Avenues of honour are characteristically Australian. Begun in Ballarat in 1917 and growing out of the Arbor Day movement, they spread rapidly across the continent. By 1921, over 100 avenues had been planted in Victoria. They were community initiatives, requiring an ongoing dedication and care that stone does not.
The idea was also taken up in Perth by Kings Park. An avenue of oaks on May Drive was planted, but was soon replaced by more resilient Bangalay (Eucalyptus botryoides) in the 1940s. Only one oak tree survives. A second drive, of sugar gums, commemorates the losses of World War II, but it is the most recent of these memorials, Marri Walk, that captures my attention.
The path takes me out of the exquisitely manicured centre of the park, lush green and chattering tourists soon giving way to a quiet emptiness, broken only by the reassuring summer crackle of dried leaves underfoot and the scented sighs of eucalypts. It’s a while before I realise that the little plaques under the trees are recording not botanical names, but the names of the dead. The marri trees stretch mottled shade overhead, their leaves weeping, as eucalypts do, to avoid excessive transpiration in the heat. Their thick fibrous bark, insulation against heat and fire, is soaked with red gum running from old wounds down their trunks. And yet still they stand, bearing their scars proudly, survivors of an ancient war we’ve waged against nature for centuries. I sniffle as I pass, although whether it’s for the soldiers, the trees or simply from hayfever, I do not know.
The war took its toll on the Coleman family, as it did on all families, with fears for cousins and husbands serving in conflict. Donald Thomson served with distinction with the RAAF in the Solomons, New Guinea and northern Australia, organising Aboriginal patrols to protect the northern shores.
The commander of a Japanese mini-submarine sent to attack Sydney shot himself to avoid capture. His mother later visited the site of her son’s death, leaving these words in tribute.
I nurtured my son just as I grew precious flowers
So that he could dedicate himself to the Emperor.
Now that the storm has passed
And all the cherry blossoms have blown away,
The garden looks very deserted.
I’m not sure there is ever a winner in war, with either nature or nations. Just an uneasy compromise, a wounded conciliation, offering some small comfort.
Flowers of the eucalypt: A source of national pride
By Edith Coleman
The Australian eucalypt is certainly worthy of our pride, for it is unique, both in habit of growth and in the unfolding of its flowers. It is full of interest to the scientist as well as the nature-lover, and each of the 250 recorded species has a distinct and characteristic beauty of its own.
According to the specialist, the eucalypts form approximately three-fourths of our forest vegetation, and they embrace some of the tallest trees in the world. Moreover, they are almost entirely Australian, the genus not even extending to New Zealand. Though now planted freely in other countries, they are so typical of Australia that to come upon them in an alien land is to feel like Ruth, sick for home. Some day, when they have become hedged about with tradition and romance, when poet and painter have done their share to make them live in colour and song, our eucalypts will come into their own. To the Australian it comes as a surprise to hear our trees described as monotonous, though in general, I think, this expression comes from those who see them with eyes accustomed to the vivid landscapes of rural England. Admittedly, perhaps, to the English-born visitor, lost in the ‘long-drawn aisles’ of a karri forest, there is a deadly sameness about the tall timber, and at times there is a touch of sadness in the soft greys and blues of our trees. One must live among them to catch their subtle beauty, and the Australian knows them in other moods.
He has seen their tall, leafy crowns shimmer happily in bright sunshine, and has caught the play of light and shade on rain-wet leaves, as supple boughs sway and dip in the breeze. He has gloried in the splashes of sunshine that dapple their boles, painted in colours that the dews of winter deepen and the haze of summer sunshine softens. To him the knots and burls that adorn giant stems are like ghostly carvings, rough-hewn pictures of the past that might have been chiselled by the cunning hand of a Rodin.
