Notes from the Field (viii)

It was with some trepidation that I went about London over the next few days, but the friends I was staying with said it was just a fact of life in the city. She had lived through the IRA bombings of the seventies, and a bomb had gone off a block away from where she lived, making the whole apartment block shake.

I was only in the city for a few days, at a conference on Life Writing at Kings College London. It was an excellent conference, much of it centred around memory, digital media and writing lives. I presented on a digital version of ecobiography, artist Pat Hoffie’s ‘ground truthing’ and met some great people.

After the conference I caught the train to Cambridge, where I’d arranged to look at the Cambridge University Herbarium. It holds a number Georgiana’s specimens, as well as those of other Australian collectors such as Allan Cunningham, and several collected by Charles Darwin on his voyage on the Beagle. This was a new herbarium, part of the Sainsbury Laboratory (the plants were moved there in 2011), with the same compactors I’d seen at Kew and an air filtration system. This was important because many of the specimens had been dipped in a solution containing mercury to preserve them (before collectors worked out that mercury was dangerous), and each time the compactors were opened, mercury wafted out. The technician who worked at the herbarium and who showed me around needed to have her mercury levels tested regularly. Meanwhile John Lindley, first Professor of Botany at University College London, developed dementia towards the end of his life, and it is thought that mercury might have contributed to this.

The technician had kindly laid out Georgiana’s specimens for me to look at and photograph. There were 25 of these, but potentially hundreds more are in the collection, which houses one million specimens altogether. I was struck by the art in the arrangement of the dried specimen on the page, which testifies to her sense of craft and elegance.

The technician also directed me to the letters of John Lindley, which had been transcribed, catalogued and bound into a volume. There were a handful to Mangles, although they didn’t contain much  of substance. Others discussed rates of payment to collectors, which I thought significant as Georgiana was paid nothing, although Mangles sent her and her husband gifts. Some were to Miss Drake, the illustrator I mentioned in my previous post. It was becoming clear to me that Mangles, if he wasn’t completely enmeshed in botanical networks at the time, was at the least very aware of who the important players were: Lindley, Hooker, the Loudons and Loddiges.

When I finished at the herbarium I wandered around the town, which was very pretty (aside from the hideous shopping centre which was under renovation). Students had just finished their exams and gathered in clumps among the tourists, clutching bottles of champagne. Beside the river, people lay in the long, sun-warmed grass, and there were bicycles galore. To my delight, on a bar outside some railings designed to stop people locking up their bikes, there was the wrong end of a pineapple.

Notes from the Field (vii)

I’m on holidays at last and catching up on my blogging, which has very much taken a back seat this year. To pick up on my last post, after my day at the Lindley Library I caught the Tube to Kew Gardens. I spent quite a bit of time at Kew while I lived in London because it’s home to the National Archives, where I did archival research for Dr Fiona Paisley for her book on Anthony Martin Fernando. This time, though, I was there for the plants.

Kew Herbarium and Library

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew has a library and an herbarium. I went to the former first, after getting a coffee at a café named Antipodean (as a general guide for coffee snobs, coffee made by Aussies in the UK tends to be ok). I knew Mangles had corresponded with William Hooker, director of Kew Gardens from 1841 – 1865, because there’s a letter from Hooker to Mangles in the latter’s letterbooks asking for information on Georgiana Molloy’s contemporary and collector, James Drummond. Alas there were only a few letters from Mangles in the archives, along with some from his son who was also in the plant trade. On the library’s databases there were also scans of letters from George Wailes, another correspondent of Mangles’, to Hooker, so I copied them too.

In the exhibition space was a collection of works by Maria Sibylla Merian, a 17th Century German naturalist and illustrator who travelled to South America with her daughter to collect and illustrate specimens. Her most famous work is Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, published in 1705 with 60 plates of engravings of the plants, animals and wildlife of the Surinam region, but she was also a scientist, closely observing and documenting insects and their metamorphosis. Some of her illustrations were on display and they were absolutely gorgeous. I thought it fitting, that I was researching a female collector of plants at the time that this was showing. 

One of Georgiana Molloy's specimens

On the third day I visited the herbarium, which is like a library of dried plants, with thousands of folders of pressed specimens stored in cupboards. I followed the lady looking after me up a red, 19th century spiral staircase (like the ones in the greenhouse), where she located some of the flowers Georgiana had pressed and sent to Mangles. I just about turned inside out with excitement, but it was also eerie, to think that she had handled those specimens one hundred and seventy five years before. The lady took me to another section of the herbarium which was cooled, and wheeled open some huge compactors to take down the folders of flowers. It was a giant botanical filing cabinet.

