‘A Lady’s Pen’ The botanical letters of Georgiana Molloy

Writing a book based on years of research can take… quite a while. The publishing process, marketing and promotion eat up a lot of time too. When a new book comes out it’s an enriching but challenging time, an affirming but pressurising time, a joyful but fearful time. Most of all, it’s a time when there is no time for thinking about much else. Now, at last, I find myself with a quiet day at my desk on a gentle day that feels like an early end to winter. There’s a feeling in the air of new things ahead, and even though I still have a couple of small projects to complete, I can start imagining what might come next. Having time — thinking time — is surely the greatest writerly luxury of all.

But there’s a breathing space for reflection, too, so I’m looking back to answer questions I’ve been asked about the genesis of A Lady’s Pen. (University of Western Australia Publishing April 2023) Why did I first publish a full biography that didn’t focus on the scientific work for which Georgiana Molloy is remembered? Why did it take me eight more years to write in detail about her botany?

This book is probably the one I should I have written first in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ but I’m quite sure I couldn’t have done so before I’d spent all those hours getting to know the person, the time, the setting, the history and the other players on that stage. Our backgrounds, childhoods and early years have such influence on who we become that they shape us in ways we may not even be aware of. Discovering the details of Molloy’s family story and filling in what had been blank spaces in her first twenty-four years, gave me insights into her character that were invaluable in all the later research and writing. That understanding of what she’d been through even helped with the tricky business of transcribing her words. But most of all, I needed the time (make that ‘years’) to learn a lot more about the scientific world she was transported into when she began making her first collection around Taalinup (Augusta) in 1837.

It was a world dominated in nearly every respect by men. The settlers were under British law, written by men with no thought about how the same laws might or might not be administered in a place as different and distant as the West Australian bush, and in a community where the social norms that arrived on the Emily Taylor were disappearing within months as people adapted to a very different existence which included near starvation. Molloy was learning from Noongar people the names that had been assigned to local plants generations earlier, many of them unknown to the botanical world of Britain and Europe. As a woman born in 1805, the people she thought of as the experts were men and they’d never seen what she saw within a few metres of her home. Noongar women took her into the bush to show her particular flowers that were new to her. She realised these did not appear in the gardening magazines and catalogues she was reading. They were natural treasures and she knew more about them than the eminent men in London who gave lectures on botany. It’s unsurprising that Molloy took up the request to become a collector and devoted any spare time she had to that work with such energy and dedication.

I can see now that I’ve learned in much the same way that she did, as an amateur with a strong sense of intention and motivation, through research and investigation, trial and error. Most new understanding came gradually, over years, with the help of generous and knowledgeable experts but the biggest thing I’ve learned is that I still know very little about botany.

I recognise, now, that this isn’t a second book about Georgiana Molloy. It’s the story of a place and its biodiversity, the plants that are still evidence of uniqueness, the physical outcomes of being a living organism in the ecosystem of the ‘species rich’ Southwest Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR).[i] The Mind That Shines was a book about a person. The main characters in A Lady’s Pen are the plants.

An engaging fictional narrative usually reveals how the protagonist changes and that often holds true in non-fiction too.  The plants’ stories are told through Molloy’s relationship with them, the interaction between the woman and the flora that shared the same environment for a short time. Each acted on the other; change happened. She was changed because of her ‘prevailing passion’.[ii]  The indigenous species she collected (whether dried specimens or seeds) had their own stories altered too, but they became agents of change themselves, around the world.

In comparison with what some professionals gathered and sent to Britain, her collections were very small. She didn’t pack multiple bags of the same seeds in order to sell them. Her aim was to provide a matching set of viable seeds for each dried specimen, in the hope that growers and botanists would, one day, be able to see the living plant for themselves. Her field notes, written from a viewpoint not only scientific but also emotive, were different to those of other collectors. She tried to capture in words something more than the plant’s appearance. Those short texts reveal her respect for the plants in the most subtle of ways. Her own experience had long been shaped by living with adversity and it seems to me that the specimens she collected and prepared so meticulously carried with them not only the story of each plant and the environment that created it but also the part she had played — another species whose connection happened through an accident of fate, an unexpected request from a stranger.

When Molloy arrived on the banks of the Blackwood river in 1830 and endured the death of her first child after twelve days, she abruptly stopped writing in her diary. Weeks later, she opened the little book once again and wrote half a dozen words in pencil, the tentative beginning of a future. Those words were probably the first written record of Wadandi Noongar vocabulary in the Taalinup area. She could not have imagined that a few years later, she would be responsible for the first formal, botanical identification of Marri in Britain. Corymbia calophylla (formerly Eucalyptus calophylla) is one of the most common native trees in the Capes region and plays an important role in Noongar culture. We’re so familiar with the creamy presence of its lush flowers and the loud, drone of the bees that swarm to its sweet nectar, that it’s not easy to imagine a time when plant lovers in other parts of the world had never seen a living tree.

