through social connections in time and space, following feminist cultural 

geographer Doreen Massey’s work (1995). Edward Said’s insight that due to 

imperialism’s influence on cultural exchange, no one is ‘one pure thing’ and that cross-

cultural connections enable survival, rather than a rigid insistence on sharp differences, 

is also relevant here (1993, 407-8).  

 

By focussing on Byles’s life and the historical and cultural context in which she lived, 

it is possible to highlight the complexities of so-called Anglo, Eastern and Australian 

identities. A close study enables consideration of connections and belongings, which 

are not necessarily ethnicity based, or dilettantish, and that thus cannot be dismissed 

simplistically as ‘Orientalist.’ It seems especially pertinent to argue this position against 

such reductive profiling as that directed at Lebanese Australians, Muslim people, and 

refugees in much popular debate in Australia today. In this paper, then, I look at four 

facets of Marie Byles’s life as an Eastern Australian: her travels in Australia and China; 

the design of her home in Sydney and its use as a hub for early Buddhist meetings; her 

publication of texts discussing Eastern philosophy; and her environmental activism. 

This is by no means a comprehensive look at her rich life and writings, or a detailed 

dissertation on Buddhist theology; rather, my aim is to point to some areas worthy of 

closer examination. 

 

 
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Marie Byles’s travels in Australia, China, Burma, Vietnam and Japan 

Marie Byles was fascinated by the east coast Australian bush from a young age and 

walked around Sydney’s bushlands with her family and with various clubs. She was an 

early member of groups like the Sydney Bush Walkers, which formed in the late 1920s 

as interest in recreation and conservation grew with industrialisation and as urban areas 

expanded into bushland. She wrote for newspapers and walking journals about her trips 

and took many photos, bringing these areas into wider Western knowledge networks. In 

her writing she promoted Australia as a worthy place to explore, proposing that the 

Australian landscape was lesser-known than the English landscape, and relatively 

unmapped and little known or valued in an Anglo-Australian society at the time. She 

also lobbied for the environmental protection of bush areas from the early 1930s, most 

notably in NSW (Cadzow 2002, 219-220). 

 

Her major passion in her younger years, however, was finding ‘real mountains’ to 

climb. After climbing in Norway, England, Canada, and New Zealand in the late 1920s, 

as recorded in By Cargo Boat and Mountain (1931), she wanted to do another major 

trip. She started reading and planning for a trip to Yunnan, in South Western China near 

the border of Tibet, in the late 1930s. Her textual encounters with the East began there 

when her approach to travel as an educational experience took an Eastern turn. 

 

She painstakingly organised an expedition to climb Mt Sanseto, with a group of women 

and men. As a consequence of wartime tensions and nearby fighting their route 

involved going through Burma to China. Before she arrived in China, geographical and 

cultural differences within Australia became more apparent to her. She took the train 

across the vast Nullarbor Plain in 1938 in order to board the boat heading overseas from 

Perth, and appears to have been surprised and disoriented by how different the west of 

Australia was from the east. This trip may have provided some of her earliest 

encounters with Aboriginal people rather than representations of them, and she was 

shocked by their poverty and, it seems, by their presence as well. Further north in 

Western Australia she noted the population comprised a ‘League of Nations’ (of mixed 

backgrounds). Her letters to her parents revealed the gulfs in middle-class Anglo 

 
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understandings and knowledge about Australia’s diversity and past, despite the claims 

of unified Anglo national identity promoted at the time (Byles, Papers 1914-1979). The 

experience also foreshadowed her limited experience and contact with Asian people, 

despite her efforts to research for the trip. 

 

Byles dated her interest in eastern religion from her trip to Burma, before completing 

the climb. She was particularly interested in pagodas and shrines and stayed overnight 

in some of them (Byles 1963). She presented images of Chinese landscapes in walking 

magazines (which often made their way to British, Canadian and US walkers and 

environmentalists) and talks. The Sydney Morning Herald published her travel accounts, 

which partly funded the trip, thus contributing to the circulation of information in 

Australia about China. In these media articles, attention was drawn to the novelty of her 

expedition, not only as a woman mountaineer, but also as an Anglo-Australian 

interested in China. As Alison Broinowski (1996) points out, since the early twentieth 

century a steady stream of Australian artists, writers and commentators had been 

travelling to China, India and the eastern-Asian region, and bringing ideas and insights 

back into their own work and the country as a whole 6. Yet ‘Asia’ was still represented 

as exotic and ‘Other,’ and thus separate and distinct from popular Anglo conceptions of 

Australianness; this was compounded by fears of Japanese invasion during the Second 

World War (Broinowski 1996, 3, 14). 

 

Some of Byles’s comments might make a contemporary reader flinch, such as her 

attitudes towards local bargaining and the all too familiar juxtaposition of ancient China 

with the ‘modern’ west, which also occur in much western travel writing about the East 

(Byles 1939, 41). Nonetheless, Byles was aware that the activity of mountain climbing 

seemed unusual rather than laudable to Chinese people and noted uncomfortably that 

she was being watched as ‘a pink-kneed animal.’ The women on the trip adopted long 

blue Chinese gowns to avoid being ‘stared at like animals in the zoo’ (1938b). Such 

self-consciousness and self -deprecation is remarked on by many analysts of British 

women’s travel writing, such as Sara Mills (1993, 22) and Alison Blunt (1994, 72-78) 

As they note, western women accustomed to being observed and subjected to the ‘male 

 
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gaze’ within their own culture were inevitably aware of their appearance and 

differential position in relation to men.  

