I search for a Walsham in Surrey anyway. Perhaps it is the name of a house, a farm, or a wood? My search returns details of a Walsham Lock on the River Wey. A pretty little red-brick cottage, trailing ivy, reflects itself from still waters, surrounded by soft English countryside. I enter the details into a mapping program.
‘Do you mean “Walsham Lock Cottage, Warren Lane, Woking”?’ the computer asks.
Warren Lane, which leads to Warren Farm, the childhood home of Edith’s father Henry Harms. That leads to the lock, whose name we did not know before, where Edith’s brother Harry recalls them all swimming and diving for the lock keeper’s key, where Edith’s parents met, halfway between their respective farms. Yes, I think that is the place I mean. This is the Walsham whose memories Edith treasured enough to bequeath its name to her new home on the far side of the world.
Standing on the edge of busy Blackburn Road, I struggle to bring to mind the wide dirt strip that once lay here in its place, the open horse paddocks that stretched between the dappled shade of the stringybarks and ironbarks. As the cars rush past, I want to put everything in slow motion, drown out the drone of traffic that underpins the air, the rumbling vibration that comes up from the ground. It is all too busy, too hard, too noisy. I bring to mind country towns, with the lazy buzz of cicadas in the summer heat, the way a distant dog’s bark can drift all the way through the silence from the far side of town. I wander down the quiet lane behind Walsham and try to imagine what it was like as natural bushland, with a creek and abundance of wildlife. But the fenced yards of suburbia rise all around me. My imagination quails and retreats.
Edith saw these changes coming.
‘Twenty years ago there were few places of greater interest to the Melbourne bird-lover than Blackburn,’ she wrote in 1938. ‘Today the forest and the creek-side brush have almost disappeared, and with them most of the rarer birds that once visited our gardens in numbers. It is too late to reinstate our native birds in the nearer suburbs, but farther out something may be done to assist them in the uneven competition with alien birds.’
‘Our once popular little picnic spot is rapidly becoming suburbanised,’ she lamented. ‘Most of the timber within half a mile of the station has been cut down to make room for villas and bungalows with neat gardens and trim hedges.’
I think of the real estate advertisements spruiking community living with rural views in the newest farmland subdivision.
Map of Coleman properties around Melbourne
They always feature gum trees and happy children riding bikes through wetlands, close-ups of birds. They remind me of the open paddocks of Blackburn a century ago: sealed beneath layers of concrete and bitumen; views of the hills enclosed by encroaching brick walls; the few surviving trees gasping for air among the roar of the traffic. Like the ultra-realist pages of a Jeannie Baker picture book, the bushland is progressively loved to death by the relentless pressure of those who would escape into nature but succeed only in bringing their suburban nightmares with them.
I am still puzzled by the absence of writing in Edith’s early years. One letter to the newspaper for the first 47 years of her life. And then for the last 30 years an avalanche – more than ten papers a year.
Edith’s very first published words appear in 1913, in a letter to the editor of The Argus. She writes in response to an article proposing legislation to restrict the harvesting of egret feathers. Edith agrees but argues that education is also required.
‘Many of those who wear egret plumes err in ignorance,’ she explained, ‘imagining them to be obtained in the same way as those of the ostrich. Can we not make it more widely known that the parent birds are shot at breeding time, leaving the fledglings to die of starvation? . . . I think more enlightenment on this subject will bring forth just as ready response to an appeal for help for our feathered friends.’
Not only does she call for education, but she calls on women in particular, the women’s movement and the Women’s Political Associations to take the lead in this cause. The hallmarks of her later writing – to educate generally and to engage women in particular – are already present, nine years before her career truly began.
Alec Chisholm speculated on the fate of the young women naturalists and illustrators who made such an important contribution to Australian natural history, and yet failed to continue in their important work.
‘So it would seem that the inclinations of girlhood towards the “rhymes of the universe”,’ he despaired, ‘are frequently put to defeat when the world issues a call to duties of everyday. In face of this, it seems to me, that our little band of women naturalists has done, and is doing, admirable work.’
