From the Miniature to the Momentous: Writing Lives through Ecobiography

Abstract

This article contemplates ecobiography, a little-researched form of life writing which depicts how human selves are supported and shaped by their environment. It details the author’s ecobiography of botanist Georgiana Molloy (1805–1843) and the plants she collected from the Southwest Australian Floristic Region, alongside an analysis of an Australian ecobiography, Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful.

Keywords:

• ecobiography
• Georgiana Molloy
• Southwest Australian Floristic Region
• botany

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Hopper and Gioia, “Southwest Australian Floristic Region,” 628.

2 Oxford English Dictionary.

3 Swarts and Dixon, “Terrestrial Orchid Conservation,” 545.

4 Myers et al., “Biodiversity Hotspots,” 853.

5 See Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Haraway, Staying with the Trouble; and Tsing, The Mushroom.

6 Lists of Molloy’s specimens are written into James Mangles’ letters books. See Molloy, Letters.

7 It is interesting to note that another Australian female scientist, Edith Coleman (1874–1951), confirmed and built upon international research on the pollination of orchids through copulation. See Clode, The Wasp.

8 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography (2nd ed.), 1.

9 Anderson, Autobiography, 4.

10 Whitlock, “Post-ing Lives,” vi.

11 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 1.

12 Lines, An All Consuming Passion.

13 Molloy, Letter to Frances Birkett.

14 Molloy, Letter to Elizabeth Kennedy.

15 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, September 1838.

16 Shteir, Cultivating Women, 36.

17 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, March 21, 1837.

18 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, January 25, 1838.

19 Molloy, Letter to Elizabeth Besley.

20 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, June 30, 1840.

21 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, June 4, 1841.

22 Hasluck, Portrait with Background.

23 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, June 4, 1841.

24 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, January 28, 1838.

25 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, January 31, 1840.

26 Konchar Farr and Snyder, “From Walden Pond,” 198.

27 Konchar Farr and Snyder, “From Waldon Pond,” 203.

28 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 268.

29 In 1998, Konchar Farr followed her essay with “American Ecobiography,” an analysis of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge. Describing ecobiographies as residing in “the space in which American autobiography and nature writing meet,” she relates how the desert melds with Abbey’s solitude and construction of self, and how Tempest Williams’ grief on her mother’s death leads to an imagined fusing with her mother and a maternal motivation to protect the earth for future generations (94). Perreten’s 2003 essay “Eco-Autobiography: Portrait of Place|Self-Portrait” examines how the structure and texture of three works are shaped by the author’s interaction with a setting. In 2010, Edlich published “Richard K. Nelson’s The Island Within: Environmental Life Writing as Ecological Identity Work,” an essay that explores how Nelson’s text captures the shift from “an anthropocentric conception of the Enlightenment Self and its traditional attendant modes of autobiographical self-representation to a highly individualised ecocentric understanding of human identity” (204). In 2011, Edlich expanded his analysis of ecobiographical texts by contemplating works by ecocritics Ian Marshall and John Elder, which are “complex composite texts that transgress the boundaries of autobiographical environmental literary scholarship and full-fledged ‘ecobiographical’ or ‘eco-autobiographical’ representation” (“Autobiographical Ecocritical Practices,” 930). In 2011, Straight published Autobiography, Ecology and the Well-Placed Self and referenced a resurgence of regionalists in the US who are producing personal and local stories in response to “our modern condition of environmental and social alienation” (11). These “writers-in-place,” he continues, “candidly examine their intimate connections to regional mythologies and recognise the inseparability of personal narratives from the large histories of region and nation” (12). Straight labels this mode “natural biography” and includes a bibliography of some fifty texts as exemplars. Kennedy’s 2012 essay “Humanity’s Footprint: Reading ‘Rings of Saturn’ and ‘Palestinian Walks’ in an Anthropocene Era” in the “posthuman lives” issue of Biography also contemplates the indivisibility of the self with a specific region. Drawing on biogeography, or the way in which geography shapes life forms, Kennedy describes Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as “infused by a sensibility that sees the natural and the human as deeply intertwined” (176). This essay’s focus on climate change is a welcome—and ultimately inevitable—step in analyses of ecobiography. The most recent mention of ecobiography is in Hornung’s foreword to a collection of essays, Ecology and Life Writing (ix). While the form is not dwelled upon at length, the volume’s wide range of Eastern, Western, and Pacific perspectives on the literary representation of environment, and how environment shapes textual selves, points to the accelerating transcultural interest in this field.

