‘There is also a family of aborigines and a group of camels from the Hermannsburg Mission,’ wrote a visiting journalist, ‘modelled from those Miss Coleman saw in Central Australia; a white gum tree from behind which peeps a little piccaninny; a donkey – one of those from Hermannsburg – whose panniers hold tiny cacti and form an attractive miniature rock garden.’
Mrs W. Whitford Hazel, who wrote regularly for The Age and The Sun, described this particular model by Dorothy in more detail. It seems to be based on a visit to Palm Valley.
‘A group of palm trees with a few illumbas (ghost gums) in the distance, while straggling across the sands come four camels; ‘Old Tom’ carrying stores and ‘Wheelie’, Miss Coleman’s mount in Central Australia,’ she wrote. ‘Behind them trail James, the camel boy, his wife and piccaninny; and the desert setting is completed by a group of native women getting water from a soak and clumps of parakeelia, the succulent plant which is the salvation of cattle in the dry areas.’
Visitors to Hermannsburg preparing for a camel trip in 1935
It’s ironic that such a solid and physical realisation of visual memory should prove the most intangible and least resilient of artefacts. Few of Dorothy’s models have survived, save some little birds treasured by her grandsons and great-nephew. As the childhood game tells us, paper trumps rock, and I am grateful that someone took the time to describe Dorothy’s modelled memories, for there are no others recorded.
Dorothy’s sculptures
Dorothy’s depiction of the famed Palm Valley has not survived. To imagine this remarkable sight in the middle of the great expanse of inland desert I search for other descriptions. Jeannie Gunn described a similar scene but it is at Warloch Ponds, 1000 miles to the north.
‘Two wide-spreading limpid ponds, the Warloch lay before us,’ she wrote, ‘veiled in a glory of golden-flecked heliotrope and purple water-lilies, and floating deep green leaves, with here and there gleaming little seas of water, opening out among the lilies, and standing knee-deep in the margins a rustling fringe of light reeds and giant bulrushes. All around the ponds stood dark groves of pandanus palms, and among and beyond the palms, tall grasses and forest trees, and here and there a spreading coolabah festooned from summit to trunk with brilliant crimson strands of mistletoe, and here and there a gaunt dead old giant of the forest, and everywhere above and beyond the timber deep sunny blue and flooding sunshine.’
Despite the vast distance that separates them across the inland, the Warloch Ponds palms are almost identical to the ones in Palm Valley. It’s strange that these palms only occur in two such disparate locations in the desert, so far apart. How they got to Hermannsburg from the north is a mystery that has long puzzled biologists – there seems to be no natural connection for their dispersal. Perhaps they are a relic of an ancient Gondwanan forest? I wonder what Edith made of them when she saw them, if she too was curious about where they came from.
Recently geneticists have found that the palms have been separated for only a relatively short time – about 15,000 years. Their separation cannot be due to ancient climatic changes. It has happened within human occupation of the continent. Someone witnessed this piece of biological history, but not all scientists are like Edith, willing to listen to the old stories and hear what others have learnt from patient observation. The German missionaries who protected their Aboriginal flock at Hermannsburg mission listened. Carl Strehlow was appointed to the mission in 1894. He was already a student of Aboriginal languages and had, at Cooper’s Creek, translated the New Testament into the Dieri language. He learnt Arrernte and Loritja, and began compiling an Arrernte dictionary and a new biblical translation, but his most significant legacy, perhaps, was his seven-volume account of local culture and customs, Die Aranda-und Loritja-Sämme in Zentral-Australien. He too, was puzzled by the palms, and took the time to ask, and listen to the answer.
‘There are beautiful 40 to 50 feet high palms here surrounded by gum trees and acacias and the herbs and flowers at their base release a sharp smell,’ says Strehlow. ‘How this palm got into the interior of Australia has not been established yet by science.’
The locals told him that ‘the gods from the high north brought the seeds to this place a long time ago’.
