Edith climbs back beneath the blankets. Better to wait until Dorothy returns and breakfast is ready. She reaches for the stack of books, her hand lingering over Wind in the Willows, before closing on the familiar form of Emerson’s essays. If his poetry was, at times, inarticulate, his essays could be reliably dipped into at any point to provide consistent inspiration.
‘No man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him,’ she reminds herself.
AT FIRST, I only knew of Edith’s scientific work. Without her science papers, I doubt that anyone would remember her at all. It is her discovery of pseudocopulation that has saved her from complete obscurity.
A scientific paper is a map to its intellectual landscape. Each article begins by charting the world of thought that came before – reviewing the already known, identifying what has been found, by whom and when, leading the reader inevitably to the edge of the known world, to the undiscovered. The centrepiece of the map is the newly found – the observation, data, result, discovery – a new location on the map held in place by a careful methodology, ensuring that others can find the same place, can replicate the same finding. What follows, in the discussion, is a description of the landscape after this discovery – what has changed, what new pathways have opened, where we could expect to go next.
Rock pools at Back Beach, Sorrento, early 1900s
And this one small map does not exist in isolation. It is littered with signposts to other maps, past and present, that chart slightly different terrain. Together this literature of interconnected maps can lead us into uncharted new ground, but it also allows us to walk back through time, into a lost landscape – of how we once saw things, before we knew what we now know. Scientific articles map not only where we are going, but where we have been: a continuous, interlinked historical trail of our intellectual journey.
I have followed this trail to find Edith. A delicate thread that can be traced both backwards and forwards in time, interweaving our various studies of life within one another. The thread is translucent and perhaps invisible to the untrained eye, but remarkably resilient.
It was in the archives of the Field Naturalists Club that I got my first inkling there was more to Edith than just pseudocopulation. Someone – A. Taylor – had compiled a handwritten list of 32 newspaper and magazine articles written by Edith for The Australian Woman’s Mirror, The Argus and The Age. The list was compiled in 1991 and sent to Rica Erickson who, I suspect, was thinking of writing a biography.
If scientific publications are intended for posterity, newspaper articles are not. They are ephemeral and transient, not intended to be kept beyond the day of reading, after which they might wrap the kitchen scraps, line a lingerie drawer, be pasted on walls or ripped into squares for service in the thunderbox. A local cafe has 1940s copies of The Australian Woman’s Mirror plastered on the toilet walls. I am sure I will find one of Edith’s articles there if I look long enough.
My plan was to find all of Edith’s articles. Twenty years ago it would have been impossible. But the major newspapers are now digitised by the National Library of Australia, processed for machine reading, and searchable in an instant. The ones by ‘Edith Coleman’ emerge reasonably quickly. The ones by ‘E. C.’ take longer. Machines don’t always read very well and typographers make mistakes. On one article, ‘By E. C.’ has been typed ‘BL E. C.’ which the machine reads as ‘Bt RQ’. I would never have found Edith’s first published newspaper article if Kate Baker had not mentioned it by name.
It is also fortunate that Edith has a very distinctive style of writing. Occasionally I find her articles published under Naturalist, Maman Cochet, E. C. Walsham or Edith Woking. Perhaps there are other pseudonyms I haven’t found.
The articles in women’s magazines are harder again. Women’s magazines are rarely collected, kept or indexed, let alone digitised. I find a reasonably complete collection of The Australian Woman’s Mirror in the University of Queensland’s library. I have the dates of eight articles, but no page numbers. I order them from the stacks and search through them by hand. I find 28 articles. Not all are complete, though. Several editions are missing page 60 – maybe the nature pages were on the back of the recipes.
The Australian Woman’s Mirror, 1935 – the series has recently been digitised on Trove
Peter Harms has an anthology of nature writing that reproduces one of Edith’s articles from Your Garden magazine. I hadn’t known she published in this magazine. On a trip to the State Library of Victoria I track down fourteen more articles.
There must be more. I find new ones all the time – a little paper in an early edition of the children’s magazine Bird Study or a mention of her work in Orchid Review. I have long since given up hope of compiling a complete bibliography of Edith’s work. I have found 354 articles so far and am still counting.
The Melbourne Public Library in the 1930s
I meet a writer who is studying Australian nature writing and I tell her about Edith’s work.
‘Oh,’ she says, with a dismissive half-smile, ‘I’m only looking at lyric nature writers.’
And I wonder how she knows that Edith’s writing is not lyrical, without ever having read her work.
I shouldn’t take offence but I do. I know exactly what she’s saying. She’s making a distinction, marking territory. ‘This’ is nature writing and ‘that’ – what Edith does, what I do – is something else.
I suddenly realise that this is why people sometimes say that Australia lacks a tradition of nature writing, even though I think we have plenty. Alec Chisholm’s 1964 anthology of Australian nature writing contains over 100 authors. Suzanne Falkiner recently revisited our nature-writing heritage in Wilderness and Settlement. Nature writing regularly features on the shelves of bookshops, although most of it comes from overseas. It’s not that we don’t have nature writers, but we have the wrong kind of nature writers. These are not deemed to be ‘lyric’ nature writers, they are not of the belletristic tradition. They are ‘straight’ natural-history writers, or even – science writers.
