We are joined by award-winning historian Dr Kiera Lindsey to talk about her latest book Wild Love.
Wild Love tells the fascinating story of Adelaide Ironside, an ambitious and determined Australian artist in the 1800’s.
In this conversation, we talk about research, art, speculative biographies and how the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts features in the book.
The SMSA would like to say a huge thank you to Dr Kiera Lindsey for taking the time to answer our questions.
You can find out more about Wild Love on Kiera’s website: https://kieralindsey.com/ .
SMSA members can borrow Wild Love from our library on level 2. This book is also for sale at your local bookstore, here is a link to our friends at Abbeys Book Shop: https://www.abbeys.com.au/book/wild-love-9781760296759.do
The marriage at Cana of Galilee by Adelaide Ironside is currently part of the public exhibition at the Art Gallery NSW (31/01/24) https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/74.1992/
We hope you enjoy watching this discussion.
Feature image of Dr Kiera Lindsey credit: Ethan White
I just had the best chat with Dr Kira Lindsay Kira is a history advocate of South Australia and an award-winning historian we had the most glorious chat about her latest book Wild Love so wild love follows Adelaide iride an inspirational Australian artist who is little known but achieved amazing feeds
We talk about Kira’s extraordinary research Journey uh with the creation of wild love and also writing process it’s truly a fascinating conversation I think you’re going to really enjoy it hi Cara thank you for joining us today so I’m just here in the Tom conel Center at the Sydney mechanical schools
Of arts and we’re on gadigal land here thank you so much for joining us whereabouts are you I’m on Ghana country uh in Adelaide on the Adelaide Plains and uh I love being here too you know I wrote most of my book on gical Country um but now I’m down here and southr
History um Advocate where I Champion history in all its forms whether by experts or enthusiasts as part of working at the history Trust of South Australia so car you’re here to chat to us about wild love your latest book yes I’m so well thumbed I loved it um so
I’m really curious to let’s start off about before we dive into the book about your writing process I’d love to hear about how you write what kind of inspires you to write and then also about so you you write from a creative historian point of view and you write uh
Speculative biographies can you tell us about this genre tell me yeah a colleague and friend of mine kind of recently accused me of making up terms that allow me to justify what I do and I I think that’s kind of playfully true to be honest I mean that’s one way
Of describing it the other is that I’m I’m kind of grappling for ways to explain um the philosophies as well as the processes that I use and so you know having an opportunity to speak with you Victoria and the Beautiful listeners and people at um smsa is a is a wonderful
Opportunity to reflect and and discuss that a little bit further so um you know I’m trained as a historian I have a master’s and PhD in that space and I’ve worked in lots of roles as a historian and one of the things that I I guess I’ve come to think about is that
Sometimes history training can be um a means towards other ends rather than history being an end unto itself right so how can we use our history skills to do a number of other things which might be to inspire people more broadly about something to um as well as to stimulate
Their curiosity about the past or to build their historical consciousness or just their sheer love of life and themselves etc etc so I like to think of History not as an end in itself that I’m obliged to play by all the rules and games of the history of history but that
I might use my historical methods to become historically conscious and to inspire that in others so I use the term creative history or in Creative myself as a creative historian because I guess when that debate happened in 2006 around the secret River by Kate Grenville and
In denon’s um you know very well own um quarterly essay called who owns the past and in that Clint Dinan um made the point that history and fiction must sit on other side of The Ravines and never can the two engage with one another because um they have different moral
Imperatives and they make different truth claims now I think that there are certainly instances where that is um that might be required you know there are ethical things associated with some historical acts of representation where when need to be very careful about things but um on the whole for my own
Practice and what I’m interested in doing I reject the notion of The Ravines and I I suggest instead we might think about history and fiction as different acts of representing the past that are more like rivers or streams of water coming into an estery where the salt
Water and the fresh water blend and this creates new fertility where different sorts of projects can emerge that’s beautiful that’s a beautiful description that’s yeah I I I totally agree um obviously there’s there’s areas that you you really can’t go into but like the story of Adelaide inside it’s just like
It connects with the reader I felt so involved I was in that world know if I maybe have read about her in a more sterile way you know fact here’s the facts then maybe I wouldn’t have connected quite in the same way you you talk in the book about um uh about
Writing in kind of a state style like Jane a or something like that and I do think it kind of just gets your emotions with the story um and you feel like you’re going on a on a on a journey with Adelaide which I think it kind of um it
Makes you empathize and sympathize just so much more and kind of put yourself in the positions um that adeli found herself and then with all the amaz so many historical uh kind of uh Little Bits that were thrown in there and the connecting bits it was um reading it was just um uh
A really uh great opportunity to learn about her life but then also have all of the immersion of the story as well so yeah oh thank you Victoria that you know there couldn’t be a more satisfying series of comments to make because that was kind of what I was trying to do I
Did want to create a sense of being a the reader stepping into her Bal moral boots as she goes out bu and looks for her flowers or Treads the Streets of London looking for sister painters or is trying to find her voice her originality because I think those themes that were
Specific to her life which I picked up from you know years of spending time with her archive they’re also themes that are contemporary for us as individuals and also as women yeah um you also asked me to talk a little bit about speculative biography so can I rip
On that one a little bito so I had um you know my first um book The was a historical biography set in a very similar time period um in fact it was about another currency l or native born woman called Maryann Gil who was my great great great aunt and she um was