‘I was surprised during my illness to receive a nosegay from a native who was aware of my floral passion.’ [iii]

The list of species that I know she collected between 1837 and 1843 has continued to grow even in the weeks since publication of A Lady’s Pen. It includes specimens which have been lost since they were first documented so any evidence that she found them growing near her home has disappeared apart from a brief mention in a language I don’t read, in an old book. Others were destroyed in a fire. Some were once listed but are not extant today. A few, still retaining hints of the petal colour they showed on the day she picked them in 1839, can be traced back through the letters and diary entries of others to reveal the exact day they were collected and the place. One still holds its story from collection as a seed, through the dates of its ocean journey, to its new life as a seedling in a London greenhouse and then a full-blown flower, seen for the first time ever by British gardeners, then painted and published in a book.[iv]

Molloy had no concept of having arrived in a biodiversity hotspot but she did recognise (particularly after relocating further north to her new home, ‘Fairlawn’, at Yunderup/Undalup) the unusually wide range of native plants growing in the area. She worked obsessively to try and include every species, often struggling to identify small differences between one variety and another but she knew that was important, scientifically. The plants she collected in a wide range of habitats in the southwest between 1837 and 1842, include some which are now rare. The dried specimens are studied today by scientists learning more about the flora of this old, climatically buffered, infertile landscape where species are still being identified each year.[v]  They are sometimes assigned new names as science learns more about plant genetics, each two-word phrase designed to tell its own story of derivation or botanical structure in a way that’s consistent worldwide allowing even more detailed study and comparison. There is still so much more to discover.

We must acknowledge that Molloy’s interaction with the native plants around her was more invasive than admiration, observation, name-giving or even domestic gathering for pleasure. She took flowers and seeds and sent them out of their environment, effectively ending the lives of each one but, in doing so, she gave enduring life to their stories.

[i]  S D Hopper and P Gioia, The Southwest Australian Floristic Region: Evolution and Conservation of a Global Hot Spot of Biodiversity November 2004 Annual Review of Ecology Evolution and Systematics 35(1):623-65

[ii] Letter from Georgiana Molloy to James Mangles, January 1840

[iii] Letter from Georgiana Molloy To James Mangles, June 1840

[iv] Bernice Barry ‘A Lady’s Pen’ p. xxii

[v] S D Hopper, 2009, ‘OCBIL theory: towards an integrated understanding of the evolution, ecology and conservation of biodiversity on old, climatically buffered, infertile landscapes’, Plant and Soil, vol. 322, no. 1/2, pp. 49-86.

‘AND LASTLY… ‘

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‘AND LASTLY… ‘

 

For the last fifteen years, much of my research into the life and work of Georgiana Molloy has led me through beautiful gardens and wild expanses of natural bushland. I’ve caught my breath at the unexpected beauty of centuries-old, dried botanical specimens and I’ve shed tears on holding in my hand small pieces of paper with heartfelt words written on them that changed lives. I’ve spent more hours than I could count trying to immerse myself into the world of Georgiana Molloy and her family, reading contemporary books and documents, listening to music, staring at paintings and sculptures, trying recipes, even touching fabrics to imagine how they would have felt against my own skin as an item of everyday clothing. But the shadowy corners of that world are always there. I’ve always tried not to turn my face away from the dark side of her life, to face it full on and acknowledge it, but every now and again I’m reminded that her world was different in ways that do more than unsettle me. They horrify me.

On the voyage to the Swan River Colony (now Perth, Western Australia) the ship Warrior spent two weeks onshore in early 1830 at the Cape Colony/Cape of Good Hope, then a British colony in present day South Africa. Captain and Mrs Molloy enjoyed the company of the governor and his family, the other lords and ladies who were there, and spent a lot of time with the commandant of the British army garrison, who was an old friend and colleague of John Molloy.

The Government Gazette was the main local source of news for those who were interested in the births, deaths and marriages of the British colonists and for anyone who cared about who’d arrived, who’d left, and whether they travelled in an expensive cabin or roughed it in steerage with the crowds. This morning, in the edition for early 1830, I found the shipping notices of the arrival and departure of the Warrior and I did what I always do. I read everything else, especially the advertisements.

There were homes for sale, livestock and goods, a reward offered for news about a wayward son who’d absconded from home for the second time. There were others missing, too.  Lists of names and descriptions of enslaved people who had managed to escape. And, littered casually among items for sale—prime Irish butter, cut glass—there were the names of human beings. On any page, the offerings for purchase slipped to and fro’ between livestock, household objects and men, women and children.

