The Wasp and the Orchid

by Danielle Clode

  The Field Naturalists Club of Victoria was established in 1880, at a small meeting of about 30 people, at the Athenaeum in Collins Street in Melbourne. The club was well supported by the educated gentlemen of the colony – men like Frederick McCoy, founding professor of biology at the university and director of the National Museum of Victoria, and Ferdinand von Mueller, government botanist and director of the botanical gardens. The functions of the club were both educative and healthy.

  ‘It would at once provide scientific amateurs with opportunities for interesting and instructive social excursion,’ commented the Australasian, ‘and tend to make science popular amongst the community in general.’

  The study of natural history covered both theory and practice: lectures and excursions into the field. The monthly meetings also comprised ‘conversaziones’ – a more elegant term for ‘show-and-tell’, where members could bring objects of rarity or curiosity for inspection and discussion. And all of these events were recorded in the annals of the Victorian Naturalist, without which Edith’s career would have taken a very different path indeed.

  This ethos of public education and engagement in science and the outdoors prompted an inclusive approach to membership. Men and women of all classes, and juniors too, were encouraged to join, irrespective of their level of learning or expertise, whether or not they were interested in active research. This intermingling of all skill levels in an equitable and friendly social environment proved amenable to women. By 1905, half the participants on a camping excursion to Mount Buffalo were female.

  The club not only promoted the study of nature, but also advocated for its protection, and was instrumental in the emerging national parks movement in Australia. Wilsons Promontory was one of their first campaigns, which club members thought they had succeeded in protecting in 1898. That reservation turned out to be less secure than they had thought, resulting in a very large delegation to the minister, including the Field Naturalists, along with seven other societies. The minister quickly made the protection permanent.

  Conservation protection was clearly close to Edith’s heart.

  ‘We have sanctuaries for animals and birds,’ she wrote, ‘why not botanical sanctuaries? It would surely be of great national value if small areas in specially favored localities could be reserved for the preservation of native flora.’

  Edith sets a high bar for the standard of nature writing. I am constantly aware of the breadth of her knowledge, the detailed level of accuracy neatly packaged into her airy prose. She wears her research lightly, as if it was effortless. I can’t begin to imagine how she acquired that level of knowledge, without training, without support, without the institutional resources of a university library – without the internet.

  Tiny insects are swarming over the bright yellow flowers of the ‘hen and chicks’ plant on my driveway. It grew from a cutting of a plant growing feral on the side of the road, so I don’t know its name. Some kind of sempervivum, aptly named for ‘eternal life’, probably Aeonium cuneatum. Even with a shelf full of gardening books and the internet it takes me half an hour to identify the species.

  The insects are even more difficult. I wonder if they are native bees. There are 1500 species of native bees in Australia and I have no key for identifying them.

  My insects look like bees but they hover more like wasps. Wasps often hunt other insects around flowers. But some wasps feed on nectar too, like these ones do. Perhaps I should add the 12,000 species of wasps in Australia to my list of possibilities.

  I take some photos and spend a day attempting to identify them. An online key to identifying Australian invertebrates only takes me to ‘hymenoptera’ (bees, wasps and ants). At least I can rule out the ants. The hymenoptera are one of the hardest groups of insects in which to identify species. The wasps, generally, tend to have a longer, narrower ‘waist’ while the bees tend to be more rounded. I try to narrow my quest to things that look like both bee-like and wasp-like, but there are bees that mimic wasps and wasps that mimic bees.

  My insects have large bulbous eyes and short stubby antennae. Maybe they are flies? Bee flies and hover flies also look like bees and wasps, although they only have a single pair of fully formed wings, instead of two pairs. There are 30,000 species of flies in Australia, a few hundred of which belong to the bee fly family (Bombyliidae) or hoverflies (Syrphidae). By the end of the day I am completely confused.

  ‘Hoverflies,’ a gardening friend declares dismissively. ‘They are everywhere this year.’

