The editor at the time was Alec Chisholm, sixteen years Edith’s junior but already an acclaimed nature writer and ornithologist. He accepted the paper but added his own disclaimer.
‘A question mark must be placed against Mrs. Coleman’s statement,’ he said, noting that yellow robins only place dry leaves, never green, in their nests. ‘No other birds that I can recall make a practice of placing green leaves on the floor of the nest.’
Such an editorial afterword is unusual in science, but Edith did not appear perturbed. She continued to write and publish at great length about the use of fresh leaves in birds’ nests throughout her life, noting the importance of ‘keeping an open mind’ on the subject of herbs and birds – alluding to their medicinal and even ‘magical’ uses. And Chisholm continued to publish this avalanche of accumulating evidence without further objection.
Is it fair to characterise Edith’s writing as women’s nature writing? Would V. S. Naipaul be able to identify her work as being written by a woman, after a paragraph or two, from its sentimentality, banality or ‘feminine tosh’, as he puts it? But Naipaul writes fiction, not science. He is under no obligation to test his assertions with data or evidence. His claims are unsubstantiated, probably intended to offend and unlikely to be true.
It is often said that women’s nature writing is domestic, steeped in the small-scale and local, grown outward from the garden. The editors of an American anthology of women’s nature writing, At Home on This Earth, commented on the frequency with which women use the word ‘home’ in their nature writing. This domestic focus, they argue, arises because of the Victorian concept of ‘separate spheres’ of influence for the sexes: that women belong in the home, while men belong in the world.
Edith’s writing very much fits that mould. She does not write about adventures in the wilderness, great hikes into mountains or existential experiences of solitude and enlightenment. She does not write in ‘the male-dominated tradition that focuses on encounters with nature separate and isolated from our everyday existence’.
And yet, if ever there are nature writers who could be said to be domestic and homely it is White and Thoreau. White, who could never leave his home parish, who focused on small-scale, detailed, minute observations, who found distinctions between the all but indistinguishable warblers: willow, wood and chiffchaff.
Nor can I see how Thoreau’s Walden ‘helped craft a male-dominated tradition that focuses on encounters with nature separate and isolated from our everyday existence’. Thoreau is not exploring the wilderness, he is playing house at the bottom of Emerson’s garden. He explicitly rejected the distant wildernesses of Peru, Siberia, Canton and the Pacific.
‘Our limbs indeed have room enough but it is our souls that nest in a corner. Let us migrate interiorly without intermission, and pitch our tent each day nearer the Western horizon,’ he argued.
Walden is filled with the accounts of home-building and housekeeping. He notes carefully his food costs, saving money by eating boiled weeds. I appreciate the attraction of self-sufficiency but Thoreau’s tallying of household accounts, food savings and meals of boiled weeds has been termed by Buell as ‘the aesthetic of relinquishment’. I feel like I’m reading the diary of an obsessive Victorian housekeeper.
If Thoreau is the father of ‘new nature writing’, it is not because of his exploration of wilderness, but because of his exploration of the landscape of the soul. He is one of the first nature writers to consistently use the ‘I’ instead of the ‘eye’, to see himself as the subject instead of merely the observer. This has nothing to do with gender.
I can’t see how this domestic/wilderness model distinguishes between male and female nature writers. I wonder if, in fact, it says more about how we choose to interpret their writing. We see the domestic in women’s writing, and ignore it in men’s. It feels post hoc, like an excuse, rather than a causal explanation.
I prefer Jessie Ackermann’s ardent claims for the rights of women to claim their own space in the Australian landscape.
‘To settle on the land in Australia means something – in every respect,’ explained Jessie Ackermann. ‘But for all that it is a place where woman “has come into her kingdom”, Eve’s paradise re-discovered.’
Edith’s writing is not narrow in the sense of restricted or domestic, but rather focused and closely resolved. She does not discriminate between work done in her garden and explorations from distant hills and shores. It is the discovery, not the circumstances, that concerns her. She has no particular interest in physical feats of endurance, only intellectual feats of exploration.
Most of Edith’s work, I think, is written for fellow enthusiasts, for the lovers of the natural world. But sometimes she does, explicitly and deliberately, write directly for women, because women are important. It is mothers, as the primary carers in childhood, who have the most opportunity to teach their young children about the values of nature. Conservation requires ‘women behind the guns’.
‘It is recalled that lifelong habits are formed during the first six years of a child’s life,’ Edith argued in a series of letters in 1933. ‘If nature-loving mothers will exercise a wise influence during that vital period, there will soon be no necessity to appoint guardians of our flora and fauna. We shall have a national forest conscience, mainly through intervention of women.’
Later that year, her work first appeared in The Australian Woman’s Mirror, the start of a series of articles which were quite explicitly intended to engage women in aspects of nature that they might not otherwise explore.
‘Almost every woman is at heart a nature-lover,’ she explained in a letter to The Age, ‘though most of us would shy at the title of naturalist. Yet a naturalist is no other than one who has cultivated the faculty of observation. The smallest garden will provide a budding naturalist with interesting studies.’