The Hive

Afterwards I wandered into Kew Gardens and had a look at The Hive, a structure designed to create awareness of bees, then my favourite part of Kew, the Palm House.

The Palm House

I also had a look at the Shirley Sherwood gallery of botanical art, and the Marianne North Gallery, which exhibits (from wall-to-wall) the botanical art of another intrepid female traveller, Marianne North, all of which was gorgeous and amazing.

River Thames at Richmond

The next morning I went for a run in Richmond Park, and walked along the river back to where I was staying. It was a gorgeous day, with clear blue sky, lush green grass, a really good running track and the odd deer - a far cry from the carnage that would unfold on London Bridge that night with the terrorist attack.

Richmond Park

#8WordStory

Those on the Queensland feeds might have come across #8WordStory, a project organised by the awesome folk at the Queensland Writers Centre to put eight word stories on billboards across Brisbane.

It was October when the call first went out and I was swooning, as I do every year, over the purple bliss of Brisbane’s jacarandas.

So I penned a paean to purple & lo! it was selected to be shown across town. I did not get a lot of work done that day because I was glued to the webcams, thus:

The #8WordStory project is on for another fortnight or so. Head to the QWC website and submit, & you might see your name up in orange lights! Trust me, it’s pretty darn exciting. And here's another jacaranda pic for the heck of it.

Notes from the Field (vi)

I’m finally getting back to my beleaguered blogging of my research trip, having been waylaid by teaching. After the May Bank Holiday weekend, I made my way to the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library, not far from Victoria Station and Westminster Cathedral. This library contains early printed books on gardening, botanical art and photographs. Importantly, it also contains the original journals in which the first details and images of Australian flora appeared in British publications.

The staff at the Lindley Library were amazing. They provided me with a list of their publications relating to James Mangles beforehand, then worked tirelessly throughout the day to help me locate them.

Perhaps the most exciting publication was John Lindley’s Botanical Register, which included accounts of many of the plants grown from seeds which Molloy and James Drummond collected, and which Mangles cultivated. In 1839 Lindley, Chair of Botany at University College, London, published ‘A Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony’, a systematic account of the flora from south west Western Australia. He states that the information was derived from a handful of preceding publications, as well as the herbaria of James Drummond, James Mangles and Robert Mangles, among others. Molloy is not acknowledged, although Mangles prized her collections, which were more carefully crafted than Drummond’s. Molloy didn’t complain about this lack of acknowledgement – she would have been conditioned not to – instead, she was thrilled that her work would appear at all. She wrote to Mangles:

The notices of the Swan River “Floral Botanical Register”, has [sic] quite inflamed my ardour; and instigated me to greater exertion, to think how small an aid I have lent to your cause —  The Colour of the Patersonia is too Blue, the natural colour is more of a violet or Amethystine colour — it really is the colour of an Amethyst and there is a yellow species at Augusta No 99, Large Hortus Siccus, with which Mr Preiss was not acquainted; but the seeds are widely different, so they may not both be Patersonias [emphasis comes from underscoring in Mangles’ letterbooks].

Often, Molloy’s passion for collecting spilled over into her admiration for Mangles. I have no doubt that this was genuine, but I also expect, given her skill with writing and the necessity for women to rely upon their femininity to achieve results, that she was creating a character that would appeal to him. Her use of the words ‘small and aid’ suggests the diminutive, an amelioration of her self, before she declares her detailed knowledge of the plants. This accords with another stylistic pattern in a passage written when she sent off her first box of seeds to Mangles:

I have no hesitation in declaring that were I to accompany the box of Seeds to England, knowing as I do, their situation, time of flowering, soil and degree of moisture required with the fresh powers of fructification they each possess — I should have a very extensive conservatory or conservatories of none but plants from Augusta, I do not say this vauntingly, but to inspire you with that ardour and interest with which the collection leaves me, and to cordially thank you for being the cause of my more immediate acquaintance with the nature and varieties of those plants that we exchanged for the productions of our own Country, and which will also benefit my Children.

Here, Molloy tempers her detailed knowledge of the plants with an explanation of how useful the collecting project is to her and her family. Her phrase ‘I do not say this vauntingly’ is telling, a deflection of the work she has put into collecting, and the knowledge she has gained of the species. To be a woman who knew too much was undesirable.

I had read a copy of the ‘Botanical Register’ online, but to see it in its original form was astonishing – the colours of the plates were still extraordinarily bright.

