The Wasp and the Orchid

by Danielle Clode

  This struggle with translation, with adaptation, goes both ways. Indigenous writers from David Unaipon and Oodgeroo Noonuccal to Melissa Lucashenko and Kim Scott have striven to tell the stories of their culture in the language of another. And Australian writers collectively struggle to tell the stories of their land in a language from another. The language of the parlour and the country lanes of England, as Mark Tredinnick described it, does not always suit this land and gives rise to an awkward disjunction between our heritage and our country. The poet and environmental activist Judith Wright felt this conflict keenly.

  ‘The land and culture I was brought up in . . . had nothing to do with the land my relatives had taken. It was wholly imported, a second skin that never fitted no matter how we pulled and dragged it over the landscape that we lived in.’

  I’m not sure if Edith was aware of this dilemma, of ‘learning to belong to a place when the stories that perpetuate our understanding of who we are and how to be have arisen in other soils’, as the American-Australian writer Catherine Mauk explains. ‘When the stories layering this landscape belong to people with whom we have limited cultural or genealogical continuity.’

  Edith may not have even thought to ask that question. But she gave us one answer all the same, in every article she wrote that is both distinctively of Australian nature and richly interwoven with an English literary tradition, of unabashed enthusiasm and in eloquent praise of both.

  In 1923 Gladys Coleman was a bright, outgoing botany student at Melbourne University. By 1924 she had, like Edith, started writing articles for the local Leader newspaper, a semi-regular column called ‘Sketches from the Bush’.

  It was at university that she met fellow student Donald Thomson, also studying botany and zoology. They married at the end of 1925 and Donald took up a newspaper cadetship at the Herald while Gladys completed her remaining studies.

  In 1927, Donald and Gladys moved to Sydney, where Donald studied for a diploma in anthropology. Gladys became the household breadwinner, writing a regular nature column, ‘Little Glimpses of Wildlife’, for the Sydney Mail. She wrote one 600-word article every week for seven years up until 1934.

  ‘You can imagine the trial a weekly article would be!’ said Edith.

  In April of 1928, Gladys was awarded a research grant of £50 for botanical work by Melbourne University and Donald was awarded £600 by the Australian National Research Council for anthropological and zoological work on Cape York Peninsula. It seems that Donald went on his first trip to Lockhart, in 1928, on his own. But he returned the following year, this time with Gladys. Her arrival, where no white women had been seen before, caused much excitement.

  ‘As soon as the cutter crossed the bar of the river, a great shout went up. “Thomson come!”’ recalled Donald. ‘And then “Two fella missus belong him.” i.e. to him and his wife. They had seen my wife: I had promised Tommy to bring her back with me. How were they going to like her? What would be her reaction to life in a native camp?’

  Despite his promise to answer these questions in the next article, Donald does not discuss Gladys in any detail. His focus is on the people of Cape York and his goal is to disabuse the public of their mistaken beliefs about Aboriginal people generally.

  ‘Almost anyone will tell you at least one “fact” about the Australian aborigine – that he is “the lowest type of the human race,” a creature half child and half beast – a libel that is known all over the world among those who have never seen an aborigine,’ Thomson writes. His intention is clearly to reverse this false impression of ‘a people who were not only my friends, but with whom I had more sympathy than I had with my own kind’.

  Gladys herself has left no record, as far as I know, about her experiences on Cape York. But the locals remembered her.

  ‘Flo Kennedy, then a girl, remembers that Gladys was a kind person, who gave wheatmeal biscuits to her and her siblings and that she dressed like Donald in shorts and shirts which distinguished her from other white women,’ Nonie Sharp said.

  According to Athol Chase, ‘the old people at Lockhart in the early 1970s also recalled that Gladys danced “naked breast” in customary fashion with the women in shake-a-leg and Island-style dances’.