The Arrernte people knew where the palms had come from. Their ancestors (or ‘gods’ as the missionary Strehlow transcribed it) had brought the palms across the country from Warloch Ponds to Hermannsburg. The answer has always been there, in the oldest known stories on earth, for anyone willing to listen.
Dorothy returned to Hermannsburg in April 1937. In June, Edith left Melbourne to visit Dorothy for two and a half months, a trip she described in ‘Flowers of the inland’ (1937) and ‘Magic rain carpets the inland’ (1938). When I first read these articles, I couldn’t quite identify where she was or what she was doing. She was so determinedly looking outwards at the magnificent vista of inland flowers that I had no idea where to place the narrator. I should have noticed the caption on a picture of silvertails: ‘Trichiniums which still flourish in a vase three months and slightly crushed after their journey from Hermannsburg and Mount Gillen’. It wasn’t until I came across a reference to an article in Walkabout that I realised exactly where she was. Several more months passed before I connected her travels to Dorothy’s and realised why she was there.
Elizabeth Durack, visiting Hermannsburg in 1941, described it as ‘a sad and desolate place’.
‘The women, particularly the old women, were very friendly, drawing me into their shade and longing, it seemed to me, to involve me in conspiracy,’ she wrote.
Gladys had also spent much time with the women in Port Stewart, learning how to make dillybags, and catch young emus, cassowaries and cuscus, and keep them as pets. The Daily Examiner reported that ‘Mrs Thomas [sic] who is a bachelor of science, devoting herself mainly to botany, was especially interested in the fruits and roots which the aboriginal women use in cooking.’
‘I have seen a woman spend almost a whole morning,’ Gladys is quoted in the article as saying, ‘preparing a few fruits – baking them, pounding them, straining them through a dilly-bag, then mixing them with water and baking again. They have a great variety of ways of cooking the vegetable food which is their mainstay when meat and fish are not available.’
The only two articles Edith wrote explicitly about Aboriginal people were about food. One focuses on nardoo, an aquatic fern whose seeds are a staple part of the diet of many Indigenous communities and, more infamously, failed to save the inept explorers Burke and Wills. In the other, ‘One man’s meat’ published in Walkabout, Edith attributes the health and vitality of Aboriginal people to their native diets.
‘That there were few deficiencies in his diet is evident,’ she wrote. ‘Regard his teeth, his alertness, his keen vision, his fleetness of foot, his superb carriage. Never saw you a slouching aboriginal among those who had not yet suffered at the white man’s hands.’
This Indigenous diet, Edith argues, pre-empted the Hay diet, which separated foods into alkaline, acidic and neutral. Having no capacity to store food required people to be constantly alert to food in their environment, to literally ‘live off the land’.
‘To him, the inhospitable land was an open book, which he read as he ran, whether tracking an enemy or in following the trail of food.’
As with so many cross-cultural contacts, humour seems to be the mediating emotion. Edith found the Arrernte reluctance to handle even harmless spiders comical, while her reaction to being offered a witchetty grub of ‘repellent corpulence’ to eat caused equal amusement in return.
‘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,’ Edith said.
This interest in food, I suspect, reflects the interests of her informants. And I suspect that her informants are largely women. Despite her use of the masculine pronoun, the skill and stories Edith describes – of winnowing seeds, grinding nardo
o, digging for roots – mostly belong to the women.
‘The natives at Hermannsburg brought in many food plants for my collection,’ Edith recalled. ‘They understood their value as food, but their interest, as pressed specimens, to the botanist was incomprehensible. In little groups they laughed and chatted about me as I prepared green specimens of the wild plum (their korputa) for the press. There was a hush as I turned the screw, and they waited expectantly for the sound of crushing fruits. Then came a burst of shrill laughter and much chattering in Arunta. Yes, white people are passing strange.’
The universally shared human experience – humour and food. The scene Edith describes reminds me of one of Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poems: ‘The Food Gatherers’. The growing darkness around a flickering campfire. The centrality of hunting, cooking and feeding in family life. The powerful connection to nature and all other living things. And the simple joy brought by shared meals around an open fire.
