‘I am sure you will be interested to learn that Cryptostylis ovata is treated exactly in the same manner by the ichneumon fly, Lissopimpla semipunctata, as described by you in your papers,’ he wrote, although he remained reserved about Edith’s pseudocopulation theory. ‘I don’t yet accept the “sex instinct” theory.’
A fortnight later, though, he’d changed his mind.
‘Since writing to you last I had an opportunity one morning of making some further observations on C. ovata under very favourable conditions, and what I saw converted me entirely to your views.’
I wonder who told the papers about Edith’s visit. Was it the Western Australian naturalists she was visiting? Or was it Edith herself? Perhaps it was just the usual fodder for the daily news, the comings and goings of the socially significant.
I am constantly finding new maps to Edith’s life. I started with the map laid out in her articles, unfolding more and more sheets as I track and collate them from the archives. The newspapers trace a different map – her movements, her activities, letters to the editor – of a public persona. And then there is the family history: fragmented and worn with age but revealing an older, less traversed landscape. The photos, the letters are tiny detailed charts to a private world. And now I realise there is another map. The hundreds of specimens lodged in herbariums all over the country. Many of them are recorded in an online database, providing locations and dates of collection. They trace both Edith’s interests in orchid collecting and some of her movements.
The vast bulk of her specimens are orchids, and the vast majority of these are collected from the vicinity of Melbourne – around Blackburn, around Healesville, or down at the coast, Sorrento or Point Lonsdale. But there are visits to regional Victoria too: Wilsons Promontory, Casterton, Bendigo and Bairnsdale, Wonthaggi, Phillip Island and Ararat. Her first specimens are lodged in 1921 – almost precisely the time she started publishing – growing in frequency to a peak in 1926 before declining from the 1930s to just a few specimens every now and again. Most of her orchid papers are published in the 1920s too. Her collections chart the same terrain as her articles. I find few surprises here.
But there are anomalies. In 1925, an E. Coleman is in the Dromedary Hills of inland Western Australia, inspecting the native grass – a specimen of mulga oats, Monachather paradoxus. It’s more the kind of plant a grazier would be interested in. I can’t imagine why she would be there in a landscape that might leave you, like Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Kimberleys, ‘the colour of red mulga and hennaed with dust’. I look at the aerial photograph of the location, struggling to find so much as a dirt track running across the fractal landscape. There is no obvious attraction, no sign of habitation, for miles in any direction. Perhaps she was visiting her brother Hervey, who claimed a mining lease at Gwalia, south of Leonora, in 1909 and later farmed somewhere near Geraldton. The Dromedary Hills are halfway between: 500 kilometres in each direction. It’s possible. Or it might not be her at all.
Edith visiting her brother Harry’s wife Sara and boys in Western Australia, 1905
There are numerous collections from Busselton, south of Perth, mostly from her most well-documented visit, in 1929, but also earlier, in 1922, and later, in 1935. There is a photo of her in the family collections, with her sister-in-law and nephews, Harry’s children, at Pinjarra, just north of Busselton, where Harry was headmaster. It’s taken in 1905. It makes sense that Edith was regarded as such an expert in Western Australian wildflowers, now I know that she came here more often than just that one trip, at the height of her fame.
I struggle to align the maps of Edith’s family with those of her professional world. They just won’t match. I imagine that the trip in 1935 was to see her father before he died, but Henry died in 1931. Her brother Harry had left the Busselton region in the 1920s. Edith stays with the Goadbys in Claremont in 1929, but does not mention either of her brothers, Harry or Hervey, both of whom were living in Claremont at that time. I don’t know if this gap is real or just an artefact of a patchy historical record. Am I missing the links? Or is it Edith who is creating a distance between her personal and professional worlds?
Rica Erickson described Edith as ‘a woman aware of social status’. There are other hints of this. Edith always referred to her father as ‘an architect’, when the historical records describe him as a builder, carpenter and nurseryman. I am told that when visiting Blackburn by train, her nephew Ivo would change carriages, from second to first class, a few stations beforehand. It would not do to be seen arriving at Walsham by second class. I am not sure what to make of this, if it means anything at all, but it niggles at me all the same.
