The Wasp and the Orchid

by Danielle Clode

  The convoy stayed the night at Healesville, lodging at the various guesthouses for which the region was famous. An early start gave them a full day for tackling the infamous Black Spur. Even today, this is a spectacular drive. The road slips up around the hillsides, the trees and bushes thickening and crowding the sides, opening occasionally to views of the northern ranges. As the pioneering motor cars struggled up the steady incline, overheating and breaking down, the forest would have increased in vitality. The trees grow taller as you climb, curving overhead, encompassing the road in an ever-narrowing gallery of arching green. On occasion, when the forest opens on a series of hairpin bends, a car might easily slip on loose gravel, and a white-knuckled passenger might glimpse the hillside dropping precipitously down into the valley below.

  Higher up and the hillsides drip with filigreed ferns and verdant vegetation. Out of the bracken, giant ferns rise on black shaggy stumps, styling themselves as trees beneath the canopy of their eucalypt protectors. Before long the trees stand tall, smooth and straight, close packed like an army of silent titans, the roadway snaking around their impassive ankles, cars grumbling past like fleas on a dog’s back. It is, then as now, a breathtaking display spiralling up through the tallest hardwood forests in the world.

  ‘Today a run over the Blacks’ Spur is a small achievement,’ recalled Edith about this memorable excursion thirty years later, ‘but motors had not then reached their present stage of mechanical perfection. From memory, I should say that most of them were single-cylinder cars – half-forgotten names today. Mr Rand’s 12–16 h.p. Decauville was probably the largest car in Victoria at the time. With our efficient cooling systems we hear little nowadays of over-heated engines, but they were prevalent then, and a number of cars were compelled to pull up near the Devil’s Elbow to cool off. Nor were brakes altogether trusty, and some of us carried a large stone in readiness to block the car if one refused to hold.’

  Alan Mickle from Narbethong remembers the first car to come over the Black Spur.

  ‘It was a high-wheeled motor buggy painted brilliant red. It was terrifyingly noisy, it shattered the stillness of the bush for miles around. Every dog in the district woke up and began to bark furiously. A bush fire raging over the countryside could not have caused very much more commotion.’

  Edith first met James when she went into a shop in Melbourne to buy a bicycle. It was 1897. Perhaps she needed it to ride to and from her new posting at Burnley State School. The manager of the store, a persuasive young man with a charming Cornish accent, was keen to assist his new customer. James Coleman and Edith Harms were married in Christ Church, South Yarra, on 7 April 1898. They lived in the bayside suburb of St Kilda, in a single-fronted four-room brick cottage on Longmore Street. Within a couple of years they were blessed with two little girls. Dorothy Gwynne was born in 1900, followed by Gladys Winifred in 1901, both of whom were christened in the church their parents had married in.

  James, born in a small seaside village in Cornwall, had coincidentally arrived in Australia in the same year as Edith’s family. At the age of twelve, he immediately gained work as a butcher’s delivery boy, then a sales assistant in a shoe shop, becoming the manager of the store at nineteen.

  I don’t know what to call Edith now. Edith Harms, Edith Coleman, Edith Coleman (née Harms), Mrs Coleman, Mrs J. G. Coleman? My grandmother always hated being called by her husband’s initials – as if it erased the last shred of her individual identity.

  ‘That’s not who I am!’ she’d insist.

  But sometimes she would address letters to me by my husband’s name, even though I have not changed mine, have never been a Mrs but a Dr. Old habits die hard.

  The convention in science is to refer to people only by their surnames. It’s common in biography too, although it doesn’t always work. In family history there are too many people with the same name. It feels impersonal, distancing.

  Perhaps Edith would have preferred to be known as Mrs Coleman. It would be polite and respectful, the convention of her times. It’s how her correspondents addressed her in their letters, how she addressed others, even those who were obviously close friends. But this attribution feels very formal now. Edith Coleman who was Edith Harms. Edith is the only common link, the name that is hers alone, not her father’s or her husband’s. I hope she won’t mind if I call her that.