  This would certainly have set Gladys apart from many of the other white women who later came to the area, particularly in missionary work, and it may help explain the large collection of women’s ceremonial body adornment in the Donald Thomson collection held at Museum Victoria, mostly relating to mourning. As Diane Bell originally noted, in Aboriginal communities, as in other places, women are much less likely to share their stories and artefacts with a man, just as men would not share their stories with a woman. How often have male anthropologists and historians presented a one-sided view of the world, assuming that it stood for the whole?

  It is around the time that Gladys and Donald commence their work up north, or perhaps shortly after her return, that Edith writes about her trip to Western Australia. It is the first time she mentions Indigenous people in her writing.

  ‘A few natives made their appearance at some of the stations,’ Edith says, ‘but most of them appeared to belong to degenerate groups. One would have preferred them unclothed. Ugly and dirty, and clad in clothes that seemed to accentuate their degradation, they begged for “silver” money. Offer them coppers, and, with an expressive shrug of the shoulders, they will disdain “black” money. Huge bones from the cooks’ quarters were borne off with an animal-like avidity.’

  It’s not a very flattering observation and it doesn’t suggest much sympathy. And I’m puzzled by that reference to ‘unclothed’. It rings a bell. I think she’s used it before. I find it in a reference to Donald Thomson’s photographs of the Cape York people.

  ‘They are almost unbelievably wonderful, I think, and show the natives of that corner as a finely built race of men,’ Edith said of these images. ‘All perfectly unclothed. (No contact with whites.)’

  I think she is seeing these people by the train through the lens of Donald’s camera. His photos reveal the northern people as astonishing and beautiful. They are long and lean, gleaming with health and vitality. Their physical beauty is apparent even in the grainy reproductions of the newspapers.

  The contrast with the people Edith sees from the train to Perth is dramatic. And she has no doubt about the cause.

  ‘One felt a sense of shame, almost of responsibility, that they had fallen so low,’ she continued. ‘Here and there one stood out from the rest with something of grace in his or her movements. In others we detected a suggestion of the bold and fearless manner of their forefathers before civilisation had laid its mark on them. One woman at least bore herself with a queenly grace that many a white woman may have envied.’

  It would be easy to dismiss Edith as just another naturalist seeing Australian Aboriginals as part of nature, some kind of romantic legacy of the ‘noble savage’, but I think this would be an overly simplistic and anachronistic view. A naturalist of her times would consider all humans as being part of nature, whites included.

  I think she is looking past the coverings in which we cloak ourselves, the claddings of civilisation, attempting to see what lies beneath.

  Donald often mentioned in his articles that, at the approach of white people, the natives rushed to hide their possessions and put on bits of European clothing. Experience had taught them that Europeans took their artefacts and expected them to wear clothes.

  When Gladys danced bare-breasted with the women of Lockhart River, she was immersing herself in their culture on their terms. I look back at my collection of photos of Edith through her life: the buttoned-up, corseted Edwardian concoctions, the 1900s motoring outfits, the hats, the 1920s drop-waist dresses, the ’40s floral frocks, the ’50s jacket and pocket square. Peter once told Rica Erickson that the photos of Edith from her early life ‘would only place her in another era – in “quaint bygone days”’. He’s right. It’s easy to judge her by the prim conventions of her times,
by the externalities.

  I remember the cheerful snapshot of Edith swimming in the rock pool, hair loose and unconstrained. It’s not easy to look beyond the clothes and conventions with which we cover ourselves.

  After returning to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Gladys and Donald made a second trip north in 1932–1933.

  Not all of the newspapers mentioned Gladys when they reported on Donald’s work. He might have been travelling entirely on his own – unaided and unassisted. But the Sydney Mail did. Sydney Mail readers were already very familiar with their weekly nature columnist. The newspaper captioned their pictorial essay in plural ‘Scientists in Australia’s Far North: Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Thomson’. The centrepiece is a photo of Gladys, in white shorts and shirt, standing among the people of Cape Keerweer, women seated in a circle to each side, and men standing alongside with long spears.

  Gladys with the Wik-Mungkan and Wik-Alkan people at Cape Keerweer, 1933

  ‘It seems strange to see a little slip of a white girl among them,’ Edith commented. She bought extra copies of the Sydney Mail, and sent it to her friends.