Edith may well have met Emily Pelloe when she was in Perth in 1928. Pelloe, too, is a well-known orchidologist and expert on Western Australian flowers. She published her brightly illustrated book of Wildflowers of Western Australia in 1921, followed by Western Australian Orchids in 1930. She mentions Edith in her book on orchids and gave Edith a personally inscribed copy when it was published.
‘Mrs Edith Coleman of Blackburn, Victoria, has made a special study of Western Australian orchids, and enjoys the honour of being the only woman to describe and name new orchid species in Western Australia. Mrs Coleman has contributed valuable additions to the known facts concerning the pollination of various species.’
Pelloe quotes at length from Edith’s studies of pseudocopulation, including from the papers by Godfery, but gives no personal details. Edith has annotated the cover of her copy of the book, including a list of the pages on which her own work is mentioned.
It was Pelloe’s comments on Edith that prompted Rica Erickson to write to Edith in 1931 offering ‘to send pressed specimens and sketches’ to add to Edith’s collection. This was the beginning of a correspondence that would last many years.
Australia’s fauna and flora are so often categorised as strange and perverse. One hundred million years of being girt by sea has given evolution an abundance of time to trace its own unique and original paths down lines long since lost on the other interconnected continents. ‘Old World’ standards are not so much ‘norms’ as homogenised waves of colonisation and expansion periodically brokered by narrow land bridges, or fragmented by broken and drifting continents.
But even for those of us for whom a forest is an evergreen swathe of sun-dappled olive-grey, with leaves crackling beneath our feet, where kangaroos are as common as sheep and spring is welcomed by the guttural cries of koalas screaming from their treetop eyries, Western Australia stands in a class of its own.
On the edge of one of the most isolated continents, Western Australia has been doubly isolated by the great inland – sometimes a sea of desert, at others a sea of salt water – a barrier for plants and animals alike. And the inhabitants of Western Australia have been freed to generate their own remarkable individuality.
This biological trait particularly applies to the south-west corner, the Kwongan, a biodiversity hotspot home to an astonishing level of endemicity. Of the 7239 plant species in the area, 80 per cent are found nowhere else in the world. And they are not only unique, but very often spectacular. With their specific adaptations to Western Australia’s poor sandy soil, these species are often unwilling transfers to the heavy clay soils of the east coast – much to the despair of envious eastern gardeners.
A few years ago I drove up the coast from Perth with a friend, past endless flapping fence banners proclaiming the imminent arrival of new housing estates. The skimpy banners failed to conceal the brutal clearfelling: charred sandy soils churned with the jutting bones of burnt vegetation, now exposed to blistering sea winds. It looked like Armageddon: a battlefield for the end of times. The encroaching suburbs crept like a concrete cancer along the coast, encasing the shoreline in cul-de-sacs of mind-numbing modernity. We detoured onto the inland road, where the scenery was softened with greenery. The remnant forests sheltered modest shacks. They felt more honest, less excessive. The roadside vegetation whizzed past as we continu
ed north.
‘What is that?’ I’d ask, as another strange plant flung past at breakneck speed.
‘How would I know?’ my American travelling companion said. ‘Want to stop?’
We huddled by the road, rocked by road trains as they hurtled north, lost in a wonderland of Dr Seuss creations. We consulted phones and brochures. Nothing looked like it should. I felt my biologist’s credibility slipping. Closer inspection revealed subtle similarities to familiar eastern forms. Grevilleas, acacias, eucalypts, but with strange protrusions, great spiked flowerheads, rounded, elongated, smoothed, as if Nature had stretched herself to produce the greatest possible diversity from the simple palette she had been given to work with.
