Silencing: The Decision to Close UWA Publishing

This is a letter I have written to Professor Tayyeb Shah, Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Western Australia, regarding his decision to close University of Western Australia Publishing. If you, too, don’t wish the press to close, I urge you to sign the Change.org petition and to express your concerns to tayyeb[dot]shah[at]uwa[dot]edu[dot]au.

Dear Professor Shah,

I am writing in relation to your recent decision to close University of Western Australia publishing. I am an academic and award-wining writer (I was shortlisted, among other prizes, for the WA Premier’s award), and my third book, Hearing Maud, was recently published by UWAP. This book is a hybrid memoir about my experiences of deafness, the history of deaf education, and the life of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed.

As a person who has been deaf since age 4, my life depends on watching watching how people communicate. I notice those who listen, those whose voices are amplified, and those who are muted. The decision to silence a press of 85 years standing, at the helm of which is a publisher who is innovative, committed to creating Australian literature of quality and who takes risks (which many major publishers are not nimble enough to do), signals to me that you do not value the way in which this press elevate the voices of several hundred writers (many of them Western Australian, including Noongar writers as well as Miles Franklin award winners) and their significant contributions to Australia’s literary landscape.

In 2016 I began an ARC DECRA at the University of Queensland to write an ecobiography of Western Australia's first female scientist, Georgiana Molloy. Although three biographies have been written on Molloy, they have not closely examined the role of science and writing in her life, nor the significant impact which the remarkable flora of south-west Western Australia had on her sense of self. Molloy is another example of a woman who, like my deaf research subject Maud Praed, was not allowed to speak as she wished because the culture into which she was born did not value her voice. Although she was a writer and a scientist, Molloy could not publish scientific papers because of her gender, and her literary and scientific skill was confined to her letters.

I have been researching this book for two decades and was planning, when it is completed next year, to submit my manuscript to UWA Publishing. This is a scholarly book, but is written in a way that makes it easy to be read by a general audience. If UWA Publishing is disbanded, I will be required to find an east coast-based publisher. As a writer I have heard often how difficult it is for Western Australian stories to find audiences in the east, and shutting down the press will, no doubt, marginalise these stories further.

The associations between deafness and colonisation are well-established (historically, deaf people have been discouraged from using their language, sign, and have been assimilated into hearing culture), and I cannot help but see the same pattern appearing in your decision to shut down UWA Publishing and the voices of its authors, particularly given the context of your relocation from Britain to Australia. I urge you to listen to those who have signed the recent Change.org petition (now approaching 7500 signatures), and statements from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the International Australian Studies Association, Westerly journal and innumerable high profile scholars and writers, and to reconsider this appalling decision.

Jessica White.

2018: My Year of Writing

2018 was a bit of a bastard, I have to say. The stress of the past seven years – it’s been accumulating since I decided to apply for a postdoctoral fellowship, & has been exacerbated by teaching – caught up with me, bowling me over with an ear infection in May. The eardrum in my good ear ruptured and for a few weeks I was left completely deaf, even with my hearing aid turned to its maximum. So last year was mostly about trying to keep it together & get better, rather than doing half marathons as I had imagined (god knows what I was thinking). I dropped to 0.7FTE in July – something that took six months to be processed, even as I got sicker and sicker with repeated colds & flu & the infection. Much of last year was also spent wondering if I could even be an academic, particularly given that most positions are teaching and research, and I’m currently research-focussed. However, reducing my load really helped; I’m seeing a specialist for chronic fatigue; and I’m trying to stop working on the weekends. And on the plus side, due to needing to rest I’ve been reading much more, which has been such a pleasure.

Publications

The big highlight of last year was getting a contract for Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice, which will be published by University of Western Australia press on 1st July this year. I’ll be at the Byron Bay Writers Festival and am lining up some ducks for appearances in Perth, Armidale, Tamworth & Brisbane, & hopefully also Sydney, Melbourne & Canberra. The editor for the book also edited A Curious Intimacy & she loved Hearing Maud & said that my craft had really improved, so that made me extremely happy.

In terms of scholarly publications, I published an essay on Annamaria Weldon’s ecobiography The Lake’s Apprentice in Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice, edited by Donna Lee Brien & Quinn Eades. This was my first publication on ecobiography & it will be part of a critical monograph that I’m writing on the form next year. I also had a piece of creative nonfiction published in one of my favourite outlets, the Sydney Review of Books, on Georgiana Molloy & my decision not to have children. This was part of their New Nature series & I was delighted to be featured among other Oz environmental writers. I worry about being typecast as a writer on disability, & while this is an issue that’s important to me, my writing life has always ranged widely across genres and subjects, & at the moment it’s my driving force to educate people about what we’re doing to the planet.

As with 2017, I didn’t publish any fiction, although that doesn’t mean I didn’t try. I wrote a 12,000 word novella for the Griffith Review novella prize on tree clearing in Queensland and the mythic salting of Carthage in the Punic Wars, & I’m now going to turn this into a book.

Teaching

Due to physical collapse last year, I didn’t take on any teaching. I wrote and presented two lectures for a third-year Australian literature course, one on Tim Winton’s Island Home (which I hope I never have to read again in my lifetime) and the other on James Bradley’s Clade. I also delivered a lecture on the Environmental Humanities to a group of advanced students at the Australian Catholic University in Banyo. This year I’m convening that third year Australian literature course & tutoring two of the four classes.

King’s Park. So gorgeous.

