2020: My Year of Writing

It goes without saying that 2020 was a disaster and that the aftermath will continue for some time. Here in Australia we have been insanely lucky, with a Prime Minister who managed not to repeat the mistake of going on holidays in Hawaii in the middle of a climate-induced national crisis, which is kind of amazing considering that he thought it a great joke to hold up a piece of coal in parliament. However, although he has been listening to the science on Covid-19, he refuses to listen to the science on climate change, which is showing itself to be as disruptive as the pandemic. At any rate, it was largely the states who came to the fore to manage our infection rates, while ScoMo treads water.

Readers of my blog will know that the pandemic meant that I had to come home from my year of fellowships, a traumatic experience because Emirates cancelled my flight (I could deal with these things better if I had all my hearing). I was heartbroken to leave Munich, and very sad that I didn’t get to experience Edinburgh in the summer and do field work for my ecobiography. I continued my fellowships remotely, but it wasn’t the same, particularly with the folk in Scotland. At least in Munich I knew the people I was working with, but in Scotland all I had to go on was Zoom, which was alienating. The Oak Spring Gardens fellowship in Virginia was also cancelled, but Hedgebook, with whom Oak Spring Gardens partnered, have honoured the fellowship, which means I can still go and write at Whidby Island in Washington State once things are under control. That is very good of Hedgebrook, as the year has been disruptive for them too.

Despite these disasters, there have undoubtedly been some silver linings. I got to rest, which after some 10 years of working like a maniac, I really needed. Now, for the first time in ages, I feel alert, functioning and ready to write. I also got to spend time with my parents, which is important because my mum is dying of bronchiectasis. And my unhappiness across the year meant that I started applying for permanent jobs, and I am excited to have accepted a continuing position as senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of South Australia. I am currently packing and trying to meet some deadlines and catch up with people before I leave in two weeks. It is all a bit hectic, but will be good once I get there.

After returning home, I was so stressed that it took a long time to recalibrate and get my brain working again. Once I was up to speed again I worked very hard but, frustratingly, it was academic work, when I’d wanted to spend 2020 on my ecobiography. Most of these pieces were things I said yes to at the beginning of 2020, so this year I have three book chapters and at least two articles coming out. I’m trying to say no to things more often, but that isn’t going too well so far. However, below is a list of literary things I did achieve in 2020.

Publications

One of my most exciting publications for 2020 was the edition of ‘Life Writing in the Anthropocene’ for the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. It took me and my co-editor, Emeritus Professor Gillian Whitlock, three years from conception to publication to get this volume into the world. A lot of the work was innovative and exciting, particularly its focus on the lives of plants. It’s now being turned into a book, to be published by Routledge next year. I was really pleased that we could feature the work of Anna Laurent on the cover - I’ve been following Anna’s work on seeds and plants for years.

I published my first piece for The Conversation to coincide with the International Day for People with Disability. I wrote about the importance of first person narratives, or #OwnVoices stories, by people with disability.

I published a few pieces of creative non-fiction. ‘We Are All Deaf During the Pandemic’ appeared in Griffith Review’s ‘Through the Window’ series about the pandemic. It was also published in Matthew Wengert’s edited volume Our Inside Voices, which consists of pieces by Brisbane writers affected by the pandemic, and will be republished in an anthology titled Queensland Memory put together by the State Library of Queensland and the Queensland Writers Centre. 

I published another piece related to deafness in Kill Your Darlings, about how deafness shapes my relationship with music (and a big shout out to my friend Melissa Fagan for suggesting that I write about this).

In April the Rachel Carson Center published a piece I wrote on the bushfires in the Stirling Ranges for a series some fellow Australians (and one German-Irish person - now a friend & therefore an honorary Australian!) curated on the 2019/2020 bushfires. This piece was reprinted in Australian Garden History.

In August I was awarded a Sydney Review of Books Juncture fellowship for mid-career critics. I love this publication and have followed it for nearly a decade, and I love the editor, Catriona Menzies-Pike, whom I met when writing my first SRB piece on Rosa Praed. So far I’ve written two reviews, one on Katerina Bryant’s Hysteria and Kylie Maslen’s Show Me Where it Hurts, and another on Gabrielle Carey’s Only Happiness Here and Danielle Clode’s In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World. Writing about two books requires substantial attention and rewriting to work out where the synchronicities lie, but for the most part I enjoy it. Next on my list is Sophie Cunningham’s Fire, Flood and Plague and Fiona Murphy’s The Shape of Sound.

I also published a few reviews in academic journals – one on Cathy Perkins’ excellent The Shelf Life of Zora Cross in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and another on New Zealander Diane Comer’s work on the braided essay, The Braided River, in an issue of TEXT, the Australian journal of writing and writing courses.

Not everything I submit is accepted. I submitted a piece on deafness to Growing Up With a Disability in Australia that didn’t make it through, and my story on a deaf beekeeper didn’t get anywhere in the Elizabeth Jolley prize. Sometimes this simply comes down to the constraints and subjectiveness of the editor or judges (as drilled into me by a father who has entered watercolour competitions all his life), but at other times it means the story or essay isn’t working. I’ve worked out how to fix the bee story, although I’m not sure where I’m going to send it next, and I’m refurbishing the deafness piece to send out somewhere else too.

Teaching

In 2020 there was no teaching! Which meant that I got my body back on track, and now I am full of beans again. In last year’s write-up I thought that I could only teach a few days a week, due to exhaustion, however in my new role I will be teaching creative writing, which I know really well, and thus it will be less anxiety-inducing (anxiety makes me tired too). I have also resolved to get fitter, so that I have more endurance, to stop working in the evenings and weekends, and to stop fretting about my writing while I’m teaching. Easier said than done, at least at first, but I’m planning to go to go back to the hobbies I used to have – dancing, life drawing, and sewing. Keeping busy with these things will stop me from working.

From a walk at Katoomba, which was free of tourists, while on a residency at Varuna (see below).

Editing

In June 2020, my friend Amanda Niehaus (author of The Breeding Season and fellow DECRA awardee) and I were successful in our application to the Australia Council for the Arts’ Covid-19 funding to create an online journal of creative writing inspired by science, Science Write Now. This meant that I became an editor (gulp). It was a bit hairy at times, but Amanda and I are a good team, and if one of us is busy (as we are both juggling other writing projects), the other steps in. Being sociable and having quite a few flaws (for eg chronic last-minutedness), I really like working with other people, and find it makes me creative and generative.

