A hundred and eighty-seven years ago today, Captain and Mrs Molloy arrived here in Australia’s far southwest aboard the Emily Taylor, part of a small group of settlers from Britain. A few days later, Georgiana moved into a tent on the riverbank, unaware that the baby she was expecting, her first, was due to arrive […]
In December, I said I’d post some more video and that got a few ‘thumbs up’ so here it is. The quality isn’t great because the file size has to be greatly reduced to upload on here but it will give you a short overview of the place where Georgiana Molloy was born in 1805. I’m kept […]
As the weather warms up quickly here in the region where Georgiana spent her last three decades, I’m remembering a visit we made to her childhood home at this time of year. In the far north of England, not far from the border with Scotland, the village of Crosby-on Eden is in winter’s grip during December. The […]
I’ve had the great pleasure of being involved in a different kind of ‘digging’ in the last few days, not research from old documents but real digging in the ground. Dr Shane Burke from the University of Notre Dame in Perth WA has hoped for some years to do an archaeological dig in Augusta on […]
I’ve escaped from the project that’s kept me busy for the last eighteen months and now it’s time to get back to the ‘to-do’ list from last year. It’s been months since I said I’d post some transcriptions so apologies for rather a long delay! In 1831, Georgiana wrote to her good friend, the elderly Mrs […]
It’s wildflower season in WA’s southwest and it’s been impossible not to think of Georgiana Molloy in the last few weeks as we’ve watched the bush blooming. Winter’s long wet tail has been good for so many of the native plants and this has to be one of the most spectacular displays for years. We […]
DID YOU KNOW…? You can view every page of the Molloy diaries on the website of the JS Battye Library in Perth WA. It’s free. You don’t need to be a member. You can sit at home and view wonderful high-resolution images of all 168 handwritten pages. The latest upgrade allows you to ‘turn’ the […]
This sketch, archived among the papers of John Molloy, Georgiana’s husband who was the Government resident in Augusta and Busselton, had always puzzled me. There’s not much doubt that it’s a representation of Napoleon Bonaparte. You can read about my first thoughts here. It took a long time but earlier this year I got much […]
“Often have I laid in bed on board and thought of you all with my eyes shut and could, for the moment, fancy myself at Rosneath.” Georgiana Molloy 1829 When I was at school I was taught that history was a fixed thing, an accumulation of dates and facts that could be learned and […]
I often talk about combining empathy and imagination with factual evidence when writing about history because that’s what works for me. The story of an individual becomes real when I can picture them clearly going about the everyday tasks in life. That’s just imagination but empathy adds something extra, the ingredient that allows a writer […]