Born six months after Adelaide but also in Sydney just a couple of streets away from where Adelaide Ironside was born but she was born to a Roman Catholic hotelier ex-convict emancipate family whereas Adelaide’s family yeah there are convicts in the family tree there including the grandmother mother who was
A convict forger but there was also a First Fleet Marine which gave them a different position in society and they also come from a presbyterian background but my interest has always been how do you write the lives of people who would otherwise be silenced or remain very
Shadowy in the archives how might might we represent them so I start from the basis that um you know as the Fantastic historian British historian Carolyn Stedman once said we can never Rec create the past we will never know what actually happened everything that we do is an act of
Representation you know this is what Greg Denny also said the historian and so mine is an active representation and I prioritize using speculation so when the archives are so porous and and and problematic as Iron Sites really truly were you know we have a rich archive in
Some ways when you compare it to other women of her era much richer than the um archive associated with the first woman I wrote about my ancestor um but you know cross-hatch letters letters with no dates letters with no signatures letters that left me completely bewildered about how to write
This and so speculation became a technique now what I think is really interesting is that speculation is intrinsic to Scientific Method you know Einstein and many other histori scientists have insisted that without speculation you cannot make new advances and yet in historical practice and you know an CTO and John Docker talk about
History as being able to be endlessly reinvented because it combines Art and Science but in fact we don’t often as historians um really interrogate the role of speculation in our work Beyond putting little caveats and qualifications each time we speculate what I like about CTO and Docker is that
They said and this was a definitive moment for me they said really for the historian narrative as a laboratory and we can test our suppositions we can test our speculations by seeing how we advance The Narrative I.E can do I know enough context to take the archive and
Then make the characters compelling um for the reader so that they as Patrick white would say get up and stand and walk across the page and do what they want to do and that’s kind of what happened for me so um you know to give a give you a definition of speculative
Biography it comes from the work of um someone my my friend and colleague Donna Le Brian who has defined the term and we produced a book about that um with many wonderful examples work in case examples of it and we Define it rather Donna defined it as all biographers use
Speculation but speculative biographies go further they believe that by engaging with the interiority of a character and trying to get to the sense of their meaning even by using um narrative and interiority in different ways and even first person that they can get to a greater deeper truth about the character
Now that is you know that’s quite um an assertion to make that and I’m not going to Swerve away from it because we are we are playing with the world of truths you know there are historical truths there are literary truths and I don’t think that it’s always helpful for them to be
On the other side of the Ravine so in this book I’ve tried to bring them together You’ very open Tru very open about that’s what happening and like um that that it opens a conversation doesn’t it it allows um you know you to to gain the things that you’ve gained
From your research and how you write it but it kind of opens the door to other people to take that journey and other people to start writing around these these kind of of historical characters that’s really exciting yeah yeah thanks Victoria I think that’s right and you
Know let’s be clear that people have been writing speculative biographies for a very very very long time Virginia wolfes her um biography of um the writer who’s in this book The Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning you know she wrote that fabulous book called flush which is through the eye of um Barrett Browning’s
Cockus baniel that’s a speculative biography and we have many other examples even in the Jour in context the um biography about Lisa Warson and I think it allows us um a it gives us a suite of affordances right we can identify with our characters in ways that traditional biography biographers or historians are
Often discouraged from you know that there’s a kind of prum arch that’s put in place with much writing which is like you must not relate with your characters well it’s like I wouldn’t be bothered doing this if I didn’t didn’t care and I don’t care yeah definitely definitely
And and care to want to get their voices heard and their stories told which is amazing yeah especially if their voices are so unique um um and that is definitely the case with Adela iride she’s got quite a voice absolutely so tell us how did you meet Adelaide how
Did this how did this story sort of come to you like how how did that happen it’s a bit worky but um so it’s got a two part to it so the first part is that um after you know like all when I was doing my masters which
Was on human hobble so this is the sensible story then I’ll tell you the other story I became very interested in um the voices of native born people as they describ themselves so the first Europeans to be born in the Australian context because um Hamilton fum was one
Such person and he managed over time to assert his priority in that exhibition Expedition sorry over the British Sterling who um C Captain William hob so I became quite interested in that and also the registers of his voice because he was clearly extremely patriotic and
When you look at The Archives of the men of that period they’re always toasting themselves and their priority as the firstborn in the country but there’s a dark heart to that Victoria which is that by using that term native born as well as distinguishing their rights over the um over immigrants they’re also
Asserting their rights over the people that they called native so First Nation people and that dark heart I think is still sort of alive in contemporary Australian nationalism in some ways so I wanted to lean more into that but to ask the question of what what about the
Female voices you know they were definitely female native born people you know that’s why we have a contemporary Australian society and uh and those women were known as currency L lasses they were highly valued within colonial society because they were considered healthier prettier more interesting uh than British migrant