Conferences

2018 was the year of overkill when it came to conferences – I went to seven of them and was on the organising committee for one – never again! The first, in February in Parramatta, was on postcolonial literature and climate change. It was a small and very enjoyable conference, but I was struck forcefully by how few young people were there. It’s part of the hollowing out of the humanities, & young people thinking that the humanities won’t help them find a job (I think studying humanities is one of the best things you can do in a coming world of automation but that’s a blog for another time). In the middle of the year I headed south to Canberra for two conferences – The Literary Interface, for which I organised two panels on science and literature with Dr Clare Archer-Lean of the University of the Sunshine Coast, and the Australian Historical Association conference. The latter was only the second history conference I’d been to and it was absolutely huge. I had a ball & met some cool people. I also caught up with my good friends in Canbez which is always a bonus.

Then, although I was still not feeling great & had depleted my reserves of energy with a week of listening, I flew up to Sydney for the Deaf History International conference. I was a bit nervous about this – I never know whether Deaf people are going to accept me or not because I wasn’t raised Deaf, even though I’ve lost 75% of my hearing – but they turned out to all be lovely. And the most wonderful thing, aside from the people, was that the equipment worked beautifully. All I had to do was turn up at the conference, put my hearing aid on its T-switch to access the loop system and I heard everything so clearly. I even had the luxury of being late one day, when usually I have to panic about getting places early so that I can check that equipment is working & that I can hear. I was inspired to start learning sign again, but after I looked into it with Deaf Services Queensland I realised I have no time this year because of my exhausting job. It’s either nearly a full day of lessons or two nights a week, and the day classes were full and I’m too tired in the evenings to function. So learning sign is on hold again.

At the end of the year I flew to Perth for the Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference. This was my first ever creative writing conference and I’m always glad of a reason to go to Perth. I met some great people, caught up with others who I knew, met my publisher for coffee and went for walks in Kings Park. Gosh I love Perth! I would move over there in a heartbeat, except that I know I would miss my family terribly.

I was on the organising panel for the International Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, which was held at UQ in December. I arranged an event on sexuality and sport with writer Inga Simpson, scholar Rebecca Olive and artist Eric Bridgeman, which was prompted by the current exhibition of the UQ Art Museum, Play On. Following that conference I flew to Melbourne for a conference on colonialism and archives, which also went well, but by that stage I was pretty dead from my massive year & I just wanted to be back home again. I organised a panel on collecting with Anna Johnstone, a colleague from UQ, and Deidre Coleman from the University of Melbourne who does fabulous work on entomologists, and that worked out really well. However, fewer conferences this year are in order.

Supervision

Nearly all of my 4 students have submitted their work now. One passed with flying colours, two are being examined and one more has yet to submit. I’m always impressed with how well their work scrubs up, particularly when I consider my own paltry efforts with my PhD 10 years ago. Along the way they have done really well, with one winning a fellowship for creating digital art biographies, and another winning a Griffith Review fellowship which led to this fantastic publication.

Research

September saw me heading to Perth for the Cape to Cape trek. This gave me a fantastic sense of the environment through which Molloy moved, and the time and distance it took for Noongar people and colonists to move through the area. A blog post on this in the pipeline - I have to get my photos up at least because the environment was just extraordinary. I also made contact with some wonderful scholars working in botanical history - Alex George in Perth, and Sarah Maroske at the Herbarium in Melbourne. Sara and I will be presenting at a conference at Baltimore next year with my pin-up scholar Ann Shteir - I was pretty over teh moon when I received their invitation. Other than this, I was very much stymied in the writing of my ecobiography, which is starting to drive me quite mad.

The Year Ahead

At the end of April I’m moving onto a new contract which is teaching and research, rather than the research-focussed contract which I’m on now. This means that I won’t get much more research or writing done, although I’m certainly going to try. I’m sure able-bodied people can do both teaching and research, but the impact of teaching on my body is so severe that I need a much longer recovery time. However, my options are pretty limited at the moment so I don’t really have a choice. The rest of this year will be about writing what I can, when I can, amidst lecture preparation, tutoring, marking & publicity for Hearing Maud. My consolation is that I ever was, & will be, a tortoise rather than a hare, and I always get there in the end.

Notes from the Field (xiii)

The last leg of my research trip was to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, which held more letters from Jane Loudon, and a brief note from Mangles. Loudon, as I mentioned in an earlier post, wrote manuals that made botany accessible to women and children.

In Mangles’ letterbooks in the Battye Library in Perth, there are a few letters from Loudon. On 22nd October 1840, she wrote ‘I am going to begin a Lady’s Magazine of Gardening and Botany the 1st of January, with coloured plates and I shall be very much obliged to you, if you will give me a few hints and point out new flowers, etc etc.’ A few days later she followed this up with, ‘I have received a note from Mr John Murray, agreeing to take my instruction, in producing Botany for Ladies; — and I write to tell you, because I know you take an interest in all my numerous publications — I am quite delighted to begin this work, because I am sure something of the kind is wanted — I never could bear the Linnean System, it is so dry! but the Natural System is very interesting, when stripped of its formal language — I mean to render Botany entertaining and if I can do this, I think I shall deserve the thanks of every lover of flowers’. The aim of every science communicator ever!

A number of Loudon’s letters in the National Library in Edinburgh are to her publisher, John Murray. This publishing house also produced books by Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Arthur Conan Doyle and Lord Byron. In a letter of 19th April, 1843, she proposed to the current John Murray (there were seven of them between 1768 and 2002) to write a three-book series on Zoology for Ladies. It would, she suggested, ‘be on a regularly scientific plan, following the modern improvements of the system of Cuvier. At the same time my object would be to make it an entertaining book fit to be read in schools or to a family circle’. Once again, Loudon’s aspiration to make science available to children is clear.

