‘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

Over the hills and far away

It was just an evening walk along the beach so I was a bit surprised to see myself caught on camera trying to get a signal on my iPad. I’ve been a bit obsessed lately with research for a new book and it turns out that when I’m doing one thing I’m often (usually?) still thinking about that story. It won’t let me go. The fierce hold it has on me is what gives me the momentum and energy to make myself sit down again at my desk, day after day, even when the sun shines and the world outside is beautiful.

But I think I’ve come to the end of the road with research I can do from so far away. The story, a true tale, takes place in London in the eighteenth century. It’s amazing how much can be discovered using online searches and digital images of records available in the public domain. I’ve pieced together the bare facts of the protagonist’s life and found some wonderful detail about the settings. I’ve used my imagination to take me there, back through time and across oceans. I’ve drafted scenes and written dialogue using transcripts of documents from websites. But this is as far as I can go without travelling in real time and space. There’s so much more. But it’s all in London – in archives and museums and libraries – and I’m on a beach in Western Australia. Far, far away.

This morning, something new appeared in my online rummaging and it’s so exciting that it made my heart pound but it will be impossible to find out more without going on a very expensive journey. So, for now, I’ll keep doing what I tell everyone else to do!

Search. Imagine. Write. And never give up.

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.

 

Lizard on a log?

Well, that hasn’t been me over the last two months since my last blog! I haven’t been slacking but the current projects have been moving forward in fits and starts in a busy diary of events including a few overnight trips to Perth. Last week was the final booking until November so I’m back to editing my new manuscript and working on some transcriptions that have been patiently waiting, so I’m hoping to tick a few longstanding things off the list very soon. A week of illness was frustrating – sneezing and coughing but no writing – though there was a bright side: all that thinking time and now I have a brand new file on my computer: the title of the next manuscript. It even contains some character and plot notes. If I ever get to the writing (2017?) it will be a prequel and that feels like an interesting challenge.

img_6563 St Bartholomew’s, East Perth

Last weekend was the wonderful, annual Perth Heritage festival and I was lucky enough to speak in two very special venues, each so different. Perth Town Hall was grand and impressive, the most elegant stage I’ve ever been on to talk about Georgiana Molloy.  St Bartholomew’s in East Perth was small and intimate, a beautiful little building and a very moving setting because two of Georgiana’s daughters were buried there.  A big thank you to Heritage Perth and to the National Trust for inviting me. The sore throat and disappearing voice arrived just hours after I finished the second talk so it was lucky timing!

Perth Town Hall img_6571 img_6574

Tiny details

Minutiae…  Small pieces of information can fascinate.  They don’t usually answer the big questions but they work together in magical ways to bring the past to life.  An individual is placed in a more detailed setting and their world is populated with real objects, against a background of colours and sounds. Even now, for most of us, each day is usually an accumulation of small experiences.  Finding details in the lives of the Molloys and the people whose lives touched theirs in some way (as family, friends, ancestors or descendants) was an important part of learning to understand their world but most of the information that I found so absorbing couldn’t be included in the book; long lists of facts aren’t always welcome as part of storytelling! But the small things that intrigued me continue to do so because they make people I’ll never meet seem just a little more real. Here’s a small and very random selection of information that came my way. I hope it gives you a sense of the enjoyment I find in history.

*When Georgiana was at school in London in the 1820s, she had her hair cut about every five weeks. Her mother had to pay additional costs for almost everything apart from the food she ate: washing for each year, the sheet music provided for her music lessons, visits to the opera, the cleaning of bonnet ribbons, the fees of her ‘Dancing’ teacher and any hairdressing required. She attended a performance of Handel’s ‘Messiah’ and for some reason I can’t imagine, she needed purple net and a black silk apron.

*The Adult Orphan Institution where two of the Bussell sisters were educated in London after their father’s death was started by Sophia Williams. Sophia was an illegitimate daughter of (Giacomo) Casanova, the Italian writer known today for his amorous affairs.

*When Georgiana’s mother married David Kennedy in Carlisle in 1800, it was an unusually warm autumn. In the English countryside, Michaelmas daisies flowered and walkers who were out in the early evening air saw gossamer floating on the breeze.

*Captain Duncan Darroch of Drums near Dumbarton, a friend of Georgiana when she was living in Scotland, was even more dashing and eligible than I had space to detail in the book. This future Baron of Gourock was part of the military guard for the exiled French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte on the small, barren island of St Helena. He was present when Napoleon died, an event that caused even the most patriotic English soldiers to collect souvenirs – a lock of hair or a piece of lint dipped in Napoleon’s blood.

*The research of Georgiana’s granddaughter, Georgie Bisdee née Hale, helped me find the right pathways to explore. There wasn’t room in the book to include the beautiful details of her wedding, an occasion that showed how John and Georgiana’s descendants had thrived.

