Georgiana Molloy: The mind that shines, by Bernice Barry. Picador. $40.
Reviewer: Ian Fraser
Georgiana Molloy has always been one of the most interesting and under-appreciated people in the rich story of our early accumulation of knowledge of Australian botany. It was with some excitement that I approached this book, which seemed to promise new and deeper understandings. And in some ways it did, in that Barry, who lives in the same part of south-west Western Australia where Molloy did her work, has meticulously researched Molloy's early life, as well as that of her husband, John Molloy. Her researches took her back and forth to England and Scotland, in the course of "a decade of investigation in archives, libraries and museums, and exploration in cities, towns, villages and bush locations".
But ... by the end of the book, which I had no trouble in reading from cover to cover, I knew no more of her brief plant collecting career, which is the only reason that virtually any of us know of her, than I already did. We are half way through the book before she reaches Australia, and only a quarter of it covers the period of her collecting days. Moreover, while Barry is good at evoking a sense of place in regard to Molloy's early life in northern England and Scotland, I got no real sense of what she would have experienced in her time collecting in the Western Australian bush. The problem is that while Barry is an excellent historical researcher, she doesn't really seem to know plants, so she can't evoke for us what Molloy saw and was excited by in that crucial part of her story. She also seems at times to confuse Molloy's passion for gardening and her botanical collecting, which are quite separate activities.
Nonetheless there is voluminous new material here for anyone interested in the Molloys as people, and in the early history of the early European settlement of the country south of Perth. Georgiana Kennedy was of the gentry, but her family was impoverished by her father's social ambitions, exacerbated by his early death leaving huge debts. Her mother seems to have been permanently embittered, favouring her other children (who were all in time damaged mentally, legally or financially, and all relied on her as adults) over Molloy. Barry's take on it seems a pertinent one: "Georgiana's sin was her emotional independence, and it was never forgiven." Molloy comes across as a genuinely kind and good person, daughter, sister and friend, and an assiduous though forthright correspondent, despite her mother's regular snide carping in letters.
John was of poor origins; his father was an Irish shoemaker in London, an origin John kept very quiet in the class-driven society of the day. He had an action-ridden army career, in a sort of Napoleonic War equivalent of the SAS. He too comes across as a decent and kind man, and Georgiana (20 years his junior) and he had a relationship based on love and friendship, as reflected in their letters and those of their children.
Attracted by the (somewhat misleading) reports coming out of the new Swan River Colony, they married in some haste and set out in 1830. (I have just summarised some 150 pages of detailed biography in the last couple of paragraphs.) Arriving in a jumble of "mud huts and a sea of tents" on the banks of the Swan, they soon moved south to the Augusta area where another settlement was growing. Children came; their first daughter died soon after birth, and a little boy drowned in a well, but four other daughters survived to adulthood. Life was hard and Molloy suffered from hunger, hard and long labour on the farm, and difficult births, but her accounts of the difficult life are admirably free of complaints. Indeed her letters are characterised by liveliness and humour. John was appointed as Government Resident and Resident Magistrate, which took him away from his family far too often. Relationships between the local Noongar people and settlers deteriorated into tragedy and Barry tells that story without flinching; the Molloys' behaviour towards them however seems to have been exemplary.
In 1837 Molloy received a letter from James Mangles in England, a collector for the eminent botanist John Lindley, asking her to collect plants for him. This part of her story is well-known; she became an expert and dedicated collector and consigner of plants and seeds, and was instrumental in Lindley's publication on the plants of the colony, but he famously failed to mention her in his main acknowledgements. She died as a result of the birth of her fifth daughter just six years later.
I am sure that anyone interested in early Australian history will find something of reward here, and Barry's insights into the investigative process are of interest and may be of help to others contemplating such a project. More than 600 'endnotes' are the work of a true scholar. It seems there was not much more to learn of Georgiana Molloy the plant collector, but plenty about the rest of her life and family.
Ian Fraser is a local naturalist, broadcaster, natural history blogger and author, whose most recent book is Australian Bird Names; a complete guide.