  Bicycles had first arrived in Australia in the 1860s but, despite their popularity, it was not until the arrival of the cheaper ‘safety’ bicycles of the 1890s that they became big business. In 1895 Frank Stuart, of the well-known clothing store Lincoln Stuart’s was keen to cash in on this new craze. Stuart employed James at the Carbine and Collier Two-Speed Cycle Company at City Road, South Melbourne, where he manufactured the bikes under licence from their English inventor. Business boomed, and the local factory was barely able to keep up with demand. In addition to manufacture and sales, the factory also contained a 150-yard-long asphalt ‘beginner’s track’. Purchasers received lessons free of charge. Maybe James taught Edith to ride her new bike here?

  James was a keen bicycle racer.

  ‘He carried road metal in his scalp all his life’ from his bicycle racing days, his grandson, Peter, tells me. Bicycles were big business but James had his sights set higher. He saw the first three motorcycles in Victoria unsold in a consignment of goods and persuaded the owner of the bicycle shop to let him buy them for sale.

  ‘The motorcycle has made its debút in the streets of Melbourne at last,’ wrote a local journalist in 1897. ‘On Saturday and Sunday afternoons the strollers on St Kilda Esplanade were somewhat startled by the approach of a cyclist with his feet motionless and apparently “coasting” before the wind. As it drew nearer, however the machine was seen to be without pedals, its rear wheel being driven rapidly by a piston while the rider, or rather driver, sat lazily in the saddle, with no more work to do than was necessitated by the steering.’

  The display drew a large crowd. Perhaps this was how James sold his first two motorcycles for the road. The third he purchased himself.

  ‘The motor-cycle of the Carbine Co. was much admired,’ reported the Australian, ‘its best points being shown by Mr. Jas. Coleman and many gentlemen present remarked that this was the kind of machine that seemed best adapted for every-day use and general convenience.’

  James Coleman racing one of the earliest motorbikes in Melbourne

  The convenience of the motorcycle, however, was not without attendant risks. James and his friend Syd Day ran into a horse and buggy on a trip to Frankston.

  ‘Happily, the injuries were not serious,’ reported the paper, ‘but both men suffered from shock and the machines were considerably damaged.’

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Edith was not overly fond of these mechanical beasts.

  ‘It lives in my memory as a thing of noise and odor,’ she declared. ‘It looked, and smelt, like something that might have had birth in the nether regions; but once its possibilities were grasped, it was accepted, if not with favour, with compromise.’ She retained a ‘disrespect for motors that perhaps the children of a farmer have for pigs’. The addition of a trailer and a side car to the motorcycle was even less appreciated.

  ‘One prefers to pass in silence this painful period.’

  The arrival of their first car was, by comparison, a treat.

  In the many articles published by Edith during her professional career, she almost never refers to herself, her family or events in her life. She writes exclusively about nature, in which the occasional oblique reference to her own life must be extracted from the detailed observations of the natural world around her. The solitary exception is an article published in 1931 in The Age by E. C. entitled ‘Thirty years of motoring in Australia: A woman looks back’. Had I not known about James Coleman’s role in Victorian motoring history, I might not have recognised this article as one of hers. But even here she only mentions her husband teasingly, never by name. The only Jameses mentioned by name in her articles
are kings, poets or gardeners. James the pioneer motoring enthusiast, champion bicycle, motorbike and car racer, remains something of an enigma.

  Edith is not the only nature writer to leave her domestic arrangements unrecorded. Annie Dillard left her husband out of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, worried that readers wouldn’t be interested in reading a nature book by a ‘Virginia housewife named Annie’.

  ‘If I call it truth and leave out Richard and this house, then not only do I lose the selling points I think I need – but also I open myself to the charge of hating my husband,’ Dillard said. ‘But I think I must.’

  There is something about nature writing, in particular, that seems to demand a solitary experience. It’s the ‘man in the wilderness’ tradition, started by Thoreau. It was Thoreau who inspired Ted Banfield to live on his tropical island – alone, one would assume, were it not for one of his books being dedicated to his wife and constant companion, Bertha. Donald Macdonald hardly ever mentioned his wife Jessie and daughter in his writing either.