 

Marie Byles’s writing demonstrates her genuine interest and desire to learn about local 

people, and a willingness to adapt and adopt elements of cultural practice, which 

appealed to her. After her trip to China, Byles took to wearing Chinese clothing for 

comfort and practicality, including an outfit—deep blue pants and matching top—that 

she wore to work in her legal office in Sydney, and that aroused varied reactions among 

Sydney’s Anglo population (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 July 1938, 13). She tried to 

learn about the mountains and the climate around her in China, noting the presence of 

the ‘black dragon,’ the deity responsible for rain, and Mt. Sansato ‘a great white 

dragon’ the snow clad 20, 000 foot mountain she aimed to climb (Byles 1939, 40-41). 

She seems to have developed a deep reverence for the mountains, as expressed in her 

dramatic description of the area: 

 
Those peaks! Those knife edges of rock enfolded one within the other. How could one approach 
them, let alone climb them? I have seen mountains in Norway, Canada and New Zealand, but 
never anything to touch the icy inaccessibility of those virgin dragon queens whose serrated and 
ice covered walls protected them. For eight months of the year the winds howl around them and 
the snows drape them. For the other four their naked splendour is veiled in rain and mist which the 
Black Dragon hardly ever lifts. (Byles, Many Lives, Papers, 1914-1979, 119-120) 

 

In contrast to other trips where she was more interested in mountains alone, this trip 

found her keen to learn about people, particularly the status of women and gender 

relations in the countries she visited (Byles 1940, 3). Unlike her other published 

accounts of travel overseas, there were more pictures of the people she met in towns 

and villages, and the guides they hired, such as Mr Shi who was in charge of their camp 

(1938c). Funerals, weddings, temples and family life featured in her images, and she 

showed interest in local religion. This could well be regarded as ‘othering,’ typical 

tourist behaviour and representation of other cultures as repositories of the spiritual to 

be tapped into at will by jaded Westerners. But more than this seemed to be occurring; 

she was being influenced and transformed by these experiences. She wrestled with her 

position as a traveller in China and local responses to her presence, mocked her own 

mixed-up instructions in broken Chinese, and was acutely aware of cultural differences 

 
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when seeking accommodation and bargaining (1938c). Such trade and negotiation was 

not a purely financial transaction, but a form of cultural exchange as well.   

 

Byles’s accounts did not uniformly celebrate Britishness, although she occasionally cast 

herself as part of an exploratory people, in a pro-Empire celebration. Mixed with these 

‘bold British’ moments was a fascination with the difference in gender relations 

elsewhere in the world, which is not surprising considering her interest in feminism. 

Among the Nashi people of China, she noted that the women did the physical work and 

were seen as strong, while the men remained at home caring for the children (1938b). 

She observed colonial divisions of labour in Haiphong, Vietnam, acerbically noting that 

the European women basically did nothing compared to their Vietnamese and Chinese 

counterparts (Byles 1940, 3). 

 

The climbers finally made it to the base of the mountain and started an attempt on Mt 

Sansato after numerous delays. Snow and rain set in during a narrow window of 

climbing time and Byles was unable to reach the summit, leaving her ‘bitterly 

disappointed.’ She made sense of this failure by highlighting other discoveries (with the 

hindsight that autobiography allowed). She alluded to new ways of looking at situations 

in her descriptions and moved beyond the aim of climbing the mountain: ‘What I had 

striven for and desired above all lay dead. I should never climb the mountain or feel 

again the touch of its rough limestone rocks…But the sun was still shining. There was 

something beyond the loves and sorrows of this world that had gone on through all the 

ages of geology. I did not understand; for the time being I left it at that’ (Byles, Many 

Lives, Papers 1914-1979,126). After this she spent more time with her fellow climber 

Marj and the guides/muleteers, Wang and Magato. She taught them how to climb in 

what she described as ‘gloriously happy’ times, enjoying their company, especially 

their lack of arrogance compared to others in the party. Her mountaineering friend Dot 

Butler believed that the male climbers dominated the trip, much to Byles’s annoyance, 

 
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as she liked to lead.3 In her autobiography she represented herself as learning from her 

guides’ conduct, admiring their smiling helpfulness and good temper, qualities she tried 

to develop within herself through meditation training (Byles, Many Lives, Papers 1914-

1979, 121). 

 

According to Byles, her ‘ripening karma’ took effect in Australia after this trip to China, 

in the 1940s. She became more interested in spirituality and started reading the 

Bhagavad Gita, the inspirational Sanksrit text central to Hinduism where paths to 

enlightenment such as devotion, meditation, action and knowledge and transcendence 

of Ego are discussed. This interest was accelerated by foot injuries she suffered in 1941, 

which curbed her walking, and forced her to find other ways of relating to the 

environment and herself (Byles 1963, 18). 