Thus far we have published three issues: ‘Women and Science’, ‘Extinction’, and ‘Lyric, Poetic, Scientific’. We have two more planned so far, on ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Illustration and Illumination’, but we are running low on funds and will start a fundraising drive towards the end of January. If you’re interested in learning more about our journal, check it out here. You can also sign up to our newsletter at the bottom of this page to hear all our news.

Service

As I took a year of leave without pay, I didn’t do service in 2020 for UQ, instead I did it for my literary and academic communities. I continued to produce the newsletter for ASLEC-ANZ (somewhat sporadically, given the vagaries of the year) and helped organise our symposium, on the wonderful theme of ‘Strange/Letters’, which will be in February.

I did two virtual author interviews for my local bookstore Avid Reader, one with Jacqueline Kent on Vida, and another with Gabrielle Carey on Only Happiness Here (both wonderful books!). I was a bit nervous about these interviews, as well as the ones that I do for Science Write Now, because I detest Zoom. I can never be certain that the sound quality is good enough to hear, and I have to concentrate so hard to catch everything. However, I found a reliable captioner, which helped, and after a while I got the hang of interviewing.

I also continued with the social media for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, which meant an awful lot of tweeting during the annual conference in June. Again, as this was on Zoom, it required much concentration, and I was so knackered afterwards that I ruled out any more online conferences for the rest of the year (this included a creative writing conference at Griffith University). Sometimes you can’t do everything.

Prizes

Signing my book for the National Library of Australia (where I spent hours in the archives) at the PMLAs.

The other silver lining for 2020 was that Hearing Maud did amazingly on the prize circuit. It was shortlisted for the National Biography Award, and ended up winning the Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Biography, which was delightful. It was shortlisted for The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance (won, perhaps unsurprisingly, by a book about the history of rugby in Queensland) and, very excitingly, it was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in the Nonfiction category (more about this in another post, because it was intense!). I never dreamed, when I set out, that the book would do so well, but it is absolutely lovely to get such recognition.

In the middle of the year I was awarded a Scribe/Varuna fellowship to undertake a week-long residency at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, to work on my ecobiography. This was a gorgeous place in which to work, and I met some lovely people, but I had to go to Canberra in the middle of it for the PM’s Literary Awards which was massively disruptive, so I didn’t get as much written as I’d liked.

The Year Ahead

2021 will mean a lot of change, but I’m looking forward to it. In Semester 1 I’ll settle in and work out how the system at the University of South Australia works and what they expect in terms of teaching style. While I’m doing this, I’m going to work hard on my ecobiography, as I want to publish it in 2022 (it’s already been 20 years in the making …). I’ll put a couple of research applications together, and Amanda and I will continue to work on Science Write Now, pending our funding situation.

At the end of 2019 I said that 2020 would be about having a break. I certainly had one of those, although not in circumstances I would ever have anticipated. I’m looking forward to 2021, even though my other half and I will have to live apart (it’s like this for many academics, especially when jobs are few and far between). I’ll meet new people, see new places and think new things. It’s going to be good.

I spent a lot of time writing at Parental Unit’s this year, which was a good thing. Here is their lovely garden, invigorated by La Nina. In 2019, during the drought, Mum was trying to decide which plants she should keep and which she would have to leave to die.

2018: My Year of Writing

2018 was a bit of a bastard, I have to say. The stress of the past seven years – it’s been accumulating since I decided to apply for a postdoctoral fellowship, & has been exacerbated by teaching – caught up with me, bowling me over with an ear infection in May. The eardrum in my good ear ruptured and for a few weeks I was left completely deaf, even with my hearing aid turned to its maximum. So last year was mostly about trying to keep it together & get better, rather than doing half marathons as I had imagined (god knows what I was thinking). I dropped to 0.7FTE in July – something that took six months to be processed, even as I got sicker and sicker with repeated colds & flu & the infection. Much of last year was also spent wondering if I could even be an academic, particularly given that most positions are teaching and research, and I’m currently research-focussed. However, reducing my load really helped; I’m seeing a specialist for chronic fatigue; and I’m trying to stop working on the weekends. And on the plus side, due to needing to rest I’ve been reading much more, which has been such a pleasure.

Publications

The big highlight of last year was getting a contract for Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice, which will be published by University of Western Australia press on 1st July this year. I’ll be at the Byron Bay Writers Festival and am lining up some ducks for appearances in Perth, Armidale, Tamworth & Brisbane, & hopefully also Sydney, Melbourne & Canberra. The editor for the book also edited A Curious Intimacy & she loved Hearing Maud & said that my craft had really improved, so that made me extremely happy.

In terms of scholarly publications, I published an essay on Annamaria Weldon’s ecobiography The Lake’s Apprentice in Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice, edited by Donna Lee Brien & Quinn Eades. This was my first publication on ecobiography & it will be part of a critical monograph that I’m writing on the form next year. I also had a piece of creative nonfiction published in one of my favourite outlets, the Sydney Review of Books, on Georgiana Molloy & my decision not to have children. This was part of their New Nature series & I was delighted to be featured among other Oz environmental writers. I worry about being typecast as a writer on disability, & while this is an issue that’s important to me, my writing life has always ranged widely across genres and subjects, & at the moment it’s my driving force to educate people about what we’re doing to the planet.

As with 2017, I didn’t publish any fiction, although that doesn’t mean I didn’t try. I wrote a 12,000 word novella for the Griffith Review novella prize on tree clearing in Queensland and the mythic salting of Carthage in the Punic Wars, & I’m now going to turn this into a book.

Teaching

Due to physical collapse last year, I didn’t take on any teaching. I wrote and presented two lectures for a third-year Australian literature course, one on Tim Winton’s Island Home (which I hope I never have to read again in my lifetime) and the other on James Bradley’s Clade. I also delivered a lecture on the Environmental Humanities to a group of advanced students at the Australian Catholic University in Banyo. This year I’m convening that third year Australian literature course & tutoring two of the four classes.

King’s Park. So gorgeous.