Women and etc etc who had come to the Colony so I wanted to know more about them I had one in my own family which was Maryann Gil and um and that was what the comics daughter was about about her life which revolved around a romantic
Scandal and then um my editor at Alan and said s you think you’ve got another book in you and and this is where we move into part two of the story so uh I went to bed and I’ve been doing this D Sila meditation technique to get myself to
Sleep and they had this little technique which is before you go to bed take a glass of water and say when I wake up in the morning I will have the answer to this question so you drink half the glass of water you put it down and say
My question is I don’t know to write my next book about is there a book in me as I went to sleep woke up in the morning and then you have to drink the rest of the water and say before I put my feet on the ground I’ll have the answer to this
Question and honestly before I put my feet down there was Adelaide on inside the word and I had not thought about her i’ stumbled across her read a Wiki page when I was doing my research um that was 2016 and I’d looked at her in
2009 so I don’t know a very seven years ago or something like that and I just read a Wiki page and thought she sounds like a nut like what an interesting person she was a republican she wrote poetry she created her own art she went overseas she did this Banner
Presentation to the voluntary troops of um New South Wales what a woman but I’d never thought about her since then and then suddenly when I went back to the Wiki page and looked at her and then I looked at the Australian dictionary of biography I thought she’s pretty
Interesting so I went and looked at the archive and I thought yeah I think I think there’s something in there yeah so I pitched a story which came um to Elizabeth that was very different than the finished product but it did start with the beginning of the book with her
Crossing the North Shore uh to Sydney in in the boat which I know that she did um from from archive research yeah yeah I have to say that like I I had not heard of her before um and then I also so the whole office as soon as you start to
Describe it buzzing just every and everyone I’ve met I’ve told them about this book they’re like who what that’s amazing how do we not know about this person you know what you know what a character what how does how does this person not kind of um come up in art
History things like that how you know like just characters of Sydney right you know in in historical context so yeah I was fascinated to kind of jump into this book and the book has so much history in it like there is because you you were traveling you’re you’re in Australia for
The first kind of half and then the second half you’re you’re in Europe and you’re foll there is so much history and so many characters and historical characters that are included throughout the book what was it like researching that because you had I’m did you have
Some sort of Bor up with lots of different like notes all over it how did you how did you get all of these different historical timelines to come together yeah it was pretty terrifying I have to say so um fortunately I receiv received an Australian research Council Grant to look at speculative biography
And Historical Method through the case of Adel iide so that meant that I had the time and the money to do the depth of research that I think her story required to kind of put it in its context and um and really reflect on it
So um you know I did follow in in footsteps that’s exactly right so I spent a lot of time in Sydney with the Sydney records you know I really immersed myself in her archive and art which is scattered across the world but is specifically really at the mutual and
Um and also at the Society of Australian um genealogists um and that archive is really it’s full of loose ends and dead ends it looks like an abundance of riches but the further you go it’s kind of scattered so um the kind of uh yeah so I followed I answer the
Research question then talk about the conceptual kind of inspiration if you like so um I did that archival research and then I started sort of building up and out one of the interesting things I found in the Mitchell record in fact was that um there were quite a few things
That hadn’t been recognized as her coming from her they would ascribe to a Mr ironide so that but one of the there was this big box from someone who was a kind of um historian biographer in the 1850s and he had written about her famous male contemporaries Daniel Dene William B
Daly and people like that who had played a big role in smsa as well right um but he had tried to do something on Adelaide Ironside he had all these scribbled notes and he’ obviously shut the book shut the box shut and decided it was too hard and I can understand why because
It’s really hard to sort of work out what to do with all these loose ends and these voices that sort of say something and you don’t really know where or what time you you’ve got no context for a lot of stuff so my research involved um intense amounts of contextual research
Every time I read something about a time period I ended up creating these massive tables uh and it would have the primary sources at the top of each year that I’d got from different places and then it would go through each month of each year for things that it happened that I
Thought might be interesting and I color coded them according to whether they were political things because Adelaide was a very political person so it would not be a stretch to weave a thread of political um interest through that in fact it would be remiss not to yeah you
Know uh and so I also had to investigate religion because her mother was very religious and that means understanding presbyterianism in Sydney as well as more generally of course art was a central piece but understanding everything from the materials that she uses to the subjects and why to The
Inspirations and how they were changing and they changed so dramatically over this period of time as you would know Victoria like the the philosophies the Aesthetics the way they’re being describ so I’m trying to get across all of that uh and then there’s just the kind
Of the the fashion the food uh the newspapers the people they’re all kind of you know flowing in and out the big backdrop pieces so Adelaide’s life um was one that intersected with John Rasin with the brownings in in Victorian England and Italy um with the resor
Jento in Italy that is the wars for unification so I had to get across all of those big kind of backdrop pieces that clearly also influenced her but I allowed her archive to tell me where the key pieces were yeah and and when I first started writing the book I wrote
It like a well behaved historian and my editor said no it’s not working we can’t find Adelaide in this so I put that manuscript down and start it again and I let her tell me but there was this moment you know this conceptual inspiration moment where I was sitting