 

Byles’s work thus became reflective and inward focussed, marked by shifts in her 

relationship to landscape in an attempt to cope with depression and illness, as she was 

not able to walk as easily. In a very fundamental way her trip to China sent her on 

another journey once home in Australia: it prompted a revision of self. In her own 

analysis, she attributed this to reaching mid-life and the reflections and questions it 

brought to the surface. In her later reflective work Paths to Inner Peace (1965, 12), 

Byles discussed this time of emergence from a confused and dark time to a calmer 

place: ‘Inner peace is now becoming an increasingly real experience. The mountain 

peaks are still a very long way off, but the path is clear and sometimes even easy to 

follow.’ Symbolically, what mountains and landscapes represented and meant to her 

changed; they became part of an intricate interplay of experience and thinking, with the 

place memorable for the experiences she had there rather than its aesthetic qualities 

alone (Riley 1992, 19). These experiences in China stimulated ongoing travels between 

Sydney and India, Burma, and Japan, as she sought further inspiration, meditation and 

guidance. Her struggles with her position as a westerner interested in Eastern 

philosophy, and her desire to share knowledge gained from this travel, emerge in print 

                                                 
3 In a 1997 interview I conducted with Dot Butler, she said of the New Zealand men climbers on the 
China trip: ‘they rather brow beat Marie when it came to getting out and exploring. They were the men 
and they were going to do it and I think Marie didn’t enjoy that much.’ 

 
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in her various spiritualist works. 

 

Marie Byles’s Buddhist interpretations and engagements with Eastern spirituality 

When she returned from her China trip in 1939, Byles’s reading of the teachings of 

Buddha seems to have stirred her interest in explaining them for English reading 

audiences and local markets. Yet, there were certainly Buddhist influences afoot in 

Australia before Byles’s work, as her own reading of Tasmanian F. L. Woodward’s 

Some Sayings of the Buddha (1925) shows. Croucher’s history draws attention to 1848 

Chinese indentured labourers who worked in Australia and constructed joss houses, 

while Japanese pearlers in the north also practiced Buddhism. Buddhism was of interest 

to Anglo theosophists, especially from the late 1890s, and Singhalese Queenslanders 

were also selling Buddhist works (Croucher 1989, 2-5). 

 

Like Woodward, with whom she corresponded, Byles was involved in interpreting and 

popularising information about Theravada Buddhism (based on the original teachings 

of Buddha about suffering and the means to alleviate it) for westerners who knew little 

about Buddhist practice and insights. She did this as a feminist from a particular 

position of valuing women’s history and as a westerner with a Christian background. 

Byles was raised in a religiously tolerant environment, which she regarded as making 

her more open to Buddhism. She saw Buddhism’s rationality as a neat fit with science 

and modern ways of thinking, and set it alongside Christian insights, a tendency she 

shared with other western-based ‘convert’ Buddhists. Byles developed an enthusiasm 

for daily vipassana (breathing/‘insight’) meditation and yoga as part of her explorations 

of Buddhism. She also tried to live by the eight-fold path as prescribed by Buddha: 

right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right 

mindfulness, right concentration (Spuler, 2003, xii). Byles’s Anglo-Australian 

interpretation of Buddhism marked a confluence of interests and practices, both western 

and eastern:  

 
It has not been an easy journey. It might, or it might not, have been easier if I could have retired as 
a nun to the Sacred Hills of Burma. But even if this would have been easier, Westerners cannot do 
this, and no spiritual training or philosophy can have any value for us unless it can be put into 
practice amid the ordinary everyday life in which we find ourselves. That the practice and 

 
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philosophy learned in Burma and Japan can be put into effect in the West, is what makes them 
important to us. (Byles 1965, 12) 

 

Her interpretation suggested a valuing of difference but also of connections and 

adaptability. It is a version of Buddhism that incorporates, as well, the Eastern practices 

and principles of Theravada Buddhism, Western psychology, democratic and feminist 

principles, and features of Buddhism as practiced by Europeans in America (Spuler 

2003, 2; Tsomo 1999, 28-9). She became keenly aware of the pitfalls of romanticising 

Eastern spirituality, drawing mocking attention to her initial obsession with finding an 

Indian swami or yogi who would show her a quick path to inner peace. An Indian 

colleague pointed out to her that an American artist, Earl Brewster, living in India had, 

by his example, richer spiritual guidance to offer than many of the yogis (Byles 1965, 

207). 

 

Such realisation came later. Her first substantial religious work in 1957 was Footprints 

of Gautama. It provided her interpretation of the adult/ministerial life of the Buddha, 

through the eyes of his disciples, both male and female. Byles went to north India in 

1954 to research the book, visiting places where the Buddha had travelled after his 

enlightenment, and returned to Australia via Sri Lanka. The author of the foreword to 

Footprints, Lalita Rajapaske, Minister of Justice in Ceylon, who had guided other early 

Australian Buddhists, noted the particularity of Byles’s feminist approach to Buddhism: 

‘Naturally, Miss Byles focuses attention on an aspect which a male is apt not to 

emphasise very much - namely the attitude of the Buddha towards women, and the part 

played by them in the development of the Dhamma’ (1957, 12). Her work covered the 

conversions and contributions of women neglected in many interpretations of Buddhist 

texts—both Eastern and Western—which focussed on men’s contributions. Figures 

such as Patacara, renowned for her knowledge of the rules of discipline, Bhadda, a 

talented debater, and Visakha, known for her generosity and munificence, are given due 

attention. Byles made sure women figures associated with the Buddha in his preaching 

life were mentioned and valued, rather than written out. This was in keeping with her 

recognition of women’s work throughout her life, in the workplace and socially. This 

often took the practical form of acts like acknowledging the work of male 

 
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mountaineers’ wives in New Zealand, which allowed their partners to go climbing, and 

consciously employing single mothers and married women who needed economic 

independence in Sydney (Ronalds 2005). 