There are indications in her family history, and in her writing, that Georgiana Molloy had different views and values to most of her fellow colonists, but in 1830, when she must surely have read the same document I read today, the abolition of slavery in British colonies was still three years away. I have no way of knowing if her feelings of revulsion matched my own or whether the text in front of her seemed no more unsettling than the usual kind of news.

Here’s the advert that led me to write this post.

It was quite long so I’ve used extracts (the italics are mine) but please, read on until you reach the names. Enslaved, all of them, some second and third generations of enslaved families in the Cape Colony, others first captured in their home country, with personal memories of the freedom that was their human right. They were aged between seventy-three. Bacchus, a labourer, born in Mozambique, and Mietje, not yet two years old, a daughter of Alida. In the minds of those who ‘sold’ them and those who ‘bought’ them, they were of less interest than the goods, the possessions listed before them as part of the same family’s sale.

I’ve written several times about the way that slavery in British colonies has a way of turning up again and again in my ongoing research, whether I’m writing fiction or non-fiction, so today is not exceptional but, for some reason, finding this advertisement in the newspaper I was reading, and the words that writer used on that day nearly two centuries ago, has hit a harder punch than usual. I have a feeling you’ll understand.

Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette 1830  (Brenda Gassner)

https://www.eggsa.org/newspapers/index.php/cape-of-good-hope-government-gazette

AND FURTHER WILL BE SOLD,
On Monday the 15th February next… All the valuable and elegant Furniture of the Estate, consisting in Sofas, Dining Tables; …

Bedsteads and Bedding complete; Looking Glasses, Toilet and Pier Glasses, Clothes Presses, Sideboards and Cupboards, Wash-hand Stands, a large Carpet, a Clock, 2 Fowling Pieces, 4 large Bibles, and some other Books, &c. &c &c.

Plate and Plated Ware Silver Table Spoons, and Forks, 2 Soup Ladles, Tea Spoons, Fish Slices, &c. plated Candlesticks…

Crockery, viz: – A blue Dinner Service, complete; a green Dessert Service…

Cut Glass – Such as Decanters, Comfit Pots, Fruit Dishes, Beer and Wine Glass, &c. –Culinary Utensils, Copper Boilers, Kettles. &c.

…

Carriages, Waggons, and Farming Implements – Comprising a covered Horse Waggon, 2 Bullock Waggons, with Yokes complete; 2 open Horse Waggons…

Cattle – 7 Horses, 70 Cows and Calves, 80 Oxen, and 10 Pigs

AND LASTLY,  the following clever male and female SLAVES, viz:

Bacchus, of Mozambique, Aged 73, Labourer.
David of Madagascar, 62 do
Jupiter, of Mozambique, 58 do
Louis, (1) of ditto, 47 do
Frit, of this Colony, 63 do
Francois, of Mozambique, 58 do
Abraham, of ditto, 43 do
Izaak, of this Colony, 37 do
Mercuur, of Mozambique, 43 do
Saul, of ditto, 43 do
Constant, of ditto, 48 do
Philander, of this Colony, 43 do
Thelemachus, of ditto, 48 do
Salomon, of ditto, 37 Shoemaker
Florian, of Mozambique, 29 House Boy
Benjamin, of ditto, 58 Carpenter
Jephta, of Bengal, 53 Cook
Hercules, of Batavia, 50 ½ House Boy
Frederik, of the Colony 17
Slammat, of ditto, 16
Apollus, of ditto, 14
Jan, of Java, 63 Mason
Esau, of this Colony, 50 ½ Taylor
Tulp, of Mozambique 43 Labourer
Jan, (2) of this Colony, 9 Child of Samida
Marie, of Madagascar, 63 housemaid
Mietje, (1) of Jave, 53 do
Alida, of this Colony,

(2) Mietje,

 21

aged 1 ½ year

 With her child
Mina, of ditto 12 years and 4 months.
Christia[an], of ditto, 22
D[ ], of ditto, 11 housemaid
S[ ], of ditto, [ ] do
Lau[], of ditto, 43 do
D[ iana ], of ditto, 23 With her child
Florentina, aged 2 years and 4 months.
Rigina, of this Colony, 46 1/2 sempstress

 

 

Image:

Thomas Whitcombe – View of Cape Town, Table Bay, Cape of Good Hope 1818

Thomas Whitcombe, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Arum Lily Story

There’s one question I get asked more than any other and it’s whether there’s any truth in the very longstanding rumour that Georgiana Molloy is responsible for the Arum infestation we have in southwest WA.