In the Mitchell looking at all these records and thinking what on Earth am I going to do with this stuff like you know I really felt like I was going through hell and as Churchill said when you’re going through hell keep going because I just couldn’t find the center
Of of this book and um one of the things that really astonished me about her story was the role of spiritualism and mysticism so Adela was very influenced by German um transcendentalism by American Romanticism all these things were shaping her thoughts and led her to eventually start scrying crystal balls
And communing with the celestial spheres and I quite directly from the archive about that there and so the you know we we tend to stereotype Victorian spiritualism as table rappers and frauds etc etc but I think we’ve forgotten that if you trace it back to its origins in
The early 40s in the 1840s it’s connected with magnet magnetism with hypnotism and with German transcend D alism and um the work of erson and and other people like that and they are looking for the universal infinite you know the the infinite intelligence they’re using these kind of phrases and
That was at the heart of the way Adelaide saw the world so that really fascinated me and when I was sitting in the archive one day racking my hair tearing my hair out um I realized that one way to get in and through her archive would be treated like she
Treated a crystal wall so one of the things I’d done was go to the British Library you know I looked at over 50 archival Holdings across the world I followed in her footsteps through London I went to all the places physical places that she visited including her apartment
In Rome anyway I’m sitting in in the uh I done all this reading about how you read crystal balls according to those 19th century mag because I wanted to understand what she was actually doing right and there were really quite important techniques around it so first
It had to be done ideally by virgins with pale skin and long dark hair they were considered the purest con conduit it had to be done when the moon was on the on the wax um and you had to wash your hands and do all these sort of
Things and then this is the bit that really moved me you had to clear your mind and uh lean in and contemplate with a kind of freshness of perspective until from your imaginings came voices and images that um could be suggestive of something and really that’s what I did
With adela’s archive archive i scried her archive into being until all those voices started to become conversations until the people that I could kind of see by serious portraits in the ad started to become people who were alive to yeah exactly and it’s at that point
That I um I started writing her story in the first person oh that was the switch that was the moment that you were able to kind of step into almost like her Universe her yeah yeah and it took years of kind of communing you know with her archives and
Um before that was possible and I think that’s you know there’s a sort of quietening of the mind and contemplating in deep contemplation of the words that they use about the scrying of the crystal halls and I just find all that really quite fascinating because really what’s going on with that kind of
Period of spiritualism is that they’re trying to empower people’s intuition and Imagination can think of Mary won craft before then talking about how we use the fire of the imagination to bring the cold clay of characters to life and um sometimes I think that we’ve lost those the important roles of imagination and
Intuition in how we make sense of the past and so that was part of what I wanted to do with the book that’s amazing that sounds fantastic so H you said that the smsa um is in the book twice it is in the book twice I would be
Fascinated to know uh so I know that aday did exhibit here from a quick look up myself but oh my gosh I am ready to dive into this but um can you tell us tell us more about uh this time and what your researchers found about kind of
Adelade and the smsa yeah well um it was definitely a part of her life so one of the first presidents was Colonel Barney and he was a friend of neighbor of hers and she’s connected with him um and in fact I believe that he played a role in encouraging her to
Go to Europe in the first place but Barney was considered by many to be a bit of an old sck and conservative in the way that he um or at least I should rephrase that and say so I don’t offend any uh descendants that people like that um that generation of native born
Currency men with whom Adelaide was very close that is Daniel Den here in particular you know the so-called Boy Wonder Boy Genius uh that they considered Colonel bnie and other and his his ilk to be to Il to have been uh very conservative in their management of
The smsa so they wanted to introduce much more radical things including discussions of female genius and uh and I think this is really interesting you know one of the things I was trying to do in this book is not just represent the women stories but also represent The
Men Who admired and supported women along the way and Dena here was one of those as was Dr John dunore Lang who adored Adelaide IR inside and and often spoke at smsa um including one of the the second incident where I um where I have Adelaide present at that one no I
Should hasten to say that I do not know if she was at the two events that I described but I know that these two events did happen at smsa so because that’s speculation I often one of my techniques is to weave people into historical events where I think it’s
Plausible or probable that it could have happen they would have been in the area at the time these were the sort of social things that people were going to or educational things that people were going to so with the group of people that that she would have been associating with I’m
Guessing yeah and that’s right and that she did attend events and that the way that I describ the events and drawn very closely on the newspapers so in a sense I’m using her presence of that to animate a thing that I know is relevant for her so in the
First instance it’s the case of uh Professor renie who was a Scotsman who Dr Lang um the Presbyterian five brand and controversialist who was her closest Mentor um he had brought out to Sydney and uh reny was on the up and up in the 18 early 1840 he was making himself as
Mr education you know the great Innovation the expert on all things and he gave many you know of his sort of hyper informed not so informed lectures to the the fortunate grateful people of Sydney including one which was about female Improvement so he ran a number of
Schools in Sydney including um one which was really um ran by his daughter and that and we know that Adelaide attended that school and at that school she learned batan construction among other things so you know it was quite interesting but renie had given a talk