Edith seems to have reversed this pattern. Like a woman’s version of Kipling’s Purun Dass, she spent twenty years a youth, twenty years a mother and twenty years a writer, give or take. Perhaps Edith waited until her children were grown and independent, her housewifely duties reduced, before finding the time to engage in her own passions.
Was Edith too busy for writing while she cared for her family? Did she rise early to coax the wood stove into life before first light and get the coffee percolating or water boiled for tea, while James dressed in the neatly pressed shirts and suit that had been laid out for him the night before? Did she prepare a typical Australian breakfast, perhaps, of bacon and eggs fresh from the black Australorps in the backyard? I know she made time for a quick trip into the garden, to pick fresh flowers for the house.
It’s likely that Edith’s days were dictated by the regular cycle of weekly activities binding women across the Western world. ‘Wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday, mend on Wednesday, churn on Thursday, clean on Friday, bake on Saturday, rest on Sunday.’ There are regional variations. Australian housewives who did not churn might garden on Wednesday and mend on Thursday instead. It was washday that took precedence and the earlier it was done in the week the better.
The thought of a pre-machine-age washing fills me with horror: lighting the copper before dawn in the backyard wash house, hefting wet fabrics in a steaming pot with a stick, scrubbing stains by hand on the washboard. Then dumping the boiling clothes into a concrete trough, rinsing whites with Reckitt’s blue, and pushing them through the wringer – careful not to catch a finger.
Neighbours raced to hang their sheets first – rumours abounding that some hung their sheets up before even washing them. I wonder if Edith had a clothesline strung between gum trees, dripping tannin in the rain. Or one held up on a prop, always at risk of being knocked over, fully laden, into the dirt. I don’t believe Mrs Mary Sproule’s exhortation that washing day was ‘the least trying of all her working days’, or that the steam of the washing effortlessly completed the work of a beauty parlour.
Ironing day wouldn’t have been much better, not with heavy flat irons heated on the wood stove, and the risk of getting stove black on the collars. Sewing seems a preferable task – reattaching buttons, darning holes in socks and running general repairs on the clothes and household items. I have a soft spot for treadle sewing machines. I learnt to sew on one, careful not to run it backwards. But sewing loses its appeal when everything must be homemade – floor coverings, curtains, bedspreads and sheets, children’s clothes and wedding dresses, even furniture upholstery. Only the wealthiest could afford shop-bought goods from the local stores appearing along Blackburn Road or the larger stores in the city.
‘Mrs Barnett’s paper and sweet shop in Blackburn Road,’ recollected A. W. Steel. ‘The Post Office just over the railway gates and Pope’s grocery . . . Prior’s butcher shop came later. Spencer Pearce and his mother had a greengrocery.’ And there was a blacksmith’s shop on Whitehorse Road. Even a pioneering motoring family like the Colemans had a horse, whose name ‘Dandy’ remained attached to the stable long after the horse had gone. The small local shops provided for immediate needs while butchers, bakers, grocers and icemen ran regular deliveries down the streets – a trade that continued in some areas right up until the 1980s.
> Then Friday for cleaning and Saturday for baking. I have a vague memory of Edith offering household cleaning tips, but when I look it’s only in reference to strewing rose petals and meadowsweet, or bridewort (now Filpendula ulmaria), through the house. Hardly the kind of prosaic practical housekeeping tip of Mr Beeton’s illusory wife. I’m more confident about the baking. Her grandsons tell me that Edith was skilled at baking and jam-making, a talent that Dorothy inherited. Visitors recalled being served ‘luscious cake with chipped toffee on top’. With little in the way of refrigeration, excess produce had to be bottled, preserved or made into jams from the fruit trees in the garden: figs, apricots and plums. Other fruit was foraged – mulberries from the old lime kiln at Sorrento and blackberries from Healesville, often from the roadside.