 

The Buddhist women’s stories and the lack of warfare in the name of the Buddhist 

religion appealed to both Byles’s feminist sensibilities and her pacifism, a linkage 

between long-held ‘western’ interests and Buddhist philosophy. It was not always a 

benign and joyous experience of cultural exchange, however. She noted that monks 

tended to ‘belittle’ women in their interpretation of the Buddha’s words, something she 

attempted to redress in her own work (1957, 14). Indeed, Byles mounted a sharp 

critique of the sexism apparent in monk worship, which clashed with her firmly held 

belief in gender equality: 

 
All this monk-worship and nun servility would be merely a source of amusement to the 
tourist…The western man, even though a meditator, would probably hardly have noticed it unless 
he were very unusual. But when you are a woman mediator and a member of the servile 
community, you notice it very much indeed. And when you have been trained to abhor sex and 
class superiorities the abhorrence upsets your equilibrium and causes pain. (Byles 1962,110)  

 

A review of Footprints in the journal World Buddhism by Margaret Barr, a Buddhist 

practising in India, suggested that Byles’s work should be appreciated for the all too 

rare attention paid to women’s importance in Buddhism, as well as its accessibility for 

Westerners interested in discovering more about Buddha (Barr 1960).  

 

Byles’s writings indicate her importance in Australia and beyond in terms of debates 

and interpretation of Buddhism. She stated that she wrote for ‘ordinary’ readers, and 

provided further references for self-guided study on how to end suffering, encouraging 

readers to seek out the translations themselves (Byles 1957, 14-15). She also included a 

guide to the eight-fold path as an entry point into Buddhist principles and practice for 

curious readers. Some scholars, such as Anagarkia Sugatananda, disputed her 

understanding of Buddhism, arguing that she made the typical westerners’ mistake of 

reducing Buddhism to a system of morality and diluting it (1960, 3). Local critics 

nonetheless recognised the value of her work in terms of its accessibility, even when 

 
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they were dismissive of her writing style, or, in the case of the masculinist Bulletin, 

found her representation of Buddhism to be escapist and ‘a submissive, feminine way 

of life’ (Terry 1962, 40). 

 

Her books and articles in publications like Metta (Sydney), World Buddhism 

(Colombo), The Middle Way (London), and Gandhi Marg (New Delhi), as well as her 

discussions on spirituality on Sydney radio, reveal Byles’s commitment to life-long 

learning beyond the academy, and her importance as a populariser of Buddhism. She 

contributed to debates on pacifism, interpretations of Buddha’s insights, as well as 

Gandhi’s work, through these journal and magazine publications, which also became 

part of a wider international and regional debate. She also corresponded with activists 

and scholars interested in Buddhist and Zen thinking, such as Thomas Merton in the 

U.S.A., regarding peaceful protests and anti-war activism. She left her mark on the 

lives of filmmakers like Gillian Coote and fellow walkers who became interested in 

Buddhism after discussions with her. 

 

Byles further developed her investigations in The Lotus and the Spinning Wheel (1963), 

which examined the life of Buddha and his disciples’ knowledge of him, and compared 

Buddha’s life with that of Gandhi, exploring connections between their thinking. She 

saw both men as inspiring figures, but acknowledged that her interpretation of the links 

between them was highly personal, and not necessarily shared by other Buddhists. She 

pointed out features they shared, such as a focus on present life and the road to 

enlightenment, the latter in the Buddha’s case requiring meditation and inner peace, for 

Gandhi consisting of good works, applied Buddhism, outward peace, and reforms. 

Byles concludes that a synthesis of both approaches was best for daily life guidance, 

and in order to connect philosophy and practice (252). Her interest in both leaders was 

shaped not only by her expeditions and the effects of her accident, but also by world 

events. Like several fellow walkers who were pacifists, she was deeply disturbed by the 

Second World War; the appeal of Buddhism at this time was partly a search for an end 

to war. She sought a shift of consciousness more broadly to eliminate the causes of 

warfare and violence.  

 
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Byles travelled several times to complete meditations in Mandalay, Burma, which she 

narrated in Journey into Burmese Silence (1962) and numerous other works, beyond the 

scope of this paper, as is her trip to Japan where she starts to explore Zen and Ittoen 

ideas at Kyoto monasteries. This trip encouraged her to promote Tenko-San’s teachings 

in A New Road to Ancient Truth, published in English in 1969. Many of her later 

writings and articles argue for a synthesis of ideas and practices from many teachers 

and sources. Byles was not a slavish follower of any one tradition, which made her an 

outsider in many ways, yet also gave her a critical edge drawn from diverse 

perspectives. She seemed to tread the same steps and themes almost meditatively in her 

writing to convince herself and others of the merit of her findings: the value of loving 

kindness, humility, service, and the diminution of ego. 