I’m sometimes told it’s ‘a historical fact’ but I’ve never found one piece of evidence to uphold it in fifteen years of research.  My own view is that, rather than keeping a focus on blame, we should use our energy and resources in trying to combat the spread of these invasive plants that cause devastation for our native species. Even so, after recently finding another item that adds to the historical jigsaw of the Arum story, and being told once again that Mrs Molloy was to blame, I decided it was time to offer my own research in a public forum.

Here’s a link to a short clip from this year’s annual “Georgiana Molloy lecture” in Augusta. I was talking about the early days of the settlement and this is the section where I shared what I’ve found out so far about the introduction of the Arum into the southwest.

ERGA Georgiana Molloy Lecture  2019

Thoughts on the season’s turning

Every now and then I post one of the texts I’ve transcribed as part of my continuing research into the life and work of Georgiana Molloy. Some of the things on my mind lately have been the connections between us all – Georgiana and me and you – that transcend time and place. A conversation with an old friend last night reminded me of the importance of holding on to the very personal stories that forge those links between women, the stories that aren’t limited by when we live, or where, or even how.

Today, as the ancient festival of Samhain approaches once again, I think about this time of year when, in the old religion, the beautiful young earth-girl Bride curls back into herself and the time comes for the Cailleach, the wise woman, the old woman who brings long dark days to the land, stillness and death. She’s the beginning of rebirth and the only way that Spring can come back to us.

Women they call ‘older women’ are the biggest demographic on planet Earth — and that’s not the only reason we matter!  We share histories and understandings and strengths and often go about our days quietly, like winter, like the Cailleach.

Here’s something for all of us, those who’ve ever had a child, lost a child or wanted a child. Georgiana Molloy wrote this in 1830 soon after her first daughter died in a tent on the beach in Augusta WA. It was sent to her mother along with the letter that told the full story of her first few weeks in the new colony. Evidence within the text suggests that she copied it from her own notes and the fact that she sent it as a separate document shows how important she thought it was to record every detail of little Elizabeth’s short life. I think it’s a reminder of the deep-rooted ways that women are connected through time and across cultures and spaces. We share and understand.

 

On Monday the 24th May 1830 Elizabeth Mary the only child of John and Georgiana Molloy was born. She laid for some time about ¾ of an hour without a single thing being done to her and sneezed 6 times but owing to circumstances which I had not power to obviate no remedy could be obtained. She was quiet and appeared to sleep all that day but at eleven or twelve at night I found her lying with her eyes wide open and looking quite awake. All said the moment she was born she was a fat child and her limbs well formed and very long, especially her legs and fingers. I never thought her in the least fat. Every symptom that day highly favourable.

On Tuesday 25th about 5 in the morning I called Mrs Heppingstone to attend her on seeing some marks on her cloaths [sic] & she was much alarmed in finding her dress and blanket soaked in blood owing to the navel string being so imperfectly tied as to be quite loose when the roller was unpinned, she said she thought poor Baby must have lost half a pint of blood. She with difficulty arranged it and Baby slept all that day, but towards evening the favourable symptoms began to change and her bowels assumed a palish green colour. She had only taken about a teaspoonful altogether of oatmeal gruel independent of what I gave her and she appeared to take her natural food with great avidity.

Wednesday 26 [sic] I gave her a little Magnesia and she did not seem affected by it in the least. Her feet and legs were icy cold and never any heat but when I either rubbed or held them. She seemed incapable of retaining warmth but still laid quiet and never cryed [sic] but when much disturbed such as being washed etc. I all along thought her a her fingers weakly child, her fingers and nails were so very long and she had much hair for so young an infant & her cry though very seldom was short & weak.

Thursday the 27th She continued much the same. I fed her occasionally as she used frequently to suck her beautiful fingers. She slept all day and I found her at night with her eyes fixed on the top of the tent. She had a very old expression in her eyes, sometimes making me laugh. I thought she frequently laughed but found afterwards her features twisted the same in her convulsions. The greeness [sic] still encreased. [sic]

Friday 28th We both took some Castor Oil, she a tea-spoonful which appeared to do her a little good but not immediately She could take more than I could give her but refused gruel.

Saturday 29th I observed some little white spots like blisters on her mouth and rubbed the inside of her lips with a little Borax which my beloved mother had provided for me. She was much better and her eyes were open nearly all day. The weather which before had been damp and cold was now very warm and she seemed benefitted by the change. I sat up doing many things, among the rest unpacking a little box with the seeds dear & kind Mr Butlin gave me little did I expect to open it at such a time. I pounded some Borax in the mortar. After 5 we both had a long & refreshing sleep till 8.

Sunday 30th She was quiet and slept much throughout the day, and seemed much the same.