And, finally, Sunday was the day to dress up in their finest and go to church. I can find little trace of the Colemans in the history of the St John’s Anglican Church – no obvious signs of donations or records of participation. They attended this church for many years before some unknown disagreement with the minister kept Edith and James away. Edith loved the language and poetry of theological tracts as much as that of any great literature, but that did not deter her from analysing and critiquing them. Neither Shakespeare nor the Bible was above correction when they erred in botanical matters. I can imagine a clergyman finding Edith’s approach challenging. Dorothy, however, remained a lifelong churchgoer and assisted in the compilation of the history of St John’s.
Weekends must also have found time for sport. James was passionate about cars, boats, bikes, bowls, cricket and football.
‘I’m very keen on cricket,’ Edith wrote. ‘The prince of games.’
Perhaps Edith did not find the housework quite as onerous as less well-off women of the times though. Walsham had a ‘maid’s room’, a long dark room with a sink and, lined along one side, shelves for linen. In 1908 the family advertised for a ‘light general’ to look after a small family, with plenty of freedom and to be treated like family.
I am picking through fragments in Edith’s later writing to reconstruct her life at Walsham. This is the period I know the least about, her time as a wife and mother. I feel like I’m clutching at straws – a sentence here, a thought there. I run the risk of wild assumptions, of connecting random dots to create a picture that isn’t there. Then again, the alternative feels like stubborn ignorance in the face of the blindingly obvious.
Surely Edith must have found time for nature study and books, even as a wife and mother? To her neighbours and passers-by she was Mrs Coleman, an ‘Englishwoman who has adopted Australia, who may appear to be reserved but has a winning openness of manner’. As a young child in the 1920s Mabel Roberts recalled taking new or unusual wildflowers to Mrs Coleman, who ‘always welcomed the local people and encouraged them to take an interest in the natural history around the area where they lived’.
Having recalled with so much affection the way in which she was raised, with her mother’s love of literature and her father’s love of nature, I can only assume that Edith would have done the same for her daughters. Too often it is assumed that women writers make poor mothers, bad wives, or lonely spinsters – Enid Blyton, Henry Handel Richardson, P. L. Travers, Dorothy Parker. If they succeed at their art it is at the sacrifice of domestic triumph. It is assumed that the selflessness of motherhood is in eternal conflict with the selfishness of art. It is a particularly vicious variation of Cyril Connolly’s oft-cited excuse that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’.
Such toxic mythology poisons the lives of women writers, guilty of being selfish if they prioritise their art, and second-rate if they don’t. It doesn’t seem to be as interesting to talk about the women inspired by their children. And yet domesticity may be both a burden and a blessing: a constraint and an unshackling. Dulcie Deamer was a talented, successful and productive writer with six children in tow. The incredibly productive Rica Erickson had four.
Writing was the only occupation I could succeed at while also being a mother at home. I learnt to write efficiently and intensively: during naptime, kindergarten and school hours. I am eternally grateful to my children for granting me the freedom, opportunity and discipline to write.
Gladys and Dorothy Coleman, about 1908
Gladys and Dorothy were probably about five or six when the family moved to Walsham. When they were about twelve and thirteen, they were given care of a tiny orphaned possum.
‘A soft, pink and grey ball of fur, with bright, bead-like eyes,’ Edith described their newest family member, ‘he hardly filled the cup of my hands when presented to me.’
They named the possum ‘Bill Baillie’, after the pet bilby in Ellis Rowan’s beautifully illustrated children’s book about Western Australian wildlife, which Edith had been reading with the girls. Bill, and later his mate Mandy, lived for many years in an enclosure screened off on the back verandah. They seemed happy and healthy enough, although Edith wasn’t sure.
‘I think that he would have preferred life in the bush,’ she concluded, ‘with all its dangers.’
Other pets were less welcome. Dorothy recalled raising a young rabbit that was brought to them, feeding it with a flannel soaked in milk as they had Bill Baillie. The rabbit made a lovely pet, so tame it would eat from her hand. But it was given away at eighteen months ‘to a girl whose father did not mind the mischief it worked in the garden’.