He has followed the march of young saplings as they climb the sides of hills in great armies, regiments of lusty life, each eager to slip into the place of the giant whose day is done, crowding and pushing in the eternal strife of all living things, where only the fittest stand out above the ruck. Here and there he sees the wavy line broken by a forest monarch that lifts its stem clean-soaring, for 100 ft. or more before sending out a simple limb. How intimately, too, he knows the river gums that guard lonely places, where mists steal from the valleys and blot out the hills – Amazon nymphs, with limbs like marble, that catch his breath with a beauty for which he has no words. He has seen tall, dead trees stand out on the hills like ghost forests, and has watched them turn to silver in the moonlight. He has sometimes been almost awed by gnarled and twisted suggestions of hoary age, such as those which fired the imagination of Dore. No wonder he resents the word monotonous.
Chapter 14
WINTER VISITORS TO BLAIRGOWRIE COTTAGE
‘On the clear, cold mornings of autumn I used to steal often into my garden and revel in its rich gifts of colour and fragrance and song. Even now, when winter’s icy finger has set its seal on many of my flowers, and I find hardly a bird with the heart to sing, I still find other quiet pleasures awaiting me, and the promise of a riotous spring.’
May 1951
A figure sits quietly, backlit from the window. A tartan blanket is tucked over her knees. She doesn’t move. Perhaps she is asleep. Perhaps someone should check on her.
But then she shifts, uncomfortably, pain flickering across her face as she struggles to lift an ungainly bulk to a better position. She turns towards the window, round glasses glinting with light. Her expression is tired and drawn, but her eyes are quick and bright, inspecting the birds as they wash in the bird bath carefully placed just outside the window.
From time to time, her gaze wanders further across the pretty garden, past the neatly tended vegetable beds towards the wildness of the tea-tree scrub that shelters the cottage from winter winds blowing across the bay. Sandy paths between the bushes entice with the promise of exploration and adventure, but the woman in the chair turns back to watching the birds, leaning her cheek on a cushion that has been placed beneath her head.
Edith reaches for a notepad on the table, and begins to write, in a wavering but determined hand.
RICA ERICKSON DESCRIBED Edith as suffering from ‘a slight deafness’. I had found no other reference to this impediment although both her grandsons mentioned it in passing. It’s a minor detail, but I ask Peter about it anyway.
‘Oh, yes,’ he agrees. ‘She was profoundly deaf in one ear after a failed operation for Ménière’s disease.’
A friend of mine has Ménière’s disease. You would never know from her sunny disposition and unfailing optimism. I met her when we were both teaching creative writing at one of the local universities. Her energy was astonishing. She rode her bike to work each day, all the way across the city from the port in the north-west to the university in the south-east. Her enthusiasm for her work never waned, despite exploitative casual contracts which required her to do twice the work of less talented tenured staff for a fraction of the pay. You’d certainly never know she suffered from a major ailment.
I only found out about the impact Ménière’s disease has on Heather’s life from her writing – her novels, poetry and essays.
Ménière’s disease comes in a wide range of severity. The mild forms might consist of little more than persistent tinnitus and the occasional bout of dizziness. The disease typically appears later in life, in the forties, fifties and sixties. Sometimes it disappears; sometimes it is utterly disabling. Heather believes that the earlier it starts, the more severe and ongoing its symptoms.
Heather was
diagnosed at 25. The noise in her ear permanently impairs her hearing – not quite ringing but more of a ‘whooshing fullness’, like holding a seashell to your ear. She is never without a sense of movement in her face, or her legs. She calls this sensation ‘the wind’. For a long time, she would walk close to walls, within reach of something to steady herself. Motion sickness is a constant risk – any kind of motion: cars, bikes, sometimes even walking. I discover she rode her bike to work because it made her less ill than cars or buses. On the worst days, even just the motion of chewing can make her throw up. Wind blowing in her face is a constant trigger. Severe attacks can debilitate her for weeks, confining her to her room, her bed, until the world stops spinning and she can keep down some food enough to recover her strength. And yet, to most people, my friend seems the picture of robust good health.
I reconsider Edith’s health. There is no hint in her published writing about ill health, certainly not anything as extreme as severe Ménière’s disease. She does not, in general, write about being ill. But she hardly ever writes about herself at all.
I know Edith suffered from repeated bouts of debilitating illness in her teens and early twenties; we have the Education Department’s punctilious record-keeping about teacher absences to thank for this information. I know she was slightly deaf. And now I know she had an operation to relieve Ménière’s disease before the age of 65. Surgery is a destructive treatment of last resort.