  ‘When I was a child my father sometimes took certain “bees” from the flowers, enclosing them in his hand,’ Edith recalled. ‘He tempted me to emulate him by pointing out the ones I might safely handle, but always my courage failed at the critical moment.’

  Recollections from childhood shift and blur with time. Edith had thought these were drones – the male honeybees – but it is only in adulthood that she questions this. Honeybee drones rarely visit flowers at all.

  ‘When golden Aeoniums were in flower, I partly solved the problem. For three weeks the huge inflorescences were haunted by bees which must have found them easy foraging. Now and again a larger brighter “bee” alighted which suggested – the wish no doubt being father to the thought – my father’s “drones”,’ Edith observed. ‘But these were too swift for me to capture, even in a lidded box. They were golden and gleaming, without the hairy, velvety look of the hive bee. Like Michelet I thought them too radiant in their illuminated wings for toilers of the hive. When at last I did capture several I found that they were without the married wings of hymenoptera, quite obviously flies.’

  Even Edith must ask for help with identification. The entomologist Tarlton Rayment confirmed that they were flower-loving drone flies, a kind of hoverfly known as Eristalis tenax, found across the world. But I am not the dedicated naturalist that Edith was. I fail to follow my hoverflies to where they are laying their eggs, and miss the opportunity to see their rat-tailed maggots swimming in a barrel of liquid manure.

  ‘I still cannot associate these swift radiant creatures with the “bees” my father captured so unhurriedly,’ Edith muses, ‘but memory is sometimes treacherous.’

  My hoverflies are not the cosmopolitan Eristalis tenax. They are much smaller and thinner with different markings. I have them identified at the museum: Simosyrphus grandicornis, one of the two most common species in Australia, unique to the region.

  I remember what it was like to do research before the advent of computers: the time-consuming searches through library catalogues; the books that were only available from overseas; the articles that had to be found by backtracking through the reference lists; scanning along the uniformly bound journal bindings for the year and hoping the page number was correctly recorded. The piles of reprint requests routinely dropped into letterboxes to an unknown reception. The overseas envelopes with their colourful stamps returning some weeks later with shiny reprints, scrawled with compliments.

  Today, we access articles instantly, downloaded to our screens. At worst, an obscure reference takes a few days to arrive, ordered through the library. I don’t know if Edith had access to a university library, although I know she used the ‘Public Library’ – the State Library of Victoria. She certainly had a vast collection of reprints. John recalls her exercise books, bulging with indexed reprints. Only one survives. It is a collection of her own reprints, cut from newspapers, glued and folded, the dates and names labelled in ink across the top. The cuttings are soft from age, dropping like concertinas into the narrow, elongated columns of early newspapers. In the back pages are her scientific reprints, on A5-sized sheets of glossy paper sometimes bound in coloured card. Their abundant white space and crisply printed plates contrasts starkly with the browned fragility of the newspapers. This form of print was intended to last.

  Edith’s notebook of her own reprints

  Not for the first time, I am astonished at what she achieved on her own. More than some professional academics in their entire
careers. Not for the first time, I wonder what she could have achieved if she’d gone to university, studied biology, completed a doctorate, been employed to teach and research. More than I have, I imagine.

  Edith could have gone to the University of Melbourne when she finished school and her pupil-teacher training. Technically, the university had been open to ‘all classes and denominations of Her Majesty’s subjects’ since its incorporation in 1853. The government explicitly clarified that this included women. But the University Council demurred and barred women from sitting the requisite matriculation examination, on the grounds that they had no dress code for them. By 1880, the doors were forced ajar by public pressure, although the council continued obstructing women’s access to medicine until 1887. The first female graduate of any Australian university, Bella Guerin, graduated from Melbourne in 1883 with a Bachelor of Arts, completing her Masters in 1885.