Monday 31 [sic] She was not so well and much of an unwholesome colour evacuated. I thought the weather affected her from its again being damp. I observed some spots on her nose and forehead they called “the Gum” Mrs Dawson says, she perceived the poor child becoming thinner every day.

Tuesday June 1st I gave her more Magnesia. I thought she had taken cold and there was inflammation on her lungs, as her breathing was so short, and whenever she laid either on her side or stomach she cried, she seemed indifferent to food and sighed and caught her breath like myself frequently, she also cried more than she had previously done. Mrs Turner thought it was cold, but I think she had a cold from the time of her birth as she then sneezed 6 times before being dressed.

Wednesday 2nd I would not let her remain out of bed to be dressed, for fear of more cold but about eleven gave her a little Castor Oil which did not improve her malady. Her evacuations throughout were regular and the Meconium at her birth very profuse, which they said was a very favourable sign. This day she seemed much worse and cried and started when moved in her sleep even when well as I imagine she started often. At night she seemed much easier, but no variation in the colour still of a paler hue. She seemed very thirsty and I fed her as much as I possibly could.

Thursday the 3rd I had a very little sleep with her and she began to be very uneasy and cry much, about two in the morning she seemed to be instantly in the extremes of heat or cold so I gave her into Molloy’s arms where she laid more still and quiet but uneasily until about 6. She cried very much and seemed to twist her features & then cry! Her countenance was changed since the preceeding [sic] night her eyes much fuller and her mouth more projecting She shrieked when she cried and refused any food. I began to fear the worst – – – –

For the remainder see your letter which closes the scene of her few and evil days on earth. Some time after her burial Dear Molloy went unknown to me and sowed Rye Grass and Clover over it and has recently put some twigs across it to form a sort of trellice [sic] work with the surrounding creepers which in this country are very numerous. I have also sowed Clover & Mynionette [sic] which are up and planted Pumpkins which will rapidly creep on the twigs over it & form a sort of Dome. Was it not curious that on February the ninth I was very sick being at sea, and nearly all day in bed, & in mistake I had written in my Pocket Book (for the 23rd of May as I suppose) on the 24th) where shall we be this day.  & that was the very day of our poor childs birth.

Cumbria Archive Centre DKEN 28/3

 

Image credit: Daria Tumanova

Through a different lens

This image is a photograph of a letter seen through the magnifying lens of the Reading Room camera at the Battye Library. I chose this one because I wanted to write today about different ways of looking and different ways of thinking.

I’ve been bent over my keyboard for weeks trying to complete some writing by the end of May. It’s been a challenging activity. Some days, my mind has been blocked, twisted into knots with uncertainty. Other days, the words pour out easily and I can’t stop the flow.  When writing feels difficult, I treasure the solace, empathy and support that come from talking with friends who are writers. I know I’m not alone in that. I also find guidance and inspiration in reading. The words on the pages are the building blocks of stories and noticing the way other writers put those words together, sit them next to one another along the lines, that always helps me. But lately, I’ve realised that staying with what I know, the familiar and the comforting, is not the only way to learn and grow in my own work.

I’ve had lots of opportunities in the last couple of months to enjoy the creative outcomes of artists in a range of different media. That’s been a reminder that there are many, many ways of looking and many ways of telling stories. The freedom from words feels a bit like walking a new path that connects two places you know well. You arrive by a different route and the journey is different. You see things you’ve never seen before along the way. Whether the new track you’re taking is music, photography, sculpture or painting, or any other medium, seeing things from a different perspective can shed light in remarkable ways on your own viewpoint when you sit down to write again.

Today I visited the studio of Elisa Markes-Young, a local artist, as part of the wonderful Margaret River Region Open Studios annual event. I’d been in touch with Elisa and her partner, Christopher Young, last year when they held a joint exhibition that included some pieces inspired by the life and work of Georgiana Molloy. MRROS draws in such a wide range of artists in this region that it’s impossible to see everything. It’s an amazing privilege to see creative people working in their own environment so we always try to visit a few studios we haven’t been to before. I heard that Elisa is exhibiting one of the Georgiana works this year so her studio was at the top of my list.

She talked to us about the thinking behind the piece, and last year’s exhibition, and described how she had first come to the idea of representing the journey into botany as Georgiana’s refuge following the death of her eighteen-month old son by drowning. After thirteen years of research, I thought I knew everything there was to know about Georgiana Molloy and perhaps I do know most of the facts but what Elisa showed me was a completely different, new way of looking at the life of a woman I know well.  Something to do with a different viewpoint. Something to do with the life experiences of Elisa herself. Something to do with personal memories and emotions. Something to do with working in a medium that does not rely entirely on words. It was refreshing, inspiring and very moving. And I learned a lot.