What was also interesting were the accounts in other volumes of the Botanical Register of the plants named after Mangles, and his attempts to grow them. Rhondanthe manglesii, for example, was described as ‘A charming greenhouse annual, introduced from the Swan River Colony in New Holland by Captain Mangles, R.N. after whom we have named it. It first flowered in the beautiful collection of Robert Mangles, Esp. of Sunning Hill, where our drawing was obtained in 1833, and whence it has since been liberally distributed. In token of its beauty it received the distinction of a medal at one of the great exhibitions in the Garden of the Horticultural Society.’

Rhodanthe manglesii

This points to the currency of flora circulating among horticultural circles in England. On one hand there was genuine excitement about new plants emerging from the soil, but on the other there was prestige to be gained through naming. George Wailes, one of Mangles’ correspondents, made repeated efforts to have a plant named after Molloy but these were ignored. More of this in a later post.

Many of the drawings in the Botanical Register were made by Sarah Drake, who went to school with Lindley’s sister Anne. Her story has parallels with that of Elizabeth Gould, who did many drawings for her husband John Gould but received little recognition. Melissa Ashley describes Gould’s life beautifully in The Birdman’s Wife.

Illustration by 'Miss Drake'

Mangles’ brother Robert, who grew many specimens in the grounds of Whitmore Lodge, is amusingly described in an essay on Mangles by Alice Coats as ‘a very large man with a very small voice’ but I haven’t yet traced the original source for this quote. There are a number of entries on the Mangles brothers in John Claudius Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine. Loudon’s wife Jane corresponded with James Mangles a few times. She was the author of The Mummy and a pioneer of science fiction, and met her husband when he wrote a review of the book. He asked to meet her, expected to find a man, but instead found Jane. Later, Jane became important in botanical history for writing books about botany that educated girls, as many of the texts about botany at this point were inaccessible and difficult to read.

So the Lindley Library was a marvellous stop on my trip. Following this I went to the herbarium at Kew Gardens and saw some of Molloy’s specimens, which was one of the absolute highlights of my research. Again, this will have to wait for a later post.

On Deafness & Creating a Living

Yesterday I gave my last lecture for the year, on Position Doubtful, a marvelous book about author Kim Mahood’s attempts to reconcile white and Indigenous modes of representing the Australian desert. We are also in the National Week of Deaf People, so I thought it worthwhile to pen some thoughts on teaching and writing as a deaf person.

This was the fifth lecture I had written in as many months. I always underestimate how long they take to put together, and how long they need to be – about 6,000 words, because I speak fast. As I walked to the ferry after work I did the calculations and realised that, instead of those lectures, I could have had a third of a book written by now. I put that thought out of my head, because I enjoy teaching. It forces me to explore new ideas, I like the buzz of interacting with students in my tutorials, and it makes me a better scholar and writer because I’m studying texts in detail and examining how they are put together. This course, which was on Women Writers, also gave me an opportunity to discuss topics that are meaningful to me: feminism, the environment and disability, among others. I also organised a series of marvellous guest lecturers - Melissa Fagan, Marianne de Pierres, Shamara Ransirini, Marg Henderson and Caitlin Francis - who were passionate thinkers and writers about female authorship and the conditions that shape it.

Speculative fiction author Marianne de Pierres giving a lecture on Octavia Butler's Fledgling, with a poltergeist overhead.

However, for someone like me with little hearing, who is conducting lessons through speaking and listening rather than sign language, teaching is much more demanding than for someone with all their hearing. Giving a lecture is a performance which takes physical and mental energy, and tutorials are even more difficult. I need to use all my energy to listen, lipread, and work out where voices are coming from, although my students are very good and raise their hands to get my attention. My FM is helpful, but I still need to be on my toes to get everything. If the class had been any larger I might have been able to ask for additional help through an aide, but as it was I was able to get by.

I knew teaching would wear me out, but I agreed to convene the course this semester because I need the experience – if I can’t find another research-focussed job when my contract ends, I’ll need to get a regular academic job which does involve teaching. It’s not the best option, but it might be the only one. Besides, academia is a nice way of paying the bills and satisfying my craving for new ideas, and if exhaustion comes with that, it’s just a price I pay. I could find a job that doesn’t need much hearing & which bores me, but for someone who finds boredom stressful, this is not a good option.

Lecturer & tutor Shamara Ransirini (far right) chairing a panel on intersectionality at the Brisbane Writers Festival.