  There are no records of Edith sitting any of the matriculation exams, no evidence that she gained a degree and no records, even, of her sitting any subjects at the university. She lies outside the established academy. James’s business prowess had positioned them comfortably in the ranks of the middle class. It would be her own merits, her skills as a writer, that provided her entrée into the ranks of the intellectual elite.

  Years ago I worked in the spider laboratory at Melbourne University. I watched an orb-weaver hanging in her web: a pendant at the centre of a delicate tracery of silver, minute patterns gleaming mint-green on her rounded abdomen, as if she were made of the finest cloisonné enamel. A tiny male spider danced down my paintbrush towards his intended, pausing before carefully stepping onto her web. He waited, one leg waving, indecisive, in the air, one touching a strand of web, the others still secure on the brush, before deciding it was safe to proceed. The female golden orb-weaver (Nephila edulis) remained unmoved by this intrusion. Her courtship would either be a long and patient affair or, if unsuccessful, short and brutal. The male moved into position, his escape line attached, ready to drop from the web in an instant, and began the gentle strumming lullaby to soothe his mate into acquiescence. If his charm succeeded, the female would relinquish her central panopticon and hang beneath her web, allowing the male to approach and transfer his precious spermatophore with his pedipalps – tiny club-like appendages close to his mouth. If not, he would find himself embraced and wrapped with high-speed, multi-needled knitting in a tight cocoon for later consumption.

  The male was successful. Relieved, I retrieved him from the web, and flicked a couple of fruit flies from the genetics lab into the upturned plastic cup that constituted his home. I marked the female’s frame as ‘mated’, slid the perspex panel closed and slotted her transparent frame back into the shelf with the other females who lined the walls of the laboratory. A couple of the tiny Drosophila flies made a burst for freedom through the door. I should have kept it shut. The neighbouring zoology labs were not so keen on spiders and flies. They liked their nature sliced beneath a microscope or smeared across a gel screen. One of the Nephila females had escaped from the confines of her frame and spread her web a metre-wide across the corner of the lab next door. She cleaned up any fleeing Drosophila with speedy efficiency. The molecular biologists were not amused and muttered empty threats about flyspray.

  Edith had no gleamingly clean laboratories for her work. She tried to capture orb-weavers, web and all, transferring them to a window frame for closer observation. She kept her huntsman spiders in museum jars, their lids of perforated board perched precariously on top. The jars covered every surface of her bedroom: the dressing table, chest of drawers and the top of the wardrobe.

  ‘They spent many hours, day and night, in beautiful courtship displays,’ Edith recounted. ‘Shy advances and retreats appeared to be part of the ceremony. Running to meet each other, they would gently touch feet, then retreat hastily as if alarmed. Walking on tiptoes, body high off the floor, the male would advance, shaking his palpi, as one shakes drops of water from one’s fingers.’

  Edith woke at intervals in the night to check on their progress, noting their behaviours. After the long courtship, copulation could take days.

  ‘Great power of endurance is suggested,’ Edith commented drily after tallying up 68.25 hours of copulation over eighteen occasions in one couple.

  Her husband James leaves no opinion, but moved to the sleep-out for the duration of her spider work.

  Perhaps university simply did not occur to Edith as an option in her youth. The Harms family followed a common migration trajectory, with uneducated, rural parents raising children who, in the first and second generations, would rise to steadily higher socio-economic achievements. Some branches of the family remained farmers, others went on to higher education and professional occupations. Migration, and the social changes of the nineteenth century, broke many of the generational shackles that had bound families to their ‘place’ in the old country.

  I don’t know what the Harms family’s financial circumstances were after their arrival in Melbourne. Henry obviously made enough money as a builder, and later nurseryman, to keep his family comfortably and build a house in Healesville. Perhaps that didn’t extend to sending a child to university. It cost £21 per year to do a science degree in 1892 – as much as Edith was earning as a pupil-teacher. And qualification might not result in any particular advantage for a woman anyway. Bella Guerin ended up as a schoolteacher, as the majority of the first female university graduates did.

