In less than three weeks roots had been sunk straight down to comparative coolness, if not moisture, and here they secured safe anchorage against the strong winds that sweep over them. Lateral roots were absent. Nature has no use for the superfluous. She provides no mouths which she cannot fill. Why waste energy in developing surface feeders where no moisture exists?
To combat fierce sunshine many plants had covered themselves with silvery coats of soft wool or silk, which act as a blanket to keep within stems and leaves the precious moisture of which hot, hungry winds would rob them.
Others again, like the useful parakeelya, of the lowly ‘pigface’ family, hoarded stores of water in juicy stems and leaves, developing tough skins that cheated the sun by making the leaves into tightly corked bottles – a drink in themselves to thirsty stock. Cattle that have access to these plants are able to go for a year without water. Thirsty aborigines have only to squeeze a plant and drink!
Plants on rocky hills defied the wind by hugging the earth. Wattles and other trees became prostrate, instead of growing erect. To secure anchorage they sank their roots deeply between rocky crevices so that neither wind nor rare torrential rains could dislodge them.
Plants that had no hope of surviving above ground added to the store of food carried in their roots, which they sank ever more deeply, so that these, at least, might survive the hot summer, and shoot again with the first rain. The saltbushes and bluebushes are the chief successes among these perennials. Creepers which managed to lift themselves high enough to secure the support of trees developed such tough, wiry stems that only the sharpest knife could sever them. Even on waterless sandhills, when the tardy rain arrives it finds thousands of potential plants ready.
Here and there on the plains, where the only trees were dead or dying mulgas and a few sad desert oaks, the red and green flowers of a lovely fuchsia glowed above the quiet silver of Rhagodias and spiny Bassias (‘goathead’). The muted colours of a few hardy buck bushes and bleached, cone-shaped tufts of mulga grass filled in other spaces, so that for mile upon mile one travelled in a grey solitude, where hardly a bird broke the silence. These plains lay hold of the heart.
Once seen one must always remember the quiet beauty and the inexpressible sadness of them.
The bushman expresses it more tersely: ‘It’s a land that gets you.’ But it is a hard land, a land for the sons of Esau. Its pleasures are dearly bought, but when one has dipped below the surface one understands why men love it, and will never leave it, preferring its sands and its searing heat to the fleshpots of cities.
But there is another, more vivid, side to the picture, when, after a shower of rain the desert blossoms, not as the rose, but into brilliant, even daring, colours, unequalled anywhere else in the world.
It is a wonderful land – a land of striking contrasts. To those of us who have fallen under its spell it will stretch out invisible hands to draw us back to its blossoming wilderness – to follow again elusive trails across silvery plains; over white, dry beds of winding watercourses, over rock-strewn hills, painted in unbelievable colours, which only a few artists have dared to put on canvas – colours which must be seen to be believed, best of all, to enjoy again the colour and perfume of its vegetation, and to marvel again at its wonderful fertility.
Chapter 12
ONE OF US
‘Perhaps we might have a league of mothers who will volunteer to plant in their little ones the first seeds of a great affection for the trees and flowers, and all living things in this wonderful land of ours, who will inculcate in them a tenderness and sympathy for living creatures that will grow with the years.’
December 1939
‘It’s hardly fair,’ declares Edith, suddenly dropping The Age across the breakfast table. ‘Miss Baker will be devastated.’
James looks up from the motoring section.
‘An award of £125 for six months has been made to Miss Stella Miles Franklin, of Carlton, New South Wales,’ Edith reads aloud, ‘to enable her to complete a biography dealing with the life and legend of Joseph Furphy.’
James takes a sip from his ‘coffee’, his moustache barely twitching at the aroma of caramelised oats rising from the cup.
‘Don’t you like her books?’ he asks.
‘That’s not the point,’ retorts Edith. ‘Franklin is a creative writer, not a biographer. And it’s not her work. She’s using Miss Baker’s research to write this book. It is Miss Baker who knew Furphy best; without her work there would be nothing to write.’