I keep seeing the mother reflected in her daughters’ lives, but I can’t tell which is the model and which is the mirror. I’ve been tempted to pigeonhole them, keep them to specialties: Edith the naturalist and writer, Dorothy the artist and Gladys the scientist. But this does them each a disservice.
All three were well trained in the sciences, Dorothy and Gladys through their university education, Edith through her own efforts. Dorothy taught biology at Tintern for many years and Gladys practised it as a research assistant. Edith, self-taught, demonstrated her excellence through publication.
All three were published authors. Dorothy, perhaps, was the least inclined to write, but nonetheless published a technical guide to model making and a paper on her discovery of the fairy lantern orchid. Gladys, it seems, wrote just as much as her mother, in her articles for children in the Leader and the Sydney Mail. Over 300 articles.
And all three were artists, but here, too, their work blends and overlaps. Dorothy was the most obvious artist, having devoted the bulk of her career to a successful modelling business. But Gladys was also a very fine artist, illustrating her own articles, Donald’s work, and Ewart’s Flora of Victoria. Edith, better known for the photography that graced her articles, was a capable artist, too. It was usually Dorothy who drew the pictures accompanying Edith’s articles, but the daffodil that accompanies ‘The Poet’s Flower’ is not signed DC and is not in Dorothy’s usual style. It is attributed to Edith.
‘Are there fairies in the bottom of your garden?’ Edith concludes in a delicately disguised ‘infomercial’ for Dorothy’s modelling work. ‘There are in mine – fashioned by clever fingers, and that divine spark, originality, to be a never-failing charm for children. Crowds of ideas are nudging my pen. I must seek a piece of clay and attempt to give tangible expression to some of them, instead of pouring them out on paper.’
Some of the orchid photographs are confusing. They look like photographic copies of watercolour paintings. I come across them in various archives, pasted onto cardboards and sent as Christmas gifts to Ethel Scouler and the Rogerses. They are finely detailed and precise. They don’t look lik
e Dorothy’s work so I wonder if they are Edith’s.
It’s only later that I remember a comment about the Donald Thomson collection.
‘There are a number of beautifully coloured hand-tinted photographs by Gladys in the Collection,’ says Moira Playne. ‘They are of orchids, common heath, grevillea, wattle and the formidable tinted photograph of fungus in Plate 3.’
Daffodil drawn by Edith Coleman
One of Edith’s orchid photos (Pterostylis recurva), possibly hand-tinted by Gladys
I can see the inspiration flowing from Edith to her daughters, but also back again, as Edith is inspired by her daughters’ interests, education and achievements. They sit together like three muses of nature, art and literature.
But perhaps I am just being blinded by my own reflection, seeing in Edith’s life a parallel to myself and my two daughters, pursuing our own triumvirate of artistic, literary and scientific interest – the wistful imaginings of a mother for her children’s futures? Again, the influence flows both ways. I am happy to claim Edith and her daughters as role models for my own.
A forest huntress: The praying mantis – her beauty, her skill and her way with lovers
By Edith Coleman
Alas! Her name belies her. See her as she rests motionless on the Easter-daisy bush. Her folded forelegs, raised as if in prayer, give her an innocent appearance not at all in keeping with her actions. Her choice of feeding-ground was not made at haphazard. She knows as well as I do that day-long bees make murmur among the abundant flower-heads, and that pretty skipper-butterflies, flitting in happy abandon from flower to flower on these sunny days make good eating.
Watch! With almost imperceptible movement she stalks her quarry until within arm’s length. Out shoots a spiny forearm (seizing-leg), and in nine cases out of ten the poor victim is caught.
Once held between those saw-like teeth that edge the formidable seizing-legs, he may ‘all hope abandon.’
Holding her prey under one arm as in a vice she mercilessly drains juices and soft internal organs, leaving an empty shell where a few moments before was a living body, murmurous with the joy of sunshine and abundant food.
One must not, however, be too hard on this Diana of the forests. To live she must eat. She dines exclusively upon living prey captured with a cunning dexterity which wins my admiration . . .
An epicure, too, is this praying lady. She prefers to kill for herself the poor victims on which she will dine. Even when pinched by hunger she rarely accepts a dish of my slaughtering.
A cannibal to boot! For company I gave her a large green mantis whose cousins haunt the daisy-bushes in my garden. Next morning the beautiful body lay motionless and empty. My lady did little hunting that day – she does not kill in wanton sport.
I am forced to admire her courage in spite of a sympathy for her victims. She will stalk and capture a hawk-moth three times her size, and she seems quite indifferent to the stinging weapon of bees. It is possible that she discriminates between those that carry a sting and those that do not.
To observe at close quarters the construction of her fairy-like egg-casket, I placed one praying lady in a large wire cage.
A living bee was captured by the time I had quickly counted up to twenty. For the second bee, appetite being perhaps less keen, I was able to count thirty.
She fairly earned her meal, caught with such consummate skill. Stealthily she stalked them along the wire walls until the poor bees blundered in her deadly grip. Larger game, such as beetles, moths or butterflies, are caught with equal dexterity on garden plants. She holds her butterflies’ wings downward to stop their sad fluttering, or she may break off the wings, as she does those of beetles, and drop them to the ground.
