The Wasp and the Orchid

by Danielle Clode

  James, it seemed, chose his hometown in Cornwall to visit.

  The traffic in London was ‘indescribable’. He was struck by the steady stream of freight-land motor vehicles travelling at high speeds along the numberless truck roads out of London. At night the roadsides were dotted with campfires where the motor men gathered for their evening meals in a scene that reminded James of the teamsters carrying their goods on horse teams to inland Victorian towns out of Melbourne.

  James’s earlier trips to England were for work, when Edith had small children to care for. But I’m surprised that by the late twenties, when the girls were older, she didn’t travel back to England with her husband. She always wanted to return to England. It is obvious in her letters that she was often planning to.

  ‘You did not say when you are thinking of visiting England,’ wrote a colleague in later years, ‘but I suppose it will not be till next year.’

  And yet she never did.

  Edith didn’t go back with James, nor when their younger daughter Gladys lived in England with her husband and their two sons. They could surely have afforded it. I don’t understand why she never returned.

  Edith and James had such different interests: one with her love of natural history and literature; the other so passionate about cars, boats and bowls. Edith loved a rambling wilderness; James was neat and tidy. Edith was organic and biological; James was mechanical and practical. Maybe it was an attraction of opposites.

  Both Edith and James worked in the garden. The grandsons remember their grandfather ‘keeping the grounds meticulously’, raking and cleaning the leaves from the terracotta gutters that lined the paths.

  ‘James cut any small patches of grass under the trees short, with great precision, using a scythe continuously whetted to a brilliantly sharp edge,’ recalls John. Peter remembers him chasing the milkman down the road for horse manure to fill the big compost bins. On the wall of James’s room, Peter remembers a matchbox inscribed with the words ‘When society does not satisfy and conversation wearies, there is always the garden.’ It sounds just like the kind of quote that Edith would use in one of her articles.

  Edith acknowledged that James did the heavy lifting in the garden, but I am not sure she always appreciated his love of sharp blades.

  ‘Daddy does the heaviest work where he can spare time from bowls but he isn’t keen,’ she wrote to a friend. It was James who dug the trenches and mounds for her rock gardens, who lifted the bitumen on the tennis court to make way for the vegetables. It was also James who trimmed her wayward plants from the path.

  ‘Other members of the household stand for law and order, even in a garden, but no mother grieved more over the loss of her baby boy’s curls than I over the shorn tendrils of my truant border plants,’ Edith declared. Gardens, like marriages, are always a finely balanced relationship of give and take, an accommodation of different interests and needs, providing both space and intimacy, contrast and complement. In the garden at Walsham, Edith and James seem to have made quite a team.

  The motoring industry had made James Coleman a highly successful businessman, allowing a financial security to his young family that would later provide Edith with a comfortable base from which to pursue her own future career. He needed a home suitable for raising a family. Both James and Edith had been raised in rural English towns, so perhaps this was the appeal of Blackburn, a recently formed garden suburb on the eastern fringe of Melbourne, readily accessible by the same train line that led up into the hills around Healesville, where Edith’s parents lived. That, and the prospect of cheap land bought up on the back of the banking collapse. James was ever a canny businessman.

  The Australian Handbook of 1896 described Blackburn as ‘a rising township on the Blackburn Creek’ in a picturesque fruit-growing district. Its facilities included a railway, telegraph station and a post office, as well as a hotel, eucalyptus oil factory, brickworks, school, various churches and a public hall. From humble beginnings in the 1860s, Blackburn had undergone a rush of ‘development’ after the arrival of the Lilydale train line in 1882. The Freehold Investment and Banking Corporation purchased a thousand acres of land in the area and laid out a model town south of the railway line and dammed the creek to create Blackburn Lake, which irrigated the nearby orchards. Real estate flyers extolled the virtues of Blackburn’s ‘beautiful combination of hills, glades and glens forming a charming landscape of Australian bush’, their covers decorated with bunches of local wildflowers and photographs of villas beneath gum trees in an open rural landscape.