James puts down his paper, giving up on his reading, and reaches for the apricot jam.
‘Of course, I understand the value of novels,’ Edith continues, ‘and she’d write a very fine novel, I’m sure, but this is an archival work. No-one is better equipped than Kate Baker to write Furphy’s biography. Franklin barely even knew him. Why would they give her the money and not give it to Miss Baker as well? They are supposed to be working together on this project.’
‘I see Charles Barrett’s new book got a good write-up,’James mentions hopefully, pointing out an article on nature books for Christmas.
But Edith tightens her lips. She knows what her friend Rupp thinks of Barrett. On the subject of people taking credit for the work of others Barrett is perhaps not the best choice of a distraction. She would never go so far as Rupp in her comments, but she did agree that credit should always be given where it is due.
Edith sips her coffee. She should have roasted the wheat and oats for a little longer. Still, everyone seemed happy enough with the brew – at least they accepted it with a fine tolerance that she took for praise.
It was so unfair on Miss Baker, who had spent a lifetime compiling and promoting the work of Joseph Furphy. She had met Furphy and his family when teaching near Rushworth and had encouraged him to persist with his book Such Is Life, which was finally published in 1903. Apparently, when Furphy died, in 1912, Baker had been heartbroken. She spent what little money she earnt as a teacher publishing his poems, promoting and republishing his book and ensuring that his legacy was not forgotten.
‘This was my lifework,’ she had said. ‘Its fulfilment my reward. I desire no other.’
Miss Baker had been so thrilled when she and Franklin had won the S. H. Prior Memorial Prize for their co-authored book manuscript ‘Who Was Joseph Furphy?’ And now it looked like Franklin would rewrite their work and take all the credit.
‘I’ll write to the papers after breakfast,’ Edith decides. ‘It’s the least I can do.’
‘Perhaps Miss Baker will write your biography instead now?’ suggests James.
Edith does not respond. She picks up the tray of boiled eggs cooling in their eggcups.
‘The echidnas need their breakfast,’ she says and heads out to the garden.
KATE BAKER WAS a schoolteacher, who lived a frugal life on her meagre pay, but devoted all her time, considerable energy and the little funds she had to promoting the great works of her friends. Roy Duncan describes her as ‘the patron without financial standing, whose only enduring capacity to foster Australian literature lay in the fibre of her own heart and soul’. Furphy was her life’s work, but she was a tireless supporter of Australian writing and writers generally – particularly those she felt were ignored or forgotten.
It was Stella Miles Franklin who encouraged Baker to complete her biography of Furphy. Lawson’s ‘little bush girl’ had met the old bullock driver, at his request, in Melbourne in 1905 when the two newly published authors were both striving to write in an authentically Australian voice. Franklin, at 22, was struggling with the sudden fame of My Brilliant Career, while the 66-year-old Furphy was seeking to gain a broader audience. It was here that Furphy introduced his friend Kate Baker to Franklin.
After Furphy’s death it was Baker who battled to keep his work in print, not always successfully. When Such Is Life was published in England it was heavily abridged. Franklin was horrified by the result. She declared to Baker that British publishers would �
��accept nothing Australian unless the Australianism was extracted, or of the colonial variety tempered to English idea of what it shd be’.
Baker and Franklin worked together on the Furphy biography at Franklin’s home in Sydney, a collaboration that was ‘painful’ for both. Franklin complained of Baker’s ‘illusion that she created Furphy’ and her ‘mania’. At 78, Baker was deaf and an exacting taskmaster, unwilling to approach her subject objectively. She felt that Franklin did not acknowledge her contribution and ‘complained of the “stab” she received at Franklin’s hand and the emotional strain’.
Despite winning the Prior award for their manuscript, the book needed more work. Franklin applied for the literature grant to support her. The resulting biography of ‘our bush Hamlet’, Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and His Book, was published in 1944, by Miles Franklin ‘in association with Kate Baker’.
