Like Edith, Franklin had an aversion to keeping wild animals in confinement. While Edith kept wild animals for study, she would not keep echidnas that expressed a strong determination for their freedom and regretted raising the possums in captivity, even though it had been for their own safety. Bill Baillie made his own choices, and returned home voluntarily, somewhat the worse for wear, after escaping for a few days.
Camping, bushwalking, beach-combing and travelling were very much a part of the Coleman girls’ childhood. While Gladys wrote of fishing for yabbies, Dorothy wrote of their success at sea-fishing.
‘On Sunday three weeks ago we got forty between the three of us,’ she wrote to Donald Macdonald. ‘Many quite large and one very fine rock flathead among them (and Gladys and I are only beginners).’
The author of ‘Notes for Boys’ duly declared that he was quite delighted to hear of the girls’ success as anglers. ‘There is no reason why they should not do just as well as boys – better, perhaps, because girls have, I think, more patience than boys, and patience is often a necessary virtue in angling.’
I did not have more patience than a boy. I would not sit heron-like for hours. There were plenty of fish in the sea. We fished off grumbling, greyed jetties, in salt-sticky boats and from tin-thin dinghies slapped by wavelets. A crumble of bread brought the water to a seething silver boil, unbaited hooks laden with double and triple headers. We fished by the dozen, by the bucket, by the moment. An hour’s effort to feed a family.
The fish have gone now. Even in the distant places, off big boats in deep water. It’s the wrong bait, wrong hook, the wrong place, wrong time, wrong tide. But that’s not what’s wrong. Some still return, sunburnt and cranky, loaded with crates for the freezer. It’s not the same, though. Perhaps it’s better not to be patient, when you’re catching the last fish in the sea. Time to let one get away.
Donald Macdonald extended his successful ‘Nature Notes and Queries’ column to a new Tuesday column, ‘Notes for Boys’, in February 1909. The audience is self-evident, even though it is not immediately obvious why contributions from girls should be confined to a subsection ‘In the Open Air’.
‘I want to renew old and very dear associations, to keep young, also, if I can, to be always a boy – with boys,’ claimed Macdonald.
His passion for boys having ‘grand aspirations [for] the defence of their country’ expanded over the weeks to war stories from Elanda River, a ‘gun and rod’ camp for boys, dark nights in Ladysmith, heroic little white boys defending themselves from savage blacks, schoolboy tales of hunting and fishing and Baden-Powell’s scouting movement. MacDonald’s contributors, boys and girls alike, remain focused on the identification of parrots and herons, the best bait for bream, and the reproduction of snakes, lizards and turtles. It seems a strange perversity to twist a love of nature into preparation for war.
Such education was not just for soldiers, but for farmers too. There is plenty of evidence that nature study in schools was intended to promote and encourage an agricultural life in the country, working the land. And it is assumed that nature study, therefore, was directed at boys, while girls must have been confined to the studies of domestic science. And yet, photographs of garden classes in Victorian and New South Wales schools reveal an even mix of boys and girls. Plans of school grounds designate both girls’ gardens and boys’ gardens. Gardening was very much a part of nature study in schools and I can’t imagine that girls were ever excluded from that, for all they may have been written out of the history of nature study.
The long history of women in science has been characterised by a struggle to gain and then maintain access. Rising literacy levels and universal education made basic science accessible to women, but they were denied access to further education and employment prospects. Most European seats of learning did not allow women into their halls. Denied access to formal education, many women wrote their own and educated themselves. Writing books was something they were allowed to do.
In the early 1800s popular science education was dotted with texts written by women – Margaret Bryan’s Compendius System of Astronomy and Lectures on Natural Philosophy were in no way lightweight treatments of their subject matter. Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry offered to the general public, but ‘more particularly to the female sex’ became a standard text for decades, educating not just girls, but also those from underprivileged backgrounds, like Michael Faraday. Her association with the French botanist Augustin de Candolle inspired Marcet to produce Conversations on Vegetable Physiology and Conversations on Natural Philosophy.