Back in Australia, Georgiana benefitted from Jane Loudon’s publications, but in terms of gardening. In an extract of a long letter written in 1840, she thanked Mangles profusely for ‘Mrs Loudon’s “Flower Garden”’ which she described as ‘beauteous & elegant beyond description I feel highly indebted not only to you but to that superior gifted Lady for the exertions made to strike off an immediate copy’. This was likely The Ladies’ Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals, published in 1840. In another letter dated a year later, Georgiana referred to Loudon’s description of Ipomoea, and thanked Mangles again for the work, commenting ‘How singular you should have even thought of thus gratifying my ardent wish to see this work’.

Jane Loudon’s husband died from lung cancer in 1843, leaving behind large debts. Jane’s letters, now bordered in black dwell upon means of making money such as raising subscriptions. Despite her ambition, intelligence and hard work, Loudon died penniless in 1858 at the age of 51, leaving ingenuity a daughter, Agnes. It seems a sad end for such a clever and innovative woman.

While I was in Edinburgh I also took the opportunity to update my author photo – a must if a writer wants to age gracefully! My photographer was my friend Ian, who was in our Australian/English bookclub when I lived in London, The Book Rangers. He hails from Cootamundra and is also a brilliant hairdresser. When I got home I revamped my website with one of his pics. You can see more of his work on his website, and also follow him on Facebook.

Another of Ian's headshots (with help from the Edinburgh wind).

Notes from the Field (xii)

Back in Carlisle, I walled myself up in the Carlisle Archive Centre, taking photos of Georgiana’s letters, which were kept by her family, so that my research assistant could transcribe them when I got home. Because paper was in such short supply in the colony, and because the recipient of the letter paid for the cost of postage, Georgiana crossed her letters. This means that she wrote in one direction, turned the page at a right angle and wrote over her words. Trying to decipher these letters is enough to send anyone batty (including my poor research assistants!), but when I spoke to a colleague who has done some research into the psychology of reading, she said people of the time were able to read these letters with ease. I guess it’s akin to someone in the nineteenth century trying to read today’s text messages.

Carlisle was a pretty unprepossessing place despite its rich history (it began as a Roman settlement then sprouted a castle in 1093) and elegant buildings. Keats, on his walking tour of 1818, described the city thus: 'The Cathedral does not appear very fine — the Castle is very ancient, and of brick. The City is very various — old white-washed narrow streets — broad red-brick ones more modern — I will tell you anon whether the inside of the Cathedral is worth looking at. It is built of sandy red stone or Brick. We have now walked 114 miles, and are merely a little tired in the thighs, and a little blistered.'

On a not unrelated note I was totally chuffed to pass a Walkabout pub when I was having a look around. These pubs were a dime a dozen when I lived in London a decade ago, but they went into administration in 2009, perhaps because of the GFC.

On the way back from the Archive Centre, the cabbie struck up a conversation about Brexit. I didn’t venture my opinions as I didn’t know what side of politics he was on (and have had my share of conservative cabbies), but it transpired he was against it. His daughter had a part-time job in a store and had no hope of ever getting ahead or owning a home, he said, and Brexit wasn’t going to help. That made me sad, and I was very conscious of how lucky I was to be able to travel and do my research.

I also got in touch with the owners of Crosby Lodge, the house in which Georgiana grew up until her father died just before her 15th birthday. The place had formerly been a bed-and-breakfast and the current owners were knee-deep in renovations – it was a mammoth task! They very kindly took me around, pointing out the part of the house that was original and that which was added on, the walled garden, which was just gorgeous, and the nearby woods, with tall trees and dappled light. There was a big ditch between the wood and the road which might have been a fortification akin to a vallum built by the Romans. This startled me, until I remembered that Aborigines in Australia have sites even older than Roman fortifications. History!

A Carlisle summer.

The owners left me to wander around and take pics. I was keen to get a sense of the countryside, and although it was another startling blue day, I remembered the last time I was there with my friends, and how overcast and grim it seemed. Although I guess for someone raised in that environment that kind of weather would have been normal. The house and grounds conveyed a sense of calm, stateliness and privilege, particularly in the walled garden, which was where Georgiana began her first lessons in gardening. It was a stark contrast to Georgiana’s life in Australia that was marked by giving birth to her first child on a hard board in a tent while a storm raged outside.

Notes from the Field (xi)

From Newcastle I took the train to Carlisle to look at Georigana’s letters, which are held in the Carlisle Archive Centre. I needed to get to Helensburgh by the weekend, so I could only spend a day here, before returning the following week. I’ll write about Carlisle in the next post.

When Georgiana’s mother and sister became intolerable, she stayed with her friends the Dunlops at Keppoch House, and later with Helen Storey, who married the minister at Roseneath. I needed to get a sense of the environment through she moved, so as to compare it to her experiences in Australia. I also wanted to look at Keppoch House.

I’d only been to Scotland once before, when H & I went to Edinburgh to see his pal Guy Hollingworth perform at the Fringe Festival. So I was delighted when we crossed the border and the train driver, in his Scottish accent, called over the P.A. ‘Welcome to Scotland!’ and he told us he’d grown up in a town nearby. I had to change very quickly at Glasgow, without having a clear idea of where I was going, but still took two seconds in the square to listen to a man playing bagpipes.

From Glasgow the second train travelled west through the suburbs, then parallel to the River Clyde until it reached Helensburgh. I dragged my suitcase up to the AirBnB place where I was staying. The town was very quiet, with streets sloping down to the sea, and the sky was so close it seemed I could touch it.