Notwithstanding their difficulties, Franklin admired the older woman’s astonishing devotion and dedication to the cause of Australian literature, a dedication she herself would continue.
‘A triumph, 91 next month, and still going about by herself and tripping down steps in a half light without holding the side rail,’ Franklin said.
How often women devote their efforts to promoting the works of others. Joseph Furphy’s classic and distinctively Australian tale, Such Is Life, regularly features on lists of the best, and favourite, Australian books. Would Furphy’s famous work be remembered, or even have been written or published, were it not for Baker’s enthusiastic support and promotion?
The history of literature is littered with such tales of posthumous promotion. How well would Percy Shelley be remembered if his wife Mary had not stubbornly insisted on publishing his poetry after his death, in the face of fierce opposition from his father? Or Byron’s poetry, for that matter, which Mary Shelley painstakingly transcribed in ‘fair copy’ for publication.
In 1937, Baker was awarded an Order of the British Empire for her services to Australian literature.
‘May I give myself the pleasure of telling you how proud we are of you and the real honor you have so deservedly won,’ Edith wrote to her. ‘It is a wonderful thing to be able to do what you have done for Aust. Literature.
‘As a warm supporter of my sex,’ she added, with double underlining for emphasis, ‘I am so proud that it is on one of us that the honor falls.’
Baker was fifteen years older than Edith so I don’t think they met through teacher training or in schools, but they both knew Frank Tate. It could have been through other literary connections, though – C. J. Dennis, the Lindsays or Vance and Nettie Palmer, perhaps.
By 1942, Baker had compiled a manuscript of short essays on important figures in Australian literature.
‘She has written around a few chosen literary notables a story of Australian literature,’ wrote Alfred Foster in the preface, ‘and does it in such a way as to make us ashamed that we are not more thoroughly acquainted with that literature; not only ashamed but dismayed that we have neglected so much of such value for so long.’
Precious few of those literary notables are familiar today. Her list reads like a lament to lost Australian literature: Ada Cambridge, Victor Kennedy, Marie E. J. Pitt, Joseph Furphy, Alice Henry, John Shaw Neilson. The neglect continues.
The third entry on her list is Edith Coleman.
‘I do not know a writer whose word and phrase more beautifully and more accurately fit the thought,’ declared Baker about Edith.
Baker’s work was never published, but the draft manuscript remains in the National Library archives. It is not a work of literature. She was, after all, a compiler, not a creative writer. But it is an invaluable and rare resource for so many figures of Australian literature whom history has all but forgotten. Without it, much of Edith’s early history – recollections of her family and childhood – would have been lost.
Writing has long been one of the few respectable careers open to women other than teaching, cleaning and child-rearing, and Australia soon added to the list of female authors – from the late nineteenth-century writings of Caroline Leakey, Catherine Helen Spence, Louisa Atkinson, Mary Fortune, Mary Hannay Foott, and Ethel Turner to the early twentieth-century works of Henry Handel Richardson, May Gibbs, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Miles Franklin, Eleanor Dark and Dorothy Wall.
Botany, too, had long been seen as a suitable career for a woman – both in illustration and in writing.
‘One is almost dazzled at the comparative brilliance of women in this work,’ enthused Alec Chisholm about botanical illustrators. ‘Take away women’s work and what a gap there would be in nature studies in Australia.’
Perhaps Edith was particularly wise to select a career in nature writing. And yet today, many people regard nature writing as being a blokey genre – particularly unwelcoming to women. Writers like Cheryl Strayed and Annie Dillard have publicly despaired of being the ‘only girls in the woods’.
‘The mythic frontier individualist was almost always masculine in gender,’ noted the historian William Cronon about the origins of America’s nature writing tradition. ‘Here, in the wilderness, a man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity.’ American nature writing, in particular, is perceived to have a strongly masculine imperative. It is said to date back to Henry David Thoreau, although in fact I think it has more to do with John Muir.