But for every opened door that provided access for women to education and science, another was firmly locked. While the popularisation of science increased access for women, the professionalisation of science denied it. Aristocratic women, like Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia, and Catherine the Great may all have been patrons of the sciences but the academies they promoted did not allow female members.
The British Academy for the Advancement of Science allowed women to attend social functions but denied them entry to research sessions. Computing pioneer Charles Babbage objected, quite possibly because he knew how valuable a woman, Ada Lovelace, had been to his own mathematical work. Women were grudgingly invited to a few lectures. The women responded by taking a mile instead of the reluctantly proffered inch and turned up in force to all the events, outnumbering the men. Force of numbers ultimately prevailed.
In the early 1900s, Alfred Ewart, professor of botany at Melbourne University, thought it would be a good idea to employ a woman to the teaching staff. Botany, unlike medicine, had long been regarded as appropriate for women’s participation. But Ewart was not so much motivated by the talent of his female students as their cheapness. Women were paid half a man’s salary for the same work.
Despite this ‘advantage’, the appointment of women was slow among the senior ranks of academics. Georgina Sweet became Australia’s first female acting professor in 1917 but the zoology chair went to a man, Wilfred E. Agar. Ethel McLennan headed the Botany School in 1937 after Ewart’s death and, although ‘every member of the committee had a personal predilection in favour of Dr. McLennan’s appointment’ to the permanent chair, they unanimously voted to appoint a young Cambridge man, John Turner, instead. Both Turner and Agar, over their thirty-year careers, actively encouraged male appointments in preference to female in their departments.
It would be another 53 years before women, Adrienne Clarke and then Pauline Ladiges, were appointed as full professorial heads of the botany department in the discipline women had long dominated. Zoology would have to wait until 1991 to finally overcome Agar’s legacy.
Fifty years after the first female graduate, in 1933, women accounted for 27 per cent of all the enrolments at the University of Melbourne. All 24 professorships were held by men. Ethel McLennan was the sole woman among the nine associate professors, alongside three women (Jessie Webb, Edith Derman and Ruth Buchanan) among the 28 senior lecturers. Isabel Cookson and Janet Raff, as the only women among fifteen lecturers, completed the tally. In other words, women accounted for just 8 per cent of the full-time teaching staff at the university, but 45 per cent of the lowly paid, transient positions of tutors, demonstrators and senior demonstrators. Notwithstanding the hierarchical disparity, women accounted for 19 per cent of all academic positions in total. By 1986, they accounted for only 16 per cent across the board.
Today, 55 per cent of Melbourne University’s enrolments are female, and the university proudly boasts of having increased the percentage of women in academic positions to 48 per cent in 2012. But among the most senior ranks of professors, representation is stuck at 23 per cent. It has been 136 years since women were first admitted to the university halls and rapidly proved their worth. At least four generations of academic staff have cycled through their working careers in that time. This is not a problem in transition. Something else is clogging up the works.
At first glance, Edith and her daughter
s appear to neatly illustrate three different approaches to female achievement. It might seem that Edith waited until she had finished her maternal duties before embarking on her own career. Dorothy provides the model for the woman who succeeds in her artistic career by virtue of doing without a husband. Gladys, by contrast, follows the path of the woman whose work is subsumed by that of her husband or employer, which seems to be a common pattern.
‘Had our friend Mrs. Somerville been married to La Place or some mathematician we should never have heard of her work,’ the geologist Charles Lyell once wrote to his future wife. ‘She would have merged it in her husband’s and passed it off as his.’
Lyell’s observation was ironically prescient. The barely remembered Mary Horner was an impressive scientist in her own right. Her work on the land snails of the Canary Islands was likened in significance to that of Darwin’s Galapagos finches. She married Lyell in 1832 and is believed to have made a major contribution to his work.
But things are not always as they first appear. Perhaps domesticity and motherhood does not have to constrain creativity and career. I cannot tell whether Edith’s career was delayed by motherhood, or inspired by it. I do not know if Dorothy’s career would have suffered had she married or if Gladys’s career would have blossomed if she had not. And if they were men, would we even give a thought to the influence of their partners and families?