It’s possible this is just a form of cultural cringe, a legacy of a long-held Australian inferiority complex and an assumption that what comes from overseas must be better. But I think it’s more than that. It’s a problem with what we mean by lyrical.
There’s an assumption that the language of science cannot be poetic, that somehow knowledge must obviate the poetic in language. Language is always about knowledge, whether aesthetic, emotional, intellectual or even scientific. I can see no reason why science cannot also be poetic if you wish it to be.
The quality of lyricism, of poetic language, of poetic devices, is independent of content or approach. The application of poetic devices – juxtaposition, fragmentation, metaphor and allusion, assonance and consonance, rhyme and repetition – may be particularly well suited to the purposes of poets, novelists and essayists, but these techniques can be applied to any form of writing. A chemistry paper can be written in iambic pentameter. A scientist can appreciate aesthetics. A conservationist can bewail the fate of their lost species with all the heartfelt despair of a poet. Science does not always include poetry, beauty or love, but it does not preclude them either.
Lyrics are words that sing. Words that make me read them aloud, just for the joy of hearing them spoken. Edith’s writing does this for me. Not all of it, not every word. But quite a lot.
It’s not that Edith’s writing, or that of many other Australian nature writers of her era, lacks lyricism. What it lacks is the personal. Ever since Thoreau we have equated nature writing with a form of memoir – nature as source of inspiration, healing or enlightenment. Man in nature, not nature on its own terms. Before Thoreau the ‘I’ in nature writing was only ever the observer, rarely the subject.
Aldous Huxley argued that the great diversity of the essay form can be analysed within ‘a three poled frame of reference’: sliding between the personal and autobiographical, the objective-factual and concrete-particular
and, finally, the abstract-universal. The personal essayist tends to ‘write fragments of reflective autobiography and look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description’. In other words, memoirists tend to fall in the first category, scientists in the second, and philosophers in the third. Edith quite clearly belongs to the objective-factual and concrete-familiar, along with so many of the classical nature writers, particularly in the British and Australian tradition. ‘New nature writing’ slides closer to the first pole, of the personal and autobiographical.
I slide uncomfortably on a greased pole between the two, anxious to avoid either extreme.
In the history and literary analysis of nature writing there are two names that predominate, Gilbert White and Henry Thoreau. I decide to re-read them, assuming that they must have influenced Edith. What impact would these giants of nature writing, dominating each side of the north Atlantic, have for a writer at the bottom of Australia?
I find Thoreau’s Walden in the American Literature section of the library, classified under American Essays in English. The shelves are swollen with multiple copies of his books, and books about him, and books about other books inspired by him. White’s Selborne is classified as Biology: Geographical Treatment of Organisms. I find the book tucked alone against the back wall between marine invertebrates and palaeontology. The territory between science and literature proves difficult to navigate.
Surely Edith would be more influenced by White, England’s ‘greatest naturalist’, the pre-eminent model for amateur science and the man whose writings must have seeped into Edith’s knowledge at the earliest age from her naturalist father. Selborne was only 25 miles from Guildford, in a land where nature writing feeds into a rural mythology of the pastoral idyll. White is Bacon’s model scientist. The ultimate observer, not speculator, who contributes the detailed knowledge of one tiny area to the cumulative progression of public science. White seems the perfect model for Edith’s externally focused nature writing. And yet she mentions him rarely, anecdotally, in relation to bees, crocuses, oversized vegetables and the once-held belief in hibernation by swallows. There is no evidence that Edith regards White as her role model for elegant ‘nature writing’. Then again, there is no mention at all of Richard Jefferies either in her writing and yet her grandsons recall her being an ardent admirer of his work.
Nor does Edith ever mention Thoreau’s writing, although she has read H. A. Page’s biography of him. It is Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson who inspires her more. Philosopher rather than nature writer.
She did say, I suppose, that it was her father who inspired her interests, and that, in any case, the answers lie in the patient observation of nature, not in books. Perhaps the joy of nature, like science, lies in the active experience, the doing, rather than the reading and writing.
Edith was indisputably well read. Her grandsons both mention her literary tastes, her articles reference her familiarity with literature, she writes to the editor of the newspaper on various literary topics and her letters are filled with a shared love of books.
Peter recalls her reading interests as being ‘a cross-section of the great literature of the 18th and 19th century’ with a fondness for Shakespeare and a whiff of ‘empire era’. Her books, and those of her daughters, reflect a strong interest in English countryside living. She was particularly fond of Richard Jefferies, William Thackeray, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Robert Louis Stevenson. She kept a ‘fairly comprehensive range’ of Rudyard Kipling’s work as well as H. G. Wells.
The literary quotes and references which filled her articles reflect more than just the breadth of her reading and her love of language. Edith was integrating the language of her childhood into the Australian landscape: re-applying and modifying it to new purposes. Her understanding of Australia was built on the foundations of a European literary heritage. She used the persuasive language of her predecessors to strengthen her authority to speak on such matters. ‘She once laughingly told me that she thought The Age accepted her first article “Birds at Blackburn” because she had begun it with a quotation from R. L. Stevenson’s “Prayer”,’ recalled Kate Baker.