I’ve been thinking about these things, and the kind of options available to me and other deaf folk in terms of creating a living, because a while ago I was approached by Connect Hearing to describe my career path into writing and academia. I became a writer because I loved reading and I was good at English, and I needed some way of expressing the frustration and loneliness of being deaf in a hearing world. Being a writer never brings in enough cash, though, so I needed another job to survive, and academia allows me to continue to write, although in different forms.

I was really interested to read of the other pathways for creative deaf people mentioned in Connect Hearing’s interviews. Many of these are physical, focusing on the body and its expression, such as Vulcana Women’s Circus, Riverside Theatres and Bust a Move. QArt Studio in Kew, Melbourne, offers support and training to artists, while HoneyBee Creations enables deaf people to explore and participate in creative arts. I identified with many of these options and the comments made by their representatives – I love dance and moving my body; I like making art with my hands because I don’t have to listen and I can focus entirely on what’s before me; and, as I have written many times before, deafness is inherently creative because it forces you to problem-solve and think laterally. So I identified, too, with Lisa Miller of HoneyBee Creations when she described herself as someone who thinks outside the box. I particularly appreciated her comments on staying positive, and focusing on what you are good at. I think this would apply to anyone, whether with a disability or not.

I have a lull next week before my marking comes in, during which I’m going to catch up on my research, and then I’m going to Melbourne to see the Dior exhibition. After all that hard work, surely some frocks must be on the agenda!  

Notes from the Field (v)

It’s been nearly two months since I returned home from my research trip in England, then a holiday in Croatia, but what with jetlag, starting teaching and the obligatory bout of flu or two, it’s taken a while to get to my laptop to write up my peregrinations.

Georgiana Molloy collected specimens for James Mangles, so my aim in this trip was to research Mangles and the archives of botanists to whom he sent Molloy’s specimens. My first stop was London. My plane arrived in the morning and as the Tube doors opened and closed at the stations, I saw the riot of a green English summer beyond them. It was eerie how much I felt like I was coming home, considering how persistently homesick I had been for the four years I lived there. Maybe the city had settled beneath my skin more than I’d realised.

My first research stop was the British Library, where I had a look at Mangles’ publications. Born in 1786, he entered the navy at age 14 and left it as a captain at age 29. A year later he travelled with his friend Charles Leonard Irby in the East, and in 1844 he published an account of his travels, Travels in Egypt and Nubia, Syria and Asia Minor: during the years 1817 & 1818. His first publication, however, appeared five years before. The floral calendar, monthly and daily. With miscellaneous details relative to plants and flowers, gardens and greenhouses, horticulture and botany, aviaries, &c. &c. was an account of growing plants in small spaces, for he lived in London. His interest in horticulture may have been pricked by his journey to Australia in 1831 to visit his cousin Ellen Stirling, wife of the governor of Perth. The Mangles family were traders and, cashing in on the lust for Australian flora, he commissioned people in the colony to collect for him, including James Drummond (who wanted payment for his specimens) and Molloy.

Mangles’ letters from his correspondents, copied into two letterbooks which are kept in the Battye library in Perth, record the receipt of collections and attempts to grow the seeds he received from Australia. These connections with nurserymen and gardeners may have piqued his interest in horticulture, or it might have been a family concern, as his brother Robert raised a number of specimens on his estate.

In 1848, drawing on his naval knowledge, Mangles published Synopsis of a complete Dictionary, graphical, descriptive and identical of the illustrated Geography and Hydrography of ... England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In this he proposed a method, which took him twelve years to develop, of charting waters to avoid shipwrecks and ‘arrest a fearful loss of human life.’

In 1851, following the disappearance of John Franklin, one-time governor of Tasmania (from 1837-1843) in the Arctic as he attempted to chart the north-west passage, Mangles published Papers and Despatches relating to the Arctic Searching Expeditions of 1850-51. Together with a few remarks as to the probable course pursued by Sir John Franklin, etc. This was a compilation of different opinions on what had happened to the ship, such as letters to newspapers and to the Royal Geographical Society, and thoughts of Franklin’s wife Lady Jane, rather than any original writing or thoughts of Mangles’ own except through his footnoted commentary and three pages listed under Remarks. However he included his method of charting outlined in his former publication, maintaining that through his proposed Universal Illustrated Geography and Hydrography, ‘no more difficulty would be experienced in ascertaining the precise position of any required place in the world, generally, than is here encountered by discovering – by means of the Keys, Beechey Island Cape Herschel, Cape Sir John Franklin, or any other point included in our Arctic List.’ It seems that he hoped to have his method of charting put to use in the search for Franklin, and to have the larger form of his work published.