Conferences

2018 was the year of overkill when it came to conferences – I went to seven of them and was on the organising committee for one – never again! The first, in February in Parramatta, was on postcolonial literature and climate change. It was a small and very enjoyable conference, but I was struck forcefully by how few young people were there. It’s part of the hollowing out of the humanities, & young people thinking that the humanities won’t help them find a job (I think studying humanities is one of the best things you can do in a coming world of automation but that’s a blog for another time). In the middle of the year I headed south to Canberra for two conferences – The Literary Interface, for which I organised two panels on science and literature with Dr Clare Archer-Lean of the University of the Sunshine Coast, and the Australian Historical Association conference. The latter was only the second history conference I’d been to and it was absolutely huge. I had a ball & met some cool people. I also caught up with my good friends in Canbez which is always a bonus.

Then, although I was still not feeling great & had depleted my reserves of energy with a week of listening, I flew up to Sydney for the Deaf History International conference. I was a bit nervous about this – I never know whether Deaf people are going to accept me or not because I wasn’t raised Deaf, even though I’ve lost 75% of my hearing – but they turned out to all be lovely. And the most wonderful thing, aside from the people, was that the equipment worked beautifully. All I had to do was turn up at the conference, put my hearing aid on its T-switch to access the loop system and I heard everything so clearly. I even had the luxury of being late one day, when usually I have to panic about getting places early so that I can check that equipment is working & that I can hear. I was inspired to start learning sign again, but after I looked into it with Deaf Services Queensland I realised I have no time this year because of my exhausting job. It’s either nearly a full day of lessons or two nights a week, and the day classes were full and I’m too tired in the evenings to function. So learning sign is on hold again.

At the end of the year I flew to Perth for the Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference. This was my first ever creative writing conference and I’m always glad of a reason to go to Perth. I met some great people, caught up with others who I knew, met my publisher for coffee and went for walks in Kings Park. Gosh I love Perth! I would move over there in a heartbeat, except that I know I would miss my family terribly.

I was on the organising panel for the International Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, which was held at UQ in December. I arranged an event on sexuality and sport with writer Inga Simpson, scholar Rebecca Olive and artist Eric Bridgeman, which was prompted by the current exhibition of the UQ Art Museum, Play On. Following that conference I flew to Melbourne for a conference on colonialism and archives, which also went well, but by that stage I was pretty dead from my massive year & I just wanted to be back home again. I organised a panel on collecting with Anna Johnstone, a colleague from UQ, and Deidre Coleman from the University of Melbourne who does fabulous work on entomologists, and that worked out really well. However, fewer conferences this year are in order.

Supervision

Nearly all of my 4 students have submitted their work now. One passed with flying colours, two are being examined and one more has yet to submit. I’m always impressed with how well their work scrubs up, particularly when I consider my own paltry efforts with my PhD 10 years ago. Along the way they have done really well, with one winning a fellowship for creating digital art biographies, and another winning a Griffith Review fellowship which led to this fantastic publication.

Research

September saw me heading to Perth for the Cape to Cape trek. This gave me a fantastic sense of the environment through which Molloy moved, and the time and distance it took for Noongar people and colonists to move through the area. A blog post on this in the pipeline - I have to get my photos up at least because the environment was just extraordinary. I also made contact with some wonderful scholars working in botanical history - Alex George in Perth, and Sarah Maroske at the Herbarium in Melbourne. Sara and I will be presenting at a conference at Baltimore next year with my pin-up scholar Ann Shteir - I was pretty over teh moon when I received their invitation. Other than this, I was very much stymied in the writing of my ecobiography, which is starting to drive me quite mad.

The Year Ahead

At the end of April I’m moving onto a new contract which is teaching and research, rather than the research-focussed contract which I’m on now. This means that I won’t get much more research or writing done, although I’m certainly going to try. I’m sure able-bodied people can do both teaching and research, but the impact of teaching on my body is so severe that I need a much longer recovery time. However, my options are pretty limited at the moment so I don’t really have a choice. The rest of this year will be about writing what I can, when I can, amidst lecture preparation, tutoring, marking & publicity for Hearing Maud. My consolation is that I ever was, & will be, a tortoise rather than a hare, and I always get there in the end.

Notes from the Field (xiii)

The last leg of my research trip was to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, which held more letters from Jane Loudon, and a brief note from Mangles. Loudon, as I mentioned in an earlier post, wrote manuals that made botany accessible to women and children.

In Mangles’ letterbooks in the Battye Library in Perth, there are a few letters from Loudon. On 22nd October 1840, she wrote ‘I am going to begin a Lady’s Magazine of Gardening and Botany the 1st of January, with coloured plates and I shall be very much obliged to you, if you will give me a few hints and point out new flowers, etc etc.’ A few days later she followed this up with, ‘I have received a note from Mr John Murray, agreeing to take my instruction, in producing Botany for Ladies; — and I write to tell you, because I know you take an interest in all my numerous publications — I am quite delighted to begin this work, because I am sure something of the kind is wanted — I never could bear the Linnean System, it is so dry! but the Natural System is very interesting, when stripped of its formal language — I mean to render Botany entertaining and if I can do this, I think I shall deserve the thanks of every lover of flowers’. The aim of every science communicator ever!

A number of Loudon’s letters in the National Library in Edinburgh are to her publisher, John Murray. This publishing house also produced books by Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Arthur Conan Doyle and Lord Byron. In a letter of 19th April, 1843, she proposed to the current John Murray (there were seven of them between 1768 and 2002) to write a three-book series on Zoology for Ladies. It would, she suggested, ‘be on a regularly scientific plan, following the modern improvements of the system of Cuvier. At the same time my object would be to make it an entertaining book fit to be read in schools or to a family circle’. Once again, Loudon’s aspiration to make science available to children is clear.

Back in Australia, Georgiana benefitted from Jane Loudon’s publications, but in terms of gardening. In an extract of a long letter written in 1840, she thanked Mangles profusely for ‘Mrs Loudon’s “Flower Garden”’ which she described as ‘beauteous & elegant beyond description I feel highly indebted not only to you but to that superior gifted Lady for the exertions made to strike off an immediate copy’. This was likely The Ladies’ Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals, published in 1840. In another letter dated a year later, Georgiana referred to Loudon’s description of Ipomoea, and thanked Mangles again for the work, commenting ‘How singular you should have even thought of thus gratifying my ardent wish to see this work’.

Jane Loudon’s husband died from lung cancer in 1843, leaving behind large debts. Jane’s letters, now bordered in black dwell upon means of making money such as raising subscriptions. Despite her ambition, intelligence and hard work, Loudon died penniless in 1858 at the age of 51, leaving ingenuity a daughter, Agnes. It seems a sad end for such a clever and innovative woman.