 

Byles’s journeys took her deep into ideas and connections with the Asian region. She 

provided interpretations of Buddha’s life that valued women’s contributions, and wrote 

comparative work about the philosophy of Gandhi and the Buddha for Australian and 

other English speaking readers. This work and her Eastern travel marked and shaped 

her environmental concerns, from regarding the Australian environments as her home-

site and meditation space to her struggles for the preservation of bushland. 

 

Byles’s Sydney home Ahimsa & the Hut of the Happy Omen  

In a grounded and physical way, Byles’s Eastern Australian approach is evident in her 

design and use of her home and property Ahimsa (taken from Gandhi’s premise of non-

violence or harmlessness) in northern Sydney. In 1949 she enlisted the assistance of 

young Quakers (another religion in which she was interested) to help her construct the 

Hut of the Happy Omen, a large meditation hut built next to her home. The hut served 

as a place of quiet reflection accessible to like-minded people, but also demonstrated 

her public mindedness and ideas inspired by Buddhist and Ittoen notions of service to 

others. 

 

As a co-founder of the Buddhist Society of NSW (1952) with Leo Berkeley, a London 

based bookseller who came to Australia in the 1940s, Byles offered her property for 

 
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Society meetings and meditations (Croucher 1989, 32-33). By 1956 the group had 

grown to include 200 members, and had become a vital contact point, source of 

information, and a key organisation for Australian Buddhists that still flourishes today 

(1956, 3). Byles also supported one of the earliest visits of a Buddhist nun to Australia 

in 1951 when Anglo Australian Buddhism was in its formative stages. Sister 

Dharmmadinna, who had trained in what was then Ceylon, came to Sydney to present 

Buddhist practice and beliefs to European audiences (Adam 2000). Her stay with Byles 

was fraught with tension; she found Byles’s accommodation too Spartan, while Byles 

found her dogmatic.  

 

Byles and interested Anglo contemporaries celebrated key events in the Buddhist 

calendar such as Vesak (Buddha’s birthday) and the moon ceremony (celebrated earlier 

by Buddhist Chinese Australian communities) at Ahimsa. This was well before the 

arrival of numerous Buddhist Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and the subsequent 

mass multicultural public celebrations of the Tet and Moon festivals in Sydney’s south-

western suburbs. For these practical steps in nurturing interest in Buddhist practice, as 

well as her writing, many Buddhist writers (Lyall, n.d.; Pearce 1981) regard her as a 

central figure in the establishment of European-based Buddhism in Australia today.  

 

Byles’s property became a meeting place for those interested in Buddhism, for forging 

community, and for fostering debate. The property was a focal point for Sydney and 

NSW-based Buddhists and Byles helped to literally make a place for Buddhism in 

Sydney. She regarded Sydney bushland as an ideal place in which to meditate, and 

valued the interaction with other Buddhists: 

 
For those who like peace and solitude Sydney is wonderfully situated, for it is surrounded by 
barren sandstone country unattractive to the farmer, so that within fifteen miles of what is 
spoken of as ‘the second city of the Empire,’ there are wild bushlands, or forested hills. In 
winter and spring they are sprinked with wildflowers and the air is filled with bird song. 
Probably our little group did not learn much about meditation, but the fellowship was good and 
also good was the practice of sitting still and being forced for a little while to try and quieten the 
busy intellect. (Byles 1963, 28) 

 

Despite her reputation as a serious person, there were some light-hearted moments in 

 
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Cadzow         Footprints, Imprints 

her spiritual journeys too, including adventures with hatha yoga, where she fell out of 

difficult poses and almost landed in the fireplace of her hut.  

 

Byles also attempted to establish other public places of reflection beyond her own home 

such as Buddhist retreats. She was involved in planning a retreat in Victoria in the late 

1940s, which did not eventuate (Croucher 1989, 35, 56). Later she found land in 

northern Sydney and arranged for the Buddhist Society of NSW to purchase it in 1956. 

She did all the legal work for free, as with her work for national park preservation with 

Bouddi National Park, Garrawarra and numerous other bush places around Sydney.  

 

On a more personal level, Byles recalled that it was ‘a great delight’ to return to Ahimsa 

after the disappointment of her Chinese mountain quest. She selected the land in 1937 

before the China trip. Her passion for the Sydney sandstone bushland and knowledge of 

it is abundantly clear in the choice of location: high up on a ridge, dry and airy, with a 

garden brimming with plants native to the area. The house was oriented to capture the 

winter sun’s warmth and light, and the windows invite the outside in, dissolving 

boundaries. Byles deliberately bought the bush land all around it so it couldn’t be 

subdivided. Her creation of such a place marked her increasing attachment to 

Australian environments, which she had initially found alienating and disappointingly 

flat (Byles, Many Lives, Papers 1914-1979, 130). Today, Byles’s place makes a sharp 

visual contrast to many other blocks in northern suburbs where private property is 

celebrated with fortress style walls and hedges are designed to keep people out. It is 

still a place of quiet and retreat, and her generosity in giving it to the National Trust of 

Australia (NSW) has meant continuing public access to the hut. 