In the afternoon I walked along the water to look at Roseneath Bay, on which a number of boats bobbed. When Georgiana lived there, boats were the main way of getting about as the roads were pretty rudimentary.

Rosneath Bay

I’d arranged to have a look around Keppoch House, and after some discussion with the bus driver we worked out where I was to get off. The owner of the house was a smart and jovial man who had worked as a commodities trader, and he offered me coffee in his kitchen. Outside, the sunshine was brilliant and very warm. ‘This weather,’ he pronounced, ‘is a lie.’ After our chat, I walked through the trees surrounding the house, which had views sloping down to the water, and saw a fox slipping into the greenery. I also wandered through the walled garden, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure if it was the same garden as when Georgiana had stayed there. I had met the gatekeeper’s wife as I walked up the drive and I thought she said it had been in a different place, but being deaf I wasn’t entirely sure. If I get back to Scotland I'll try to see if there are any plans in the archives.

View from the trees at Keppoch House.

What struck me most was the proximity of the water and the size of the house. Georgiana wrote in her diary about being very cold in winter, and I wondered if the house was hard to heat (I had turned the heaters on in my accommodation in the summer evenings! But I am a thin-skinned Queenslander). And the water was everywhere – to me it suggested promise and a sense of possibility, for Georgiana would eventually sail on that sea to Australia, where her life changed dramatically.

The next day I caught a bus to Kilcreggran, passing Rosneath, where Georgiana had stayed with her friend Helen Story, who had married the minister there (alas the original church had been replaced). From Kilcreggan I caught a ferry to Greenoch. The sunlight was absolutely dazzling and the vistas were incredible, at least for someone who had grown up in inland Australia. The space between sea and sky seemed very small, the land rising abruptly from the ocean.

I got talking to a young fellow on the boat. Perhaps he heard my accent when I spoke to the man selling tickets, or perhaps he was just friendly, and he asked, ‘Where are you from?’

‘Australia.’

‘Australia! What are you doing here?’

‘I’m researching a woman who used to live here.’ I explained about her life, but he was incredulous that I’d given up the weather in Australia to come to Scotland. When we got off the boat he pointed me in the direction of the main street, which was helpful as it wasn’t immediately apparent to me where I should go.

On the boat from Kilcreggan to Gourock.

I had a coffee in a café and read a newspaper, watching a film crew busying themselves across the road, then wandered along West Bay. Here, the afternoon sunlight was absolutely dazzling, and I wished I could have stayed there for longer but I was getting pretty tired. Being deaf means I have to be very alert in new places to take in information, & I had to strain to hear the Scottish accents, so I was a bit worn out. After a wander I caught the ferry back. It was about 5pm and people were finishing up work, and I wondered about their lives, if they were happy in a small place, boating back and forth the way Alexander Dunlop had nearly two hundred years before.

At the Kilcreggan jetty where the boat docked, the boat master’s dog was sitting on a post. He was so pretty I patted him as I went past, & wished I could have a dog like him. And then it was back to my accommodation on the bus, passing the Garelochhead Military Training Camp and the Faslane Peace Camp which protests against nuclear weapons. The lady at the AirBnB told me that the lochs were so deep that submarines docked in them, which to me – again used to the arid inland – was incredible.

I regretted that I didn’t have the time or energy to see the lochs. I was still working on the latest iteration of my memoir and that took up my spare time. But I’m pretty sure another visit will be on the cards at some stage, as the scenery was just stunning, and it would be good to see what it’s like when the sun isn’t shining as strongly, as Georgiana’s experience of the weather influenced her moods, and vice versa. It would be impossible for it not to, given its grandeur and presence.

Notes from the Field (x)

I was last in Newcastle in 2014, ushering in the New Year and then my birthday with some very good friends, one of whom had been in my London book club of expats (with a few English folk tossed in), the Book Rangers. I blogged about that trip here, but I didn’t mention the mead we drank on NYE as we watched the fireworks and the drive to Solway Firth (which was freezing but gorgeous – the morning light was silver), then up to Hadrian’s Wall (the temperature was 2 degrees celsius!) thence to the famous Barter Books bookstore (housed in a restored train station), where I bought a copy of Praed’s Political Poems by Winthrop Mackworth Praed. We then headed down to a beach with a view to a ruined castle. It was almost pitch black and the wind cut my skin, but it was exhilarating to be beside a castle and the sea in air which, but for the moon, was thick with night.

This trip was more scholarly, though it was great to see my friends again and to meet their new addition, a charming son. Before I left for the UK, I contacted the Hancock Museum to see if I could find out any more about Mangles’ correspondents, author Jane Loudon (Mangles sent a copy of Loudon’s Ladies Flower Garden to Georgiana) and horticulturalist George Hailes (who grew some of Georgiana’s seeds). My query was passed on to Les Jessop, honorary librarian of the Natural History Society of Northumbria. There was no George Hailes, he wrote, but there was a George Wailes, founder of the Natural History Society.

I went back to Mangles’ letters and checked the writing; that lovely, scrolling ‘H’ was indeed a ‘W’. This was a revelation for both of us. Les had known Wailes mostly as an entomologist, but now realised that he’d had extensive involvement in plants. As for me, it meant I could check Kew Gardens’ and Chatsworth House’s archives for other letters by Wailes (I found one in which Wailes got a bit shirty with William Hooker over an exchange of plants, which amused me).

Saltwell Towers

George Wailes had a brother, William Wailes, who set up a successful stained glass manufacturing business, and his windows feature in dozens of churches. In 1860 William bought Saltwell Park, built a mansion and set about improving the grounds. He later ran into debt and sold the house and grounds to the Gateshead Corporation. It’s now a gorgeous park, so I took myself off to look at it on an unseasonably warm day (summer in England continues to surprise me). The house, known as Saltwell Towers, is still there, and I thought it was lovely.