While I was in Edinburgh I also took the opportunity to update my author photo – a must if a writer wants to age gracefully! My photographer was my friend Ian, who was in our Australian/English bookclub when I lived in London, The Book Rangers. He hails from Cootamundra and is also a brilliant hairdresser. When I got home I revamped my website with one of his pics. You can see more of his work on his website, and also follow him on Facebook.

Another of Ian's headshots (with help from the Edinburgh wind).

Notes from the Field (xii)

Back in Carlisle, I walled myself up in the Carlisle Archive Centre, taking photos of Georgiana’s letters, which were kept by her family, so that my research assistant could transcribe them when I got home. Because paper was in such short supply in the colony, and because the recipient of the letter paid for the cost of postage, Georgiana crossed her letters. This means that she wrote in one direction, turned the page at a right angle and wrote over her words. Trying to decipher these letters is enough to send anyone batty (including my poor research assistants!), but when I spoke to a colleague who has done some research into the psychology of reading, she said people of the time were able to read these letters with ease. I guess it’s akin to someone in the nineteenth century trying to read today’s text messages.

Carlisle was a pretty unprepossessing place despite its rich history (it began as a Roman settlement then sprouted a castle in 1093) and elegant buildings. Keats, on his walking tour of 1818, described the city thus: 'The Cathedral does not appear very fine — the Castle is very ancient, and of brick. The City is very various — old white-washed narrow streets — broad red-brick ones more modern — I will tell you anon whether the inside of the Cathedral is worth looking at. It is built of sandy red stone or Brick. We have now walked 114 miles, and are merely a little tired in the thighs, and a little blistered.'

On a not unrelated note I was totally chuffed to pass a Walkabout pub when I was having a look around. These pubs were a dime a dozen when I lived in London a decade ago, but they went into administration in 2009, perhaps because of the GFC.

On the way back from the Archive Centre, the cabbie struck up a conversation about Brexit. I didn’t venture my opinions as I didn’t know what side of politics he was on (and have had my share of conservative cabbies), but it transpired he was against it. His daughter had a part-time job in a store and had no hope of ever getting ahead or owning a home, he said, and Brexit wasn’t going to help. That made me sad, and I was very conscious of how lucky I was to be able to travel and do my research.

I also got in touch with the owners of Crosby Lodge, the house in which Georgiana grew up until her father died just before her 15th birthday. The place had formerly been a bed-and-breakfast and the current owners were knee-deep in renovations – it was a mammoth task! They very kindly took me around, pointing out the part of the house that was original and that which was added on, the walled garden, which was just gorgeous, and the nearby woods, with tall trees and dappled light. There was a big ditch between the wood and the road which might have been a fortification akin to a vallum built by the Romans. This startled me, until I remembered that Aborigines in Australia have sites even older than Roman fortifications. History!

A Carlisle summer.

The owners left me to wander around and take pics. I was keen to get a sense of the countryside, and although it was another startling blue day, I remembered the last time I was there with my friends, and how overcast and grim it seemed. Although I guess for someone raised in that environment that kind of weather would have been normal. The house and grounds conveyed a sense of calm, stateliness and privilege, particularly in the walled garden, which was where Georgiana began her first lessons in gardening. It was a stark contrast to Georgiana’s life in Australia that was marked by giving birth to her first child on a hard board in a tent while a storm raged outside.

Notes from the Field (xi)

From Newcastle I took the train to Carlisle to look at Georigana’s letters, which are held in the Carlisle Archive Centre. I needed to get to Helensburgh by the weekend, so I could only spend a day here, before returning the following week. I’ll write about Carlisle in the next post.

When Georgiana’s mother and sister became intolerable, she stayed with her friends the Dunlops at Keppoch House, and later with Helen Storey, who married the minister at Roseneath. I needed to get a sense of the environment through she moved, so as to compare it to her experiences in Australia. I also wanted to look at Keppoch House.

I’d only been to Scotland once before, when H & I went to Edinburgh to see his pal Guy Hollingworth perform at the Fringe Festival. So I was delighted when we crossed the border and the train driver, in his Scottish accent, called over the P.A. ‘Welcome to Scotland!’ and he told us he’d grown up in a town nearby. I had to change very quickly at Glasgow, without having a clear idea of where I was going, but still took two seconds in the square to listen to a man playing bagpipes.

From Glasgow the second train travelled west through the suburbs, then parallel to the River Clyde until it reached Helensburgh. I dragged my suitcase up to the AirBnB place where I was staying. The town was very quiet, with streets sloping down to the sea, and the sky was so close it seemed I could touch it.

In the afternoon I walked along the water to look at Roseneath Bay, on which a number of boats bobbed. When Georgiana lived there, boats were the main way of getting about as the roads were pretty rudimentary.

Rosneath Bay

I’d arranged to have a look around Keppoch House, and after some discussion with the bus driver we worked out where I was to get off. The owner of the house was a smart and jovial man who had worked as a commodities trader, and he offered me coffee in his kitchen. Outside, the sunshine was brilliant and very warm. ‘This weather,’ he pronounced, ‘is a lie.’ After our chat, I walked through the trees surrounding the house, which had views sloping down to the water, and saw a fox slipping into the greenery. I also wandered through the walled garden, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure if it was the same garden as when Georgiana had stayed there. I had met the gatekeeper’s wife as I walked up the drive and I thought she said it had been in a different place, but being deaf I wasn’t entirely sure. If I get back to Scotland I'll try to see if there are any plans in the archives.

View from the trees at Keppoch House.

What struck me most was the proximity of the water and the size of the house. Georgiana wrote in her diary about being very cold in winter, and I wondered if the house was hard to heat (I had turned the heaters on in my accommodation in the summer evenings! But I am a thin-skinned Queenslander). And the water was everywhere – to me it suggested promise and a sense of possibility, for Georgiana would eventually sail on that sea to Australia, where her life changed dramatically.

The next day I caught a bus to Kilcreggran, passing Rosneath, where Georgiana had stayed with her friend Helen Story, who had married the minister there (alas the original church had been replaced). From Kilcreggan I caught a ferry to Greenoch. The sunlight was absolutely dazzling and the vistas were incredible, at least for someone who had grown up in inland Australia. The space between sea and sky seemed very small, the land rising abruptly from the ocean.

I got talking to a young fellow on the boat. Perhaps he heard my accent when I spoke to the man selling tickets, or perhaps he was just friendly, and he asked, ‘Where are you from?’