‘You can still have that operation,’ Heather tells me. ‘It cures the Ménière’s disease but it leaves you deaf in one ear. It’d be worth it, if it weren’t for the risk.’
Ménière’s disease tends to be one-sided. It mostly only affects one ear. The constant noise of Ménière’s disease can make deafness irrelevant, even worthwhile to lose the debilitating nausea, dizziness, migraines and other symptoms associated with the syndrome. The trouble is that the Ménière’s disease sometimes reappears even after the operation – in the other ear.
Peter had assumed that Edith’s operation was unsuccessful because it left her deaf. But it seems that this outcome was probably intentional. Perhaps it was unsuccessful because the Ménière’s did not go away. He remembers that his grandmother was sometimes unwell, confined to bed. She was suffering from ‘neuralgia’, Gladys told her son. That sounds like typical Ménière’s.
‘It sounds like she got it young,’ says Heather. ‘She must have had a severe form or she wouldn’t have had the operation.’
The illnesses that ‘protracted’ her as a pupil-teacher, requiring three weeks or a month’s leave, could well have been Ménière attacks. The doctor’s records cite ‘gastric catarrh’, ‘neuralgia’ and ‘exhaustion’ – vague, imprecise diagnoses that might, or might not, be Ménière’s. I can’t be sure how severe Edith’s symptoms were but I suspect that this unspoken disease must have played a major part in her life, making her achievements all the more remarkable.
Heather loves the outdoors. Since discovering that acupuncture helps control her symptoms, she’s always off on camping adventures with her energetic young family, or biking trips around England. Edith did not have this option and Heather has reservations about Edith’s choice of nature study in later life.
‘Nature’s not your friend,’ she explains. ‘The wind, hiking, cars – they’re all movement. They all trigger attacks. Ménière’s shuts you in your room all alone with the curtains drawn until it’s gone.’
This is not a wonderful scenario for a woman who married a motoring pioneer and embarked on a career studying the great outdoors. Edith went on many travels, by train and by car. She often went camping for a week or two at a time. She went on a great many excursions with the Field Naturalists Club and with Dorothy. I don’t know how often, or how severe, any attacks she may have suffered were, but presumably she learnt the danger signs and was able to live her life around them. Perhaps this was one reason why Edith did not believe that ‘long walks and field work are essential to such study. I am not jesting when I say that a shelf or two across the kitchen window will provide the house mother with a vast field.’ Her own research was often conducted at a close and detailed scale, nature observed in a vase of flowers at the open window, in a museum jar kept by her bedside, or at a bird-feeder outside the dining-room window.
Edith’s close observation of nature did not lead her, as it did her favourite writers, to metaphysical speculation. I can’t imagine her looking outward to infinity, like Richard Jefferies looking at the starry sky and feeling ‘that I was really riding among them: they were not above, nor all around, but I was in the midst of them’.
Much as she admired Jefferies’ writing, I cannot imagine that she would find such a dizzying spectacle of life’s transient insignificance particularly appealing. Edith’s close observation is grounded, solid and specific; it leads her further and further into the intricate workings and delicate mechanisms of life, offering a steadily increasing clarity, precision and certainty that are the greatest beauty of the scientific method. I wonder if she clung to that steadiness, in a life that so regularly spun, literally, out of her control.
‘Here was the centre of the world, the sun swung round us; we rode at night straight away into the space of the stars,’ wrote Jefferies. ‘On a dry summer night, when there was no dew, I used to lie down on my back at full length (looking to the east), on the grass footpath by the orchard, and gaze up into the sky. This is the only way to get at it and feel the stars: while you stand upright, the eye, and through the eye, the mind, is biased by the usual aspect of things: the house there, the trees yonder; it is difficult to forget the mere appearance of rising and setting. Looking straight up like this, from the path to the stars, it was clear and evident that I was really riding among them; they were not above, nor all round, but I was in the midst of them. There was no underneath, no above: everything was on a level with me; the sense of measurement and distance disappeared. As one walks in a wood, with trees all about, so then by day (when the light only hid them) I walked amongst the stars. I had not got then to leave this world to enter space: I was already there.’