 

Byles’s design of her home and approach to building (low maintenance and with 

minimal environmental impact) was part of a wider movement to live more in harmony 

with the Australian bush surroundings, and to foster better social relations (Stephenson 

1999, 49). This movement was partly stimulated by Federation, urban expansion, and a 

growing number of non-indigenous Australians being born in Australia and spending 

much of their lives there. With some important exceptions, the Australian bush had 

 
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been seen by invader-settlers to need taming and refashioning along British lines in 

what amounted to a kind of ecological imperialism; thus, valuing it as Byles did 

represented quite a departure (Griffiths 1997, 3). Byles was friends with Clare 

Stevenson and Stella James who had a Burley Griffin home designed for them in 

bushland on Sydney’s northern beaches. According to Stephenson, the design of the 

Stella James house in Avalon reflected the relationship between these women as equal 

partners and their desire to fit in with their surroundings rather than dominate them 

(1999, 45). 

 

Byles’s pleasure in bushland dovetailed with her interest in simplicity and respect for 

nature that had been inspired by her interest in Eastern philosophy. She was deeply 

attached to her home, which seemed to nurture her sense of self as well as her thinking. 

Like several other women writers and artists of the time, as well as fellow walkers such 

as Dorothy Lawry, she drew a sense of strength and personal identity from her 

relationships with certain landscapes. Janice Monk and Vera Norwood found that 

women from a range of backgrounds in south-western USA were drawn to desert 

landscapes and felt liberated and creatively stimulated by them, in a way comparable to 

the relationship of Byles and other Australian women with east-coast bushland (Monk 

et al 1987, 229).  

 

Byles’s attachment to the Australian bush was expressed through homesickness for the 

gum trees, scents and comforts of Ahimsa when she was in India (Byles 1963, 56). Yet 

her home and meditation bungalow at Binsar was held in similar esteem: 

 
I have never had the slightest desire to acquire that ‘proper house’ and of all of my places I have 
stayed during my travels only the bungalow at Binsar in the Himalaya hills with its visions of 
snow peaks, could compare with the beauty of the bushlands seen from my own cottage. (Byles, 
Many Lives, Papers 1914-1979, 130) 

 

It seems that she felt in some senses at least as ‘at home’ in parts of the East as she did 

in east-coast Australia (172). This sense of belonging to several homes at once thus 

raises questions about the complex connections between people and place and the 

motives on the part of people such as Byles to care for and look after those places. 

 
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Cadzow         Footprints, Imprints 

 

Byles was interested in the concept of sanctuary for herself, and other people, partly as 

a result of her interest in bushwalking and camping. This was an element of 

bushwalking she had always valued, but was less able to pursue after the accident. In 

setting up places for Buddhists to meet, there appears to be a convergence of her 

practice and approach; the very western practice of bushwalking to escape the city and 

industrialised society now met with an Eastern valuing of forests and mountains as 

sacred places for meditation and revelation, where people can be in harmony with 

nature (Cuc 1999, 71; Dinh 2003, 578). 

 

Marie Byles’s Eastern Australian environmentalism  

Perhaps Byles’s most lasting legacy was her contribution to environmental debates. She 

had been interested in environmentalism and vegetarianism from a very early age, 

influenced by her mother and English traditions. As a child in Britain she had a keen 

interest in hiking, and later in the Romantic poetry of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Keats 

and Coleridge, which celebrated the natural world and spiritualism (Byles, Scrapbook). 

Living in Eastern Australia and witnessing changes to the environment around her 

increasingly shaped her views. She also drew upon her travel experiences, to promote 

protection strategies from her observations in Canada, USA, and England. Numerous 

walks in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, stimulated her desire to protect areas 

from roads and suburban encroachment, including what is now Bouddi National Park 

on the NSW Central Coast.  

 

After the 1940s shifts and changes in Byles’s approach to the Australian environment 

were evident, influenced by her accident, travels and increasing interest in spirituality. 

As the ways in which she could physically engage with her surroundings changed, so 

did her thinking about environments and the relationships of people with nature. Her 

writing for bushwalking magazines and newspapers became decidedly less recreation 

oriented, with fewer claims of ‘discovery’ and ‘firsts,’ and a greater emphasis on 

valuing of all living things (Cadzow 2002). 

 

 
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Cadzow         Footprints, Imprints 

In 1942, inspired by English writer H. G. Wells’s Modern Utopia, in which citizens 

spent seven days alone in the ‘wild’ without creature comforts in order to clear their 

minds and rejuvenate themselves, Byles spent a week in an isolated favourite camping 

spot at Kosciuszko, in the Snowy Mountains. She had few supplies: matches, a tent, 

compass, and a map. She went there not to walk or go ‘peak-bagging’ as before, but to 

meditate. She claimed it was hard but re-creative, and took immense pleasure in 

observing life around her, the chance to be still and think, and to escape news of the 

Second World War for a while: 

 
Gradually, too, the world and its happenings got further and further away, and history passed like 
a cinematograph film to a god on Olympus. The hills with their knowledge of the last ice age, ten 
thousand years ago, took no account of empires – Babylonian, Roman, Spanish, British, German 
or Japanese, what did they matter? The only thing that counted and persisted in that cinematograph 
film, and grew as the years passed, was the little slender plant of human kindliness and helpfulness, 
and that had nothing to do with empires or wars. (1942, 36) 

 

Byles also adopted a cave near her brother’s home in the Blue Mountains for 

meditation. She increasingly saw bush and forest landscapes as conducive to the 

reflection and inspiration celebrated in much Eastern and Romantic writing. 