‘Australia.’

‘Australia! What are you doing here?’

‘I’m researching a woman who used to live here.’ I explained about her life, but he was incredulous that I’d given up the weather in Australia to come to Scotland. When we got off the boat he pointed me in the direction of the main street, which was helpful as it wasn’t immediately apparent to me where I should go.

On the boat from Kilcreggan to Gourock.

I had a coffee in a café and read a newspaper, watching a film crew busying themselves across the road, then wandered along West Bay. Here, the afternoon sunlight was absolutely dazzling, and I wished I could have stayed there for longer but I was getting pretty tired. Being deaf means I have to be very alert in new places to take in information, & I had to strain to hear the Scottish accents, so I was a bit worn out. After a wander I caught the ferry back. It was about 5pm and people were finishing up work, and I wondered about their lives, if they were happy in a small place, boating back and forth the way Alexander Dunlop had nearly two hundred years before.

At the Kilcreggan jetty where the boat docked, the boat master’s dog was sitting on a post. He was so pretty I patted him as I went past, & wished I could have a dog like him. And then it was back to my accommodation on the bus, passing the Garelochhead Military Training Camp and the Faslane Peace Camp which protests against nuclear weapons. The lady at the AirBnB told me that the lochs were so deep that submarines docked in them, which to me – again used to the arid inland – was incredible.

I regretted that I didn’t have the time or energy to see the lochs. I was still working on the latest iteration of my memoir and that took up my spare time. But I’m pretty sure another visit will be on the cards at some stage, as the scenery was just stunning, and it would be good to see what it’s like when the sun isn’t shining as strongly, as Georgiana’s experience of the weather influenced her moods, and vice versa. It would be impossible for it not to, given its grandeur and presence.

Notes from the Field (x)

I was last in Newcastle in 2014, ushering in the New Year and then my birthday with some very good friends, one of whom had been in my London book club of expats (with a few English folk tossed in), the Book Rangers. I blogged about that trip here, but I didn’t mention the mead we drank on NYE as we watched the fireworks and the drive to Solway Firth (which was freezing but gorgeous – the morning light was silver), then up to Hadrian’s Wall (the temperature was 2 degrees celsius!) thence to the famous Barter Books bookstore (housed in a restored train station), where I bought a copy of Praed’s Political Poems by Winthrop Mackworth Praed. We then headed down to a beach with a view to a ruined castle. It was almost pitch black and the wind cut my skin, but it was exhilarating to be beside a castle and the sea in air which, but for the moon, was thick with night.

This trip was more scholarly, though it was great to see my friends again and to meet their new addition, a charming son. Before I left for the UK, I contacted the Hancock Museum to see if I could find out any more about Mangles’ correspondents, author Jane Loudon (Mangles sent a copy of Loudon’s Ladies Flower Garden to Georgiana) and horticulturalist George Hailes (who grew some of Georgiana’s seeds). My query was passed on to Les Jessop, honorary librarian of the Natural History Society of Northumbria. There was no George Hailes, he wrote, but there was a George Wailes, founder of the Natural History Society.

I went back to Mangles’ letters and checked the writing; that lovely, scrolling ‘H’ was indeed a ‘W’. This was a revelation for both of us. Les had known Wailes mostly as an entomologist, but now realised that he’d had extensive involvement in plants. As for me, it meant I could check Kew Gardens’ and Chatsworth House’s archives for other letters by Wailes (I found one in which Wailes got a bit shirty with William Hooker over an exchange of plants, which amused me).

Saltwell Towers

George Wailes had a brother, William Wailes, who set up a successful stained glass manufacturing business, and his windows feature in dozens of churches. In 1860 William bought Saltwell Park, built a mansion and set about improving the grounds. He later ran into debt and sold the house and grounds to the Gateshead Corporation. It’s now a gorgeous park, so I took myself off to look at it on an unseasonably warm day (summer in England continues to surprise me). The house, known as Saltwell Towers, is still there, and I thought it was lovely.

Saltwell Park

I also took myself to Newcastle University’s archives to look at some letters between Jane Loudon and Pauline Trevelyan. Jane Loudon is a fascinating woman. I knew of her from Ann Shteir’s wonderful Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, for she was a pioneer in making botany and gardening accessible to women by writing entry-level manuals (those that existed were for people, largely men, who knew quite a bit about these fields). I also knew her husband had died prematurely, leaving her high and dry, so she had turned to writing to support herself.

As I read more about Loudon in preparation for this trip, I found that history had repeated itself. Jane’s father had died when she was 17, so she published a novel she’d written, The Mummy, in 1827 to raise some some funds for herself. So Jane Loudon was one of the world’s first science fiction writers! Wonderful stuff. Also amazing was that John Loudon, editor of a magazine, reviewed the book and asked to meet the author. He assumed the person who turned up would be male, but then he discovered it was Jane, and married her a year later.

Laura Trevelyan, to whom Jane wrote the letters housed at Newcastle University, was a lightening rod for Victorian culture. She met her husband, a geologist, at a conference for the British Association for the Advancement of Science (which I think is a great story). She was an artist, and made her house in Northumberland, Wallington Hall, a place where she gathered friends such as John Ruskin, the Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth Barrett), the Rossettis, John Everett Millais, Thomas Carlyle and Swinburne beneath its roof.

Alas there was no mention of Mangles in the letters (it was a rather long bow to pull, to be honest, but I had to check). Still, I was so pleased that I’d grown to know more of these two remarkable women.

Notes from the Field (ix)

I have been horizontal for 48 hours due to another bout of flu, and also very bored, so I figured it would be a good time to catch up on my blog of my UK trip.

Following my stay in Cambridge, I zigzagged east across the country to Matlock, an extremely pretty little town nestled between hills. The River Derwent ran through it, leafy trees hanging over the banks, and 19th century townhouses stretched up a slope in the distance. I was disappointed that I only spent an evening here, as the next day (after the most enormous British breakfast ever) I caught the bus to Chatsworth House.

One of Mangles’ correspondents was Joseph Paxton, a gardener trained at Kew who was appointed head gardener at Chatsworth in 1826, when he was 23. Chatsworth was home to the Duke of Devonshire, and Paxton was employed by the 6th Duke. In 1836 Paxton began building the Great Conservatory, which was a test run for the Crystal Palace, which he had designed for the 1851 Great Exhibition. He remained Head Gardener at Chatsworth until 1858.