Then in 1853 he published Thames Estuary. Guide to the navigation of the Thames Mouth, and Key to the Model which was very dull indeed.

While all this didn’t make for exciting reading, it did give me a sense of Mangles as a man who was keen to make and profit from professional connections. No doubt his interest in geography underlined his publications as well; he was a co-founder of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830. When I was in London doing my PhD on Molloy I found some of his letters in the RGS archives but, not finding them very illuminating, I never transcribed them. Now I must have another look at them.

Also in the British Library was a transcribed collection of papers, including the journals written or dictated by W.J. Bankes to Mangles’ travelling companion, Leonard Irby, detailing Bankes’ journeys to and from Petra in 1818. Bankes, when he returned to England in 1820, had hoped to have these published, but nothing eventuated. He fled for Italy in 1841 after being arrested for homosexual acts, then a capital offence. His papers stayed at Kingston Lacey (which H & I visited with Parental Unit while we were in England) until it was bequeathed to the National Trust in 1981, then they were sent to the Dorset History Centre in Dorchester.

The transcriber of the journals, Norman Lewis, states that Mangles and Irby met Bankes at Aleppo in November 1817 and at Tiberius in March 1818. Bankes asked if they would accompany him on a tour beyond Jordan and around the Dead Sea and they enthusiastically agreed. They then, a bit later on, tried to reach Petra. As Bankes detested writing, Irby transcribed his journals and/or took dictation from him. However, after comparing Bankes’ account with Mangles and Irby’s 1844 Travels in Egypt and Nubia, Syria and Asia Minor, Lewis concludes that almost all of Letter V in this work was copied by Mangles from Bankes. He writes that Mangles also ‘added a map of their route, a “sketch of the ground plan of Petra” and a better sketch map of the south end of the Dead Sea than had appeared in [Bankes’] original notebook as well as a few other illustrations and fifty biblical quotations. All in all, Mangles produced a useful, straightforward account which was well received. It was now very much his text, not that of Bankes’ journals which no on except his companions had ever seen.’ Lewis also adds ‘I believe it would be fair to say that the fundamental difference between the Journals and Letter V was that Bankes conceived the Journals primarily as his record of archaeological and other discoveries, whereas Mangles simply wanted to produce a good travelogue.’

A bit of plagiarism jumping out of the archives was much more interesting than Mangles’ shipping charts! Clearly he wasn't averse to appropriation as a way of furthering himself.

At Kingston Lacy with H in 2007. H is checking his watch against the sundial.

Incubating Writers

Nearly four years ago, I answered a call out from writer Michelle Vlatkovic, via the Queensland Writers Centre, for members to form a writers group. I’d been in Brisbane for a few years but was finding it hard to meet other writers. I walked into Avid Reader to find Michelle waiting for me at a table, a copy of the story I’d sent on the table before her. As we chatted over coffee, I found that Michelle hadn’t followed the now-standard approach of going to uni to study creative writing, but had immersed herself in community radio and not-for-profit organisations. Her writing was striking in its unconventionality - abstract but full of heart at the same time.

Since that meeting the group has grown and shrunk as people come and go but we still have four core members – Michelle, myself, Pamela Greet and Rose Anderson. Pam has just finished a PhD in creative writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast and has a wry, quiet but incisive way of writing, and Rose’s tiny fiction is off-the-wall and marvelous.

The group has grown us as writers. One of the first stories Michelle and I workshopped made its way into Griffith Review. With feedback from others (including, at one point, artist and writer Julie Kearney) my story Old Honey was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and published in adda. Michelle’s work has been published in the Review of Australian Fiction, Southerly and Gargouille. Rose’s work has been read on Quart Short  and published in a fine line, The School Magazine and 4th Floor Journal.

We haven’t met much in the last year because I fell off my horse with full-time academia and Michelle and Pam have started an exciting new venture, Salon REaD.

In response to difficulty of finding publication in literary journals, which usually only have a select readership and are highly competitive, Salon REaD showcases the work of artists and writers in the Brisbane community. It’s about growing audiences and gaining exposure at a grassroots level. Michelle and Pam have hosted a couple of salons over the past year and it’s working: the audiences are expanding, artists are selling their work and writers are finding their feet. Poet Nic Addenbrooke for example, who read at the last salon, is part of this year’s Queensland Poetry Festival.

This Saturday I’ll be reading at Salon REaD5 with Pam and Stefan Jatschka. Artist Manu, whose chalk art is at the Burrow in West End, will exhibit his work. Music will be performed by Nigel Kimber Llewellyn of the Dustbin Hoffmans.