Jefferies’ writing takes us beyond ourselves, literally out of our own body and into a different dimension. Perhaps this disembodiment is what is so appealing. It certainly appeals to me. While my colleagues are busy exploring the notion of embodied nature writing, I realise that I have always searched for something entirely different. It is the disembodied nature that attracts me. Almost a loss of self. Like Jefferies, I search for tales of otherness, the non-human, the post-human. Jefferies’ post-apocalyptic After London enthrals me, until the human characters return.
I don’t think I am alone in this. Our love of wilderness is very often coupled with a longing to escape the human condition, to retreat from civilisation, to return to a state of nature. It explains our love of national parks, our craving for landscapes that appear ‘undisturbed’ by human hands, our adoration of nature documentaries where the only human we will tolerate is the amiable David Attenborough. Many nature writers crave the state of being alone in nature. Naturalists take this one step further – removing their own presence as well.
Edith’s interest in losing herself in nature was perhaps similar, but perhaps also grounded in a particular physical urgency. She had a very specific reason to wish to escape her own body.
I reconsider everything I know about Edith. John told me that Dorothy returned from the Hermannsburg mission because her mother needed her. I assumed she needed Dorothy to help in her work, to look after the house, to cook and clean, to drive her on collecting trips, to illustrate her papers. It’s a plausible expectation for an unmarried daughter, but it always seemed rather selfish on Edith’s part. Dorothy had her own successful business, career and life to run. Everything I have heard about Dorothy suggests that she was a carer: gentle, kind and unfailingly generous, whereas both Edith and Gladys seem to have been more reserved, keeping themselves to themselves. The image of Edith, the famous naturalist, putting her own need
s ahead of her daughter’s always seemed unattractive. Now the image flips and rotates. Edith, ill and long-suffering, tended by a devoted daughter who shared her love of nature and garden. Perhaps the truth is always more complicated than our assumptions.
It makes sense to me now that Edith’s research and writing began in her domestic sphere and circled out, in incremental detail, into the bush beyond. This was not simply because she was a woman, bound to the hearth, as convention would have us believe, but because of an illness she barely even acknowledged.
I can understand why she didn’t drive, why she never travelled back to England with James or her daughter. Perhaps this is why James never got the boat of his dreams – not because Edith did not share his interest, but because it was an activity she could never have engaged in. And I think I am beginning to understand why Edith loved the writing of Jefferies and Emerson and Barrie, even though her own writing is so different. They were not role models for her writing, they were sustenance simply for survival: inspiration for living a courageous, philosophical life devoted to the observation of the natural world.
It is in a letter to Rica that I read the only account by Edith of her illness.
‘At present I’m still in bed,’ she writes, ‘but apart from the nervous condition of the ear, I am quite well; but rest and quiet completely cured an attack of this 10 years ago, so the doctor is being obeyed. I have been thoroughly overhauled recently by one of Melbourne’s leading specialists. He pronounced me a first-class life and sent me along to the ear-specialist. Now my own doctor gives the same verdict – heart and ‘blood pressure’ (the latest fashion in illness) perfectly normal, ‘good as the youngest’ and all organs sound as a bell. But I have a nasty noise in one ear which at times makes me almost deaf in that ear. It isn’t even suspected outside the family, so far!! The specialist could find nothing wrong with the ear but suggested that some gold crowns might be the trouble (They blame everything on to teeth nowadays), so I obliged him. The teeth, my dentist assured me were quite sound and innocent, but time will show. At any rate the doctor wanted me to shut off steam – no work – and very little reading for a week or two. Fortunately (I think unfortunately, for I hate my burdens to be shouldered by others) Dorothy’s holidays have commenced and she has taken charge of things. We shall go to the sea for a while, then to our cottage in Healesville. I’m one of those people, of whom doctors say ‘Responds readily to treatment’ – so I am sure to be on the warpath soon. Two pages all about myself. Shame on me!’
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 29
