Ghost Plants: The Possibilities of Botanical Ecobiography

Sarah Brooks, an early botanical collector in the remote south-east of Western Australia, and entanglement with that region are the subject of my research. I came to Sarah’s story through a fascination not only with her as a person, but also with the place where she lived; the period of colonisation and dispossession of First Nations people in the late nineteenth century; and with the plant life she encountered in the global biodiversity hotspot of south-west Australia. In looking for ways to honour the deep entanglements between Sarah, the place she lived and the many hundreds of botanical specimens she collected, I found my way to ecobiography, a form of life writing that explores an ecosystem of the Self, comprised of all the interactions between the Self and the other-than-human world. In this essay, I explore the potential of botanical specimens as biographical source material—and as one piece of evidence of Sarah’s entanglement with place. This essay also touches on the possibility of Sarah’s specimens as historical archive, in order to approach her story with an awareness of the other-than-human, so that the agency of other living beings in shaping (human) histories can be centred.