Edith’s trip to Hermannsburg left a lasting impression on her. She mentioned the Arrernte people in several articles afterwards. Her focus was twofold, aesthetic and pragmatic. She mostly wrote about their use of food plants, but she commented on their beauty as well.
With 1940s naïveté she advocated the use of Australian decorations in the garden – drawing inspiration from nature, including Aboriginal figures.
‘Little mia mias and figures of aborigines will convey, far more vividly than pictures can do, the grace and natural dignity of the first Australians. A little native boy or girl would grace any Australian garden,’ Edith declares. ‘I have seen nothing more satisfying than the figure of Claud, an aboriginal boy at Hermannsburg as he bent over a rock pool, or knelt billy in hand, ready to dip water from the soak he had scratched with his fingers in a dry river bed. (The aborigines have beautiful hands.)’
‘A native girl wading in a lily lagoon for the roots that form part of her diet is a thing of beauty. Such graceful movement, arrested and made permanent for a lily pool in the garden, would indeed be “a joy for ever”,’ she concludes before moving on to a sculpture of a basking frogmouth.
It’s hard to read this without shuddering at the memory of caricatured concrete Aborigines, fading and cracked, in suburban front gardens of the 1970s. But that particular mass-produced kitsch, together with an understanding of the damage of cultural appropriation, lies in the future, beyond Edith’s lifespan. Her prototypes are classical, evocative of Aphrodite Kallipygos or Silenus and the infant Dionysus, as her references to Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ attest. Like William Ricketts’ garden in the Dandenongs, Edith is, somewhat clumsily, attempting to integrate classical ideals of beauty here with an Indigenous inspiration. She is promoting an artistic endeavour growing out of Australian Impressionism – the development of a distinctive Australian aesthetic.
More than anything else, though, in this particular article, Edith is promoting a more specific artistic endeavour. She is describing Dorothy’s work.
After her return from the inland, Dorothy was asked to decorate the window of the Tourism Bureau in Melbourne with the wonders of the local bush. It was a perfect job for the naturalist/artist and educator, but not without its challenges.
Dorothy had long used modelling materials while working as a biology and botany teacher. She constructed relief maps and biological models from clay to use as teaching aids, but their fragility was a constant problem in the classroom.
‘A delicately modelled botany specimen would with the slightest tap lose a leaf; or in a nature group, honey birds would unaccountably forfeit their tails.’
This fragility had plagued her work.
‘Moving about in a window required the touch of a fairy,’ explains Mrs Whitford Hazel. ‘A few wagtails minus their tails determined her resolve to set about experimenting for another substance that would be kinder to a clumsy move.’
Through trial and error, and much experimentation, Dorothy happened upon the combination that would become Nucraft, a durable modelling medium that required no firing. Much of her subsequent career would be spent using her material to make models, particularly birds for florist shops, as well as selling and marketing Nucraft for others to use. Eventually, she sold Nucraft to Cheshire’s of Melbourne.
Peter recalls Dorothy’s models scattered throughout the house, garden and outhouse at Walsham as reflecting her development as an artist in technique as well as theme: inspired by her travels to Hermannsberg and elsewhere, by Australian wildlife alongside traditional themes of fairies and gnomes.
‘In her studio opening out on to a lovely garden where shrubs are grown especially to encourage the birds, Miss Coleman finds inspiration comes uninvited: and if her models have flown away at a vital moment she has at hand her mother to correct details. Mrs Edith Coleman, naturalist, literally lives among her sweet-scented herbs, of which she has almost every known species. It is not surprising, surrounded by this atmosphere, the inventor finds delight in her work.
