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 (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.

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.

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.

Notes from the Field (iv)

I headed to WA again in late November for conferences & research, and took my boyfriend with me so I wouldn’t have to drive & bushwalk on my own. We stayed in Fremantle and I left him to his own devices while I went to the Ecological Society of Australia conference to listen to a symposium on Indigenous Biocultural Knowledge. There were plenty of interesting presentations, such as the investigation of dieback in culturally significant Melaleucas in the Laynhapuy Indigenous Protected Area in northern Australia. The results of Western scientific methods of investigating dieback corresponded with the information derived from interviews with senior traditional owners ie both methods indicated that 70% of the problems were caused by salinity and erosion from pigs and buffalo. Another team monitored bilby populations by drawing on Indigenous ecological knowledge on where bilbies were distributed an how they liked to live, and combined this with their data on population levels. I was dismayed to see that these bilbies had once lived in the eastern states too but now their last stronghold is in Indigenous land that covers the deserts of WA and the NT. Their populations had also shrunk in quite a small space of time.

Some of the presentations also described different models of working with scientists. Some maintained their autonomy and slowly built up relationships with stakeholders, others are employed via the federal government, but worryingly funding for this is not secure. The Country Needs People campaign is raising awareness about this – you can head to their page to read about the work rangers do and sign a petition to support them. Speakers also stressed the importance of collaboration, rather than appropriating information, or coming in and doing a project and leaving again, rather than forming continuing relationships.

As a literary scholar at a conference for scientists, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to understand anything, but the presentations were all clear and straightforward.

Then we headed down to the south west, stopping on the way at Lake Clifton, which houses thrombolites (our ancestors!). Annamaria Weldon writes about this lake in The Lake’s Apprentice and the area was beautiful – the light silvered, the lake choppy and foamy with wind. The b/f, whose first degree is in ecology, looked around for bugs while I took photos.

We headed on to Margaret River, through which I’d travelled when researching A Curious Intimacy, but never stayed at. We were a little way out of town in a lovely house among the eucalypts. Nearby was an abandoned vineyard through which wallabies hopped.

I needed to get to know the area, so I’d arranged a tour with Sean Blocksidge, who was informative, funny and very personable. I couldn’t get over how blue the sea and sky were. A few wildflowers were still out; it had been an incredible season because there’d been quite a bit of rain, but generally the rainfall is decreasing. The wineries also use a lot of water so it’s uncertain what will happen to them as climate change affects the area. Sean took us canoeing on the Margaret River, which was still and tranquil, and showed us a part of the Three Capes Track. I also just about turned inside out when I saw the Nuytsia floribunda was in flower - botanists in England were desperate for this plant but they could never get it to grow, because they didn't realise it was a parasite. I hadn't seen it on previous trips because it only flowers at Christmas (and is known as the Christmas tree, although the Noongar names for it are moojar, moojerool, munjah and mutyal).

We did another tour with Josh Koomal Whiteland which was fantastic. Josh is a Wadandi man, and he's now based in Dunsborough. With a stick he drew a map in the dirt of the different groups which lived in the south west, and explained about the six seasons, and how eating different plants and animals is contingent on their breeding or flowering times. I wished I could have learnt more about this, as it made my brain explode, I but figured he needed a tour that interests a wide range of people (it also included a look around Ngigli Cave where he played his didge, which was wonderful). Josh had a great sense of humour and a gentle disposition. A snake lived near the drain, so he got out his stick in case he needed to move it on. ‘It’s their place, too,’ he explained.

Another highlight of the trip was having a cuppa with Bernice Barry, who has published a very detailed and extensively-researched biography on Georgiana Molloy, The Mind That Shines. There were plenty of parallels between her own life and Georgiana’s, and after researching Rosa and Maud Praed for so long, I wondered if, as researchers, we’re drawn to those whom we have synchronicities because we understand their motivations and actions. At any rate, that sense of connection is important when you’re working on a project that takes a long time, otherwise you’d get bored and walk away.

We were heading to Augusta the next day to have a look around, and Bernice suggested we check out the granite rock where Georgiana sometimes collected (and would have had to get there by boat). She also recommended Castle Rock, to which Georgiana dreamed of moving, and when we got there I could see why – the water was exquisite. I was bitterly disappointed that I hadn’t packed my swimmers, but the b/f said we could come back – I hope so!

Thence it was back to Fremantle for the bi-annual InASA conference, the theme of which was ‘Encountering Australia’. I presented my research on ecotones and caught up with some fab folk who I hadn’t seen for a while, and listened to a splendid keynote by Kim Scott on the importance of listening to and growing Noongar language.