Art by Manu.

The salon will be held at 59 Ekibin Road Annerley, and entry is by a gold coin donation to community radio station 4ZZZ. Performances and readings at the salon will also be recorded for broadcast on 4ZZZ. Hope to see you there!

On Science Communication

A few weeks back I presented at a symposium at UQ hosted by the Translational Research in Creative Practice group, which explores how creative practice can translate complex research in the humanities into the public realm. It borrows this idea from the medical sciences, which translates knowledge created in the lab to everyday environments – the phrase used to describe this is ‘bench-to beside’, which I like. I signed up to present on writing an ecobiography, because I’m interested in how writers can use their craft to convey science, and I think it's imperative to transmit knowledge from the academy to the public.

Last year I presented at the inaugural Quantum Words Science Writing festival hosted by the NSW Writers’ Centre, where I met plenty of wonderful writers, including poet Carol Jenkins who wrote the marvellous Fishing in the Devonian, and Indigenous writer Tony Birch, who is doing interesting and important work on colonialism and climate change, looking at how the resilience of Indigenous communities surviving colonialism might educate people on how to negotiate the increasing instability which climate change brings. I also caught up with my pal Cat Sparks, a spec fic writer who has just published Lotus Blue and who makes every occasion entertaining, even when she’s talking about the coming environmental Armageddon (which really is on its way, although Cat maintains we’ll be killed by robots first).

At this festival, Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty gave a marvelous keynote. He expressed his ideas clearly and had a very good sense of humour, which was a balm for everyone’s depression about the US election and the implications of this for our climate. He mentioned how one of the difficulties about communicating science is that science is about quantifying uncertainty and is therefore conservative in its analysis, whereas journalism, which relies on headlines on to sell its news (at least in these days of clickbaiting), is more interested in dramatisation (these are not his exact words, but the gist of them - I had to consult ecologist-philospher-b/f for clarification).

Another part of the difficulty in communicating science is confirmation bias: the more emotionally charged an issue is, the more people will interpret information (especially ambiguous information) in favour of their beliefs.

So, what to do?

Jamie Freestone, a literature PhD student at UQ, talks about the need for making science fun, and points to the success of the World Science Festival in Brisbane. He also mentions films such as Interstellar, and I would also add that docos such as David Attenborough’s Earth II can raise awareness, although Attenborough was criticised for creating an ‘escapist wildlife fantasy’ in which‘worldwide mass extinction is simply not happening’.

I’m a bit disappointed that Freestone didn’t mention literature, however, especially as this is his field of focus.

And mine too. While entertainment has its place, I also believe in seduction, in pulling the reader into a text through imagery, language, plot and character. And this is what I’m trying to do in my ecobiography, as I explained in my presentation. The impetus for writing the book is to raise awareness of the South West Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR) which is one of 25 biodiversity hotspots around the world (and the only one in Australia), by rendering the lives of the plants Georgiana Molloy collected. I’m following them from the south-west at the time she collected them in the 1830s, to England, where they were distributed by James Mangles, a plant middleman, and then back to the south-west to see how they’re faring now. This forms the book’s plot. The characters are Georgiana and the Noongars with whom she interacted, the botanist Mangles to whom she sent his specimens, and his acquaintances, among whom he distributed Georgiana's’s specimens.

The plants, too, are characters, with different colours and textures, and ways of trapping and acquiring food, and responding to air and light. Through rendering them, I’m trying to explain that they are as just as important as humans. In a traditional biography, a human is the focus of the work, but in an eco-biography, the non-human is of equal significance. My premise is that, if we want to have a life, we need to write the lives that support us. And language is of the utmost importance in this respect - through it, I show readers the beauty and vitality of plants.

I’m nearly halfway through the project, and soon I’m heading to England to do research on Mangles and his botanical buddies, which will require much trawling through archives. Hopefully I’ll have time to post as I go, but if not, I’ll be updating my Instagram and Facebook author pages fairly often, in case you want to see what I uncover of 19th century science!

Days in the Life of a Deaf Woman

A little while back I went to a play at La Boite Theatre at QUT which a friend had written. I really wanted to see the play because I knew she’d been working on it for a long time and it had received rave reviews. However, I’d previously been to The Wizard of Oz at La Boite in 2013 and hadn’t been able to hear it because the loop system wasn’t working. My experience with loop systems is that they’re rarely fixed and my complaints go unheeded. Nonetheless, I really wanted to see the play.