One of the images here is from that piece which includes black mourning ribbons, embroidered with words from a letter Georgiana wrote in 1837 about her little boy’s death.

MRROS is on for another week and I’m definitely planning to stretch my mind and heart again over the next few days by exploring artists who work in different media.  If you’re around, or just down this way for a while, don’t miss out!  The list of contributing artists is HERE. Elisa and Chris are number 73 in the list and their delightful studio is close to Margaret River town centre.

 

 

 

Steps forward, steps backward

I write this on the day I heard the sad news that Ursula K Le Guin has died and, once again, I think of journeys. She told us it’s ‘the journey that matters, in the end’ (The Left hand of Darkness 1969) and I’ve reflected on that many times over the years.

When I was fifteen, I kept a notebook (what would now be called a writer’s journal, I suppose) and filled it with words. My own writing, then, was mostly poetry full of the anguish and passion of youth, but I also copied onto its pages anything that moved me or resonated with my teenage brain. I was already devouring anything I could find in the school library written in the eighteenth century, and poems ruled my heart.

When I emigrated to Australia sixteen years ago, just a single packing box was lost during the journey and my notebook was in that box, but I still remember with great clarity the power of one particular line and the way it made me feel when I first read it. The long poem it came from was called ‘The Journey’, written by Charles Churchill (1731-1764) and I copied the seven words so they were alone on the page.

‘I on my journey all alone proceed.’

I wasn’t the only teenager ever to feel the grip of disillusion and isolation even in the company of friends but I do remember, as I wrote the words, the sudden conviction that whatever might lie ahead in my life, the steps in that journey were mine alone to make. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of those same words and felt very connected to the girl who found a personal truth in a line of poetry. I don’t think of it now as a sad concept, because the years since then have been filled with friendship and love. It’s more the idea that, in the end (even if we happen to be surrounded by family and friends) the choices made, in the moment, belong to each of us. I’ve learned that there was always more in that line of poetry than I realised when I was fifteen. The journey is so many things.

When I write, each day can be a long journey, and so can just one page. Sometimes even a word, if it’s a hard one to find. A single moment can move me from one thought to another, changing the direction of everything.  And each time I sit down at my desk, and wonder whether doing something else might be a better idea, what I choose to do is the next step.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the main character in the novel I’m writing at the moment has a habit of counting her steps. Towards someone, away from something, nearer, further away. Steps forward, steps backward, but always proceeding in life. Like a story.

The skating minister: how I found a protagonist

This is the story of a protagonist and how he found his way into my imagination.

In late 2014, I had the bare bones of a new book, the themes and basic structure. I had the main characters too, but I still knew very little about them. I was really challenging myself when I suddenly decided to make the main character a man. Would I be able to look at the world through his eyes, think his thoughts and speak for him through the dialogue? How would I get to know him well enough to write convincingly?

On a visit to the National Gallery of Scotland, in Edinburgh, I was blown away by the amazing collection but there was one portrait that I didn’t want to walk away from. The moment I saw ‘the skating minister’ I knew I’d found the man I’d been trying to picture in my imagination for weeks. Everything was right: the subject was the right age, born in the right year, and he was painted in Scotland. I thought about that painting for months and when I looked at it again on the Internet, back at my desk in western Australia, I began to get to know my fictional character better.

I was spending time randomly doing research for the book while I worked on self-publishing and marketing ‘Georgiana Molloy, the Mind That Shines’ and I was still not sure whether or not to start work on a new piece of writing that would keep me busy for at least a year.

In November 2015 Mike and I went to Sydney for a few days and I met with Alex Craig at Picador for the first time, to finalise details of the new publishing contract for ‘Georgiana Molloy’. Right after that meeting, I walked with Mike across the park to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see an exhibition I’d read about and was really keen to see. It was called, ‘The Greats’ and all I knew was that it included some of the most famous paintings in the world. As we walked into the foyer, I went cold, on the hottest November day in Sydney for twenty years. The skating minster was everywhere around me, on enormous posters, on every display area and on the front cover of the exhibition catalogue. I’d had no idea, until that moment, that all the paintings had been loaned by the National Gallery of Scotland, and that the painting by Sir Henry Raeburn that had captured my imagination had been chosen as the main iconic image.

The Reverend Robert Walker, skating on Duddingston Loch, had followed me from Scotland to Australia and I stood in front of him once again and stared even more closely. I bought his face on a T-shirt, on a bag, on a postcard and even on a case for my glasses.

