The Wasp and the Orchid

by Danielle Clode

  Thoreau observes with painstaking detail, but the understanding he reaches is of himself, of human nature, not of nature itself. It is the wildness within, rather than without, that Thoreau seeks to understand. Walden Pond remains a ‘perfect forest mirror’.

  ‘Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; – a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush – this the light dustcloth – which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.’

  Nature frames all of Thoreau’s experiences, but he requires no deeper understanding of what lies beneath the surface.

  ‘The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know,’ Thoreau observes.

  Mary Oliver, too, seeks not to know.

  ‘I would therefore write the kind of elemental poetry that doesn’t just avoid indoors but doesn’t even see the doors that lead inward – to laboratories, to textbooks, to knowledge. I would not talk about the wind, and the oak tree, and the leaf on the oak tree, but on their behalf.’

  I can’t agree. I am struck mute by ignorance. I do not have words to describe that which I do not know. If I cannot name it, by species, by structure, by system, how can I speak for it? In ignorance I would see only the surface, the superficial. The detail is hidden until I have the process, the mechanism, the meaning to unlock it. It is only through knowing that the details come into focus, and things that were quite hidden and unnoticed reveal new and exquisite beauty.

  Sympathy without insight feels like a lack of empathy to me. It feels locked within the human experience, constantly looking inward, checking on our own perspective, reflecting our own views and values onto the outside world. It is an imprisonment I long to shed. We can never escape ourselves, of course, or genuinely understand what it is to be other than human, but if any organ is going to help us achieve even a semblance of such a magical transformation it will be an achievement of the brain rather than the heart. The brain takes us to worlds we could never experience, while the heart ties us to our lived reality. And it is writing that allows us to share that vital, temporary, imperfect experience of otherness.

  Edith’s words gently chide me as we walk along a Sorrento beach, reminding me of the ecologist William Beebe’s words, ‘I am truly sorry for anyone, be he technical conchologist or casual naturalist, who, for some brief time, has never forgotten all science, all studied objective, in a wild orgy over unadulterated beauty.’

  The poetry of earth: Return of the flowers

  By Edith Coleman

  The poetry of the earth is never still. The metre may vary, but the poem sings throughout the changing seasons. Perhaps the road has seemed somewhat heavy this winter, yet there were always happy bends around which we spied the beckoning finger of Spring.

  Of all the flowers that fill the gay pageant of spring, the modest wild orchids hold first place in the hearts of many lovers of nature. Although generally of smaller size, the Australian species are the equal of the ground orchids of other parts of the world. The smallest and least conspicuous of them is unrivalled in the delicacy of colouring and perfection of line. Botanists of other countries are envious of the Commonwealth’s orchid wealth.

  September brings some of our quaintest forms – the elves and fays of the forest world, the whimsical members of the wildflower realm. With warm sunny days the rush begins, and the student of these wildflower aristocrats is somewhat exercised to keep apace with their crowded hour. These shy, wild orchids are essentially flowers of uncultivated lands, and those who have fallen under the spell of their beauty, who have, perhaps, grown up among them, say that they can make a friendly place of some remote wilderness. They are there for all. One needs no expensive glasshouse. Nature is our universal gardener, and she draws no wages. All one needs is the desire to know them and a love for bush rambles. One need be no great walker, nor need one travel far, for many species grow in easily accessible places. If our wild orchids are fast disappearing in settled areas, we may cheer ourselves with the assurance that they are claiming new territory in the lightly timbered virgin country, where a sufficient fall of leaves provides the humus they love.

  In fancy let us enlist the service of a magic carpet and seek a few of the 101 things that tell so happy a sum of spring joy. It need bear us no farther than Bayswater. It must set us down on a path which leads into a sea of slender bluebells; where tall blue pincushions grow luxuriously, intermingled with shell-grass and lady’s hair, ‘quivering sweet to the touch.’

  We shall wade through luscious flowering grasses that glint magically when breezes stir their burnished blades. Patches of wild iris make purple lakes in long, level stretches of russet grasses, and nodding blue lilies spread wide their petals, offering their very hearts in exchange for our admiration. But for only a few brief, sunny hours are we permitted to enjoy the gleaming golden stamens; then once more they are closely cradled in the folds of blue to protect them for their great work in the world.

  The air is laden with sweet briar scent, and is almost heavy with the warm vanilla fragrance of chocolate lilies. Can you smell them? Over all peep inquisitively those wildflower gossips, the tall white grass-tree flowers. We have the chance of finding a round half-dozen species of the queens of all forest flowers, the modest wild orchids. There are spiders, brownbeards, pink-fingers, double tails, and greenhoods by the score. The quaint bearded green-hood alone is worth coming to see. Most people who know the wild orchids at all are familiar with the brownbeard – Father Christmas many children call it – with its labellum fringed with long, silky hairs, curiously like a beard. But the bearded greenhood, although abundant in its favourite habitats, is not so well known. Its long, thread-like labellum is adorned with yellow, sometimes green, hairs, and it resembles a centipede with its numerous legs.