30 In Indigenous Australian English, “country,” as Rose explains in Nourishing Terrains, is “not only a common noun but also a proper noun” (7). Country is not used in the sense of “a day in the country”; rather, it is “a living entity” (7).

31 Rose, Nourishing Terrains, 10.

32 It is important to note that Rose’s descriptions of Indigenous peoples’ relationships to country do not apply to all Indigenous Australian peoples. The Australian Bureau of Statistics indicates that the majority (eighty-one percent) of Indigenous Australian people currently live in cities and non-remote areas. However, these relationships were a fundamental tenet for Indigenous Australian peoples at the point of the British invasion and remain so for many Indigenous Australian peoples today.

33 Rose, “Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism,” 95.

34 Roughsey, Moon and Rainbow, 42–43.

35 Grossman, Entangled Subjects, 63.

36 These interactions have been described by Bunurong, Yuin, and Palawa man Bruce Pascoe in his seminal Dark Emu, Black Seeds, and in Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth.

37 The southwest Western Australia area contains several linguistic subgroups. For example, Whadjuk Noongars are the traditional custodians of the area surrounding what is now known as Perth; Wardandi Noongars are the traditional custodians of what is now the area between Cape Leeuwin and Cape Naturaliste; and Wirlomin Noongars are the traditional custodians of the area around what is now known as Albany. The Noongar people are one of many regional groups, or “nations,” of Indigenous people in Australia.

38 John Molloy was also heavily involved in a massacre carried out against Wardandi Noongars. See White, “‘Paper Talk.’”

39 These ecobiographies tend to be concerned with the impact of European land-management methods on a non-European environment with vastly different soil, rainfall, plants, and animals. See, for example, Mahood, Craft; Muecke, No Road; Somerville, Body/Landscape Journals; Beudel, A Country in Mind; and Weldon, The Lake’s Apprentice. Critical commentary on these ecobiographies has been published in Brennan, “Kim Mahood’s Craft”; Probyn, “Poetics of Failure”; Probyn and Somerville, “‘Postcolonial Practice of Writing’”; Slater, “Intimate Australia” and “Is Any Body Home?”; and White, ‘“I Felt This Landscape.” These ecobiographies differ from the numerous accounts of humans observing, enjoying, and deriving respite from the natural world, often in the form of grief or rambler narratives (such as H Is for Hawk by Macdonald or Strayed’s Wild ), in that they highlight the connections between humans and vital ecosystems. They are also different to natural histories of a place, which likewise do not examine the way in which human selves are shaped by other-than-human selves.

40 Simpson, “Writing the Country,” 273.

41 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 2.

42 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 3.

43 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 2.

44 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 5.

45 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 1.

46 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 5.

47 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 5.

48 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 29.

49 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 28.

50 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 213.

51 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 213.

52 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 213.

53 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 214.

54 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 214.

55 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 180.

56 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 188.

57 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 193. In Indigenous Australian culture, a songline, also known as a dreaming track, is a path across the country or sky created during the Dreamtime. These paths are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dances, and artwork.

58 Canning Stock Route Art Project, “Billy (Mr. P) Patch.”

59 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 214.

60 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 33.

61 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 7.

62 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 162.

63 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 2.

64 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, January 25, 1838.

65 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, January 25, 1838.

66 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, 1840.

67 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, March 14, 1840.

68 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, March 14, 1840.

69 Molloy, Letter to James Mangles, January 31, 1840.

70 Clarke, Aboriginal Plant Collectors, 7.

71 Mahood, Position Doubtful, 162.

72 Hansen and Horsfall, Noongar Bush Medicine, x, 3.

73 Hansen and Horsfall, Noongar Bush Medicine, xi, 3.

74 Hansen and Horsfall, Noongar Bush Medicine, 216.

75 Xylomelum is a genus which consists of seven species, of which Xylomelum occidentale is one. A genus is ranked above the species but below the family.

76 Pausas and Lamont, “Ecology and Biogeography,” 1472–1473.

77 Pausas and Lamont, “Ecology and Biogeography,” 1474–1475.

78 Wilson, Biophilia, 145.

79 Swarts and Dixon, “Terrestrial Orchid Conservation,” 545.

80 Monks et al., “Threatened Plant Species,” 60.