I knew then, without any doubt, I had to write the story of my fictional David Dennisoun Sinclair. The portrait gave me most of the important characteristics of the man I came to know well over the next two years. He had once studied to become a minister of the church. The black clothes he wore for the rest of his life would contrast well with another main character who dressed very differently. The painting itself gave me one of the most important scenes in the story, too. And there was much more.

While I was writing and redrafting and editing, I looked at the skating minister every day, pinned next to my computer. Writers work in so many different ways and what works for one doesn’t work for another. I know that, for me, a character that has its roots in something real – even just a place, a name, a face – is what makes me want to write. If someone is real to me, they matter.

Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch
Sir Henry Raeburn c1795 Attribution:Henry Raeburn [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Research for writing 2: THE TEXTURE OF LIVED EXPERIENCE

The writing has been going slowly during the last couple of weeks, not because I’ve been slacking but because I’ve been researching more than usual as I write. It’s a reminder that research, for a writer, is so much more than checking names and dates and background events when drafting the plot.

I’ve been reading more than usual as well. I’m writing in a genre that’s new to me and I learn from the books I really enjoy as a reader. It’s all there on the pages, how to do it well. Sometimes, how to get it wrong (for me, anyway) is there too, and I learn from that. I’ve realised that the way a writer uses their research, the way it lives and breathes in the story, very often makes the difference between a book I can’t put down and one I struggle to stick with past the first chapter.

When a show house is ready for viewing, the designers ‘dress’ the rooms for the public, to make them look lived-in and attractive: scatter cushions, vases, books on the coffee table, magazines by the bed and pictures on the walls. And yet, somehow, nothing looks real. The appearance of human habitation has been dropped in and it doesn’t fool anyone. Nobody’s home. The same thing happens when the outcomes of a writer’s research are scattered like those cushions, placed deliberately to add the sounds and smells and sights of a particular historic period. The name of a song popular at that time, the title of a book that was being read, the name of someone who was in the news, an apparently casual reference to something topical, dressing the spaces. It all adds up to an effect that’s attractive, just like the ornamentation in a show house, but it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t take you into the minds and bodies of the characters living there.

Hilary Mantel has said that the job of a novelist is to ‘recreate the texture of lived experience’ and, from my own reading, that doesn’t happen when historical authenticity has been injected into the story in the redrafting. I can only say what I know about my own writing but for me, research is as much a part of the writing process as it is part of the preparation for writing. It takes a long time to understand the world picture of the lives lived by my characters from the past. When I write about them, or find the words to let them think or speak, I need to know what they care about, what they fear, what makes them laugh. I agree with Hilary Mantel when she says it’s time to write when you ‘not only know what your characters wore, but you can feel their clothes on your back’.

Sometimes I feel that slipping away from me and that’s when I have to step back and re-immerse myself in the world my characters inhabit. What’s available from a free Internet download is varied and surprising. My protagonist is nineteen years old in the chapter I’m writing at the moment, and the year is 1798. I’m reading the same stories she read in women’s magazines that year, studying the newspaper cartoons she saw that caricatured politicians and well-known people. I’ve spent several hours reading a cookery book published that same year, which helpfully includes advice about how to maintain a household, including how to remove bed bugs from a headboard and how to use wet sand to clean a kitchen floor. I’m reading poetry published in monthly magazines, newspaper reports and, more than anything else, the advertisements, those self-contained little stories that reveal so much about what mattered to men and to women. It’s not a fact-gathering activity. It’s a method of transportation through time and I can feel myself shifting back into her world. The cotton cambric on her back feels light, flimsy, too cold on a day like this. Discomfort.

‘Research is not a separate phase from writing. There is no point where the writer can say, “I know enough.” Writing a novel is not like building a wall.’

The quotations are all from the fourth of Hilary Mantel’s 2017 BBC Reith lectures, ‘Can these bones live?’ broadcast by BBC Radio 4 and available as Podcasts

Pleased to meet you!

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It’s been happening again, that thing.

I’m sitting at my keyboard, thinking I’m writing a novel and doing what authors do. Managing the plot. Creating characters. Making things happen. Deciding who does what and why. After all, it’s fiction. Then, even as I type the words, I become an observer. Forced to stop my silly game of authorial control, I see what really happened, like playing the action on a DVD. They show me what they did, the people in my story, what they said, they even hint at why. Now and then I’m forced to watch, helpless, as someone I wasn’t even expecting walks in to the room bold as brass, someone (I now realise) who will be essential to untangling the mess of motivations and situations I plotted (Ha! Ha!) when I wrote that first plan a few weeks ago.