Western Australia’s biodiversity is exceptional. Even the standard brown mammals take astonishing forms here. Is it possible for any creature to be cuter than the tiny brush-tongued honey possum or the stripy ant-eating numbat? It’s as if the animals do battle to be as interesting as the plants. As if the plants are inspired to reach great aesthetic heights by the spectacular beauty of a landscape strung with red cliffs, ochre sands, blue lagoons and pink lakes. Only the developers remain blind to such natural wonders.
Western Australia boasts many wonderful orchids famed for both their beauty and great size.
Edith was charmed by the thick and fleshy greenhoods, with strange ‘horns’, striped in red and dark green. The spider orchids (Caladenia excelsa) grow to an astonishing size.
‘One beautiful specimen which I received is 3ft high,’ Edith declared, ‘and the septs of the huge “spider” flower are more than 6 ½ in. in length, making a spread of more than 13in – A gargantuan spider to dream of!’
But even Edith found a giant Western Australian leek orchid a little challenging.
‘The dark purple stem, which is as thick as my thumb, bears 42 expanded flowers and 28 buds! Lying on a light coloured table, the monster looks unpleasantly like a black snake,’ she said, adding in concession, ‘although its individual flowers are decidedly handsome.’
Surely Edith’s connections with Western Australia are due to her brothers. First Harry, then Hervey, moved to Perth. And in 1930 Harry brought his father Henry, suffering from dementia, back to Western Australia to live with him. If her brothers sent her material on the local flora from time to time, Edith does not mention it. Perhaps Harry put her in touch with local naturalists, or encouraged them to write to his sister about their queries. Or perhaps not. I can find no mention of her siblings in any of her writing.
One of the great beauties of orchids is not so much in what they display, but in what they keep secret. In June of 1928, a Western Australian farmer at Corrigon, Jack Trott, bent to investigate an odd crack that had appeared in his garden. A sweet smell rose from the crack and, as he pushed the soil away, he uncovered a tiny white flower, no more than an inch and a half across, growing entirely underground.
‘What is generally regarded as the “flower” of the orchid somewhat resembles that of a cactus,’ clarified Edith, ‘but the apparent “petals” and “sepals” are really only modified leaves, or bracts, forming a cup which contains the real orchid flowers, groups of tiny purple orchids of simple structure.’
The fact that it had no green leaves suggested to Edith that it had ‘a tale of lowly origin, perhaps of depravity’, since without green chlorophyll, the plants cannot generate their own food and must rely instead on a symbiotic relationship with fungi. And indeed, this orchid Rhizanthella gardneri hosts a mycorrhizal fungus, which draws nutrients from nearby broom honey myrtles. As it is pollinated by underground insects, like termites, it has no need to break the surface, attracting them instead with its powerful scent.
Although this strange orchid is endemic to Western Australia, and found in just a handful of locations even there, its habits are not unique. In 1936, Dorothy Coleman discovered Sacrosiphon rodwayi (now known as Thismia rodwayi) on a ramble through the Sherbrooke forest, the tiny ‘little amber and red lanterns, two-thirds of an inch high’. The species had formerly only been known in Tasmania, but even there it is unusual, being a member of a rare, predominantly tropical species. The difficulty of finding them, Dorothy discovered, is due to the fact that these ‘fairy lanterns’ do not always emerge from the soil at all. Like Rhizanthella gardneri they can open underground or deep in leaf litter, surrounded by a web of fungi on which they depend for survival. In fact, they look so little like flowers at all that they are often mistaken for some kind of fungus.
Orchids that look like insects and smell like pheromones. Orchids that look like fungus and live in the dark earth. ‘Unconventional’ hardly even begins to describe the secret lives of orchids.
Edith travelled by train down to Augusta ‘at the mouth of the beautiful Blackwood River, and exploring the many delightful little coves which lie between Augusta and the Leeuwin’. Like the early plant collector and former resident Georgiana Molloy, Edith never tired of the richness of this region’s vegetation.
