An All Consuming Passion: Origins, Modernity, and the Australian Life of Georgiana Molloy
By William J. Lines
Allen and Unwin. 332 pp.
Reviewed by Geraldine McKenzie
Georgiana Molloy discovered no rivers, opened up no large tracts of land, took no active part in the oppression of native Australians. Unlike the majority of white settlers, she valued the land for what it was rather than what might be done with it. In this she provides a strong contrast to the Bussells, an aggressive and acquisitive family, who share the focus of this sensitive and well-researched book.
Both Molloy and the Bussells were assiduous letter writers and keepers of journals, and William Lines' use of this material, combined with the unfolding of a life of an increasingly sympathetic character, gives An All Consuming Passion the sort of narrative impetus more common in a novel.
Lines confines himself to a mere 17 years in the earliest days of white settlement in Western Australia, but even in that short time the main features of white occupation were already emerging.
Wildlife was seriously reduced, and the Aborigines, faced with this depletion of food sources, were beginning to rely on imported foods; imported diseases devastated native communities; large areas of pasture created by the Aborigines' use of controlled burning were occupied. Following from that came the imprisonment, harassment and massacre of blacks. Commenting on one such massacre, Charles Bussell stated, "No one circumstance has been productive of greater benefit".
From an assumed position of superiority, the Bussells did not acknowledge any injury to the native inhabitants. The explorer George Grey saw more clearly: "The mere circumstance of Europeans residing there does the Aboriginal, on whose land he settles, the injury of depriving him of his ordinary means of subsistence." In fact, as Lines shows, white occupation deprived the Aborigines of considerably more than that.
The early years also brought the beginning of an aggressive deforestation; the founding of Perth featured the ceremonial cutting down of a tree by the governor's wife. Less than three generations later, the karri and jarrah forests were ruined.
Things were no better in the ocean. The settlers wiped out colonies of seals around the Perth area, and North American whalers were making their presence felt.
Lines details the frequently appalling life of women settlers. "The freedom male settlers experienced on the new shore ... required the confinement and emplacement of their wives, daughters and sisters." Molloy herself spent the whole of her 17 years in Australia either pregnant or nursing an infant.
Evangelism and utilitarianism were both fuel to a sense of superiority and a narrow-minded acquisitiveness. Further, the new settlers, although firmly in the camp of laissez-faire economics, found that the harsh conditions in the new land made government support necessary. This combination of laissez-faire with government subsidies is still a familiar feature of Australian capitalism.
In the midst of robbery, hypocrisy, murder and greed, Molloy, who was one of the first to systematically collect botanical specimens in the south-west, emerges as a woman of intelligence and sensitivity, having little in common with her fellow settlers but sharing with her Aboriginal guides a love and respect for the land. Lines' success in this very readable book is not only to provide an incisive account of a formative time in history, but also to bring to our awareness one of the few settlers really worth remembering.