Learning Lessons from 'Georgiana'

At present I'm wrestling with my close-to-final draft of the book about the botanical artist Margaret Flockton. During the recent Melbourne Writers' Festival, I attended Brenda Niall's session on writing about various Lives of the Artists, hoping to pick up some handy hints. Afterwards I bought her latest book True North (about the artist Elizabeth Durack and her sister Mary Durack, the writer) as well as Brenda's 1994 biography of another artist, Georgiana, which for a while was hugely popular among book clubs in Melbourne. No wonder, as cosmopolitan Georgiana Macrae, the illegitimate daughter of a Duke, was a pioneer of primitive Melbourne in the 1840s.

Brenda signed both books with a flourish and we exchanged a few words. Recalling my struggles to recreate the lives of three early convict settlers of Australia, I asked Brenda whether she would attempt to write a biography where the subject left virtually no personal records. Robert Forrester, Paul Bushell and Charles Homer Martin did not leave the diaries and letters and family memorabilia that Georgiana did, and very limited material of a personal nature survives for Margaret Flockton. Brenda's doubtful expression indicated that overcoming that challenge to 'evoke the drama of personality' (her words) would be extremely difficult. I can testify that it is.

We also talked briefly about the silences in historical records and what could be inferred from them. In my books about convict forebears, the silences have helped me a great deal. When trying to define a man's character in early colonial Australia, no news was often good news.

By contrast, no news was bad news for Brenda, as she tried to interpret Georgiana's silences about the nature of her marriage to Andrew Macrae. This gap in Georgiana's extensive writings is a constant theme of Brenda's book, somewhat thwarting her quest to gain a full understanding of Georgiana. This was the Holy Grail for Brenda - finding written evidence of Georgiana's attitude to her husband Andrew, and his attitude to her. Brenda was disappointed to find so little.

As I turned the final page of Georgiana, I felt that Brenda and I have much in common in our writing tasks - it's all in the thrill of the chase, the drive to find those elusive clues to life experiences and character.