  Blackburn Road in a 1914 real estate flyer for Frankham’s Paddock

  The 1890s depression brought those plans to a close. The Freehold Investment and Banking Company went bankrupt in 1892, sending land prices plummeting and the banking sector into collapse. At this point, a savvy investor may well have bought up large tracts of land in Blackburn for a fraction of their previous value. James Coleman owned extensive areas of Blackburn south of the train line, including land on South Parade, which he later donated to the Blackburn bowling club, and land subdivided around Walsham Road.

  In the State Library of Victoria there is an old plan for the Freehold Investment and Banking Corporation model town for ‘Blackburn Park’, once it was under the agency of T. R. B. Morton. It was obviously a working document, with various pencilled-in annotations noting the sections of land sold, houses sketched in on vacant lots, prices paid, property owners, fences added or removed. ‘Further plans under counter’ someone has noted across the bottom. Across blocks 73 to 76, the name Coleman has been scrawled. The start of a property that would one day be known as ‘Walsham’.

  Fishy, maybe, but what a father!

  By E. C. Walsham

  To meet the ideal father I should ask you to visit some of the beautiful sea-weed gardens that fill many a rock pool along the coast, or to dip a net where the angler finds his shrimps for bait. Here you may see not only an ideal father but the most docile of husbands, one of the meekest males the world has ever known.

  He is everything that a husband should be. Perhaps the secret of his success as a father lies in the possession of a clever wife – one who points a way of escape to all weary, toil-worn wives, not only in her own watery world but in yours and mine.

  All down the ages long-suffering woman has had thrust upon her the care and nurture of offspring. She has submitted, if not always with a good grace, with seeming meekness. It has remained for little Mrs. Pipe-fish (Urocampus carinorostris) and a few other emancipated mothers to turn the tables – with a vengeance.

  Mrs. Pipe-fish has decreed that the office of nursemaid shall devolve upon her husband. She has turned him into a veritable pipe-fish perambulator. Though but a mere silvery streak a few inches in length, Mrs. Pipe-fish has taken the bit between her teeth, so to speak, and has bullied her meek mate not only into carrying the parcels (i.e. eggs) but into carrying them right until they hatch into wee replicas of himself and his clever spouse. Moreover, he must have his pocket always in readiness, so that his score or two children may seek safety therein when danger threatens.

  There is only one name for this model father, and Jeeves he became. Mrs. Pipe-fish has but to produce the eggs. The rest may safely be left to Jeeves, who obligingly allows them to be incubated in his queer little tail-pocket until they are ready for birth.

  My ideal father wears no badge of office. Indeed, seeing him and his family sporting among sea-grass in lovely sunken sea-gardens, one has difficulty in deciding which of them ‘wears the breeks’. Laying them on the palm of a hand (they are only wee creatures) one sees in some of them a long, elliptical swelling on the under surface at the base of the tail. These are the male pipe-fish, and the swelling is really a brood-pouch in which, later, he will cradle the eggs of an emancipated wife.

  In immature males only a slight ridge is apparent, but as the mating season approaches it becomes more pronounced. Presently the lips of the pouch part to allow the entrance of eggs. One may soon foll
ow two lines of bead-like swellings where lie the orderly rows of developing eggs.

  From the moment when he takes charge of them life becomes a serious business for Mr. Pipe-fish. He is now an automatic incubator for the eggs of his emancipated lady, who skims away to lead a carefree, bachelor-girl life in the fairylike little sea-gardens. Nor do his troubles end with the birth of the babies, for until they can fend for themselves he must be ever in attendance, like a broody hen with her chicks.

  Have I introduced the model father? Not until one has witnessed the birth of a baby pipe-fish from the brood pouch of its father can one measure the height and depth of his devotion.

  My specimens were placed in a glass of water as soon as they were taken from the sea. In mature males the ova were clearly defined in those bead-like swellings that ran the length of each pouch. The inside of the pocket is honeycombed with cells, and in each of these an embryo pipe-fish, with great dark eyes, lay coiled around its yolk-sac.