I try to analyse the literary sources of one of her orchid papers. The first page quotes Robert Browning, Stephen Phillips and Algernon Swinburne. There are references to well-known Williams – Shakespeare, Hazlitt and Wordsworth – and to Maurice Maeterlinck and Robert Burns. The next page continues with Oscar Wilde, more Robert Burns, James Russell Lowell, Percy Shelley and possibly Anthony Trollope.
I stop analysing. This will take years and I’d end up with a research thesis, not a book. I notice that in closing she quotes the Australian poet Bernard O’Dowd, as if indicating a successful transition from the literature of the Old World to the New.
In a letter to the editor, about books to ‘dip into’, she recommends the ‘Book of Job’, the Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Lamb’s letters (‘in two handy volumes’) and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s essays and poems collected in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
Novels, perhaps, are less ‘dippable’. But still she recommends Lorna Doone and Precious Bane.
Her choice of Richard Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, I suspect, has little to do with its popularity in the aftermath of the marriage of Princess Louise to the Marquis of Lorne. Like Thomas Hardy, Blackmore’s strengths lay more in the richness of his descriptions than the strength of narrative plotting. Blackmore was ‘a hale, homely market gardener’, happiest in his orchards and vineyard.
‘One may write passage after passage of “Lorna Doone” in blank verse of almost perfect metre,’ says Edith. ‘Whether Jan Ridd is describing the coming of spring to his valley, golden harvest, white winter; or telling of his love for Lorna, he speaks in lyric words.
‘All of his readers must agree that Blackmore’s books reveal him as a scholar, wedded to nature,’ she continues. ‘Those who are reading for “escape” in these dire days could not do better than to take up “Lorna Doone” with “its orchards full of contentment.”’
‘Her interest in literature,’ her grandson Peter reflects, ‘was, I think, in description and atmosphere.’
In other letters she mentions Conrad and Galsworthy, and admires Gordon and Dennis, Shakespeare and Kipling, while gently correcting their biological imprecisions. H. G. Wells and Edward Bellamy stand testimony to her interest in science fiction. She mentions the eminently readable Walter Hines Page and his southern lyrical charm, and ‘Q’ – Arthur Quiller-Couch – whose books On the Art of Writing and On the Art of Reading she particularly enjoys.
She read Australian poets: Alexander G. Stevens, whom she knew through his sister Hilda, and the prolific, but little published, Myra Morris. She read Australian stories by Ellis Rowan to her daughters.
She discusses the role of the ‘lovely virtue’ of courage in James M. Barrie’s writing, as ‘by no means confined to the stronger sex’. She takes great comfort from Emerson, as a ‘tonic’, from his encouragement of self-reliance and the idea that the things we have lost may not have been as essential as we thought anyway.
‘My grandmother had a great interest in biblical history,’ says Peter, ‘and also on the theological thinking typical of the 19th century Anglican church.’
Jefferies, Emerson, Barrie’s courage: I am struck by these philosophical, spiritual and theological interests in a writer so pragmatic and analytical. The metaphysical musings of these writers clearly appealed to Edith. And yet Edith does not seem to have been tempted to follow any of them down the path of spiritual revelation through nature in her own work, even though it is such a common theme in so much nature writing. There is nothing I have read that is in the slightest bit transcendent in Edith’s work. It’s possible that the conventional and private rituals of faith, of prayer and church, fulfilled this need, but Peter tells me that she did not go to church after falling out with the minister at St John’s in Blackburn. Edith’s public writing was firmly grounded and material, robustly optimistic and
positive, and yet her private reading suggests some need for solace, guidance or consolation. I cannot help but wonder what private discomfort in her life might have required that salve.
Some people write to get to know themselves better. But maybe some people write to get away from themselves.
‘Who knows what this urge is all about,’ asks writer Anne Lamott, ‘to appear somewhere outside yourself, instead of feeling stuck inside your muddled but stroboscopic mind, peering out like a little undersea animal – a spiny blenny, for instance – from inside your tiny cave?’
She thinks writing is a powerful antidote to narcissism, to being obsessed with ourselves, to our own ‘colorectal theology’ as she calls it – which offers hope to no-one.
A cloud of tiny blue butterflies hovers around the young acacias on top of the hill. We planted the acacias from tubestock a few years ago and they still require careful attention. They are vulnerable to drought, the blunderings of kangaroos, the depredations of insects, all of which wage warfare on the smallest, weakest trees, stripping them to bare stumps until changing seasons bring a fresh spurt of growth.
I frown at the butterflies, flirting flashes of lilac-blue, and inspect a tree more closely. Large ants march up and down on illicit business, their forelegs threatening at my approach. They emerge from a neat caldera of pebbles at the base of the tree. The butterflies and the ants are connected. Lycaenid butterflies – Nabokov’s blues – often live in complicated concert with their ant attendants.
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 19