So I bought a ticket for myself and my b/f and phoned the theatre beforehand to check that the loop system was working.

‘Yes, it’s working,’ I was told.

My b/f & I went to La Boite, had a drink and located the theatre manager, who said we needed to sit in a particular spot and that she would reserve those seats for us. She mentioned she had also reserved seats for another deaf person and her friend. Inside we found the seats. I put my hearing aid on its T switch, which picks up sound from the loop system and cuts out background noise. It wasn’t working.

I introduced myself to the lady who was sitting next to me and asked if she was deaf.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I’m deaf too. Is your hearing aid working with the loop? Mine isn’t.’

She tried her T switch. ‘No, it’s not working.’

We consulted the manager, but she couldn’t get the technicians to fix it before the play started. Nor could she sort it out at half-time. At least I had a nice chat to the lady next to me, who signed and worked as a translator.

Meanwhile my b/f laughing uproariously throughout the performance and I felt left out.

At the end of it, the manager was hugely apologetic and offered for me and the other lady to come back and watch the play again, but I knew it was pretty much booked out and I wanted other people to have the chance to see it, and I was flat out at work. Besides, a similar situation had happened some 15 years before at the Sydney Opera House, when I was invited to see a play again after the staticky loop system made hearing anything impossible. However the magic had gone. The manager with whom I was dealing was so terrible that I never went back to the Opera House again, except to see dance performances that didn’t need hearing.

The manager at La Boite also asked - and I could see she was trying to be tactful - how deaf I was. I don’t have a speech impediment so people don’t always believe me when I tell them I’m deaf, or forget very quickly how little hearing I have. I guess she was checking that I wasn’t faking it, but I was annoyed. My b/f reassured me it was just that I challenge the idea of what a conventional deaf person is, which is precisely why I tell people that I’m deaf. I also had the sense that, if the lady who was also deaf hadn’t been with me, I would have been disregarded (which has happened frequently before).

However, the manager’s response was certainly a damn sight better than of the staff at the South Bank Cineplex around the same time, when I went to watch La La Land. The last time I’d tried this cinema was in 2006, when I watched Happy Feet with my sister and her kids. I figured that, in eleven years they would have worked out that it was discriminatory not to have any means of helping deaf or hearing impaired people at their cinema.

I approached the counter. ‘Do you have a loop system that will help me to hear the film?’

‘No, sorry, we don’t.’

I was too tired to be surprised or to put up any kind of a fight. I walked out. They didn’t deserve my money.

A few weeks later I went to a World Science Festival talk at the Queensland Conservatorium a few weeks later and found the loop system was too faint to hear (despite have called beforehand and mentioned this to them, as it was quiet the last time I used it when I went to listen to Elizabeth Gilbert). The nice man on the door offered to seat me down the front but I was totally disheartened.

‘Forget it, I can’t be bothered,’ I told him.

I was sick of having to stand up for myself, and tired of the consistent message I was getting: that people simply don’t care. Later that week, I emailed the World Science folk to see they had made a recording of the talk that I might be able to listen to with headphones, but I didn’t receive a reply.

It’s sometimes hard to feel relevant to a society that, for all of your life, has shown that it doesn’t really give a damn about deaf people. However, I doubt that I’m alone. Australia has become meaner and harder and nastier and more small-minded since John Howard. I'm sure refugees, people of colour and Indigenous Australians feel like me a lot of the time.

If more places made more of an effort for their patrons with disabilities, they’d probably sell more tickets – not just to the folk with disabilities, but to the family and friends they bring with them. It makes economic sense to try harder.

At the end of the evening at La Boite, before my b/f and I walked away, I said to the manager, ‘Thank you for caring, because no one else ever has.’ She had tried, and that alone made me feel like it was worth coming back to listen to another play.

2016: My Year of Writing

This past year has been like being flattened by a freight train, and I’m only just now picking myself up and straightening out my limbs. After being perpetually unwell for pretty much twelve months due to stress and working too hard, I have resolved to do something about my work-life balance this year and to stop working on weekends. That is kind of happening, which is good, but hence the lateness of this post. Anyways, here are my literary doings for 2016.

Publications

In July my short story ‘Melliodora’ was published alongside William Lane’s ‘Vivienne’s Fingers’ in the Review of Australian Fiction. I’ve always loved Bill’s writing and was very happy to be working alongside him with this issue. It was a short piece, but most of my creative work seems to be like that of late, probably because my time is so compressed.

In August, my short story ‘Unfurling’ was published in Griffith Review. I’d been working on this story for nearly two decades so I was really glad it found a home!