Saltwell Park

I also took myself to Newcastle University’s archives to look at some letters between Jane Loudon and Pauline Trevelyan. Jane Loudon is a fascinating woman. I knew of her from Ann Shteir’s wonderful Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, for she was a pioneer in making botany and gardening accessible to women by writing entry-level manuals (those that existed were for people, largely men, who knew quite a bit about these fields). I also knew her husband had died prematurely, leaving her high and dry, so she had turned to writing to support herself.

As I read more about Loudon in preparation for this trip, I found that history had repeated itself. Jane’s father had died when she was 17, so she published a novel she’d written, The Mummy, in 1827 to raise some some funds for herself. So Jane Loudon was one of the world’s first science fiction writers! Wonderful stuff. Also amazing was that John Loudon, editor of a magazine, reviewed the book and asked to meet the author. He assumed the person who turned up would be male, but then he discovered it was Jane, and married her a year later.

Laura Trevelyan, to whom Jane wrote the letters housed at Newcastle University, was a lightening rod for Victorian culture. She met her husband, a geologist, at a conference for the British Association for the Advancement of Science (which I think is a great story). She was an artist, and made her house in Northumberland, Wallington Hall, a place where she gathered friends such as John Ruskin, the Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth Barrett), the Rossettis, John Everett Millais, Thomas Carlyle and Swinburne beneath its roof.

Alas there was no mention of Mangles in the letters (it was a rather long bow to pull, to be honest, but I had to check). Still, I was so pleased that I’d grown to know more of these two remarkable women.

Notes from the Field (ix)

I have been horizontal for 48 hours due to another bout of flu, and also very bored, so I figured it would be a good time to catch up on my blog of my UK trip.

Following my stay in Cambridge, I zigzagged east across the country to Matlock, an extremely pretty little town nestled between hills. The River Derwent ran through it, leafy trees hanging over the banks, and 19th century townhouses stretched up a slope in the distance. I was disappointed that I only spent an evening here, as the next day (after the most enormous British breakfast ever) I caught the bus to Chatsworth House.

One of Mangles’ correspondents was Joseph Paxton, a gardener trained at Kew who was appointed head gardener at Chatsworth in 1826, when he was 23. Chatsworth was home to the Duke of Devonshire, and Paxton was employed by the 6th Duke. In 1836 Paxton began building the Great Conservatory, which was a test run for the Crystal Palace, which he had designed for the 1851 Great Exhibition. He remained Head Gardener at Chatsworth until 1858.

I had been in touch with the archivists, who told me that a previous Australian had been through the archives and hadn’t uncovered anything. I assumed this was William Lines, who wrote the second biography of Georgiana, An All Consuming Passion. I still wanted to check the material out, because what one researcher finds in the archives isn’t necessarily going to be the same as the next researcher.

The house was undergoing restoration, and when I checked in I was led through a rabbit warren of dark rooms and stairs up to the offices. I took photos of Paxton’s letters written around the same time as those he wrote to Mangles (which are in Mangles’ letterbooks in the Battye Library in Perth), just in case I could glean anything from them, but nothing jumped out.

Mangles sent Georgiana’s seeds to Paxton, who grew them in the gardens of Chatsworth. Georgiana didn’t yet know the names for these plants, so she used a list of numbers. Paxton wrote that her collection was ‘collectively, the best and contains more good things than I have before received from that interesting part of the world.’ He sowed the Australian seeds, writing to Mangles on 3rd September 1839 that ‘It is with pleasure that I am enabled to communicate so favourable a visit from your invaluable collections of seeds. Several hundreds of the two last lots have vegetated, and are now making fine young plants. I have had a list made of those “Numbers’ of those which have vegetated’. When they grew, Paxton was able to identify them as kennedias, hoveas, chorizema, anigozanthos, mimosas (wattle) and everlastings.

There were a couple of letters from George Wailes, another correspondent of Mangles’ and John Lindley’s, regarding the horticultural show he organised as part of a ‘Fancy Fair’. Wailes wanted to show the Victoria Regia, a giant water lily (now Victoria Amazonia), and while the flower turned up, the leaf didn’t! More of Wailes in the next post.

Ladies near a folly & giant rhubarb.

I took a break at lunch and wandered out into the gardens, which had been under siege the weekend before from the Royal Horticultural Society Chatsworth Flower Show (the hotel manager in Matlock told me the hotel had been bursting at the seams with flower enthusiasts). I didn’t have time to see inside the house itself – I left in mid-afternoon to catch another series of complicated trains to Newcastle, as I was staying with friends and didn’t want to be too late.

I arranged for a cab to take me from Chatsworth to Chesterfield. The cabbie was a nice chap who pointed out the crooked spire of St Mary’s as he drove me to the station. It had twisted because the wood was green, so the timber warped over time, and also because the lead tiles used to cover the wood were very heavy. I was altogether very taken with the area, which is at the edge of the Peak District - clearly another visit is in order.

River Derwent in Matlock

Georgiana Molloy: Collector of Seeds and Words

Over at The Australian Legend, Bill Holloway is hosting a focus on the first generation of non-Indigenous women writers in Australia. As this is my area of specialty I thought I’d pen something on Georgiana Molloy and, if I get time, another on Rosa Praed.