 

Buddhist influences on her environmentalism led her into opposition with Myles 

Dunphy, a key conservationist, mapmaker and walker. Despite their differences, they 

worked together on many environmental projects. Myles wanted to establish a 

Kosciuszko ‘primitive area’ with access for bushwalkers, while Byles regarded his 

ambition as selective and self-important (Meredith 1999,160). ‘Primitive area’ is a term 

that now seems very dated, but which is nonetheless revelatory. It suggests museum-

like forests and landscapes, untouched by humans. These areas had, in fact, been 

managed by Aboriginal people for centuries. Aboriginal people were displaced and 

forced off the land around Sydney in places like the Burragorang Valley (a favourite 

spot for bushwalkers including Byles); their leases were often revoked in the twentieth 

century, and not earlier as is popularly imagined and suggested in many Anglo-

Australian histories (Goodall 1996, 123-24) 

 

Byles argued that Myles Dunphy and his supporters had to agree to cater for all nature 

 
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Cadzow         Footprints, Imprints 

lovers, or exclude people altogether, because allowing people in would lead to 

expectations of infrastructural improvements, such as roads and toilets. She articulated 

and wrestled with some of the dilemmas facing non-Aboriginal Australians who were 

attempting to look after and preserve eastern Australian landscapes. The Federation of 

NSW Bush Walkers, a peak body, took her position; it valued nature and regarded the 

setting aside of such places as compensation to nature for other damage done: 

 
the vast majority of bushwalkers have ruled that a primitive area must be for the wildlife which 
shall flourish there, not for our pleasure but for its own. After all, why should man in his arrogance 
say that primeval lands are of value only in so far as they subserve his ends? Is this not the vicious 
old profit motive coming out in another form? The Romans stripped the Dalmatian hills in quest of 
timber to build their empire. Kidman blasted a trail of ruin across Australia to build a fortune. It is 
true that people who want a primitive area only because it satisfies a human desire, would not ruin 
it like Kidman or the Romans, but their motives are the same, profit to themselves, mental or 
physical, if not material. (Byles 1945, 5) 

 

In a blistering critique of capitalist and imperialist relations with the bush Byles argued 

that other living things had rights too. She questioned the elitist and people-centered 

approach of the Myles Dunphy position, which lobbied for ‘wild’ areas to be set aside 

primarily for bushwalkers. Byles was not against people using such areas to interact 

with nature; rather, as she explained it: ‘Human beings will not be excluded from the 

primitive area but no facilities for entering it will be given, and the flowers may 

blossom and the kangaroos and wombats enjoy their lives there, whether any one sees 

them or not’ (1945, 5). The influence of her Eastern travels is apparent in this re-

evaluation of her relationship with the bush and her understanding of the mountains as 

her teachers (Byles, Many Lives, Papers 1914-1979, 153). In other texts, such as ‘Our 

Attitude to Nature,’ she argued that Nature was a living entity like people, and thus 

ought not be treated as inanimate or existing solely for profit. This viewpoint was 

inspired by her consideration of Chinese and Vietnamese ideas of nature as inhabited 

by spirits (Byles, Papers 1914-1979, Box 1). In a similar vein, and with sharp foresight, 

she saw through the panic caused by the power of the atom bomb unleashed on 

Hiroshima; though horrified by it, she argued that the destruction of nature through 

clearing and ‘the rape of nature’ was more of a threat than the atom bomb. 

 

Byles issued challenges to fellow walkers (who often considered themselves to form 

 
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Cadzow         Footprints, Imprints 

the environmentalist vanguard) in texts with deliberately challenging titles, such as 

‘Can Bushwalkers Save the Bush?’ (Byles, Papers 1914-1979, Box 1). In this piece she 

argued that the destruction of nature came from the mind, suggesting that instead of 

asking ‘do I want this,’ people needed to ask ‘do I need this,’ and to recognise the 

interconnectedness of all life. She suggested that a shift in thinking was essential for a 

reduction of consumption and in order to address such problems as pollution and 

mining devastation. Byles thus defined herself clearly as an Eastern Australian 

environmental critic, pointing out that in places like Britain, the damage caused by sand 

mining and cement production was not as evident as in Australia, where national park 

areas were being reduced in order to increase mining revenue (Byles Papers, 1914-1979, 

‘Wanting Little’ Box 9).4 Byles critique of materialism connected with her Buddhist 

beliefs, which rejected the perpetuation of insatiable desire because of the ways it feeds 

suffering.  

