AustLit

'Georgiana Molloy, one of the first wadjelas (white people) to encroach on Wardandi Noongar country in the nineteenth century, collected seeds and specimens for Captain James Mangles, a botanical connoisseur living in London. In 1840 she wrote to him, ‘I discovered a plant I have been almost panting for, a very small neat white blossom, on a furze looking Bush’. Molloy’s use of the verb ‘panting’ indicates the depths of her obsessive acquisitiveness, which was informed by a nexus of loneliness, boredom, and her ‘prevailing passion for Flowers’ (as she described it in another letter of 1840), as well as the wider colonial project of collecting.'  (Introduction)