Before we caught the plane back, we ducked into the art gallery to see the ‘Unknown Land’ exhibition, about Europeans’ first views of Western Australia. I’d seen a few of these in books, but I hadn’t known that Louisa Clifton, who came to Australia as part of the ill-fated Australind settlement in the 1840s, was also an artist. Her lithograph of Koombana Bay was intricate, its muted, melancholy blues very unlike the bright seas we'd seen, although that could just be my interpretation as I know she wasn’thappy about having to leave England. Women didn’t get much of a say in those days.

I was a bit sad to fly back east – I loved Freo and the south west is a marvelous and overlooked part of Australia – but after a month of living out of a suitcase I was also desperate to wake up in my own bed, tend to my beleaguered plants, and get a coffee from the café on the corner.

Notes from the Field (iii)

The last few months of this year were unbelievably hectic, being filled with conferences and travel. Despite the exhaustion occasioned by running around the country, I met plenty of great people and listened to some wonderful papers.

At the beginning of November I flew to Sydney to listen to and present at the Australian Women’s Writing Symposium, which I wrote about here. I returned to Brisbane to do my marking, then came back to Sydney to speak at Quantum Words, a science writing festival organised by the NSW Writers Centre – a post about this is in the pipeline.

I’d booked a week of annual leave to try to finish my Praed book at my brother’s place in the Blue Mountains, but as it was the first time I’d stopped properly for a while, I got sick. I also ended up having to finish my marking and write conference papers, so that was a bit of a disaster.

Passed this fellow when out for fresh air & caffeine.

Then it was back to Sydney for the ASLEC-ANZ environmental humanities conference, where I presented on two ecobiographies, Dick Roughsey’s Moon and Rainbow and Margaret Somerville’s Body/Landscape Journals. There were wonderful keynotes at this conference, including Alice Te Punga Somerville, Elspeth Probyn and the wonderful artist John Woolsley, pictured here with his taped-together notes. Alice stressed the importance of included Indigenous scholars in one's work. 'Who's in your ecology?' she asked. 'And does it include Indigenous academics?' It's a point worth remembering & acting upon.

Alas I could only spend a day at this conference, as the next day I headed down to Wollongong for the Colonial Formations conference, which was just fantastic. I wish it hadn’t been on at the same time and that I could have stayed there for longer. In a keynote, Jane Lydon discussed how anti-slavery contexts were applied to Australia, for example the second fleet to Australia was contracted by slave owners, and the 1830s saw the height of anti-slavery discussions but it was also when colonial violence was endemic in the south west. She referred to the limits of empathy, in that we might feel but not act and a representation of suffering might obscure a slave's subjectivity. Coldness and compassion are two sides of a coin, which I thought was an interesting idea. There was also the secrecy of massacres - the frontier violence of Myall Creek was obscured for decades. Even Rosa Praed, writing about the Hornet Bank massacre decades afterwards, distorted her narrative.

Then there was an absolutely brilliant panel on collectors. Deidre Coleman of The University of Melbourne spoke about Henry Smeathman (1742-1786) an entomologist about whom she is writing a biography. In 1781 he wrote an essay 'Some account of the termites, which are found in hot Countries', and Deidre looked at how he used the termitary and the way in which termites colonised as a metaphor for human colonisation. She also described how insects helped him to communicate with a range of classes, including wealthy collectors and the people of Sierra Leone, where he collected. He sent natives to collect for him but their curiosity and bartering was overwhelming and drove him nuts. Ann Coote of UNE then spoke about Indigenous guides and collectors in a very clear and well laid-out presentation on why Indigenous people agreed to collect for Europeans. Reasons included obtaining useful goods and information, personal prestige, communal stability and the protection of Country by controlling the movements of collectors. Jude Philp, senior curator at The University of Sydney, then talked about collectors in Papua New Guinea in the 19th Century, and how some of these made their way into Aberdeen University so that people in Scotland could know something of Papua New Guinea. And Simon Ville, a professor of economics and business history at Wollongong, ended the session with a discussion of how the commerce of collecting - how prices were negotiated, for example, or the reputation signalling of naming.

View from train window.

It also happened to be the last day at the university for my good friend and former poetry teacher, Alan Wearne. At lunch we had a coffee and Alan printed out his latest poem for me. Then I caught the train back to Sydney, a trip which is simultaneously too long and invested with my ambivalent memories of Wollongong, but also very pretty.