The botanist at the herbarium has sent me a list of the 90 or so orchid specimens that Edith sent to Dr Rogers in Adelaide. He searched for ‘Coleman’ and organised the list by year. The earliest records are for 1921 but they were not sent by Edith. They were sent by Dorothy.
A year later, in October, Edith sent Rogers several orchid specimens, including an unusual leek orchid, with a delicate lilac lavender colour. It was a new species. He named it Prasophyllum colemanae, although it’s also known as colemaniarum and, most commonly, colemaniae.
‘He should have called it colemaniarum,’ explains the botanist. ‘Because it is the plural form. He named it after the three of them – Mrs Coleman and both of her daughters.’
The Latin ending -ae is singular; -arum is plural. I check Rogers’ original paper.
‘Named in honour of Mrs Coleman and her daughters, enthusiastic collectors of orchids in Victoria,’ he wrote.
Not just one daughter then, but both: Dorothy and Gladys.
I had always assumed this orchid was named after Edith, but the story is more complex. It is Dorothy who has started the collecting, initiated this relationship, and it is Edith who continues it. Gladys, too, is part of this trio. I’m not sure if Dorothy sent any more specimens to Rogers. Most of the orchids are from Edith, Mrs Coleman or Mrs E. Coleman. There is an occasional specimen from a Miss Coleman in Blackburn and also a D. Coleman from Saddleworth in South Australia, but this is probably a mistranscription or another person entirely.
The lilac leek orchid is rare. Edith is the only person to have collected it – from Ringwood, in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs, and Bayswater and Anglesea, south of Geelong, along the surf coast. For many years it was presumed to be extinct. But a few years ago Mitch Smith photographed a blue-banded bee visiting a small colony of leek orchids, much further east, in Gippsland. They seem to be the same species. Edith’s legacy, and that of her daughters, has re-emerged.
Finding Dorothy’s specimens makes me check for other members of the family, and so I come across a dozen or so specimens of orchids collected by ‘J. G. Coleman’. They are from the early 1920s, from Melbourne and Wilsons Promontory, from a collecting expedition Edith said she did ‘in a party of four (Dr. and Mrs. R. S. Rogers, of Adelaide, my daughter and myself)’. It is one thing not to mention your husband, quite another to explicitly exclude him. Did James collect orchids? Even briefly, at the beginning of Edith’s career? There is no evidence of this from the family history. The online database cannot answer my questions so I have to travel to the New South Wales herbarium to see for myself.
The neatly pressed sheets of plants, with notes of various levels of historical antiquity attached, quickly answer my question. J. G. Coleman has been mistranscribed from ‘Mrs J. G. Coleman’. The specimens were clearly collected by Edith, not James.
It occurs to me that I have never read of Edith referring to herself by her husband’s name and initials. In her own letters and articles she is always Edith Coleman or Mrs Coleman. Some of these specimens also have her original collection notes attached. It is not Edith who has added the initials. It is the recipient of her generosity: Reverend Rupp.
Rupp records the collector under her husband’s name: Mrs. J. G. Coleman. Time, error and transcriptions have reduced her identity to that of James. If James had collected orchids in his own right there would be no way of untangling them. But it seems that Rupp recognised his error. On some of the specimens he has added, later, in a different pen, the word ‘(Edith)’ above the initials. On others, he has rubbed both the addition and the initials out entirely, rewriting ‘Edith’ into the space so that there can be no confusion. He has erased the erasure and restored Edith to her own identity.
In 1923 the Tintern Old Girls Association held its annual dance raising funds for the War Memorial Scholarship Fund. An article in The Age documents the event – all two columns of text devoted entirely to the description of each and every girl’s dress.
Parson’s bands (Eriochilus cucullatus) from Rupp’s collection – with the collector amended from J. G. to Edith Coleman
‘Miss Dorothy Coleman was in delphinium blue taffeta and her sister Gladys wore a pretty frock of cherry shot taffeta which suited her to perfection.’