I had been in touch with the archivists, who told me that a previous Australian had been through the archives and hadn’t uncovered anything. I assumed this was William Lines, who wrote the second biography of Georgiana, An All Consuming Passion. I still wanted to check the material out, because what one researcher finds in the archives isn’t necessarily going to be the same as the next researcher.

The house was undergoing restoration, and when I checked in I was led through a rabbit warren of dark rooms and stairs up to the offices. I took photos of Paxton’s letters written around the same time as those he wrote to Mangles (which are in Mangles’ letterbooks in the Battye Library in Perth), just in case I could glean anything from them, but nothing jumped out.

Mangles sent Georgiana’s seeds to Paxton, who grew them in the gardens of Chatsworth. Georgiana didn’t yet know the names for these plants, so she used a list of numbers. Paxton wrote that her collection was ‘collectively, the best and contains more good things than I have before received from that interesting part of the world.’ He sowed the Australian seeds, writing to Mangles on 3rd September 1839 that ‘It is with pleasure that I am enabled to communicate so favourable a visit from your invaluable collections of seeds. Several hundreds of the two last lots have vegetated, and are now making fine young plants. I have had a list made of those “Numbers’ of those which have vegetated’. When they grew, Paxton was able to identify them as kennedias, hoveas, chorizema, anigozanthos, mimosas (wattle) and everlastings.

There were a couple of letters from George Wailes, another correspondent of Mangles’ and John Lindley’s, regarding the horticultural show he organised as part of a ‘Fancy Fair’. Wailes wanted to show the Victoria Regia, a giant water lily (now Victoria Amazonia), and while the flower turned up, the leaf didn’t! More of Wailes in the next post.

Ladies near a folly & giant rhubarb.

I took a break at lunch and wandered out into the gardens, which had been under siege the weekend before from the Royal Horticultural Society Chatsworth Flower Show (the hotel manager in Matlock told me the hotel had been bursting at the seams with flower enthusiasts). I didn’t have time to see inside the house itself – I left in mid-afternoon to catch another series of complicated trains to Newcastle, as I was staying with friends and didn’t want to be too late.

I arranged for a cab to take me from Chatsworth to Chesterfield. The cabbie was a nice chap who pointed out the crooked spire of St Mary’s as he drove me to the station. It had twisted because the wood was green, so the timber warped over time, and also because the lead tiles used to cover the wood were very heavy. I was altogether very taken with the area, which is at the edge of the Peak District - clearly another visit is in order.

River Derwent in Matlock

2017: My Year of Writing

Even workaholics need to have fallow years if they are to continue functioning well. 2017 was such a year for me, as I needed to pull back after nearly killing myself in 2016 (when I hadn’t even properly recovered from 2015). I finally finished my memoir while I was on hols in Croatia, and while I might still have to do one more draft, it’s been a huge load off my shoulders. I was still unwell for most of the year, but the colds & flu weren’t as intense. And now, after a few weeks off over Xmas, I’m full of beans again. Long may it last! Below is a list of my literary doings over the past year.

Cockies on the Gold Coast

Publications

I had more academic work than creative pieces published this year, which makes sense as all my time is taken up by being an academic. If I do write fiction, it’s on the weekends, or bashed out the night before my writing group’s deadline.

At the beginning of the year, my essay on the craft of Georgiana Molloy’s writing was published in Claiming Space: Australian Women’s Writing. I started writing this essay in Rome at the end of 2014! This was followed in October by an essay on eco-memoir in Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir, in which I compared Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me with Tim Winton’s Island Home.

Just before Christmas, the Journal for the Association of Australian Studies published my essay on John Molloy’s (Georgiana’s husband) involvement in a massacre against Wardandi Noongars, and the subsequent papering over of this in later accounts. Writing this paper was hard work: it took hours to piece together a timeline of what had happened, as well as the debate over the events that resurfaced in later histories, and to attend to the language that was used in covering up what had happened. I was glad when it was finished.

In each of these volumes or issues, my work sat alongside that of other wonderful scholars, and I am really grateful to the editors for publishing my work.

In August I was Southerly journal’s monthly blogger, publishing four posts (one each week) about writing, deafness and environment. You can read them all via the links on this page. In October my eight-word story was featured on a billboard courtesy of the Queensland Writers Centre. That was pretty exciting!

I was pretty dismayed, once I got to the end of the year, to realise I hadn’t published any creative work (aside from said billboard), but then I remembered I’d finished my memoir. Fingers crossed that it gets somewhere this year.

UQ Ferry

Awards/Funding

I was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize again, this time for ‘Depths Exceeded’, which is a small part of my mermaid book. I’m still trying to find a home for it; I’ll get there eventually.

I continued with my study on vernacular criticism, for which I received funding at the end of last year, and will have this written up by March. It turned out to be a much bigger project than I anticipated and is eating up a bit of time. While it’s something that engages me intellectually, it isn’t a topic I’m downright passionate about, which is problematic. I remember one of my supervisors telling me that when you choose a PhD topic, it has to be something you’re obsessed with if your interest is going to carry you over three years. The same holds, it seems, for any kind of project. Still, it’s a good short-term study, and I’m finding I’m applying some of the research methods I learnt as a research assistant at Autism Queensland, which is a boon.

Gum blossoms!

Teaching

In the second half of the year, I was course convener for Women Writers, the subject I tutored in last year. This was a very steep learning curve – a little hairy at times – but it was ultimately very rewarding. The books I set were: Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Joyce Carol Oate’s Foxfire, Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Gillian Mear’s Foal’s Bread, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Helen Oyeymi’s White is for Witching. The students responded well to all these books except for The Golden Notebook (and some were a bit mystified by The Lesbian Body). Although The Golden Notebook was revolutionary when it came out, it held little meaning for them now. I wonder how or why that matters; Jane Eyre is poles apart from the experience of women in the 21st century but readers are still enraptured by it. Perhaps it was the form of the novel, which made it hard to digest, whereas Jane Eyre is a fairly conventional romance. Aside from this it was really heartening when students told me they enjoyed the books because they were works they wouldn’t usually encounter.

I tutored a class alongside the lectures, and as with last year I loved my students – they were confident, intelligent and outspoken. But by the end of the year I was in my usual haze of fatigue because of the toll of straining to listen and to lecture (every lecture is a performance). I think most people are knackered by the end of the year anyway, and the holidays straightened me out.