  Presently much movement was evident. Then bubble-like swellings appeared in the ‘furrow’ of the pouch, and instantly out squirmed first one, then another, and another, of the wee pipefish, colorless replicas of their daddy.

  So transparent they were they seemed nothing more than silver streaks, tiny phantom-fish, whose great dark eyes were startlingly clear. Their transparency is a means of protection in water teeming with hungry enemies.

  These babies swam about their small glass world with a writhing, lashing motion – like the tail of a boy’s kite mounting into the sky. At the tip of each tail was a wee fan-like fin which doubtless acted as a rudder.

  As each baby left its father’s pouch one noted its close resemblance to another group of curious fish, the seahorses, which are believed to be descended from a common ancestor. Among its brethren, in their sea-grass pastures, the mature pipe-fish is well camouflaged. So closely does he resemble a blade of grass that he is discovered only with difficulty. His long tubular mouth, which is open only at the tip, hasn’t a tooth in it! He can dine only upon such trifles as can be sucked through the small opening.

  I have known many human fathers whose generous pockets were easily accessible to wife or daughter; but when I see one of them searching twelve or thirteen pockets for a tram-ticket I feel that here is something Mr. Pipe-fish could teach him – this model father who has but one pocket which he places at the complete disposal of his spouse.

  Chapter 6

  MATERNAL DEVOTION

  ‘With the seething masses of spherical, green abdomens and translucent legs about her the quiet mother made an exquisite picture of spider-maternity.’

  July 1905

  The two girls race to the wooden footbridge crossing the creek, little more than a haphazard lashing of rough-cut poles and planks. Dorothy all long hair and limbs with Gladys stomping on sturdy little legs behind her older sister. Gladys’s hat flicks onto the path and, at her cry, Dorothy doubles back to pick it up, tucking it down over her sister’s short dark hair and taking her hand to continue together.

  Edith watches them on the bridge, as they throw sticks into the swollen creek. The girls rush to the other side to see whose stick will win, Gladys shouting in triumph. Dorothy has laced some flowering mistletoe over her shoulder, glistening red and gold in the sunlight. Such pretty blossoms for such a vicious plant. There seems to be more of it in the trees this year, Edith has noticed. Not good for the trees, but good for the little spinebills feasting on its abundant nectar and sticky fruits.

  The two girls in their white smocks could be in a Frederick McCubbin painting, framed by the round grey leaves of the juvenile Red Box trees, the gold of the early wattle glittering with winter dew. This was McCubbin country. How many people knew that The Bush Burial had been painted in his backyard, just across the road, in Wolseley Crescent? Not quite the rustic wilderness people expected. But it was no surprise to Edith that such a beautiful area had attracted the famed plein-air painters of the Heidelberg school: Tom Roberts, Jane Sutherland, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder and Clara Southern. Wilderness was where you chose to find it.

  ‘Mrs Coleman!’ cries a young girl, running up the path behind them. ‘Excuse me, Mrs Coleman, but I found this.’ She thrusts a flower towards her. ‘Is it an orchid?’

  ‘Oh, well spotted,’ Edith replies. She holds the tiny flower up close to better see the little cluster of purple orchids on top of their fat stem, rows of sepals jutting out like the verandahs of a tiny pagoda.

  ‘An elfin midge orchid,’ she declares. ‘Prasophyllum archeri. See – the flowers are upside down. And they trap their insects just here, like so.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Coleman,’ says the girl. ‘I’ll tell Mother.’ And off she rushes, muttering the orchid’s name to herself under her breath.

  IN 1905, BLACKBURN was not much more than a small dusty township, with fewer than a thousand residents. It lay at a crisscross of the trainline and made roads connected by bush tracks. Orchards covered most of the area to the north, while the area to the south was known as ‘The Paddock’.