Part of the garden at Crosby Lodge

Georgiana was born into a life of wealth in 1805 in Carlisle, England. Her father, an ambitious Scotsman named David Kennedy, married Elizabeth Dalton, daughter of the Mayor of Carlisle. Kennedy built a house on his wife’s land (which was now his) at Crosby-on Eden, a few kilometres east of Carlisle. Georgiana, as a girl training to become a lady of leisure, learned her first lessons about plants in its gardens. Like other decorative arts such as writing, painting and flower arranging, botany was seen to be a worthwhile pursuit for women as it combined leisure and learning. It encouraged women to go outdoors, learn botanical Latin and read handbooks about Linnaean systematics.

Georgiana’s father fell from his horse and died in 1819, leaving behind debts, five children and a widow with no means of supporting them. Georgiana was fourteen. As she grew older, her family situation became even more unstable, as there was conflict with her mother and sister. One of Georgiana’s motivations for marrying Captain John Molloy and emigrating with him to Augusta in 1829 was that her options were narrowing.

The Molloys were among the first Europeans to live at Augusta (roughly 300km south of Perth). Not long after her arrival, Georgiana gave birth to her first child in a tent, but the baby only survived twelve days. In Georgiana’s archives is an undated and unaddressed account which catalogues her baby’s decline towards death. I have always thought this was an attempt to make sense of the event. She wrote to her mother and her friend Frances Birkett about her child’s death, but this account must also have been sent to her family or friends, otherwise it would not have made it into her archives.

Georgiana’s grief could easily have turned her against her environment, but instead she and her husband responded with a tentative acceptance of it. Sometime after her daughter’s burial, Georgiana wrote in her undated account, ‘Dear Molloy went unknown to me and sowed Rye Grass and Clover over [the grave] and has recently put some twigs across it to form a sort of trellice work with the surrounding creepers which in this country are very numerous.’ The mingling of English and Australian plants seems symbolic. Later, Georgiana wrote that in her garden she had ‘frequently endeavoured to introduce the native Plants among the exotics, they do not succeed from want of their Native shelter’.

Georgiana had another five daughters and a son. In December 1836, she received a box of seeds from James Mangles in England, cousin to Ellen Stirling, wife of the governor of Perth. With the box was a letter requesting the exchange of the English seeds for ‘the native seeds of Augusta’. Georgiana didn’t have time to collect for Mangles on account of what she called ‘domestic drudgery’, but in November 1837 her son, then nineteen months old, fell into a well and drowned. Following this, Georgiana had a ‘dangerous illness’ (which I interpret as a breakdown), and when she recovered she went into the bush to collect seeds for Mangles, and to take her mind from her grief.

Kennedia

Georgiana’s extraordinary and poetic life has been chronicled in a number of biographies, most recently with great detail by Bernice Barry in The Mind that Shines. However little attention has been paid to Georgiana’s skill as a writer. The letters that she penned to her family are quite different to those that she wrote to Mangles. This is largely on account of audience, for writers always adapt to whomever they are writing for. To her mother and friends Georgiana chronicled the hardship of her life at Augusta and the heartbreak over her loss of her children. The letters to Mangles, however, sparkle and shine with wit, humour and poetry, particularly when it comes to writing about plants. Mangles gave Georgiana the opportunity to write with creativity and imagination, and the letters she wrote to him were extremely long. Below is an excerpt from a letter of 1840, so long that Mangles only made extracts from it. The Molloys had by this time relocated from Augusta to the Vasse (now Busselton) because the country there was better for farming:

            To day I have been employed in your service after breakfast the Children and I went in search of Flowers; — It has been a beautiful day & I have not been so long a walk for many months.  I found two sorts of lovely Kennedia Nos 50, 311 the first I had never seen before in flower altho’ I sent you a green specimen and the seed by the Box which certainly must have arrived in the beginning of July I have received so much from you I am quite ashamed to think of it, and the little leisure I have, or rather opportunities I take to endeavor [sic] to collect are so circumscribed I am quite mortified I cannot do more to contribute to your laudable pursuits.

              I was out riding a few days back & the country was assuming its usual garb Hibbertias & Hoveas thickly covered the ground I dried two or three Specimens but not being able to gather them myself I did not get all I wanted, However rely on it I will do my best — I have dried some beautiful specimens of Kennedia but by the time you receive them their brilliancy of colour will be fled — I never ride out that it is not on your account the other day when in search for Nuytsia I had most delightful success — We went a very nice ride in a south easterly direction following a small tributary stream to the Vasse, the banks were thickly studded with Banksia, Acaccia [sic] & the Shea - oak, the ground was adorned with the crimson flower of Kennedia, but not so profusely as it will be, a week or two hence — all at once after going through an interminable grove of Jacksonia we came on to an open plain of many acres in extent scarcily [sic] a tree on it and those that grew were large & fine — I discovered a plant I have been almost panting for, a very small neat white blossom, on a furze looking Bush, I do not know the Number, it is in the last collection, & Mr Preiss could not tell the name, it being peculiar to this Vasse Country We found a large quantity of it — a little further on another enigma was solved the beautiful White blossomed tree, the flowers I sent in my last I found to be the identical Tree. which bears those wooden Pears or Nuts, the first was hanging on the tree, but was too high for us to reach I was quite happy to make such a discovery as the shades of night were commencing we reluctantly turned homewards, when other agreemens met my inquiring eye — What? but a grove of “Nuytsia Floribunda” I thought myself really blest that these desiderata should place themselves before me, & going up to [the] trees I unhappily found I was too late, I should but for my long illness have had the seed, it was too dark to detect seedlings, but these I will repair for — you will think I am romancing when I tell you that out of this Nuytsia swamp we came on one as thickly & universally covered with Kingia if I understand rightly what Kingia is — the grass plant with many short heads branching out whereas the “Xanthorea hastile”, are very tall and upright, these 4 things have occupied my mind many a long day — I was quite exhiliated [sic] I had found these treasures so unexpectedly before this, I was working blindfold.

