Dr Jessica White
Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellow, June - July 2020
From the Miniature to the Momentous: An Ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy
Georgiana Molloy (1805-1843) emigrated from Carlisle, England, to Augusta in south-west Western Australia with her husband, arriving in 1830. She collected seeds and botanical specimens for Captain James Mangles, a project with which she became obsessed. Using the genre of ecobiography, which decentres its human subject and focusses on their connections with their environment, this project illuminates the relationships between Molloy, traditional custodians and the botany of south-west Western Australia in the 1830s.
Molloy spent time in Rosneath and Keppoch prior to her emigration. During my time at IASH I will research Scottish perspectives on environment in the first few decades of the 19th century to understand how this shaped Molloy’s responses to south-west Western Australia.
Biography
Jessica White is a writer and scholar at The University of Queensland. She is the author of the novels A Curious Intimacy (Penguin, 2007) and Entitlement (Penguin, 2012) and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud (UWA Publishing, 2019). Her short stories and essays have appeared widely in Australian literary journals and she has won funding, residencies and awards. Her research profile is here: https://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/14106