The alone-in-the-wilderness experience demanded by much modern nature writing seems antithetical to the domestic duties so often required of a wife and mother. But I am not sure how much of that ‘alone in the wilderness’ thing is just so much bravado. Nature doesn’t care if you are alone or not. Nature takes her place wherever she can, in a crack in the pavement, on a rubbish dump or in a back garden. A lot of nature writing feels like it is not really about nature as much as man-in-nature – with emphasis on the man.
When I think of the history of nature writing in America, I assume it has always been dominated by men. And yet, ‘roughly half of the nature essays contributed to the Atlantic Monthly during the late nineteenth century, the point where the nature essay became a recognised genre, were by female authors’. By the twentieth century, though, the contributions by women in retrospective anthologies had dropped well south of 30 per cent.
‘Is national forgetfulness simply a case of benign absent mindedness?’ asks Australian historian Clare Wright, whose work has restored to our collective memory the history of women in pubs, goldfields and revolutions. ‘Or is it a ruse?’
Are the women of history absent, unrecorded, lost, forgotten, obscured or erased? It’s a difficult question. In nature writing, at least, they were present. They have written their contributions, published their work. But we have not been listening. It’s well known that we hear men’s voices more readily than women’s: they interrupt more, step back less; we listen more carefully to men’s views, think that men are the ones who’ve made the best contributions; we accord them greater status. The women’s voices, I suspect, are being lost when we anthologise, analyse and criticise the literature. In this case, it’s not a question of what’s written, but who we have chosen to hear.
Edith had no concerns about how ‘wild’ nature was. An orchid is an orchid whether you find it in an undisturbed mountain forest or growing by the back doorstep. Sometimes you need to bring things in from the wild in order to really understand them. While camping for five weeks at Sorrento, Edith found a young echidna, only three months old, wandering beneath a mulberry tree.
‘He shared our tent and intrigued us with his fascinating ways,’ she wrote. ‘A small animated mat of fur and prickles, with almost invisible legs.’
They called their visitor Stickly-prickly, Stickles for short, and brought him home to Blackburn (with appropriate legal permits) to study.
Stickles had free range of the house and a suitcase for a bed on the sunny wired verandah. Outside, a disused aviary with eart
hen floors provided room for burrowing, while the garden offered opportunities for supervised ant hunting.
‘This son of Australia is an ardent sunworshipper,’ Edith observed. ‘He spends many half-hours, spread-eagled on sunny days.’
In time, Stickles was joined by Prickles, and later by other echidnas usually rescued from dogs. Edith moved from broad observations of behaviour towards more detailed discussions of hibernation, climbing skills, skin shedding and sense of smell. A portfolio of photographs reveals the undeniable charms of their temporary residents.
Adorable though Stickles might have been, Edith was under no illusions about his mental powers.
‘One is not impressed with such signs of intelligence as he shows,’ she noted.
By and large, the echidnas were released back into the wild where they were found whenever they showed any signs of discontent during their stay. Edith wistfully hoped that on their release, one of their wild kin might ‘teach him to forgot the indignity of this period of his existence as a domesticated echidna’.
Stickles the echidna at breakfast
‘I rail against the short-sighted custom of my childhood,’ Edith wrote, ‘which permitted boys to keep mice, but imposed inanimate dolls upon little girls.’
Edith’s daughters suffered no such restrictions. I imagine their childhoods to be more like that of Miles Franklin.
‘Santa Claus, the displaced European with his cotton-wool beard and minus the enchanting reindeer, is a bore,’ Franklin declared. ‘The open air furnished with miles of flowers, streams, orchards and mighty trees was my nursery-playground and there was a variety of living toys. To grow up in intimate association with nature – animal and vegetable – is an irreplaceable form of wealth and culture.’
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 24