Nuytsia floribunda, just starting to open.

When Georgiana first began collecting, she didn’t know the names of plants, so she created a system whereby she named each of the seeds and their accompanying specimens, and asked Mangles to give her the names. In this extract this system is still place (evident through her mention of Nos 50 and 311) but she has learned the names of other plants and is keen to use them. Although she might not have been aware of it, Georgiana was practicing science: she created and organised her knowledge of  plants, then tested that knowledge against that of botanists such as John Lindley, professor of Botany at University College London.

Georgiana’s poetic tendencies appear in her use of adjectives such as ‘thickly studded’, ‘adorned’ and ‘small neat white’. Even more starkly apparent is Georgiana’s obsession with collecting, indicated by her comments ‘I ride out that it is not on your account’, ‘I discovered a plant I have been almost panting for’ and ‘these 4 things have occupied my mind many a long day’. The latter, in particular, indicates the intellectual nourishment that collecting gave Georgiana in a colony in which, when she first arrived, ‘Nothing was to be heard of but Beef and Pork’. Her joy in discovering these plants also underscores her sense of collecting as a vocation, as she wrote to Mangles, ‘when I sally forth either on foot or Horseback, I feel quite elastic in mind and Step; I feel I am quite at my own work, the real cause that enticed me out to Swan River.’

As Clarke and Spender relate in Life Lines, early women writers in Australia did not have access to publication, but this doesn’t mean they weren’t writing. Letter writing ‘could stir and challenge the creativity of the woman writer and promote a sense of power and pleasure in the achievement of the writing’ (Clarke and Spender, xxvi). Anyone who has read the letters of Rachel Henning will understand this, for Henning had a great capacity to stir her readers with plot and drama. Georgiana, too, used imagination and creativity to charm her audiences – at first Mangles, and now readers of the 21st Century. Her intelligence, fortitude and appreciation for her environment - so evident in her letters - continues to resonate and inspire.

Further Reading

Barry, Bernice. Georgiana Molloy: The Mind that Shines. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2016.

Clarke, Patricia, and Dale Spender. Life Lines: Australian Women's Letters and Dairies, 1788-1840. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992.

Shteir, Ann B. Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

White, Jessica. 'The Inexhaustible Properties of a Lady's Pen': The Literary Craft of Georgiana Molloy. Claiming Space for Australian Women's Writing, ed. Das, Devaleena, and Sanjukta Dasgupta. Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

2017: My Year of Writing

Even workaholics need to have fallow years if they are to continue functioning well. 2017 was such a year for me, as I needed to pull back after nearly killing myself in 2016 (when I hadn’t even properly recovered from 2015). I finally finished my memoir while I was on hols in Croatia, and while I might still have to do one more draft, it’s been a huge load off my shoulders. I was still unwell for most of the year, but the colds & flu weren’t as intense. And now, after a few weeks off over Xmas, I’m full of beans again. Long may it last! Below is a list of my literary doings over the past year.

Cockies on the Gold Coast

Publications

I had more academic work than creative pieces published this year, which makes sense as all my time is taken up by being an academic. If I do write fiction, it’s on the weekends, or bashed out the night before my writing group’s deadline.

At the beginning of the year, my essay on the craft of Georgiana Molloy’s writing was published in Claiming Space: Australian Women’s Writing. I started writing this essay in Rome at the end of 2014! This was followed in October by an essay on eco-memoir in Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir, in which I compared Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me with Tim Winton’s Island Home.

Just before Christmas, the Journal for the Association of Australian Studies published my essay on John Molloy’s (Georgiana’s husband) involvement in a massacre against Wardandi Noongars, and the subsequent papering over of this in later accounts. Writing this paper was hard work: it took hours to piece together a timeline of what had happened, as well as the debate over the events that resurfaced in later histories, and to attend to the language that was used in covering up what had happened. I was glad when it was finished.

In each of these volumes or issues, my work sat alongside that of other wonderful scholars, and I am really grateful to the editors for publishing my work.

In August I was Southerly journal’s monthly blogger, publishing four posts (one each week) about writing, deafness and environment. You can read them all via the links on this page. In October my eight-word story was featured on a billboard courtesy of the Queensland Writers Centre. That was pretty exciting!

I was pretty dismayed, once I got to the end of the year, to realise I hadn’t published any creative work (aside from said billboard), but then I remembered I’d finished my memoir. Fingers crossed that it gets somewhere this year.

UQ Ferry

Awards/Funding

I was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize again, this time for ‘Depths Exceeded’, which is a small part of my mermaid book. I’m still trying to find a home for it; I’ll get there eventually.

I continued with my study on vernacular criticism, for which I received funding at the end of last year, and will have this written up by March. It turned out to be a much bigger project than I anticipated and is eating up a bit of time. While it’s something that engages me intellectually, it isn’t a topic I’m downright passionate about, which is problematic. I remember one of my supervisors telling me that when you choose a PhD topic, it has to be something you’re obsessed with if your interest is going to carry you over three years. The same holds, it seems, for any kind of project. Still, it’s a good short-term study, and I’m finding I’m applying some of the research methods I learnt as a research assistant at Autism Queensland, which is a boon.

Gum blossoms!

