Eco-Humanities Research Group - Lunchtime Seminar Series

Thursday, 6th April, 1-2 pm

CACSSS Seminar Room (O’Rahilly Building - ORB. G.27)

Jessica White (University of Southern Australia)

The world’s ecosystems are under increasing strain from deforestation, global
heating, and mass extinctions. Anthropocentrism – a belief in the primacy of human
life – is in fact undermining human and nonhuman life. Life writing has traditionally
centred upon the fortunes and furies of human lives, from the extraordinary to the
quotidian. Yet in focussing so firmly upon the human, it can forget about the lives
that are part of us: air, water, fungi, soil, plants, fish, animals and bacteria.
We urgently need new ways of communicating the importance of ecosystems, not
simply as life-support systems for humans, but as a mesh of lives in and of
themselves. This paper dwells upon ecobiography, a form of life writing that, by
representing the imbrication of human selves within an ecosystem, decentres the
human and encourages an awareness of nonhuman lives.

Specifically, it attends to the crafting of my ecobiography of nineteenth century
botanist Georgiana Molloy (1805-1843), who emigrated from England to southwest
Western Australia in 1829. It shows how the soil, rocks and plants of southwest
Western Australia shaped Georgiana’s response to her environment, and in
turn how it is influencing the style and form of my prose.

Jessica White is the author of the award-winning A Curious Intimacy and
Entitlement, and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud, which won
the 2020 Michael Crouch Award for a debut work of biography and was
shortlisted for four national awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary
Award for Nonfiction. Jessica has received funding from the Australia Research
Council, the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland and Arts South
Australia and has undertaken national and international residencies and
fellowships. She was a 2020-2021 Juncture Fellow for the Sydney Review of
Books and is a 2022-2023 Arts Leader for the Australia Council for the Arts.
Jessica is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at the
University of South Australia.