 

In other writings Byles debated the lofty claims of bushwalkers that the bush had 

intrinsic spiritual value. She asked whether it made a difference in terms of how those 

walkers engaged with life’s struggles. She suggested learning from nature in order to 

apply Buddha’s wisdom of accepting suffering and seeking harmony with nature: 
 

As I sat alone in the bush I wondered whether the forest had helped him [Buddha] find that 
wisdom. Perhaps it had. For natural things accept what life brings; they don’t “want”; they play 
their part and pass on. And perhaps too, amid the vastness of nature the pettiness of our troubles 
falls into proper perspective… I do think that if we relax and let go and seek harmony with the 
natural things around, then Nature may be the goddess to us…Can the bush help us keep smiling? 
That is the test of its “spiritual value.” I think it can – if we let it! (Bona Dea 1945, 11) 

 

Western writers before her like Thoreau and Whitman had investigated Eastern 

philosophy as an alternative to destructive thinking about the environment. 

Paradoxically, however, Eastern philosophy does not necessarily stop environmental 

damage in predominantly Buddhist nations, as Callicott and Ames point out (1989, 279, 

286). Nonetheless, such ideas have been drawn upon in western contexts in conjunction 

with other arguments for greater care of environments. Some of Byles’s 

environmentalism stemmed from Western thinkers, but it took a decidedly Eastern turn 

                                                 
4 This appears to be a reference to the Colong and Bouddi National Park (NSW) preservation campaigns. 

 
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Cadzow         Footprints, Imprints 

after the 1940s when her interest in Buddhism saw her revise her approach to life. 

 

Croucher’s epic and invaluable study of Buddhism in Australia points out that links 

between pacifism and a non-domination approach to the environment were crucial in 

the appeal of Buddhism to early Anglo-Australian naturalist writers. Croucher 

described Byles as writing works of ‘Buddhist inspired ecology’ and as being a soul 

mate of E.J. Banfield, a journalist and author of Confessions of a Beachcomber, who 

abandoned city life to become an environmentalist on Dunk Island in Queensland in the 

1940s. Croucher connects both Banfield and Byles with the contemporary poetry of 

Robert Gray, which argued for acceptance of the Australian landscape as it was, as 

opposed to remaking it in a British or European mould (Croucher 1989, 86). As an 

English migrant to Australia, Byles struggled with nostalgia for the mountains, snow 

and shady forests of Britain. Initially she saw the Australian bush in terms of its lack; 

later she grew to value its unique offerings.  

 

In addition to pacifism and Buddhism, Byles, and many of her fellow walkers, were 

also influenced by feminism as they developed gendered approaches to ecology. 

Various editors of the Sydney Bush Walker, and colleagues and friends of Byles, such 

as Dorothy Lawry, were very interested in writers like Thoreau and Whitman, as well 

as in the U.S. novelist Willa Cather, who queried the logic of profit and the ego driven 

relationships with nature (Lawry 1932, 12). Byles was part of a community of thinkers 

interested in these issues, a number of whom were feminists and critical of power 

relations in their own society. Convergences of Buddhism, feminism, pacifism, and 

early environmentalism, occurred in her writings about the Australian landscape.  

 

Conclusion 

Marie Byles explored complex connections and composite knowledges in her thinking 

and writings on travel and environmentalism. Examining her work afresh in an 

Australian and Asian context is a reminder that biologically and ethnically defined 

identities may overdetermine contemporary readings of past lives. Revisiting the work 

of Byles, and tracing her shifting positions and changing identity, is a case in point. 

 
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Cadzow         Footprints, Imprints 

Although she was deeply implicated in imperial and modernist thinking, Byles’s work 

also shows the possibilities of a broader, transnational humanitarian and intellectual 

framework and self-identification. Byles’s approach was born of lived experience. She 

witnessed changes in the Australian bush and developed critiques of power relations 

from an entwining of feminist and socialist, pacifist and Buddhist/spiritualist 

revaluation of environments. From these influences she challenged her fellow walkers, 

environmentalists, other Buddhists, and society at large, to rethink their relationships 

with nature and each other. The significance of her writings, and the possibilities raised 

by her spiritual and environmental analyses, have yet to be valued sufficiently. This 

article barely touches on some of her insights. 

 

In Footsteps Byles notes that the presence of the Buddha was once announced by his 

footprints, rather than by the statues that are so familiar today. Footprints is an 

appropriate image for someone as interested in bushwalking, travelling and spirituality 

as Marie Byles. The footprints’ image suggests the ‘take only photos, leave only 

footprints’ mantra of recent eco-tourism, and a grounded connection with the earth, 

rather than separateness from it. The imprints of spiritual and ecological thinking can be 

traced through Byles’s life’s work, and provide intriguing directions for future 

explorations of Eastern Australian beliefs and environments, and for valuing the work 

of women in Asia as thinkers and activists.  

 

Acknowledgements 
This paper was originally delivered at the Women In Asia conference, UTS, 27 September 2005. Thank 
you to Dr Devleena Ghosh for posing the challenge of thinking Australia as Asian. Thanks are also due 
to Prof. Heather Goodall, Dr Denis Byrne, and Assoc. Prof. Stephen Wearing for many fruitful 
discussions about landscape , spirituality and migrancy. I am also grateful to friends and acquaintances of 
Marie Byles for discussing their memories of her with me and to the referees of this article for their 
suggestions. 
 

 

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