The impressive fireplace in the very grand hallway of Keppoch House. It’s not difficult to imagine this mantelpiece decorated with the wedding flowers that Georgiana picked from the flower garden early on the morning of the ceremony.
The site of the Molloys’ first land grant in Augusta. Their small wooden cottage had a thatched roof and stood to the left of today’s road near the riverbank. Her first garden of vegetables extended across the photograph. Grain crops were grown in the foreground on the slope of the hill and the stockyard was […]
Views in two directions from the site of John and Georgiana Molloy’s home: looking towards the sandbank that sits between Augusta and the Indian Ocean, and looking upstream over Seine Bay towards Molloy Island, with the East Augusta shore on the opposite bank. In the 1830s when John and Georgiana’s children were growing up here, […]
Boffins Bookshop, Perth WA Thank you for putting us in very special company on the front page of the Mother’s Day 2015 recommendations newsletter. Viva Books, Busselton WA What an outstanding read Bernice Barry’s new book, Georgiana Molloy, is. This is a biography on a significant historical Australian settler that should become a part of […]
An enormous thank you to the Hon Barry House, the team at MR Bookshop, the friends who sent flowers and sponsored the wonderful wine we drank from Gralyn and Cape Mentelle (‘Georgiana’) the descendants of original Augusta settlers and the many others who travelled to join us in Margaret River. We launched a book… but […]
Holding Georgiana’s Acacia extensa specimen, at the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, near London. Records give us the date and place where this was first collected in Western Australia and research reveals the story of its journey through the last 160 years. Touching history.
Transcribing a small note buried among the papers of Georgiana’s father revealed for the first time an event that marked what was probably her earliest planting. She was just three years old and the tree she planted, a Balm of Gilead, was said to have miraculous medicinal properties. Carlisle Archive Centre D KEN 4/13
The floral emblem of the state of Western Australia, flowering in in our garden.
In 2012, I received this beautiful gift from my husband, Mike: Anigozanthos manglesii a copper line engraving with original hand-colouring, 1838. It’s from the same edition of the book that Captain James Mangles sent to Georgiana. The species was named for his brother, Robert, whose gardener grew on the seeds taken to Britain by James […]
These semi-parasitic trees flower in summer in the southwest. Not long before she died Georgiana was still trying desperately to collect the seeds successfully but they ripened so suddenly and burst so fiercely that it seemed an impossible task. She tried laying sheets beneath the trees and tying little wraps around the seed pods. When […]