Teaching

In the second half of the year, I was course convener for Women Writers, the subject I tutored in last year. This was a very steep learning curve – a little hairy at times – but it was ultimately very rewarding. The books I set were: Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Joyce Carol Oate’s Foxfire, Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Gillian Mear’s Foal’s Bread, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Helen Oyeymi’s White is for Witching. The students responded well to all these books except for The Golden Notebook (and some were a bit mystified by The Lesbian Body). Although The Golden Notebook was revolutionary when it came out, it held little meaning for them now. I wonder how or why that matters; Jane Eyre is poles apart from the experience of women in the 21st century but readers are still enraptured by it. Perhaps it was the form of the novel, which made it hard to digest, whereas Jane Eyre is a fairly conventional romance. Aside from this it was really heartening when students told me they enjoyed the books because they were works they wouldn’t usually encounter.

I tutored a class alongside the lectures, and as with last year I loved my students – they were confident, intelligent and outspoken. But by the end of the year I was in my usual haze of fatigue because of the toll of straining to listen and to lecture (every lecture is a performance). I think most people are knackered by the end of the year anyway, and the holidays straightened me out.

As well as the lectures for Women Writers, I also delivered one on Position Doubtful for the third-year Australian studies course. This year I’ll be lecturing on James Bradley’s Clade and Tim Winton’s Island Home for this same course, but I won’t be doing any other teaching as I need to devote myself to finishing my ecobiography.

Flowers at Kew Gardens

Conferences and Supervision

In February I presented on Liptrot’s The Outrun at a conference on excess and desire at The University of Queensland. In London in June, I presented on a digital example of ecobiography, Queensland artist Pat Hoffie’s ground trothing. In retrospect this was not a great example of ecobiography but I was trying to align it with the conference’s focus on digital life writing narratives. Still, I enjoyed being back in London, thought the conference was absolutely fantastic, and met some great Aussie writers and academics, including Ellena Savage and Nicole Matthews, who presented a very memorable paper on hearing air reviews.

From England I flew to Croatia and presented at the European Society for Environmental History conference in Zagreb (preceded by a field trip to Kornati National Park near Zadar). This was the first history conference I had ever been to. I presented a similar paper to that which I’d delivered in Perth the year before, on ecotones, but my paper, I found after some rather harrowing comments from the audience, was not up to scratch (no one likes getting criticism, but having to receive it in a public forum is way worse). Once I recovered from that experience and was able to examine the comments with equanimity, I realised they were constructive. I’m intending to present at the environmental history conference in Canberra this year and to do a better job.

As soon as I arrived back in Brisbane I turned around and went down to the Gold Coast to present on Molloy and ecobiography at a conference on Literary Environments. This was not a very smart move as I was shattered from jetlag, but I couldn’t bear to miss it because Ursuala Heise gave a keynote and a workshop, both of which were amazing.

I capped off the year with a paper on Georgiana Molloy’s participation in botanical connoisseurship – the rage for exotics collected by Europeans and grown in their gardens – for a conference on the Nature and Spaces of Enlightenment. I really enjoyed this conference as well but I was completely wrung out from the year, so I couldn’t make it to all the sessions.

Throughout the year I also took on the supervision of four creative writing students, three doing MPhils and one a PhD. I found this unexpectedly rewarding, as I could chat to them about their ideas and help them with their critical essays. I also supervised a wonderful third-year student who wrote a brilliant essay on young adult novels and their representation of deafness. Aside from my research, supervision is one of the satisfying parts of my job.

Kornati National Park, Croatia

Research

I used my funding to fly to the UK and comb through the archives relating to Mangles and his contemporaries. This was a great trip but it was jam-packed and involved zig-zagging up the country from south to north. I like travelling and the distances didn’t faze me, but I could have done with a more leisurely pace. My next big task over this month and next is to collate and transcribe everything so that I’m ready to write in March, as well as writing up the rest of my trip (it's happening, but v.e.r.y s.l.o.w.l.y).

V cool plants in the UNESCO Stari Grad Plains, Croatia

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

I put the ball for AWW on the shelf last year as I had too much going on, but managed to co-ordinate guest posts from lesbian/queer authors (Kelly Gardiner; Eden S. French; Jess Davidson; and my own thoughts on the themes that have appeared in guest posts by lesbian/queer women writers), and authors with disability (Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench, editors of Defying Doomsday; and Anna Spargo-Ryan). This year I’m picking up the baton from Marisa Wikramanayake and am going back to bi-monthly roundups, as well as the usual guest posts. This year, the theme for NAIDOC is ‘Because of her, we can!’ so I really want to feature more posts from Indigenous women writers.

BrisVegas rainforest

The Year Ahead

I have tried not to take on too much this year as I need to focus on finishing my ecobiography, but already there are quite a few pots on the stove. Aside from the two lectures which I need to write and present, and my vernacular criticism study to complete and write up, I’m co-ordinating, with Clare-Archer Lean from the University of the Sunshine Coast, two panels on the interface between science and literature at the annual literature conference in Canberra in July, as well as subsequent publication of these papers in the Australian Humanities Review. I'm also giving a workshop on Writing Animals and Their Worlds for the Queensland Writers Centre on Saturday 28th April.

On top of this I need to prepare a fellowship application for gainful employment next year, as my contract ends in January 2019. I think I had pretty much better say ‘no’ to anything else that comes into my inbox this year.

Health-wise I am determined to start running again, with the aim of doing a half-marathon in August, and of getting out of the city into bush more often. Exercise and the environment will help ameliorate my stress. I’m also casting about for some kind of hobby, instead of working all through the weekend. I think dancing, drawing and going to the movies are back on the cards. Well, time to dive into 2018!

Everything is going to be ok if there are peonies in the world.

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.