At the um at the school of arts about female Improvement and in the newspapers there’s a letter in response to this from a currency lass where she basically mocks professor renie and says oh thank you so much for enlightening our ways you know we are so much better now
You’re here how could you know she basically says you’re God’s gift to the universe thanks Mr professor renie and she’s really kind of you know having it go with him and um and so when I recounted that episode I put Adelaide and her friend into the story of that
Event so that they could then be the author of that particular letter so we could get a sense of what was going on with the way that currency LS were engaging with the way that they were being educated and the role that they were being prepared for in society but
Professor reny’s story is better than Fiction because uh he’s let’s just say that his great scaling of the heights is followed by a stupendous fall that involves pornographic material in a court case so we will say no more oh and a Mari um warax as well so we’ll say no
More about the end of got to read the book they’ve got to read book if they want to find out but it’s definitely worth telling you you know it’s it’s a it was such a cracking story and again it opened up these little Windows into different parts of Victorian colonial
Society that I think we sometimes forget yeah yeah I I think that um from the the way that uh the book talks about women’s education it’s kind of uh it kind of brings light on the fact that yes women were allowed into these spaces but it
Was for the idea that they were s become better companions for their their husbands and yeah so it kind of it it gives a lot of context to things that were happening within kind of uh women’s rights and with the the petition that is mentioned in the book um you
Know and things like that it kind of gives a bit of context to how those kind of shifts were made were starting to be made so yeah and also thanks for saying that Victoria because it also reminds me that the other reason I wanted to put
That in there is it explains why Adela didn’t want to get married yeah because you know there’s all these references to her having many excellent offers that said she chose to marry her well you know her mother’s marriage obviously didn’t go so well and I think that
Combined with these sort of attempts to um turn her into to improve her into someone who was fit for marriage probably had some sort of um effect impact on her one way or another so the other incidents where um which is based at the smsa is um when Dr Lang gives one
Of his talks about trying to create an Australian Republic uh and we know that this took place it’s all in the newspapers and uh I wanted to you know Adela was a passionate fiery Republican who wrote um really extraordinary poetry which was published in the newspaper on these themes often referring quite
Explicitly to Dr Lang so although again I don’t know if she was at this event it seems very likely that she could have been and I wanted to bring this scene in to capture a moment where Australia might possibly have become a Republic in that late 1840s early
1850s um before the gold rush and the Crimean War just absolutely extinguished those possibilities I think we’ve forgotten that there was this luminous moment where there was a gathering of energies around Dr Lang who was not only one of the most f one of the most famous controversial figures in Australia but
Worldwide you know he was kind of like Trump um but I think with a Kinder heart and with no none of that sexual impropriety and cruelty and dishonesty well yeah Lang was fast with the truth in different ways but he was you know many of his Visions about the str’s
Future as a Federated Republic as a sorry as a Federated Nation came into being so he was a a great Visionary and architect of kind of the future possibilities of Australia and I wanted to just bring that back to our surface to understand Adelaide’s passion for her country um her explicit commitment to
Republicanism which becomes relevant when she’s in Italy as well where she’s there in a republican period and she’s very preoccupied with garabaldi he features in her artwork so in order to kind of understand who artwork you need to sort of understand what republicanism mean to meant to her because it meant
Something quite different than it did to say English people at the time you know the English did have much of an appetite for republicanism at all you know they’ve had their own fora in that space so I was trying to give it its kind of specific Colonial context and then what
It meant for Adelaide which as an artist you know republicanism means Independence so just as she’s striving for autonomy and agents she wants to see her country do so too yeah definitely um and I also think that you know from those two um two meetings at the smsa
You kind of get these beautiful friendships you know Katherine that she meets at the the first one um and then also uh you know the the support networks that she has in Sydney and you get an idea of the kind of community that she’s uh that she that she kind of
Was within which is something that you’ve built around her which is just that’s it was just really fascinating to see how um you kind of visualized this person who um was basically decided to not go with the Norms not to go with what was expected right just to
Throw out the rule book and decide to do her own thing which you know was F fascinating so I I thought it was brilliant the way you’d built it all up with all the different people around her so yeah oh thank you thank you that’s thank you Victoria that means means a
Lot to me because I really felt to understand ad you had to look at her from other people’s perspective as well as understand understand the kind of the fountain within her you know she often uses this language about wild blue electric F fires blowing from within so
She you know and um Robert Browning described her wild and enthusiastic way so we know that she was kind of like a force to be reckoned with right yeah but um in order to kind of that’s just not enough in some ways you need to situate her within a context
To see what a what a creature she must to come across um but you know and in this I was really inspired by the novel J because that was published in um 1847 which is around exactly the same time that Adelaide is kind of stepping into
The world as a young woman and like janire who is described and know that wonderful scene with Rochester was plain small odd and ordinary I think Adela fits into those qualities and in fact like um J paints ideal works and that’s how she describes her work and that’s
How adelay also described her work they’re drawing on the kind of platonic German idea of the ideal that’s what they’re inspired about janire was Rochester often teases her of being part of the green people and the F folk etc etc and this is how isy Adelaide is also