  Not far away we find the misty purple flowers of the scented brownbeaks in their favourite tangles of tall tussock grass. In an especially favoured spot there are hosts of buttercups, billy-buttons, fringed lilies, golden everlastings, and myriads of tall, pink triggers. Farther over we wander about low-lying grass flats, on which every little weed-grown pool is a garden in itself, blue as the sky it reflects or the glinting wings of the great dragon-flies that dart and dip, dealing death, mercifully so swiftly, to the hapless victims in its depths. We follow the exquisite scent with which Nature has compensated the sweet-leeks, the Cinderellas of the orchid family, for their modest apparel and their topsy-turvy habit of growth. Or, if we wish, our carpet shall take us toward the coast, where the wedding-bush will soon be a dream of soft, creamy loveliness. The tea-tree already wears its spring mantle, and the heavily laden bees scatter storms of snowy petals as they browse among the starry flowers. On the sandy heathlands, amid correa and pinkeye, we find the redbeak orchids, their flowers a little suggestive, perhaps, of pink and white peppermints. The well-known popular name, ‘flower-of-sadness,’ seems most appropriate when one sees pressed specimens lying on a sheet of white paper, for the plant turns coal-black when it is dry. Here we find some of the fantastic, even grotesque, members of this queenly family, whose weird shapes invite a smile. ‘Mosquitoes’ and ‘gnats’ fraternise with helmet-orchids and pink-fairies. Birds and orchids are never far apart. One stops to look at one and to listen to the other.

  Must we reluctantly turn our carpet toward town and the trials that await us there? Happily our working days are short, and we can easily count the hours that lie between this and our next happy jaunt into Nature’s wildflower realm. Those of us on whom the gods have bestowed the gift of imagination may sail away on our carpet when we will, to watch the return of the flowers in the yearly resurrection of spring.

  Chapter 11


  THE MOST INTERESTING RAGE ON EARTH

  ‘The natives at Hermannsburg brought in many food plants for my collection . . . I came to regard these happy people as comrades, “cobbers” shall we say, for they shared my love of trees and flowers, birds and beasts.’

  November 1933

  Edith sighs deeply as she pours the tea. Thank goodness that’s over. Everyone had been so generous for the cause, one had to be grateful, but the timing could not have been worse.

  John Shirlow had kindly sent a beautifully framed etching, from the first pull so that they might reproduce it and sell the original as well as copies. Dora Serle donated paintings – pale pastel impressions of colour and light. Her work was so popular at the moment. Another friend had sent six posters and some designs for cards. It was fortunate that Dorothy had so many artistic friends like the Lindsays and their circle. They had raised plenty of money for the animals, but Edith’s mind had not been on the task.

  She can hear Dorothy outside calling the dogs for their dinner. Not that Gladys and Donald’s huge beasts need calling for food. Despite their size, the dogs were very well behaved – it must seem strange to them to be confined even at Walsham, after all their time free-range up north.

  Poor Gladys had returned with Donald only last Saturday. She looks thin and tired, but there is no time to rest. Every day they are at the university, supervising the unpacking of all their equipment and their precious research materials. And in the evening there are endless functions and receptions that neither of them can be in the slightest bothered with, and yet they must go, and Donald receive the credit for all his work, when all he really wants is to be getting on with it.

  Edith can’t imagine what it must have been like for Gladys, to travel all over northern Australia to lands never before traversed by a white person. On their first trip, a few years ago, they travelled by pack horse with Aboriginal guides, the only Europeans for miles. Edith had been terribly worried at first. What might happen if Donald fell ill or if the natives turned nasty? Well-travelled friends had assured her that Gladys would be quite safe with the northern tribes, but Edith couldn’t help but worry all the same. Would you say the same of a native girl among white men?

  But Gladys is brave and resolute. She has been such a staunch mainstay for her husband, supporting him through his studies in New South Wales with her weekly articles on natural history in the paper. And then she illustrates Donald’s papers, even those on the most uninteresting topics – dissections of blood vessels for his snake venom research. But Gladys remains patient and sweet about it all, nonetheless. He is fortunate to have her. Still, Edith shudders to think of the risks her slender daughter took, looking barely more than a child herself–crossing swollen rivers rife with crocodiles, escaping a boat on fire, or scrambling up a tree to safety from a wild boar.

  ‘That Wolf is well named,’ says Dorothy, coming in from her chores. ‘I’ve never seen food disappear so fast.’

  Edith passes Dorothy her tea. ‘Put your feet up,’ she says. ‘You’ve done too much today.’

  But Dorothy just smiles and breathes in the fragrant steam. Nothing ever seems to faze her.

  Edith sips her tea. There is no sign of Dorothy finding a husband. She is always so busy with her teaching, she has little time for socialising, except perhaps among her artistic friends. Edith once dreamt that one of her daughters might marry a cricketer. The naturalist took one off the list, but there is still Dorothy. Or a farmer, perhaps. Edith can just imagine Dorothy enjoying life on the farm, she is so hardworking.

  But, then again, perhaps that would be like harnessing Pegasus. Perhaps Dorothy is better off with her freedom.

