The ethics of writing performance from the archive: The case of Georgiana Molloy

Abstract: Historian Greg Dening writes of history as performance. In his book Performances, he considers the limits of knowledge, claiming: we cannot describe the past independently of our knowing it, any more than we can describe the present independently of our knowing it. And, knowing it, we create it, we textualise it. That is the circle, hermeneutic if you like, of our human being. In the light of Dening's statement, I would like to reconsider my own exploration of the Australian colonial archive in writing for performance. My point of departure is a performative lecture, The More I Study Nature: Georgiana Molloy and the Code of Modernity, that I wrote as part of a larger creative work - a play, as yet unproduced, called Orchids and Insects. In the performative lecture, I follow the life story of Georgiana Molloy (1805-43), an early settler of Western Australia, and ask my reader - or audience - to consider the codes of knowledge and behaviour that we in the twenty-first century might have inherited from our colonial predecessors. My research journey led me to reflect upon the kind of stories we draw from the past, so that we might know ourselves in the present, and the role performance might play in this. I consider the choices we make about the stories that we as a culture celebrate and also, as I was to discover, the stories that we repress