As well as the lectures for Women Writers, I also delivered one on Position Doubtful for the third-year Australian studies course. This year I’ll be lecturing on James Bradley’s Clade and Tim Winton’s Island Home for this same course, but I won’t be doing any other teaching as I need to devote myself to finishing my ecobiography.

Flowers at Kew Gardens

Conferences and Supervision

In February I presented on Liptrot’s The Outrun at a conference on excess and desire at The University of Queensland. In London in June, I presented on a digital example of ecobiography, Queensland artist Pat Hoffie’s ground trothing. In retrospect this was not a great example of ecobiography but I was trying to align it with the conference’s focus on digital life writing narratives. Still, I enjoyed being back in London, thought the conference was absolutely fantastic, and met some great Aussie writers and academics, including Ellena Savage and Nicole Matthews, who presented a very memorable paper on hearing air reviews.

From England I flew to Croatia and presented at the European Society for Environmental History conference in Zagreb (preceded by a field trip to Kornati National Park near Zadar). This was the first history conference I had ever been to. I presented a similar paper to that which I’d delivered in Perth the year before, on ecotones, but my paper, I found after some rather harrowing comments from the audience, was not up to scratch (no one likes getting criticism, but having to receive it in a public forum is way worse). Once I recovered from that experience and was able to examine the comments with equanimity, I realised they were constructive. I’m intending to present at the environmental history conference in Canberra this year and to do a better job.

As soon as I arrived back in Brisbane I turned around and went down to the Gold Coast to present on Molloy and ecobiography at a conference on Literary Environments. This was not a very smart move as I was shattered from jetlag, but I couldn’t bear to miss it because Ursuala Heise gave a keynote and a workshop, both of which were amazing.

I capped off the year with a paper on Georgiana Molloy’s participation in botanical connoisseurship – the rage for exotics collected by Europeans and grown in their gardens – for a conference on the Nature and Spaces of Enlightenment. I really enjoyed this conference as well but I was completely wrung out from the year, so I couldn’t make it to all the sessions.

Throughout the year I also took on the supervision of four creative writing students, three doing MPhils and one a PhD. I found this unexpectedly rewarding, as I could chat to them about their ideas and help them with their critical essays. I also supervised a wonderful third-year student who wrote a brilliant essay on young adult novels and their representation of deafness. Aside from my research, supervision is one of the satisfying parts of my job.

Kornati National Park, Croatia

Research

I used my funding to fly to the UK and comb through the archives relating to Mangles and his contemporaries. This was a great trip but it was jam-packed and involved zig-zagging up the country from south to north. I like travelling and the distances didn’t faze me, but I could have done with a more leisurely pace. My next big task over this month and next is to collate and transcribe everything so that I’m ready to write in March, as well as writing up the rest of my trip (it's happening, but v.e.r.y s.l.o.w.l.y).

V cool plants in the UNESCO Stari Grad Plains, Croatia

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

I put the ball for AWW on the shelf last year as I had too much going on, but managed to co-ordinate guest posts from lesbian/queer authors (Kelly Gardiner; Eden S. French; Jess Davidson; and my own thoughts on the themes that have appeared in guest posts by lesbian/queer women writers), and authors with disability (Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench, editors of Defying Doomsday; and Anna Spargo-Ryan). This year I’m picking up the baton from Marisa Wikramanayake and am going back to bi-monthly roundups, as well as the usual guest posts. This year, the theme for NAIDOC is ‘Because of her, we can!’ so I really want to feature more posts from Indigenous women writers.

BrisVegas rainforest

The Year Ahead

I have tried not to take on too much this year as I need to focus on finishing my ecobiography, but already there are quite a few pots on the stove. Aside from the two lectures which I need to write and present, and my vernacular criticism study to complete and write up, I’m co-ordinating, with Clare-Archer Lean from the University of the Sunshine Coast, two panels on the interface between science and literature at the annual literature conference in Canberra in July, as well as subsequent publication of these papers in the Australian Humanities Review. I'm also giving a workshop on Writing Animals and Their Worlds for the Queensland Writers Centre on Saturday 28th April.

On top of this I need to prepare a fellowship application for gainful employment next year, as my contract ends in January 2019. I think I had pretty much better say ‘no’ to anything else that comes into my inbox this year.

Health-wise I am determined to start running again, with the aim of doing a half-marathon in August, and of getting out of the city into bush more often. Exercise and the environment will help ameliorate my stress. I’m also casting about for some kind of hobby, instead of working all through the weekend. I think dancing, drawing and going to the movies are back on the cards. Well, time to dive into 2018!

Everything is going to be ok if there are peonies in the world.

Notes from the Field (viii)

It was with some trepidation that I went about London over the next few days, but the friends I was staying with said it was just a fact of life in the city. She had lived through the IRA bombings of the seventies, and a bomb had gone off a block away from where she lived, making the whole apartment block shake.

I was only in the city for a few days, at a conference on Life Writing at Kings College London. It was an excellent conference, much of it centred around memory, digital media and writing lives. I presented on a digital version of ecobiography, artist Pat Hoffie’s ‘ground truthing’ and met some great people.

After the conference I caught the train to Cambridge, where I’d arranged to look at the Cambridge University Herbarium. It holds a number Georgiana’s specimens, as well as those of other Australian collectors such as Allan Cunningham, and several collected by Charles Darwin on his voyage on the Beagle. This was a new herbarium, part of the Sainsbury Laboratory (the plants were moved there in 2011), with the same compactors I’d seen at Kew and an air filtration system. This was important because many of the specimens had been dipped in a solution containing mercury to preserve them (before collectors worked out that mercury was dangerous), and each time the compactors were opened, mercury wafted out. The technician who worked at the herbarium and who showed me around needed to have her mercury levels tested regularly. Meanwhile John Lindley, first Professor of Botany at University College London, developed dementia towards the end of his life, and it is thought that mercury might have contributed to this.

The technician had kindly laid out Georgiana’s specimens for me to look at and photograph. There were 25 of these, but potentially hundreds more are in the collection, which houses one million specimens altogether. I was struck by the art in the arrangement of the dried specimen on the page, which testifies to her sense of craft and elegance.