  WHEN I FIRST started reading Edith’s papers, I was struck by the lack of mention of any Indigenous Australians, their relationships with, impact on or knowledge of the natural world. Indigenous knowledge has long been recognised (if not always fully acknowledged) by the earliest explorers and naturalists to modern researchers, as essential to the understanding of Australia’s flora and fauna. At the time Edith was writing, natural history and ‘pre-history’ – human culture before the advent of writing – were grouped together. Indigenous people were seen as part of the natural world: distinct, as it were, from civilisation.

  Walsham sits on the land of the Wurundjeri-balluk people, whose language is Woi wurrung. They are one of the tribes of the Kulin nation. They camped along the creeks and rivers that Edith frequented, leaving traces of their presence in scar trees and middens. But by the 1900s, there were few of those traces left in Blackburn. There is no mention of the Wurundjeri-balluk people in Edith’s writing. Still, she could not have been completely unaware of the area’s Aboriginal history. Aboriginal artefacts were keenly studied by other members of the Field Naturalists Club, including Bob Croll. The ‘Aboriginal Problem’ appears regularly in the Melbourne papers in the early 1900s, peaking in the 1930s.

  Edith had also lived in Healesville for many years. Up until 1924 the land around Badger Creek, now home in part to Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary, was the Aboriginal reserve Coranderrk, which the Wurundjeri people managed very successfully as a farm, selling wheat, hops and craft at Melbourne markets and even winning prizes at the International Exhibitions.

  By the late 1800s and early 1900s, though, Coranderrk was under threat. The farming land was valuable. Perhaps the residents were too successful. The Aborigines Protection Act of 1866 demanded that half-castes under the age of 35 be ‘integrated’ into white society. The enforced loss of able-bodied workers crippled the community’s ability to work their farms.

  William Barak, elder of the Wurundjeri-willam clan and tireless proponent for Indigenous rights, protested about his people’s lack of rights.

  ‘Could we get our freedom to go away Shearing and Harvesting and to come home when we wish and also to go for the good of our Health when we need it,’ he declared in a petition to the government. ‘We should be free like the White Population there is only few Blacks now remaining in Victoria, we are all dying away now and we Blacks of Aboriginal Blood, wish to have now freedom for all our life time . . . Why does the Board seek in these latter days more stronger authority over us Aborigines than it has yet been?’

  By 1924, the majority of residents had been shifted to Lake Tyers, severing their last remaining connection to country. A few stubbornly remained in the neat little cottages of the settlement. The last known resident, Lizzie Davis, died aged 104 in 1956 but was denied permission to be buried with her family. Much of the land was turned over for soldier settlements although not, presumably, for returning Wurundjeri soldiers.

  Edith’s writing is a settlement narrative, a colonising narrative. She takes ownership of a new homeland, puts down roots, extends feelers, seeks to understand her landscape and make it her own. She did this on an individual level, as an immigrant to a new country. But was she also doing this as a white settler, as a colonist? Is this nature writing a form of taking possession, or writing over Australia’s past, of silencing other voices?

  Wiradjuri writer Hannah Donnelly protests against ‘colonising narratives that fail to understand the true nature of the Australian landscape’, particularly its Indigenous significance. It’s a good point, but I’m not entirely sure what other kind of narrative a colonist, or a colonial descendant, can write. How long does it take for that particular stain to fade?

  Edith was certainly taking possession of her land. Was she doing so at the expense of other voices? Possibly. But maybe not if her daughters had anything to do with it.

  Near Currency Creek, south of Adelaide, an old river red gum, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, hangs over the road. A vertical scar runs down its flank, about five metres long. At some time in the past, Ngarrindjeri people carved a canoe from its side, careful to keep the bulk of the bark intact so that the tree survived. Their care paid off. The tree, hundreds of years old, grew strong and vigorous.

  In 1998, someone ringbarked the tree, chopping away the bark that carries food and
water around it. It’s the equivalent of slashing someone’s windpipe and leaving them to wheeze to death. The perpetrators scratched a message in the bark: ‘Coons did this’.

  Every time I drive past this tree, I can hear them laughing at their own joke. As if jokes are always just fun, rather than a way to define out-groups and in-groups – sometimes harmless, sometimes insightful, all too often just savage and destructive.

  I am at a loss to understand such facile spite. Ashamed that I even share a continent, a species, let alone a culture, with such people. And yet here it is. Again.

  The tree hangs on, prematurely haggard and aged, grey fingers poking through wispy green tufts in the remaining canopy. They are tough trees, eucalypts, not easy to kill. And they persist, despite the loss of habitat, destruction of their ecosystems, extinction of cohabitants, changes to the water tables, climate and environment. Some, like this one, even outlast attempted massacre. They are survivors.

  It is impossible to discuss the absences in Australian nature writing without discussing the space around Aboriginal voices. Nature writing is, by its very name, a written tradition firmly grounded in nonfiction genres of descriptive and experiential prose and poetics. It does not have particularly strong links to the oral storytelling that predates writing, and which provided the most significant mode of knowledge transmission in pre-European Aboriginal culture.

  Not only writing, but writing in English – in and of itself it is an activity grounded in European cultural practice.

  ‘English is my language because of the history,’ says Alexis Wright, ‘and what I try to do . . . is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.’