Thinking of herself she takes the nickname she gives herself the name of she draws it from each initial of her name Adelaide Eliza Scott onight to call herself isy and isy sounds like the iy which is another word to talk about the faith folk so when I you know getting
Deeper and deeper into Jan a just made me think one way to write this is like a 19th century novel that resurfaces isy Adel einside as a kind of Jane a character but on her own distinctive Journey with all the ferocity and the fierceness that Jane a yeah so had right
She was so wlow that Jan no you decided to describe the the work that um Adela did would you mind doing a little reading for us yeah that would be amazing GNA put on my glasses and see what we can come up with okay so I thought um that I might read a
Little bit from the beginning of the book so this is um I think it is yeah it’s chapter chapter 3 and this chapter is called bristly a beginning now at each chapter it um starts with a flower which is one of the wild flowers that she painted so the way that adelay um
First became famous was she painted a folio of Australian wild flowers that won prizes in Sydney and then was sent onto a Paris exhibition where they were highly recommended and she follow she and her mother followed afterwards on that exhibition to followed and went to um Paris and then Rome firing Eng land
And during that time aday would often introduce herself as the flower of Australia and uh so she’s really trading off her flowers right but I think these flowers were incredibly important to her I think that up until this moment the people who had been painting Australian wild flowers had been doing so for
Botanic scientific purposes but here in the in the wake of the 1851 International exhibition where paint boxes were available women going out and painting wild flowers but most of the wild flowers that were being painted were in England or Europe and there were those kind of world be haave flowers but
So I think adelay can make the claim for one of the first if not the first Australian born woman to paint Australian wild flowers not for their scientific purposes but as acts of as pieces of Art and Beauty in their own right so I wanted to capture you know
For myself I grew up going out and looking at wild flowers as a kid my grandma also taught me to paint wild flowers and I found it such an intimate way of connecting with nature that I had a feeling that it would be something like that for her a kind of meditative
Practice really I we all like going out into the bush you know it grounds us somehow so I wanted to kind of capture a sense of that so this is from the third the the third chapter and I’m just going to write the moment where she’s returned home from collecting her bristly um
Heath and she’s about to start painting it and I know where she was doing this work because I know she had a studio in the Attic of Burton Lodge a place that she lived in on the NorthShore I’ve been able to get um the description of that
House I know a lot about the house and I also know the art materials that she used the colors of the paints because I did a lot of research in art cataloges at the time so what I’ve done is draw on oodles and oodles of research and then I
Made speculations about about the experience that she would have had but I also know she painted this flower from a pamphlet about her folio so let’s start she’s sitting at her desk and she’s about to St that instant upon the threshold of a new creation is one I now consider
Sacred because it is when the firm facts of a new subject first begin to blend with the mysterious Spirit of the infinite and yet even as I allow my heart and mind to become receptive to such possibilities Another Part Of Me always remains sharp and alert carefully making decisions about questions of form
And tone and volume and as my grandmother taught me I always take great care not to press too heavily upon the page lest dark marks show through the translucent paint when I add color will you believe me when I tell you that as I put the tip of my pencil to the
Paper that morning it felt as if the entire universe was falling to a hush as if it too was waiting for me to begin sensing the magnitude of all that awaited I took a deep breath before closing my eyes and then trusting my hand to release the essential shape of
The specimen upon the page to form a glorious Parabola when I opened my eyes I was so pleased with what I had produced I quickly began sketching out out the bell-like shapes of the flowers making sure my composition was harmonious and of equal height and depth then came the
Cylindrical shapes of the Twigs as I sought to capture the delicate shifts of texture which each stem where each stem departed from the branch there you are my bristly friend I whispered about an hour later when I finally stopped to stretch my arms and consider my work
Speed not haste iy I reminded myself before leaning down to the basket and grabbing a wet rag to sling over my neck before the because the sun was now pouring through the window after all I will knew that one careless mistake would be enough to force me out onto another morning exhibition Expedition
And then I would waste not only time and light but also my precious paper within the hour I had all four flowers upon the page along with the short pointed leaves which I had shaped into an irregular star formation that would then allow me to capture the dark green color and
Sharp yellow tips replacing my pencil with the number six Sable I always use for the soft washers and two thin tiied ones for the detailed dry brush work I rolled up my sleeves and crumbled a little of the cake of dragon’s blood paint into a porcelain palette from the
For the branch and stem after I blended this with burnt sienna and a little water a rainbow of Reds began to materialize upon on the page as these dried I produced a comparable spectrum of greens before using my thinnest brush to add tiny Dash dashes of Chinese white
Into the lightest loock so I could compare the I could capture the creaminess of the buds stem I was so absorbed in this task I did not notice Mama slip into the room but when she leaned over my shoulder I had to smile for she gasped in delight at the sight
Of my full bell-like flowers floating together as if in a quadrel their feathery petticoats lifting and turning in a World that’s beautiful oh I can already imagine it it’s absolutely glorious oh what a connection right what a oh beautiful yes and that also actually brings in as well Martha who’s a huge huge part of this story tell tell us about I love Martha I love Martha Rebecca Ironside formerly
You know her maiden name was Redmond she was the um the daughter of a confict forger and um a First Fleet Marine who had become the town Jailer and they lived down the lower end of George Street at a place named Redmond’s court and she married a um a Scottish
Auctioneer and broker called James iron sign but the marriage finished after the death of um is’s younger brother in the 183 and so thereafter Martha brought her daughter up ad up by herself you really captured that beautiful relationship in that desri you know that the the way
