‘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

Living history

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Each time I visit Fairlawn, the home where Georgiana Molloy spent the last few years of her short life, I’m drawn to the garden, for obvious reasons. One tree in particular, a Black mulberry, always pulls me to gaze up at the sky through its lichen-laced branches or to touch its gnarly trunk. Although the tree fell and split at some stage in its long history, it still stands like an ancient, stooping sentinel between the house and the Vasse River, and a few months ago I enjoyed the taste of its ripe fruits. The video I posted on my Facebook page a couple of days ago was taken when Mike and I visited Fairlawn this week to see the Morus nigra once again –  for a very special reason!

It doesn’t take an expert to see that the tree’s very old. Fairlawn existed as a cottage for a few years before Georgiana moved there in May 1839 but she began work on planting the first garden herself, so I’ve often wondered whether she planted the Mulberry tree then, before she died in 1843. Soft fruits were an important food crop for the settlers at that time, used fresh in season, for puddings and as jams, wines or preserves during winter.

A few weeks ago, I came across some evidence that made my heart skip a beat. I’d read the words many times before but never made the connection. In a letter Georgiana wrote to James Mangles RN, started in June 1840, she thanked him for the ‘Box of Plants’ he had sent her. She’d just opened it and told him all the fruit trees were ‘gratifying to behold’, some with long shoots and all ‘white, of course, from the exclusion of light’ during their long sea voyage. She went on to describe ‘the Black mulberries, literally with green shoots’.

 

Given her excitement, and the difficulty of acquiring healthy fruit trees in the colony at that time, it doesn’t seem like a leap of assumption to believe that she planted in her own garden the Morus nigra that Mangles sent her. Mulberry trees usually take well and tend to grow vigorously without too much care and attention. In the mild climate at the Vasse and so close to the water table in the flood plain of the river, the young tree was unlikely to fail, especially given her horticultural knowledge and its position near the house, handy for any additional watering needed in summer.

Of course, I had to consider the possibility that the tree could’ve been planted after Georgiana’s death in 1843, perhaps by a later inhabitant of Fairlawn. It would be impossible to assess the exact age of the tree without investigating its growth rings but I wondered if a real expert might be able to shed some light. Through the kindness of a botanical-world friend in the UK, I was put in touch with just the ‘tree expert’ I needed and gave him the information he asked for about the tree’s position, climate and soil.  I also sent photographs to show its size and dimensions. I asked if he thought it could have been planted in 1840.

He told me the tree certainly looks ‘all of that age’. There’s one at Kew Gardens planted in 1846 and the Fairlawn tree is larger.  His last comment, ‘I think you can safely say that it is from 1840 or earlier’, was exactly what I was hoping to hear.

Of course, the Black mulberry at Fairlawn can’t be linked without any doubt at all to the trees Georgiana received from Mangles in 1840, but given the age of the tree we can see today, her comment in the letter, and knowing that it could not have been planted before that time, the provenance is very, very strong.

And if it is the same one, then it’s the only living specimen, still alive and growing, that was planted by her.

Have you guessed yet why I was wearing my gardening gloves in the video?

We were taking cuttings, in the hope that the buds already showing will become green leaves in the next few weeks and the roots will take. If the cuttings make it, they too will be genetically identical to the original tree. They will be clones of the tree Georgiana planted not seedlings.  I’ll be watching them carefully, protecting them if necessary. And I’ll keep you posted!

    

 

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 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

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.

 

Never say ‘Never!’

Earlier this year I was at the Margaret River Library, talking about the latest research I’ve been doing since publication of my book about Georgiana Molloy. I closed the presentation by making the point that some things simply have to remain a mystery forever.

I showed the audience a photograph taken at the JS Battye Library a few weeks earlier, an image of a document found among the papers of John Molloy, Georgiana’s husband.

Bernice Barry 11

I said, “I’ve always believed that John Molloy drew this little sketch of Napoleon for his children, telling them about his adventures in the Napoleonic wars and perhaps even saying that he had caught a glimpse of the emperor himself during the Battle of Waterloo. But the provenance of this sketch this will probably be something I’ll never be able to find out.”

That same afternoon I sat down at the computer and decided to have one more go at discovering some pathways, clues that might just lead me to the truth. What came to the surface that day is a remarkable, twisting tale.

Ten years ago I said, “I’ll never find out how and when John and Georgiana first met. It was nearly 200 years ago and nothing’s recorded about that small event.” Then, in 2011, a list of old apple trees on my computer screen opened the door to discovering the wonderful story of their first meeting.

I’ve learned an important lesson: when it comes to research, never say ‘Never’.

To read the next instalment of this story, ‘John Molloy and the emperor’ look  here:

 

© Photograph by Mike Rumble

JS Battye Library WA (SLWA) ACC 4730A Pencil drawing presumed to be of Napoleon with tree and cottage to the right. Anon.

From fact to fiction

The last few weeks have been full of new experiences and much new learning. When things slow down a bit I’ll try to collect my thoughts about all of that, especially what I’ve learned about being interviewed and how to stay calm when you’re on the phone, live, to a lot of people listening in other states. I’m still a real beginner but the best things so far (for me, anyway) have been the encouragement and feedback. Readers tell me their thoughts about my book and their own reasons for a personal connection with the story. Messages from reviewers and writers have also meant a lot to me.

It’s also been a busy time of moving on with writing something new and that feels strange, with so much interest now in John and Georgiana Molloy, having so many conversations about them and answering questions about researching their lives, at the same time as I’m travelling  further into the new manuscript I’ve been working on for the last six months. It’s fiction so it’s another challenge but I deliberately set out to find out what would happen for me as a writer if I stepped way beyond my comfort zone.

The extended pathways of research over the last decade meant that I collected a huge amount of interesting material that ended up being filed away and was never used.  But there were a few things – tiny, colourful pieces from hidden lives – that lodged in my memory and kept burrowing away into my imagination. I couldn’t let them go and last year I decided to find a way of bringing those parts together and adding new elements to make a complete story. I thought fiction would be so easy in comparison with writing a historical biography… After all, you can just make it up! But it’s not easy. It’s difficult. Yet it’s difficult in the same delicious, mind-stretching way because it still involves choosing words and putting them next to one another in the very best way you can.

Family anecdotes and old, old documents like this one from Georgiana’s history started me off on an exploration of someone else’s world, one that I had to create rather than find. But it still feels like ‘finding’ and the people in this narrative have already become real to me in a way I’d never, ever anticipated. The strangest thing of all, so far, has been the way a new character appears in front of me in the scene I’m writing. The whole book is planned and researched and plotted and yet someone I wasn’t expecting suddenly walks onto the stage and I realise they were part of the story all along. I just hadn’t met them yet.