  Long-time resident A. W. Steel described it as ‘always well cloaked in trees with an old house or two tucked away. My father’s daily route to the station was then a path down through the trees in a straight line from our front gate. The path developed a kink when the Colemans built on the west side of Blackburn Road between our place and the station.’

  There was no electricity, no piped water, no sewerage and only a handful of gas streetlights along the main roads. Even the ‘made’ roads were dirt or metalled, rutted with wheel tracks, clay-slippery in winter and dust-powdered in summer. Broad paddocks opened out into distant views of hills and farms, shaded with patches of statuesque gum trees, under which lolled kangaroos in defiance of the hoofed beasts carving up their land.

  ‘Within a few minutes’ walk of the station,’ Edith recalled, ‘one could observe a wonderful variety of birds, many of them quite rare: and the student of insects, beetles or butterflies could add a wealth of material to his collection.’

  ‘The creek banks were clothed with indigenous vegetation. In spring and summer the air was full of perfume and song of birds – native perfume and native bird-song! Blue wrens, yellow robins, crested shrike-tits, grey and rufous fantails, harmonious thrushes and many other delightful native birds nested freely under cover of native vegetation.’

  Edith’s eye was also caught by the unusual.

  ‘Our little creek sides were often gay with brilliantly colored fungus growths which suggested hot-house flowers rather than toadstools. The rich velvety bracket fungi was especially plentiful, and one often came upon a clump of the phosphorescent variety which remained luminous for days.’

  And then there were the orchids.

  ‘One could gather large bunches of wild flowers, including many of our lovely little orchids,’ she wrote. ‘Only a few years ago the auctioneer held up a bunch of orchids as an added inducement to the would-be purchaser to make up his mind.’

  ‘Gathered, ladies and gentlemen, on this very block of land.’

  And indeed, the cover of an old real estate brochure features a bunch of wildflowers, with donkey orchids prominent.

  Edith found rare little rusty greenhoods, Pterostylis squamata, growing just outside her gate. She describes various midge orchids, the duck orchid, Cryptostylis longifolia, and the greenhood Pterostylis pusilla, which she cultivated herself. Even as late as 1922, parts of Blackburn could still be considered bushland. The Field Naturalists Club found it a suitable destination for a ‘ramble’. On one such trip, shortly after Edith joined the club, members noted ‘about seventy species of plants’, including several conspicuous bush and bitter peas and seven common orchid species.

  Today, the only hint of Edith’s Blackburn is preserved in the Blackburn Lake Sanctuary, the centrepiece to the garden suburb and immortalised in McCubbin’s Bush Idyll. By the time her children were grown, Edith would have to go further afield for her explorations than the garden at Walsham. />
  A picture of the Coleman family taken at the northern end of the block at Walsham shows cleared land beneath remnant native trees. But the southern end of the block seems to have already been partially cultivated. Edith’s herb garden was started not on virgin soil, but on land ‘already occupied with rather neglected fruit trees over which Roses ramble, and among which Roses, Lilies, Irises and Violets were grown, as well as vegetables’. Had she had a clear block to start with, I doubt that she would have chosen ‘geometrical beds with paving slabs for tiny creeping Mints and Thymes; or narrow accessible beds like any other herbaceous borders; or . . . an orderly arrangement of herbs’. Edith had long declared her love of wilderness in the garden, preferring to ‘put the herbs here there and everywhere, as fancy or necessity, dictated. The result was a sweet confusion, in many ways more pleasing than regimental orderliness.’

  ‘The house was named for the village my grandmother came from,’ one of the grandsons mentions.

  ‘Walsham’ clearly carried some meaning for the family. Both Edith and her parents used it as a house name. James named a street in a Blackburn subdivision ‘Walsham’. And Edith sometimes used it as a pseudonym on her articles.

  Gladys, James, Edith and Dorothy at Blackburn, about 1910

  In an idle moment I search for Walsham on the internet. But the only Walsham is North Walsham in Norfolk, 170 miles from Guildford. I check back through the family history. There is no trace of a Norfolk connection. Where or what is Walsham then?