‘Her dress was white crepe de Chine over white silk, trimmed with some beautiful old lace and chiffon. The bridal veil, arranged to shade the face and to fall in graceful folds past the waist at the back, was a piece of lovely old Brussels lace, and had been worn by the mother of the bridegroom on her wedding day more than sixty years ago. It was caught at the back with a diamond fillet. A shower bouquet of white roses and bouvardia completed the costume. The two bridesmaids were Miss Dorothy Bisdee, niece, and Miss Joan Cox, cousin of the bridegroom, who both looked very pretty in gowns of cream-embroidered mousseline de soto over silk, with cream straw hats, trimmed with champagne coloured ribbon, and carried bouquets of fortune’s yellow roses and autumn leaves, with trails of Virginia creeper.’

Western Mail Perth WA 7 May 1904 (trove.nla.gov)

*Listening to music from the past, recent or distant, can seem to make the years disappear. On 17 March 1812, as John Molloy’s regiment took up their battle position outside the town wall of Badajoz in Spain, their band was playing the very appropriate tune,  ‘St. Patrick’s Day’. On 15 June, after weeks of marching, hunger and hardship, the regiment arrived at Puente Arenas, a town where they could rest and re-supply. The band of the 1st Battalion played, ‘The Downfall of Paris’ (another traditional dance tune) as they marched over the bridge and camped nearby. There are many versions available to listen to but this one transported me to a place side by side with the marching men of the Rifle Brigade.

And on this clip the wonderful Martin Carthy tells the full story of how this tune came to be a favourite during the Napoleonic War.

*By the time Georgiana’s mother was forced to move out of Crosby Lodge, she had reduced her household to just two servants, a man to do the heavy work/odd jobs and a woman. This meant that Mrs Kennedy had to take on some domestic duties herself, probably for the first time in her life.

*The city of Ladysmith in South Africa was named in 1850 for Juana María de los Dolores de León Smith, the wife of Sir Henry George Wakelyn Smith. This Harry Smith was John Molloy’s old friend from his days in the Rifle Brigade and Molloy was with him when he first met Juana in Spain during the Peninsular War in 1812.  Georgiana met her too during their stay at the Cape of Good Hope. Juana taught the newlywed Mrs Molloy the Spanish folk songs that she and John later sang to their children.

*In her letters, Georgiana often made reference to poems and stories from her childhood, or mentioned the fact that her children knew them too. Most of these can still be traced through Internet searches. The nursery song, ‘Dame Durdan’ tells a story of farm life much like Georgiana’s in Augusta:

‘Dame Durdan kept five servant maids to carry the milking pail,
She also kept five labouring men to use the spade and flail.’

Another example: in 1833 she asked her sister to send her some books for little Sabina, ‘The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s feast’. A poem written by the Princess Mary tells this simple story (Bell 1808) and other versions (William Roscoe) were designed for children. New editions and adaptations of both are still in publication today.

‘And there came the Beetle, so blind and so black

Who carried the Emmet, his friend, on his back;

And there came the Gnat and the Dragon-fly too,

And all their relations, green, orange and blue.’

 

‘Emmet’ is an old English word for an ant. You can see the rest of this 1808 text here.

*Captain Francis Byrne was an army colleague and friend of John Molloy but when the two couples travelled together to Perth, Georgiana found that she disliked Mrs Byrne. Anne-Matilda was the daughter of Sir Amos Norcott, a commander in the Rifle Brigade. Her brother Charles sailed to WA with her and became Superintendent of Police. The area known as Norcott Plains was named after him and so was a street in Perth, but ‘Noreatt Place’ was the result of someone misreading the spelling of his name!

A wintery update

The beginning of June is the beginning of Winter in Western Australia. The native plants in the garden are coming into flower and there are lambs in the paddocks but the rain isn’t stopping for a while yet so time today to get on with some indoor jobs – like posting an update.

Good news yesterday. In the Bookcaffé (Claremont, Perth) newsletter for June, ‘Georgiana’ was in the top four best-selling non-fiction books for May.

It was wonderful to hear from Mr R Richardson-Bunbury, a descendant of John and Georgiana Molloy, over the weekend. He sent  a photograph of ‘Fairlawn’ that he took in the 1990s and he’s given kind permission for me to share it here. Comparing this photograph with the older image opposite p 247 in my book shows that the shape of the house as it was around 1860 was still evident in the 1990s.

Fairlawn 1990s

It might be a cold one… but today’s an exciting milestone. We received the proof copy for the second print run of ‘Georgiana Molloy, the mind that shines’ less than 12 weeks after the book first arrived in bookshops. So if you spotted that missing space – no more worries. Lots and lots of boxes will be arriving very soon from the printer in Perth  – and just in time!

Proof copy June 2015