  The only insights we have into Gladys’s relationship with the people she met on her journeys are second-hand.

  ‘They are scrupulously honest, and have a wonderful sense of humour,’ a newspaper records Gladys as saying, ‘and they are great companions.’

  Edith reported to Rica on a letter from her daughter, written near Coen, on her second expedition.

  ‘They had walked 120 miles in 6 days through the ranges. The most desolate country she had seen, walking from early morning until dark – to get horses. She said they were lean, and brown, but well. They had even animals and birds new to even them, for already they are familiar with much that is new to us from their previous expeditions. There were wild pigs and horses, as well, all through the ranges (brumbies they call these horses that have gone wild) and on one occasion she had to be put up a tree while a wounded boar was despatched as they were on foot. By the time the tree – in a land where big enough ones were scarce – was found, the danger was not so great. She says she thinks she must be a tough citizen for she never felt better,’ reported Edith. ‘She writes of shimmering heat and an appalling absence of vegetation round Coen. The cries of crows worried her. But her letters would delight you – in spite of it all. It is fine to be young and full of enthusiasm. I am proud of her part in it all, but shall be glad to have her safe home.’

  Gladys in camp on Cape York

  Gladys continued with her work, meeting her regular weekly newspaper column while also photographing, sketching and note taking. As Edith had feared, Donald came down with a fever.

  ‘His wife and the tribal medicine man pulled him through,’ reported the paper.

  He had fallen out with the Australian National Research Council and returned his grant. Now their only income came from their journalism and publications. Donald took the photographs for his papers and Gladys did all the illustrations.

  ‘The illustrations depict smoking pipes, a snake, a spear, a harpoon head, an awl, a fish hook, camp and house types, methods of tying, a bark canoe, a bark baler and the fruit of the mangrove.’ She also drew animals – brown bandicoots, sugar gliders, wallabies, possums and quolls.

  ‘Gladys was always acknowledged in print,’ reports Moira Playne, ‘for her assistance and the illustrations in these publications and proposed publications.’

  In his lectures, too, Edith commented that Donald always recognised Gladys’s contribution, particularly to his botanical work and in preserving specimens and illustrating his publications.

  In 1934, Gladys’s days of field work came to an end when she gave birth to twin boys, John and Peter.

  The family spent time in England from 1938, but by 1942 Gladys and Donald’s marriage was in difficulty. The couple separated in 1946 and, following a long and publicly acrimonious court case, a divorce was finally granted in 1954. To all intents and purposes, Gladys’s public life, her career, came to a close. With Donald based at the university, and academic friends taking sides, there was never a prospect for Gladys to return to her own research.

  A curtain falls over Gladys’s life after her divorce. In part it has been drawn by her and in part by her sons. In her later years Gladys became an intensely private person. She moved back to Blackburn, and then to Blairgowrie, close to Dorothy. She is buried there in the Sorrento Cemetery, with her sister and mother.

  Gladys Thomson with Donald, John and Peter and Irish wolfhounds

  There is no call to intrude any further. Whatever the difficulty of her personal life, Gladys was a talented writer and artist, and an adventurous and tireless field worker whose contributions to the work of her mother, husband and colleagues could well have been all the greater had she had the opportunity and support to pursue a career of her own. And she raised two generous sons who have gone on to make their own contributions in their own fields of study. It is enough to let those achievements speak for her.

  I don’t know what inspired Dorothy to travel to Hermannsburg mission in the 1930s. Perhaps she was inspired by her sister and brother-in-law’s adventures. Perhaps it was part of the school’s activities, or just part of her normal interest in travelling. Or perhaps it was the influence of the bohemian artists who had links to the Blackburn area – the Lindsays, Bob Croll or maybe Rex Battarbee.