The technician also directed me to the letters of John Lindley, which had been transcribed, catalogued and bound into a volume. There were a handful to Mangles, although they didn’t contain much  of substance. Others discussed rates of payment to collectors, which I thought significant as Georgiana was paid nothing, although Mangles sent her and her husband gifts. Some were to Miss Drake, the illustrator I mentioned in my previous post. It was becoming clear to me that Mangles, if he wasn’t completely enmeshed in botanical networks at the time, was at the least very aware of who the important players were: Lindley, Hooker, the Loudons and Loddiges.

When I finished at the herbarium I wandered around the town, which was very pretty (aside from the hideous shopping centre which was under renovation). Students had just finished their exams and gathered in clumps among the tourists, clutching bottles of champagne. Beside the river, people lay in the long, sun-warmed grass, and there were bicycles galore. To my delight, on a bar outside some railings designed to stop people locking up their bikes, there was the wrong end of a pineapple.

Notes from the Field (v)

It’s been nearly two months since I returned home from my research trip in England, then a holiday in Croatia, but what with jetlag, starting teaching and the obligatory bout of flu or two, it’s taken a while to get to my laptop to write up my peregrinations.

Georgiana Molloy collected specimens for James Mangles, so my aim in this trip was to research Mangles and the archives of botanists to whom he sent Molloy’s specimens. My first stop was London. My plane arrived in the morning and as the Tube doors opened and closed at the stations, I saw the riot of a green English summer beyond them. It was eerie how much I felt like I was coming home, considering how persistently homesick I had been for the four years I lived there. Maybe the city had settled beneath my skin more than I’d realised.

My first research stop was the British Library, where I had a look at Mangles’ publications. Born in 1786, he entered the navy at age 14 and left it as a captain at age 29. A year later he travelled with his friend Charles Leonard Irby in the East, and in 1844 he published an account of his travels, Travels in Egypt and Nubia, Syria and Asia Minor: during the years 1817 & 1818. His first publication, however, appeared five years before. The floral calendar, monthly and daily. With miscellaneous details relative to plants and flowers, gardens and greenhouses, horticulture and botany, aviaries, &c. &c. was an account of growing plants in small spaces, for he lived in London. His interest in horticulture may have been pricked by his journey to Australia in 1831 to visit his cousin Ellen Stirling, wife of the governor of Perth. The Mangles family were traders and, cashing in on the lust for Australian flora, he commissioned people in the colony to collect for him, including James Drummond (who wanted payment for his specimens) and Molloy.

Mangles’ letters from his correspondents, copied into two letterbooks which are kept in the Battye library in Perth, record the receipt of collections and attempts to grow the seeds he received from Australia. These connections with nurserymen and gardeners may have piqued his interest in horticulture, or it might have been a family concern, as his brother Robert raised a number of specimens on his estate.

In 1848, drawing on his naval knowledge, Mangles published Synopsis of a complete Dictionary, graphical, descriptive and identical of the illustrated Geography and Hydrography of ... England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In this he proposed a method, which took him twelve years to develop, of charting waters to avoid shipwrecks and ‘arrest a fearful loss of human life.’

In 1851, following the disappearance of John Franklin, one-time governor of Tasmania (from 1837-1843) in the Arctic as he attempted to chart the north-west passage, Mangles published Papers and Despatches relating to the Arctic Searching Expeditions of 1850-51. Together with a few remarks as to the probable course pursued by Sir John Franklin, etc. This was a compilation of different opinions on what had happened to the ship, such as letters to newspapers and to the Royal Geographical Society, and thoughts of Franklin’s wife Lady Jane, rather than any original writing or thoughts of Mangles’ own except through his footnoted commentary and three pages listed under Remarks. However he included his method of charting outlined in his former publication, maintaining that through his proposed Universal Illustrated Geography and Hydrography, ‘no more difficulty would be experienced in ascertaining the precise position of any required place in the world, generally, than is here encountered by discovering – by means of the Keys, Beechey Island Cape Herschel, Cape Sir John Franklin, or any other point included in our Arctic List.’ It seems that he hoped to have his method of charting put to use in the search for Franklin, and to have the larger form of his work published.

Then in 1853 he published Thames Estuary. Guide to the navigation of the Thames Mouth, and Key to the Model which was very dull indeed.

While all this didn’t make for exciting reading, it did give me a sense of Mangles as a man who was keen to make and profit from professional connections. No doubt his interest in geography underlined his publications as well; he was a co-founder of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830. When I was in London doing my PhD on Molloy I found some of his letters in the RGS archives but, not finding them very illuminating, I never transcribed them. Now I must have another look at them.

Also in the British Library was a transcribed collection of papers, including the journals written or dictated by W.J. Bankes to Mangles’ travelling companion, Leonard Irby, detailing Bankes’ journeys to and from Petra in 1818. Bankes, when he returned to England in 1820, had hoped to have these published, but nothing eventuated. He fled for Italy in 1841 after being arrested for homosexual acts, then a capital offence. His papers stayed at Kingston Lacey (which H & I visited with Parental Unit while we were in England) until it was bequeathed to the National Trust in 1981, then they were sent to the Dorset History Centre in Dorchester.

The transcriber of the journals, Norman Lewis, states that Mangles and Irby met Bankes at Aleppo in November 1817 and at Tiberius in March 1818. Bankes asked if they would accompany him on a tour beyond Jordan and around the Dead Sea and they enthusiastically agreed. They then, a bit later on, tried to reach Petra. As Bankes detested writing, Irby transcribed his journals and/or took dictation from him. However, after comparing Bankes’ account with Mangles and Irby’s 1844 Travels in Egypt and Nubia, Syria and Asia Minor, Lewis concludes that almost all of Letter V in this work was copied by Mangles from Bankes. He writes that Mangles also ‘added a map of their route, a “sketch of the ground plan of Petra” and a better sketch map of the south end of the Dead Sea than had appeared in [Bankes’] original notebook as well as a few other illustrations and fifty biblical quotations. All in all, Mangles produced a useful, straightforward account which was well received. It was now very much his text, not that of Bankes’ journals which no on except his companions had ever seen.’ Lewis also adds ‘I believe it would be fair to say that the fundamental difference between the Journals and Letter V was that Bankes conceived the Journals primarily as his record of archaeological and other discoveries, whereas Mangles simply wanted to produce a good travelogue.’

A bit of plagiarism jumping out of the archives was much more interesting than Mangles’ shipping charts! Clearly he wasn't averse to appropriation as a way of furthering himself.

At Kingston Lacy with H in 2007. H is checking his watch against the sundial.