They are throughout the story you know that nurture and the Martha shows to Adelaide you know that support that she always has and you almost feel like throughout the book she’s a little uncomfortable quite a lot of the time but she well that was just so apparent in
The archive it was really very interesting so you know she was Martha was also a native born currency L but she was of a different generation and I think she was much more socially anxious about um life she didn’t have Adelaide’s confidence and and you can understand why but it’s interesting the records
Show that um Martha could speak um French and Italian and that she was also an accomplished musician who who taught music lessons um after she left her husband to keep the family afloat so she had um many accomplishments which weren’t recognized and she had many more responsibilities you know she in in many
Ways allowed Adela to be a Freer Spirit than she could afford to be yeah absolutely quite the entrepreneur really when you think about it and social like being able to deal with social situations and things like that I think that them as Adelaide obviously devoting herself to her artwork and and then her
Mother really devoting herself to Adelaide really was what it was it’s a be it’s a throughout the story it’s a beautiful relationship and you decided to write it from these two perspectives I thought that was really interesting where did that when did that start to
Form well um and the book is called wild love not only because um Adelaide uses that phrase in one of her poems but for me wild love became a way of describing the many things that the many passions which consumed Adela but also Martha’s wild love for her daughter you know
After Adelaide died Martha writes and says you know I’m returning now to Christ aware that um I’ve been distracted all this time with my Earthly Idol my beloved one referring to Adelaide Ein so there was a great love there too and um in adela’s very last
Letter she writes to Dr Lang from Italy and um and she says you know if I don’t make it back to Australia I’m sending all my artworks with my excellent mother who has come with me and sacrificed so much to be with me on this journey and
That I just found that so moving Victoria because in um the work that’s been done on ATA dside in the past there’s not much but and and it’s wonderful work you know including a terrific biography by um Jill pton um kind of from the 1980s but not much
Attention is given to Martha and I really felt that she had been um that she deserved to come out of the the shadows and have a voice of Her Own and you know will admit also that putting her voice in allowed for a different generation of currency lasses to have a
Perspective but it also meant that there was a point of tension um between the characters that I thought would be healthy to see certain events and situations from different perspectives because just adela’s perspective is pretty out there and Martha is much more cautious I think she was much more
Anxious about the convic stain and the impact that it you know and also being a single mother um and she was much more religious you know whereas Adela proudly described herself as a Christian spiritualist I think Martha was well truly in the square of being a well behaved devout
Presbyterian so I wanted to bring out those sort of things but um you know Martha’s voice just really moved me as well it was a much more fragile a much more tenuous voice and ultimately I just didn’t want this to be another B rhy that was only a hero’s journey of
Adelaide einside because her story when you look at the archive is full of all these other women’s voices and it tells a heroin story which is of many women supporting each other um and that was the nature of what it was like to be a woman in the 19th century you just
Didn’t go off on your own you know so when Adelaide was in um England and Italy she became part of a group of people known as the sister painters who had gone to Italy to have greater um personal and professional freedom and female networks were absolutely essential to building your confidence to
Creating um social Mobility to supporting you and she Adelaide had many of them and right at the heart the one person who stayed with her to the very very end was Martha and I guess just to finish off with one last thing is that I was really struck
By how um you know we started this conversation by talking about how Adela is not well known and I think that is probably because people have tended to be very critical of her art and what I saw in her artwork was a moment where she was just about to change from um a
Previous fascination with neoclassicism to moving more towards the prer raite focus on a sort of hyper reality and had she done so her work would have been much more in keeping with the times and more popular and better appreciated today but Adela died before she could make that successful transition and so
There is a kind of sense of failure in her story of anonymity and failure that she didn’t get the recognition she didn’t make the changes you know as artists we’re always experimenting yeah failure is intrinsic to the experimental process right and to be cut short in the
Middle of an experiment that looks like a failure that’s tough but when I was thinking about that I really got thinking I couldn’t get away from the parallels I saw between the story of pany and Dema uh and so pany in the Greek myth is out collecting wild flowers where the Earth
Opens up and Hades quite literally drags her down into the underworld and then Dema um stops spring and forces winter across the world no crops you know she’s the god of the grain until her daughter comes back until she’s um reunited with her daughter and that becomes the cycle
Of the seasons and those were very ancient powerful women’s stories from um from that period and they’ve continued but I think there’s a parallel there you know um like Dema Mara literally follows her daughter into hell yeah to try and retrieve her and recover her but Adelaide has this compulsion to go into
These dark places and come out the other side whether it’s her health whether it’s her artistic journey and the question that stays for me with this is was panie abducted or did she willingly go into that place and it’s worth thinking about that in those ancient tra Traditions panie becomes known as the
Queen of the underworld and I wanted to just have that resonating through the book because I think as artists people who want to be original whatever it is my own experience of writing the book is that you have to go into the underworld uh willingly or not that you have to
Reconcile yourself with those Dark Places um yeah before you can come out and find the spring again definitely it’s a the the process isn’t it and to be cut short during that process of her you know learning and working on her work definitely absolutely so I wanted