I wonder what other books Edith was reading with her girls. Was Gladys drawing on childhood reading when she later quoted lines from Annie R. Rentoul’s immensely popular ‘Bush Songs of Australia for Young and Old’? Were they reading the country life stories of Ethel Turner or Mary Grant Bruce, the fantasies of Jessie Whitfield or Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, or the bush tales of Amy Mack? As well as the English classics, I’m sure. I just wish I knew.
The girls attended Tintern Girls’ School, which was then located in a large two-storeyed house on Glenferrie Road next to the Presbyterian Church in Hawthorn. At the time, Tintern was primarily regarded as a finishing school – small and friendly: a family. There was no need to train girls for jobs. Clever girls, who might go to university, were sent to the Presbyterian Ladies’ College or the Methodist Ladies’ College.
Nonetheless, Tintern did have some impressive teachers. Botany and physiology were taught by Dr Georgina Sweet for a time, who later became Australia’s first female professor and head of biologyat the University of Melbourne. Her successor, Bertha Rees, went on to become a botany demonstrator at the university. Teachers like these undoubtedly inspired students like Ethel McLennan who was determined to pursue an academic career, despite the shortcomings of the school’s performance in senior mathematics.
From Dorothy’s sketchbook 1919
‘She sits alone, grappling with Senior Public trigonometry,’ relates the school historian, Lyndsay Gardner, ‘the last prerequisite she needs for entry to a science course at the University of Melbourne.’
‘Dr. Mac’, as Ethel was known, became associate professor of botany at the University of Melbourne, teaching and supervising Gladys. Just ten years older than Dorothy and Gladys, McLennan would undoubtedly have been a role model for them at school.
By the time Dorothy and Gladys were in their senior years, the school was being run by Agnes Cross, who, over the course of their education, transformed the school and drastically improved its educational outcomes, if not its discipline.
From the occasional solitary university aspirant like McLennan, the school began to produce a steady batch of girls with Intermediate and Leaving passes. By late 1919–1920, both Dorothy and Gladys would be among them. Throughout their senior years the girls regularly took honours in various subjects, Dorothy particularly for drawing, as well as competing in tennis and basketball.
Agnes Cross had a particular passion for literature – which no doubt endeared her to the daughters of Edith Coleman. Her readings of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Lamplighter remained
in her students’ memories decades later, as did her love of J. M. Barrie and the English poets. But one of her other traits – a passionate commitment to social justice – may well have left a more profound mark. Cross was known to regularly waive fees for students with financial hardship, particularly during the war years. In 1917 Edith held an open garden at Walsham to raise funds for the Tintern Girls’ Grammar School Repatriation Fund. The following year, according to the Box Hill Reporter, ‘two little girls, Misses Dorothy and Gladys Coleman, of Blackburn, are holding a “bush afternoon” . . . in aid of the repatriation fund at their residence “Walsham”.’
By what stretch of the imagination a sixteen- and seventeen-year-old can be called ‘little girls’ I cannot imagine, but they raised £35 for the fund.
According to the school history – largely compiled from the recollections of those who had been young girls at the time – Agnes Cross was sufficiently progressive that ‘the mother of three part-aboriginal daughters felt no longer the need to conceal her husband whose colour would have betrayed his origin’. These students, whoever they were, must have been classmates of Dorothy and Gladys. What impact, if any, that experience had on their later connections with other Aboriginal communities, I can only speculate.
By 1915, Edith’s parents were living in Healesville, in a house also called Walsham and built by Henry. The Colemans, too, purchased property here, just across the Old Fernshaw Road, and had their own cottage, ‘Goongarrie’, where they stayed for weekends and holidays. It was the perfect place for Edith to indulge her passion for nature.
But Lottie’s health was failing, and she was worried about Henry. She had long suffered from goitre, a condition often associated with other complications. In April 1917 she wrote to Harry in Western Australia saying that she was planning to leave Healesville and move nearer to the girls ‘as she was getting too crippled to go about her household duties, and when Father got sick she was in a fix’. Barely a fortnight later she died.
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 10