I don’t spend much time scanning social media but even my quick, half-awake early morning visits to Twitter reveal that I’m not the only writer to experience this phenomenon. But I still don’t understand what’s going on. I’m more convinced than ever that I don’t write what I make up. I write what I’ve already watched taking place. After a few lines, I close my eyes and just wait to see the next bit of the current scene, with no idea what might happen. Of course, I decide which episode I’ll watch (‘I need to write the bit where…’) but after that, it’s all down to them, those people I thought I’d just made up, conjured from the rich tapestry of stereotypes who populate my imagination after six decades of story-reading. But it turns out they’re real, my characters, they have lives and they want me to get the facts right.

They have names, too. Between you and me, it’s a bit creepy sometimes, the way it goes. Today, for example, a new character has just joined the story, a cook who worked for a family in London in 1799. I didn’t know she’d be arriving. She’s a very minor character (at least, as far as I know at the moment but she might have more to tell me) and I needed to know her name. That’s it exactly. She really did have a name and it’s not for me to just make one up. I did what I usually do, and looked for her name. Sometimes it’s the parish registers I go to, for the right place and the right years. Today I knew I’d find her in the trial transcripts for the Old Bailey in London. I scanned down hundreds of names until I found her. There she was. Poor woman stole a loaf of bread while she distracted the baker by discussing the cost of cooking a gooseberry pie in his oven. But it was definitely her.

Mrs Whiskin, pleased to meet you, after all this time. I look forward to getting to know you.

 

Research for writing 1: DISTANCE NO OBJECT

I’ve been thinking lately about the many different ways that research contributes to my own writing. There’s been a lot on the social media landscape about the ways other writers use research. In reality, it can be a very expensive process and can seem problematic or impossible if it involves travel.

I gave a talk this week about the research behind my last book, a biography of 19th century botanist, Georgiana Molloy, and just yesterday I had a completely new kind of research experience so I think the time has come to say a bit about what all this means to me. Research is so much a part of the work I do, so embedded in my writing and thinking, that this blog will probably have to be a two-parter!

In the early days of the research for ‘The Mind That Shines’ I occasionally had to travel to the UK for work and it was a chance to do first-hand research in the archives at weekends while I was there. I even travelled to the places where Georgiana had lived in London and Scotland, though time was seriously limited by my budget. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know I emptied my bank account for a train ticket and the cheapest hotel in town to see a diary in the north of England the day before I came home to WA. I realise now that I might have been able to apply for a grant to support some of that decade of research but I was happy just to follow in Georgiana’s footsteps while I was on that side of the world. My husband spent his weeks off – for years – in graveyards and museums in lieu of holidays and I’ll always be grateful to him for his forbearance.

Time has moved on. The research question comes up again and again. I’ve finished work on another story set partly in Jamaica in the late 18th century. I’ve never been there. I’m retired so now I have all the free time I ever dreamt of but a research trip for that book was financially out of the question. So, I used first-hand contemporary accounts, available free online, and immersed myself in descriptions, diaries, letters. I read for hours and hours until I felt as if I knew the place. I could feel it and smell it. Perhaps not the same as a visit but perhaps even better – I needed to know what it was like to be there in 1790.

Today, I’m in the early stages of a novel set in London in the early 19th century and it involves a true crime. With a list of vital documents in the archives there, papers I need to see, I felt blocked in moving any further with my writing. A long-distance trip to the UK is out of the question. How many of us can choose to travel interstate, or even further afield, just to do research for a book?

But there are ways! A generous friend who lives near London agreed to visit one of the archives on a sunny London morning. I spent the evening here in Western Australia  and she sent me some photographs of a document, just as if I was there with her. It was a thrilling experience to see somethingI longed to see for myself, popping up on my computer screen – perhaps even more exciting than it would have been to be there myself.

It was Miranda’s first go at archival research and I’m happy to say she enjoyed it very much. Actually, I think that’s an understatement. She was moved by the closeness such an old document can give us to people who lived in the past “I must say it is VERY exciting to hold something that may not have been read for 200 years. You do rather feel the ghosts.” She was in awe of the amazing knowledge the archivists have. “They were so incredibly knowledgeable and good at their job.” I saw her connection to the story growing as her emails came through. “It’s been really enjoyable so far! And very different. It’s everything you expect it to be but 100% more.”

So, if you really want to write about a place you don’t know from personal experience… If you want to see a document that’s hidden away in a library somewhere… If you want to just know what it’s like to stand in a particular place, far away, and your finances don’t smile back at you…. Don’t give up, at least not until you’ve explored all the research pathways that could take you there in other ways. It’s obvious that the first choice for all of us would be to make the trip, feel the paper, see the landscape, touch the bricks. But if that isn’t an option we can travel in other ways. We have imagination and when that merges with careful research, distance does not have to be a barrier. Other writers may feel differently, and I can only pass on my own experience, but I hope these thoughts might be helpful.