The region seems much the same today as Edith described it. The ‘winding road dappled with shadow’ still leads to the isolated Leeuwin lighthouse, with its cluster of keepers’ cottages. No keepers live here now – the lighthouse was automated in 1992. But the view of the windswept coastal vegetation and the sandstone buildings perched on this rocky southern promontory feels timeless and unchanged.
Edith told Kate Baker a story of her stay in Western Australia in 1929. On returning from Busselton to Perth she saw a kangaroo paw which was different from any of the others that she had studied there. When the steam train slowed for water, passengers were not permitted to alight, so Edith asked the guard if he could gather her a few.
‘He brought her the specimens,’ Kate related, ‘and asked her why she wanted them. She told him she was taking them back to Melbourne for classification. He then asked her when she was returning, and said if she called at the cloakroom of the station he would have some ready for her.’
She returned a week later than she had said she would and found ‘a glorious bunch of marvellous specimens waiting for me’.
‘Everybody on the train,’ she said, ‘helped me to keep that wonderful bunch of Kangaroos fresh.’ Two of the specimens she later pressed and sent to England.
The train no longer runs all the way to Busselton. It stopped taking passengers in the 1980s, I think, and is now reduced to a small weekly goods train that stops on the outskirts, in the industrial estate.
I drive south, following the train line along the coast out of Fremantle, glimpsing a verdant Indian Ocean, until I get lost in a confused maze of light industry and suburban dead ends.
At Busselton the sole reminder of the once busy train line is a small tourist track that runs along the elongated jetty. The trolleys no longer roll out to steamers or sailing ships, carting jarrah or potatoes to London or New Zealand. Today they transport tourists to an underwater observatory, to glimpse pillars of barnacles, encrustations of feathered ascidians and pillows of green and yellow sponges. Small colourful fish flicker across the windows like cut-outs suspended from a child’s mobile. I remember vast silver schools milling beneath the shadowed jetties of my childhood and wonder at their absence. These fish are all small and pretty – too small to eat. Above, on the jetty, hot-footing bikinis jostle with coathanger board shorts, their salt-crusted skin and athletic bravado contrasting with silent fishermen in knitted niqabs and reflective sunglasses. I retreat to the quiet backstreets, in search of the old railway station.
I’m told that it’s still here somewhere – encased within the boardings and bunting of a local shopping centre development. So much of this coastline seems to be bustling with building works, retail precincts and rejuvenating shorelines, glowing neon strips of cafes and chip shops along the foreshores. Finally, in the carefully indexed and catalogued photograph albums of the local history museum I find photos of old Busselton, including several pictures of Mrs E. Bryant, Edith’s host, sitting casually in an open-necked shirt with h
er husband, on the grass in the backyard of the Manse having a picnic, or posing in front of a fruit tree, in a loose gingham frock, hair barely contained at the nape of her neck and always with a broad welcoming smile.
And I am transported back to a calmer world, a slower pace – filled with sociable communities, empty sunny beaches, broad shady gardens, tennis parties and picnics.
I struggle to imagine Edith relaxing with Mrs Bryant under a tree in the backyard. And yet something tells me it is my image of Edith that is the problem here. I only know her from her articles, from formal portraits of her late in life, from her grandsons’ memories. Even in the family photos of her childhood, she is stiff and formal, although I know this is an artefact of the era and the technology, not an expression of her personality.
But I feel I am missing something. As I look at the smiling Mrs Bryant, I wonder if there is a different Edith from the professional persona I have met. Her wry sense of humour is obvious in her articles. Her articles are charming and engaging but also authoritative, poised and tightly controlled. They often conceal more of the author than they reveal. She is inhabiting an authorial persona in her professional work, but there are glimpses of a more relaxed character in the letters her colleagues write, and in the person described after her death. But I can’t hear this in her own voice. I can’t see it in her photos.
Of all her writing, Edith’s letters have proven the most ephemeral, but perhaps the most revealing. She must have written thousands in her lifetime, often writing several a day.
‘I am trying to get off about twenty letters so forgive this please,’ she wrote to one friend.
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 17