  I am not convinced that the absence of a husband in Edith’s writing is particularly significant. The absence of wives and children is a common practice among naturalists and nature writers alike. Edith’s fellow orchidologists, Oakes Ames, Richard Rogers and Colonel Goadby, rarely mention their wives even though their wives actively collected with them, assisted them with their work, illustrated their manuscripts. Why should we expect Edith to mention her husband?

  There is an exception to this rule – this absence of domesticity in nature writing. Though Eleanor Alliston is rarely included in the canon of Australian nature writing, to my mind she was a more genuine castaway than Banfield, a far more committed proponent of the simple life than Thoreau. I remember being greeted by her on a Bass Strait beach, strong brown legs striding down the sand, impervious to the elements, inviting us in for tea and cake. She was the first person I had ever met who wrote books for a living. She wrote about her island life in Escape to an Island and Island Affair but romance novels were her bread and butter. She dictated while walking on the beach and typed while standing at a bench, decades before standing desks were a thing. She wouldn’t tell us her pseudonyms. Far from being written out of the story, her husband and children were integral to Eleanor’s island exile from society.

  ‘It was largely for the sake of our children (born and unborn) that we elected to come to this remote, inaccessible island,’ she explained. ‘We wanted to create a little world of our own moulding. And it seemed that we were able to provide the three younger ones with an early childhood of near perfection.’

  I had forgotten until now that it was Eleanor Alliston who first inspired me to become a writer.

  ‘In 1903 there were not, I think, more than 20 motor cars in Victoria,’ Edith recalled, ‘but interest in them was quickening. In that year, three of the pioneers, while on a fishing trip together, conceived of the idea of forming a club to serve the interests of motorists. A meeting was called at the Port Phillip Club Hotel. By the end of the year their idea had materialised, and the Automobile Club of Victoria was formed with a membership of 56.’

  On their second tour, the Tooradin Trio of Syd Day, Harry James and James Coleman sent out around 100 invitations to riders and drivers across Melbourne. The Herald reported that ‘the smell of petrol is over the land, and the air is split with the noise of throbbing engines’.

  At the inaugural meeting of the Automobile Club of Victoria, James excluded himself from being an office-bearer by successfully moving that no-one employed in the car industry could hold office and thereby ensured that the organisation remained committed to the interests of the enthusiast, rather than those interested in commercial gain. James seemed content to remain behind the scenes, rather than play the frontman.

  I have a photo of Edith, taken in about 1931, in the driving seat of ‘The Lugger’, a two-door version of a Citroën 5HP Type A.

  ‘But she never drove!’ protests her grandson. ‘It was always James and Dorothy who drove.’

  Despite the picture, Edith makes no mention of driving herself. In a letter from this time she writes that, despite how tired and busy Dorothy is with her teaching, she still has time to take Edith to the St Kilda Town Hall for the two-day Wildflower Show.

  ‘Dorothy drove me over,’ says Edith, ‘and spent the evening of the first day there. On the next she drove me then sat in the balcony, or in the car part of the time, correcting papers!’

  I can understand the photo – the driving seat makes a natural portrait – but why did such a capable, confident woman never learn to drive herself?

  Motorcycles were followed by motor cars and James soon saw the potential for an importer’s warehouse. In 1904 James travelled to France to purchase six l’Éclair cars for the local market.

  Edith and James travelled over thousands of miles of Australian roads ‘good, bad and execrable’, hardly daring to stop the car for fear it would not start again. The pain of a stalled car lay not just in the inconvenience of hours of repairs, but in the ridicule endured in the process if failure happened to have an audience.

  ‘For the motoring pioneers,’ Edith recalled, ‘were regarded with ill favour by those who had for so long held undisputed right over the middle of the road. How exultantly they pushed us off when there was an exceptionally bad bit at the side and how cheerfully they allowed us the middle of a freshly-metalled section. Horses, too, were restive, and one had frequently to smooth matters with an irate driver.’

  James, for one, was not deterred. He knew the future lay in cars. People just needed convincing that they were safe and reliable.

