Trisha Dixon

Trisha Dixon Burkitt is a writer and a photographer with a passion for landscape, literature, music, art, architecture, design and history. She leads specialist private tours within Australia and abroad, does photographic commissions and occasionally runs photographic workshops. Trisha lectures within Australia and abroad including for ADFAS (Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Society).

Trisha's tours focus on landscape, gardens and private properties, architecture, literature, history, landscape designers, art and music. Trisha has a private mailing list and leads tours for World Expeditions who also bring cycling groups to Bobundara to stay in The Steading and The Quarters, and in the past has led many for Academy Tours, the Australian Garden History Society, Renaissance Tours as well as Historic Houses Trust, Royal Botanic Gardens, the Queen Adelaide Club in Adelaide, Alexander Club in Melbourne and the Australian Club in Sydney. Tours always have access to private properties not usually available to the public. 

Trisha has a number of books to her name, has edited journals and contributes and has contributed as a photographer/writer/columnist to various publications.. Her wide-ranging interests in landscape, philosophy, music, art and water ethics has led to the publication of her most recent books, Spirit of the Garden (published by the National Library of Australia in 2021) and Adagio: Living and Gardening Mindfully (2013)..

Linking her passions of literature and landscape, Trisha’s book Under the Spell of the Ages was published in 2007 by the National Library of Australia. This followed two previous publications for the NLA: Little Book of Australian Gardens (2005)  and Australia’s Timeless Gardens (1996) with Judith Baskin.

Her research into the life and landscape designs of Edna Walling has resulted in a number of books, articles and consultancy on her remaining gardens The Vision of Edna Walling 1998 and Gardens in Time: In the Footsteps of Edna Walling 1988 both co-authored with Jennie Churchill). Trisha also wrote the Foreword to the reprint of Edna Walling’s own copy of  Gardens in Australia: Their Design and Care by Bloomings Books.

Also over recent years Trisha was invited to write the Introduction to the magnificent monograph Horse Island by Christina Kennedy.  

A private commission to write a biography of one of Australia’s most interesting pastoral properties, Bolaro Station, where our only Nobel Prize laureate for Literature wrote his first novel and other noted Australian poets were also inspired, led her to Greece and the island of Hydra where she continued to spend much of each year and now takes annual tours there.

Trisha provided research and photographs for Banjo Paterson’s High Country published by Angus & Robertson (1989) and other books and journals on the High Country, as well as the front cover image for Charles Massy’s Call of the Reed Warbler published in Australia by University of Queensland Press as well as in the US by Chelsea Green - and the front cover for Peter Timms Making Nature published by Allen and Unwin in 1991 as well as Michael McKernan’s The Valley: A Story from the Heart of the Land also published by Allen and Unwin, in 2009.

Working with Gordon and Gwen Ford to bring Gordon’s manuscript to publication by Bloomings Books led to Trisha photographing all Gordon Ford’s gardens for the 1999 publication of Gordon Ford: The Natural Australian Garden.

Trisha has worked as a pilot, as a presenter on ABC Television, as a landscape consultant and heritage adviser.

Living in the ancient landscape of Monaro at the foothills of the Snowy Mountains in an 1830s homestead and an even older house in the south of France, Trisha spends as much time as she can cycling and imbuing landscape.