The article titled ‘Pretty Girls in Smart Frocks’ might more aptly have read ‘Smart Girls in Pretty Frocks’ but that was not, it seems, the journalist’s interest. The annual dance, with its laden tables of food, was an event where ‘housewifely accomplishments are added to their scholastic achievements’.
Such triviality was not just directed at young marriageable ladies. The following year, a celebration of the renovated hall at Blackburn described similar charms of suburban couture.
‘Residents of Blackburn are proud of their enlarged and redecorated hall, the opening of which was celebrated by a jolly dance on September 10,’ the Box Hill reporter enthused. ‘The hall presented a gay scene with its appropriate decorations. Dainty refreshments were laid on poppy-decked tables in the supper room.’
Among the many guests described, all female, was ‘Mrs Coleman, flame satin veiled with black georgette and caught with a rose on the shoulder’.
If this is Edith, I can hardly recognise her. It reminds me of another dance, and another nature writer, separated by the Atlantic and almost a century.
‘The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever tried,’ complained Thoreau. ‘They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure whether or not they are there or not there.’
I think Thoreau was going to the wrong parties.
Edith exhibits no anxiety about her work or her capabilities. Occasionally she makes an error, and is annoyed about it. But in general, in public and private, her writing is pervaded by a calm, confident and utterly authoritative aura that brooks no patronage.
She would have swiftly corrected Thoreau’s misconceptions about women had she met him at a dinner party, kindly and humorously, but firmly, as she does Mr J. F. McCormack, who criticises the ‘lady – Edith Coleman’ who recommended in a letter to The Age Emerson’s essays as bedside reading.
‘In my opinion the place for thought-provoking essays is not the bedside table, but the library, where they can be frequently perused,’ he declares, considering these essays too stimulating to be ‘somniferous’.
‘I had forgotten that there are many, alas! who use books to woo sleep, so apt are we to measure another’s need by our own,’ Edith replies lightly. ‘Some of us read in bed for pure enjoyment . . . The test of a bedside book is not that of rereading but of “dipping into” in any spar
e movements [and] Emerson’s “Essays” can be opened anywhere.’
This is not the only time she responded to a public ‘correction’.
‘Strictly speaking, your contributor, Edith Coleman (Blackburn) was not right in her correction of “Maryborough” who stated that plants derived nitrogen from the air,’ writes J. H. Sampson of Vermont. ‘Leguminous plants in association (symbiosis) with certain micro-organisms contained in nodules upon the roots of the plants do derive nitrogen from the air.’
‘My letter was not intended as a correction of “Maryborough’s” statements,’ Edith clarifies in response, ‘but a friendly note from one nature lover to another, that plants do not derive nitrogen from the air through their leaves.’
I think this is what the American literature professor, Lawrence Buell, calls ‘Victorian feminist mock insouciance’. It is a familiar pattern, he says, of ‘the woman writer creating a space for feisty assertion with the parenthesis of “deference”’. Buell quotes the American nature writer Celia Thaxter’s employing the ‘left-handed compliment’ to devastating effect in 1874.
‘It takes Thoreau and Emerson and their kind to enjoy a walk for a walk’s sake, and the wealth they glean with eyes and ears. I cannot enjoy the glimpses Nature gives me half as well, when I go deliberately seeking them, as when they flash on me in some pause of work. It is like the pursuit of happiness; you don’t get it when you go after it, but let it alone and it comes to you. At least this is my case. In the case of geniuses (now is that the proper plural?) aforesaid, it is different.’
In the early 1940s, Edith observed some birds in her garden stripping pyrethrum leaves from a plant to line their nests. She’d seen yellow robins putting green leaves in their nests but hadn’t given it much thought. A colleague reported sparrows using rue in their nests and Edith began to wonder if the antiseptic qualities of these plants were being used by the birds. Edith published her observations and theories in the Victorian Naturalist.
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 25