Just as a last question to you cara thank you so much for your time so far why do you think this is so important right now this book what do you think it is oh I think me personally after reading this um I think this is a book for anyone who is
Deciding to take a leap it’s a real inspiration it’s like going into being your true self going into the unknown taking a chance you you read this book and you’re just like wow what a character to just just not not go with the norm and it’s almost like it wasn’t
Even a consideration to her either you know I mean it’s just not even a consideration this is who I am I want to uh to focus on my work and that’s exactly what I’m going to do and obviously the the people that she had around her allowed to do that but it was
That so I I really think at the minute if you’re looking for a book that’s uh something that if you’re about to step into something that you want to do that’s new and you’re feeling challenged this is a great book but I also I also think at the minute there’s
Such a huge movement with uh trying to give especially women artists voices there’s a whole there’s a whole movement now I I feel that has kind of had women uh there was a exhibition just quite recently uh know my name Australian women artist at the National Gallery you
Know G giving actually photographs and names and artworks to people who were around it’s a very U male dominated art history that we have so I think it’s amazing to hear about people like Adelaide you know so very inspiring that’s how what I think that’s at the
Minute I think this is an amazing book for those two reasons So yeah thank you thank you um that’s that’s wonderful um because I guess that was my experience too of writing it I felt like I was stepping away from being a well behaved historian even a well behaved biographer
Now I was breaking rules all over the place but I was following my instinct my intuition and um and even even though that kind of took me into Hell in a lot of different times and places uh almost three years in fact you know of the actual writing
Was was pretty hellish in some ways but you know who are we if we don’t have a relationship without intuition so I feel that so often the way that we write humans lives we um you know when we Short change the past we Short change the present and the future and so
There’s these fantastic historians in England who call themselves or across the world actually and they call themselves The historians of the unknown and one of their cases is that they’ve made is that the way that we’ve been doing history for a very long time since it sort of entered the academy is to
Keep ourselves at a great distance from anything to do with emotions or spiritual beliefs or religious principles that we really look at it through the kind of scientific lens and try to justify our own you know try and build our own cred by treating that with a degree of distance even
Content um and in so doing we deny the fact that people’s lives are animated by what they believe in they’re profoundly shaped by their interior worlds their intuition their in their imagination um by their spiritual experiences right you know Adelaide had spiritual mystical experiences in her life and they made
Helped her to make decisions that made her the person that she was but historians and biographers I think often ignore that and I wanted to put it front and center because I think it is front and center of our lives but we’re often not given any platform for talking about
It it’s like we have to assure it deny it put it on the distance and I think it’s one of those kind of leftover hangovers of having a very male centered world that men don’t like to talk about this a lot so women just you know behave
The same way it’s all we’re all very well behaved about it but when I was reading Adelaide’s archive and I heard her talking about the universal intelligence you know the infinite power of love and all these things that she’s talking about I was blown away by the
Fact that this is the language that people kind of still are using in different ways and that there is a kind of a set of spiritual Traditions that inform the way that we connect with nature the way we make meaning of ourselves the way we make meaning of Our
Lives the way we look after one another or fail to you well the way we look after one another the way we see the world and I just wanted to bring that back into the conversation because I think we’re you know we need Deep Roots to live in this
World we need roots that tap roots that go down into the water and that kind of those spiritual traditions and I’m not saying there aren’t fors and fakes and all that sort of stuff There Are Spiritual Traditions that we can tap into that have long legacies and Adelaide’s story is a gift
That brings those up for consideration I guess recovery oh beautifully said and thank you so much Cara for your time talking to us today um it’s been an absolute delight and I really appreciate all the time and effort you put into making this book it’s been fantastic to hear about
It and yeah so thank you so much I would like to thank you too Victoria that was um a stunning interview and um so thoughtful so connected right and what you also reminded me is that those spiritual Traditions that I’ve been talking about they’ve also shaped the
Way we’ve thought we’ve created art you know it’s an eight to the creative process I think think and and you seem to really Reg in that space you know with your own understanding of creative processes and stuff like that so thank you for meeting me in this project on that level
Great what a fascinating conversation with Dr Kira Lindsay about her new book Wild Love so uh you can buy the book uh I’ll put a link in the bio so you can see where you can get the hold of the book also the city Mechanic School of
Arts in our members Library you can uh borrow that book as well um if you were super interested in the things that we were talking about today I’m also going to be putting in a link to Kira’s uh website and there’s also research material on there that you can go and
Check out and if you are like me absolutely fascinated by Adelaide you can actually go and see one of her paintings on display if you’re in Sydney you can go to The Gallery at the Art Gallery New South Wales on the ground floor for free you can go and have a
Little look um I must have walked into the Gallery space so many times and I totally missed it which I feel awful about but it’s called The Marriage of Kaa and galile and you can find it on their website but you can also go and
Visit it for free um it it was a beautiful experience going to see it um and it’s surrounded by other artists who have made uh artworks around Australian um wild flowers as well or flowers Landscapes things like that so it’s it’s really worth going and checking that out
As well so yeah anyway I hope you enjoyed this conversation um and uh have a lovely rest of your day