  Family expectations also exert considerable force. Builders’ daughters from state schools were rare indeed at the university in the late 1880s. A century later, as the daughter of a boatbuilder at a rural state school, I did not even know what university was. I wondered whether I should be a boatbuilder, like my father, or a receptionist, like my mother. The careers advisor signed me up for a signwriting course at TAFE on the basis of good marks in art. I was rescued only by the local doctor’s daughter, who told me I should go to university. It was a student allowance, no fees and monumentally high regional unemployment that made university the most viable option for me.

  Both of Edith’s daughters attended university. Her grandsons, Peter and John, inspired perhaps by the mechanical aptitude of their grandfather, and biological skills of their grandmother, went on to study engineering and biology respectively, completing PhDs and lecturing in their chosen fields. But it was surely Edith who broke that ground for them.

  I finally find a copy of Edith’s little known and elusive ‘first’ article, published in the Gum Tree, the ‘official organ’ of the Forest League. It pre-dates Edith’s first paper in the Victorian Naturalist by two years. The library at the Adelaide herbarium found the issue in their collection and sent me a scanned copy of Edith’s article. The cover is pure Arts and Crafts – with its hand-drawn fonts engraved into the black and white forest etching. Edith’s article itself contains no surprises. She begins with a quote from Marie E. J. Pitt’s poem ‘Spider Orchids’.

  ‘It was a charming fancy that likened some of our orchids to fairy dancers,’ Edith writes, ‘for to the imaginative mind there are no more fairy-like creations than these little Pucks and Ariels of the forest.’

  The article bears all the hallmarks of her later works: the literary allusions, the vivid descriptive passages, the emotive appeal, the reassuring metaphors and the alluring enthusiasm of a gentle, trustworthy guide in unfamiliar terrain. Edith is in full flight here. There is no transition to witness. I have gained no particular insight into her development. The article simply sets the clock two years earlier on her appearance as a nature writer.

  The illustrations, though, are intriguing. They are by Dorothy and Gladys Coleman: confirmation, surely, of the collaborative relationship between mother and daughters in the development of their mutual interests in natural history, illustration and publication.

  The illustrations are unsigned, but already I think their characteristic styles are apparent – even at the age of twenty. Some of the illustratio
ns are simple line drawings, quick, fresh and vital. Dorothy’s, I presume. I recognise her work from magazines, on her mother’s and Jean Galbraith’s articles, signed with familiar initials that never fail to catch my eye.

  The others are shaded and detailed, intricate and precise – perhaps in ink; some might be pencil sketches. It’s hard to tell from the photocopy. These I think belong to Gladys. Gladys’s artwork is best known from her illustrations of Aboriginal artefacts, in the Donald Thomson collection.

  ‘The first stage of Gladys’ working methods for finished line drawings of natural history or ethnographic objects was apparently to draw in pencil as accurately as possible from the specimens,’ says Moira Playne, who has studied this collection and its artists. ‘Then she superimposed the drawing with black ink . . . She used a range of pen widths to achieve structure, texture, function and appearance.’

  Not all of Gladys’s work is signed; her talents were collected and labelled under her husband’s name. Her illustrations also appear in Alfred Ewart’s monograph Flora of Victoria. I don’t know which ones they are, but her son John tells me that she illustrated and wrote the orchid section. Ewart admits that Gladys ‘assisted in preparing the section of Orchids’. Ethel McLennan organised the team of illustrators, nearly all of whom were women. Only a single colour plate in the illustrated text is attributed, to Mavis Arnold. It’s part of a long tradition, of women’s work subsumed under the name of their husband or supervisor.

  I suddenly remember that I once wrote a section for my supervisor’s book. All his students, male and female, wrote the sections for their respective species, with few changes. I wonder how our work was acknowledged. I find that we are collectively, euphemistically, recognised for ‘having helped excise the errors from the first volume’.