Edith’s writing, I realise, is a constant process of integration, of assimilation, of her literary heritage and her Australian setting. She is taking the stories and literature of the past and adapting them to her current home. ‘Manna in the Wilderness’ is more than just a botanist’s attempt to understand what plant is being described in the Bible. Edith analyses scriptural then poetic references before turning to the uses by apothecaries and the biology of the manna gums and the sweet sap-sucking lerps. But she concludes by linking the concept of some kind of heavenly food with the Aboriginal term ‘munna’ for food, which includes the sugary substance collected from lerps. She is connecting the old and the new, the familiar with the unfamiliar, connecting one history to another, adapting a European literary landscape for an Australian stage. Creating a new world of words.
I recognise this process, this writing in order to understand, in order to connect with a place, whether through history, nature or both. It is why I write. It is the only thing I can do – as an itinerant, a colonist, a traveller – to belong and to connect.
‘The more familiar I become with the landscape in which I exist,’ says Catherine Mauk, ‘and the more my stories accumulate in a place, the greater my sense of belonging. I believe this is how we learn to belong: we become alive in landscape.’
Dorothy returned from Hermannsburg because her mother needed her, John told me. At the time I didn’t think to question him about this. Dorothy did much of the housework and meal preparation at Walsham as well as being an enthusiastic and imaginative aunt to her nephews. She was Edith’s driver and collaborator on many field trips and the artist for her many publications. If it seemed a little unkind to make a daughter give up her own career, or her prospects, to care for her parents, I just assumed it was the way things were done then.
In the 1940s my mother-in-law had been the daughter who stayed home to care for her elderly parents until their deaths, while her sisters worked as kindergarten teachers, nurses and librarians. It was just the way things were. Years later, when her own children were older, she went to night school, studied librarianship and trained herself in the career she had missed. But even so, in her seventies she once told me she had dreamt of a bitter confrontation with her parents, which had never happened, about being made to stay home.
‘I didn’t think I was that angry about it,’ she said, surprised. ‘It’s just what was expected.’
I suppose it was, but, thinking about it, I’m not so sure why it was that Edith needed Dorothy’s help so much.
Magic rain carpets the ‘inland’: Many and brave are the flowers of the inland – blooms of a ‘desert’ that is no desert
By Edith Coleman
Few people associate beautiful flowers with the inland of Australia. To most of us the word conjures up pictures of burning sands, paths of streams that rarely run, dead and dying mulga, shifting sandhills, or stony plains that carry little or no vegetation.
The misconception is due to a general application of the word ‘desert’ to Australia�
�s vast inland spaces. Actually its use should be restricted to lands quite devoid of animal and vegetable life, as well as water . . .
With the exception, then, of some shifting sandhills and stony gibber fields, there is really very little naked land in the whole of the inland. Even the gibbers may be miraculously clothed in luscious grasses after rain. The word is not used carelessly. Growth in those fascinating regions seems indeed a miracle. As in other arid lands, an abundance of elaborated plant food lies near the surface, awaiting the magic touch of rain. It was my good fortune to witness a transformation wrought by that touch.
Crowds of small, plumed seeds, wafted by winds into little hollows and crevices of rocks, had lain sheltered from the burning sun, awaiting the whisper of rain.
In 14 days they had germinated, sent up yard-long stems, flowered, and fruited. Magic? Read further. Lands bordering the dry bed of the Finke River, which, three weeks earlier, had been brown and bare, were now carpeted with green plants. Prostrate creepers had sent out 10ft. long trailers, which linked plant with plant. Moreover, they were already in flower.
In a land where the next rain may be a year or two away, where fogs are rare, and even the frosts are dry ones, there is no time to lose.
The silver sands of the dry river bed were dotted with the green, lacy circles of flat-spurge (red soldiers) and other prostrate plants, all of less than three weeks’ growth, but already in flower.
One read in the green things that had patterned the earth so swiftly stories of wonderful adaptation to difficult conditions. Trained in a hard school, they survived only because they had learned to make the best of things, at times to make the best of a very bad job indeed. They learned to move with the very first drop of rain, and to keep moving swiftly, in order to perpetuate their kind before drought and searing heat should cut them down. Digging deeply to examine a root, one read the same story of marvellous adjustment to hard times.
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 23