I also read an extract of the work at the Powerhouse at an event organised by Griffith Review, which was a wonderful evening.

In November, my short story ‘Old Honey’, which was shortlisted for the 2015Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize, was published on adda. I worked with Grenada-born writer Jacob Ross, a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature, to edit the piece, which was illuminating.

Also in November, my essay on Rosa Praed and her deaf daughter Maud was published in the Sydney Review of Books. I love this journal – their essayists are splendid and the editor Catriona Menzies-Pike has been commissioning really interesting work – so I was delighted to be published on their pages.

My essay on Dorothy Cottrell, an artist and writer from the Queensland outback who spent her life in a wheelchair, was also published in Queensland Review. One day, when I eventually find some time, I’ll expand this research into a book.

Awards/Funding

As I have funding to write my ecobiography for another two years I haven’t been seeking any extra cash – instead, I’m trying to save what I earn so that I can write for a few years once my postdoc finishes. However I was successful in winning an internal grant at the university to do a study on gender and vernacular criticism. This will pay for a research assistant to look at stats and compare the content of written reviews with online reviews.

In terms of awards, my short story ‘Black Soil’ was also longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize. I would have liked to have entered more competitions but there just wasn’t enough time.

Teaching

In the second half of last year I was a tutor for a course on women writers convened by Professor Carole Ferrier. This was one of the best classes I’ve ever taught, covering books such as Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. My students responded really well to the texts, as well as being motivated, politically savvy and articulate. I was hugely impressed with all of them. In the second half of this year I’ll be convening this course, though with slightly different texts.

Conferences and Presentations

In July I attended the annual conference for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature at Canberra. Usually I love these conferences but I was a bit too stressed this time around as I was moving house and, having turned into a wussy Queenslander, the cold rain really got me down.

At the end of the year I was in much sunnier climes in Sydney, where I was delighted to take part in a symposium on Nineteenth Century Australian women’s writing.

I also presented a paper on ecobiography at the bi-annual ASLEC-ANZ environmental humanities conference, then headed to Fremantle for the International Australian Studies Association conference. Where the paper I presented in Canberra was on violent clashes between Noongars and white colonists, this paper was on the positive interactions between them.

Another highlight was presenting on Georgiana Molloy at the inaugural Science Writing Festival at the NSW Writers’ Centre.

Research

My research was huge this year, consisting of background reading on environment, literature and Aboriginal relationships to Country, as well as archival research. I made two trips to Western Australia. For the first I was based in Perth, copying archives about the colonisation of the south west by Europeans. For the second I was travelling around the south west of Western Australia to get an idea of the country through which Molloy moved. This year I’m travelling to England to look at the archives of the men to whom her specimens were distributed, and I’ll also head up to Scotland as Georgiana spent time there with her friends and I want to get a sense of the environment which formed her impressions of landscape. In all this I have been aided by Bernice Barry’s comprehensive biography The Mind That Shines, which is a fantastic resource.

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

Sadly, after five years, this was my last year as editor of diversity for the AWW Challenge. I’ve been too pressed for time and am trying to cut back on the amount of work that I’m doing. I coordinated a focus on Australian women writers with disability, and another one on Australian women writers of migrant background, and also arranged an interview with Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko. I came to know some lovely writers through this, including poet Eileen Chong and fiction writer Michelle Cahill. I was already familiar with Melissa Lucashenko, Lee Kofman, Gaele Sobott and Amanda Tink and it was great to talk to them further as I coordinated the posts. I also penned my thoughts on fiction for young readers with disability.

The Year Ahead

Gosh, well, we’re already into February! After feedback from my brother and writer friends in November, I realised that my draft of Hearing Maud was dull & still too academic, and that I had to rewrite it (for the fifth time). I spent all of Christmas & New Year working on it, and now I only need another week to edit it. Then I’m going to let it fallow for a bit so that I can return to it with fresh eyes and do one final draft. As my time was so constrained this year, trying to get this book across the finishing line has been ridiculous.

The two books for which I won OzCo grants, The Sea Creatures and When the World Shivered, are going to have to wait until I’m done with the postdoc. I didn’t get to my poems, as I had wanted to, but I'm still planning on writing a novella based on my experiences in Rome. Often, I wish there were two of me as there’s so much I want to write and no time to get to it, and sometimes I feel like I’m going mad. In the meantime, though, there is my ecobiography, which is going well and which is a delight to research and write.

And hopefully I'll get some time to relax, as my writing companion Hudson demonstrates admirably.