  Since graduating from Melbourne University with a BA (in 1923) and a Dip. Ed. (in 1924), Dorothy had both pursued a teaching career and developed her interest in science. She taught science at Tintern, taking on botany and animal biology. Students of the time recall ‘dissecting frogs and rabbits and collecting botanical specimens from far and wide’. Dorothy generated a spurt of enthusiasm for biology in the girls of the 1930s.

  She took her students to the marshes under the Bourke Road Bridge for plant ecology and on a camp at Goongarrie in Healesville, where they remembered spilling the cocoa, putting out the fire and burning the toast black. But Dorothy had ‘never a word of impatience’.

  ‘One sweet memory,’ recalls Lois Meyer, ‘is of her passing up pieces of apple to the possums in the wildlife sanctuary – she had the kindest heart.’

  It is a common pattern for dedicated teachers who care about their students to work themselves too hard, to insist on perfection, to sacrifice their own time or effort for the sake of their students. Perhaps that was the case for Dorothy.

  ‘She is going as hard as she can, and gets very tired,’ said Edith in 1932. ‘Just now she is heartily tired of correcting exam papers. Her own work has had to be set aside for the time.’

  By 1935, Dorothy had had enough of teaching and retired, presumably to pursue that work of her own.

  As best I can tell, Dorothy first travelled to central Australia for some months in 1936. She was based at the Hermannsburg mission and took camping excursions out to the MacDonnell and James ranges, riding on a camel called ‘Wheelie’ in the company of ‘Old Tom’, the pack camel, and an Aboriginal guide, James, and his young family. On her return she wrote to the paper, seeking support for the Hermannsburg Mission Garden Appeal.

  ‘Only those who have seen the “red centre” can fully appreciate the difficulties to be overcome by the missioner and his staff in the long dry seasons,’ she wrote. ‘I was there before very hot weather had set in, and shared the comforts which followed the advent of water. I hardly like to think what it must have been like when shortage of water and lack of fruit and vegetables had caused much illness.’

  The water had come courtesy of money donated by Victorians to provide a regular water supply. She encouraged readers of The Argus to donate money to assist, enclosing ten pounds of her own to the cause.

  ‘Green food and root vegetables grown in their desert garden have worked a miracle. Scurvy, which was so prevalent owing to vitamin deficiency, has been almost completely subdued,’ she explained. ‘May I join you in heartily commending the appeal for further aid to all who hav
e at heart the welfare of this vanishing race.’

  Travelling inland at this time was certainly an adventure, but not altogether uncommon. Parties of schoolgirls made trips to Hermannsburg, camping under the stars and taking turns to sing hymns in English and Arrernte with the residents. Writers like Ernestine Hill and Henrietta Drake-Brockman shared their outback adventures in Walkabout magazine – a high-quality travel magazine launched in 1934 to promote Australia and the South Pacific. But then, as now, there remained more than a frisson of danger to outback travel: two aviators went missing for three weeks in January of 1936. A few months later Lasseter’s grave was found at the head of the Shaw River after the prospector died of starvation on his search for gold.

  The following year in late April, Dorothy returned inland ‘where she is continuing the botanical research which she started during her visit there last winter’. This time she took craft equipment with her – for basket making, weaving and rug making – skills she planned to share with the local Arrernte women.

  Dorothy was a natural craftswoman. In addition to painting and drawing, she was a talented sculptor and modeller. Her Sunday school lessons at churches in Blackburn and Sorrento were illuminated with a small portable ‘story-box’. Each of the four sections could be rotated into view as the story progressed, revealing scenes of beautifully modelled figures, angels and animals. Her skills were also developed as a teacher in constructing classroom teaching models. As a result, she had a unique way of recording the memories of her travels. Not content with two-dimensional sketches, paintings or even photographs, Dorothy constructed scenes from her travels. These mementoes could be seen in the workshop in the garden at Walsham. A model of the Jenolan Caves included rock wallabies and birds. A model of Healesville featured ‘Wenda’ the Wombat, koalas and their families. A souvenir of Wilsons Promontory displays ‘an austere lighthouse standing on rocks backed by vigorous-looking country’. And among the many depictions of Australian animals, flowers and fairies there were other memories.