  Edith in ‘The Lugger’, about 1931

  On 25 February 1905, a crowd of sixty thousand gathered at Melbourne Haymarket to witness, with cheers and perhaps some puzzlement, the conclusion of the first Sydney to Melbourne Motor Car Race. No doubt Edith would have been among them, ready to welcome home her ‘begoggled knight’ James, joint winner on points with seven fellow competitors, in his little Swift 7HP.

  ‘No Greek or Roman women were prouder of their gallant men as they set off in search of fresh worlds to conquer,’ Edith declared. ‘It needed . . . some courage to mount the awesome things, but men who had raced on the old safety bicycles were perhaps not lacking in courage.’

  It was the year of the big car races. Organised by Harry James and sponsored by Dunlop, the races’ function was to awaken ‘the public to the capabilities and reliability of the automobile for transport’. The course was a challenging one chosen specifically for several sections of notoriously bad roads. The cars had no ‘lamps, hood, horn or speedometer, nor . . . windscreens, electric lights, self-starters, four wheel brakes, or detachable wheels’. At a cost of between £500 and £750, they were still expensive, but became more and more accessible in price. Most of the competitors were men, notwithstanding the ‘plucky driving’ of Mrs B. Thompson, who completed the course in a very respectable time.

  Endurance, rather than speed, was the primary purpose of the race. The drivers competed for points awarded for punctuality and lack of stops. With an average speed of around 19 miles (30 kilometres) per hour the pace was far from snappy. In fact, ‘reckless driving’ was frowned upon and the cars were forbidden to exceed 12 miles per hour in urban areas.

  ‘The return was frequently less triumphant,’ Edith recalled of these early motoring days, ‘when a weary knight pushed toilsomely before him a heavy lifeless burden, too crestfallen to give a lucid account of “her” misdeeds.’

  A journalist described the finish line from the return race, later that year, from Melbourne to Sydney.

  ‘One by one the travel-stained cars arrived at the finishing point at Strathfield,’ the paper reported. ‘A motorist, goggled and coated in the approved fashion, who has just finished a 500-mile journey along dusty roads, is not a particularly picturesque object. Those who were to be seen at Strathfield as they came in fresh from their exciting race, themselves and their cars reeking with dust, presen
ted a weird sight. No-one seemed to envy them as far as the experience through which they had passed was concerned and one local resident confidentially remarked to another that he didn’t think “this’ere motorin’ business was what it was cracked up to be”.’

  In the early days of motoring, a motorist speeding over the 15 miles per hour limit was overtaken and booked by a policeman on a bicycle. I slow my car down to 30 kilometres an hour. It feels like crawling. I open the windows and try to imagine driving without power-steering, without ABS brakes, without a roof or windscreen, without suspension. In 1931 Edith said you would have to be a Wells or Bellamy to imagine the developments of the car industry in another thirty years’ time. What happened to the Jetson-inspired flying cars I dreamt of in my childhood? I close my windows with the tap of a button and barely touch the accelerator of my automatic, turbo-charged, fuel-injected, climate-controlled, computerised car with its stability control, power-steering, anti-locking brakes, crumple-zones, reversing cameras, proximity sensors, airbags and self-levelling suspension on high-tech pneumatic tyres. The car effortlessly, almost silently, slides up to 110 kilometres per hour and I realise that they are already here.

  If the purpose of those early rallies was to promote interest in this new form of transport, they certainly succeeded. Within thirty years there were almost half a million cars on the road, 142,000 trucks and vans and 75,000 motorcycles. The motoring industry was one of the biggest in the country, which generated over ten million pounds in taxation revenue. But this uptake was nothing compared to the way cars had revolutionised England. Edith’s quiet pastoral childhood landscape had all but vanished.

  ‘Those who have not been in England for a few years will be astounded,’ James told a reporter for the Australian Motorist in 1930, ‘at the road services that have become available. There are numerous coach depots in London from which people can travel on regular time-tables to every nook and cranny of England and Scotland. The vehicles are fast, comfortable and beautifully appointed: the passenger usually finds himself in a swing-back chair, with excellent vision, and he can choose from his journey almost any inland or coastal town.’