My captive painted for me one of the loveliest pictures I have seen.
One morning she refused to stalk her bees. She seemed uneasy and edged away from them. I decided to free the bees, but I reckoned without my praying lady mantis. She was out as soon as I opened the door.
With great lacy wings outspread she rose above me, over an apple-tree, higher again over a silver stringybark, until I lost her as she flew over a tall yellow-box.
As I watched the beautiful, rapidly moving wings beating their way up into the sunshine, with a deep-blue sky to set them off, I rejoiced in her freedom.
Such a long flight I had not before witnessed yet Nature has provided her with wings for just such flights as this. How had I dared to pinion them!
Often in the dusk I have seen the mantis’s evening flight as she hurried softly past me like some great moth; but the winging-off of the released one was so unexpected, so much more beautiful. I vow I will not cage another.
I will have to wait my chance, as I have done before, to see her at work on her egg-casket in the bush. One may often find the caskets sticking to twigs or trunks of small shrubs or trees. One of these placed in a box provides convincing proof of Nature’s prodigality when dealing with the perpetuation of a species . . .
As the queer little babies wriggle and squirm their way into the big world they seem very weak and helpless; but once free of the first skin often shed during their birth struggles they soon become strong and active, perfect little mantids, but without the wings of adults. These do not appear until they are grown-up. In the meantime they will outgrow and shed other coats.
When but a day old my mantids, born in captivity from an egg capsule taken in the forest, were able to run about freely in their glass cage and to feed on aphids which I stripped from the rose bushes. It was delightful to see each diminutive creature stalk and capture an aphis in the finished manner of its parents. Holding its tiny prey under a seizing-leg it would run off to a corner like a chicken to enjoy its booty without interference from its numerous brothers and sisters.
Numerous! The adjective is inadequate to describe the crowd of little mantids that covered the lid of a box four inches square – all from one casket. As one looked at the moving mass one realised the truth of the poet’s words: ‘Of fifty seeds she brings but one to bear,’ Nature is taking no chances. She banks on numbers.
The mother mantis is larger than her mate – or mates perhaps I should say, for she has been convicted of dining upon discarded lovers. In captivity, where the poor male has little chance of escape, she has been known to devour no fewer than seven husbands.
Doubtless an unappeased appetite lay at the root of these dark deeds. In normal circumstances so finished a huntress could easily stock her larder without stopping to such shady practices.
In spite of her merciless ways, the praying mantis is a beautiful creature. I am glad to have entertained her in the garden and in the house.
I am glad, too, to remember that she is clever enough to be ready when opportunity knocks at her door, both in the matter of capturing a meal and in securing her freedom.
Chapter 13
COME BACK IX WATTLE TIME
‘Once again war has brought home to the Australian soldier his deep affection for the wattles of his land. Once again sprigs of blossom enclosed in his letters are whispering: “Come back. It’s wattle time.”’
January 1942–
EDITH SURVEYS the damage to her garden with pursed lips and a frown. Clumps of thick yellow clay pile up on the grass between the apple trees. She must have let a sigh escape, for James looks up from where he is digging, sweat sticking his shirt to his back. She smiles brightly, trying to be encouraging. It is not a task that she wants to take over.
‘Fancy those Japs making me do this,’says James, with some bitterness.
It is tempting to offer some good, mouth-filling condemnation of a people whose dark ways had defiled so many green places. But Edith opts for something more soothing.
‘Come, my spade, there is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers and grave-makers: they hold up Adam’s profession,’ she murmurs.
James mops his forehead and pauses for a drink before returning to his labours.
In truth an air raid trench is t
he last thing she wants in her garden. She has far better things to fill it with. Already her herbs, set wherever she could find a space, are taking over the vegetable garden, causing Dorothy and James to mutter comparisons with Hitler over-running Europe. And now the tennis court has been requisitioned for vegetables and it feels like she has been left, like Alexander, with no more worlds to conquer.
Edith watches the growing pile of clay, wondering how on earth they will camouflage it. Some of the inner-city councils, like Essendon, have constructed public trenches in their parks and gardens. But out here at Blackburn, with such a dispersed population, it was hardly efficient for them to consider municipal facilities. Instead the council urged ‘all residents to provide their own’.
‘Well, I suppose it’s best to carry an umbrella and it won’t rain,’ Edith says. The pile does look unhappily like a grave, though. The voice of Tennyson’s ‘May Queen’ drifts through her mind.
‘Don’t let Effie come to see me until my grave is growing green.’
Edith smiles. She isn’t fond of that poem, but it has given her an idea. She will plant the roof with succulents – house leeks and orpines, crassulas and sedums – beautifully patterned rosettes with leaves of green, blue, violet and metallic tints, and trailing green cushions all starry-flowered. Those beds were always overcrowded and looking for room to expand. Like Lindsay’s Magic Pudding they could be cut and cut again at pleasure. And succulents would need no water that might run into the dugout. Within a few hours, she might have an ‘instant’ garden at no cost and little effort.
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 26
