James grunts as he hits a rock and reaches for the heavy crowbar. Well, little effort for some, anyway.
LIKE BADEN-POWELL, DONALD Macdonald believed that a well-prepared, self-sufficient boy made a fine soldier. The Boer War had taught both men that a war could be all but lost by professionally trained English soldiers to a ragtag guerrilla army of veld-hardened and determined farmers. The pastoral life in the new world was not some kind of sylvan idyll, but instead bred tough and rugged survivors.
‘All the boys of Australia may grow with one aspiration,’ Macdonald wrote, ‘the defence of their country – ever in their minds. This is the greatest, the grandest aspiration in all the world, the undying resolution that as long as we have life, and strength, and courage no harm shall come to Australia.’
Australia, Canada and New Zealand could be seen as training grounds for future troops loyal to empire. Nature worship, and the study of nature in schools, was not just about farming and agricultural economy, it was also about preparation for the ultimate sacrifice. Country life was virile, while city life was degenerative. Writers like Paterson, Lawson and O’Dowd reinforced this view in the Australian imagination.
Many believed that the harsh bush setting had had a beneficial effect on Australia’s settlers despite inauspicious convict origins. The land promoted their intrinsic hardiness and resilience and weeded out faults. Australia’s rugged environment had brutally purged the immigrants of their homeland weakness, creating a stronger, healthier, more vigorous population. Survival of the fittest, dog eat dog: the language of exploration, colonisation and settlement is shared with the masculine world of conquest, warfare, rape and battle.
‘Boys, in nature, race and war, were powerfully bound together in the preaching of the nature writers,’ says historian Tom Griffiths.
Perhaps some nature writers, but not all of them. It depends who you read.
‘I trod the hill of yellow grass; the land was veiled in the smoke of the still-burning bush-fire that was wallowing in red seas from some desolate shore to the end of its journey. Above the dry grass the blue smoke wandered, and in the mystical twilight I cried, “O Patria Mia! Patria Mia!” and my naked brown feet kissed the dear earth of my Australia and my soul was pure with love of her,’ declared Eve Langley in The Pea Pickers.
While Macdonald was deliberately attempting to reach boys, Edith was speaking to the girls and women. While Macdonald wrote of Boy Scouts, Edith made ‘a special appeal to Girl Guides’, noting that the ‘brotherhood’ of sawfly larva might better be termed a ‘sisterhood’.
Just as it did for Macdonald, though, the war permeated Edith’s writing from 1940 to 1950. But she had a pragmatic, small-scale response to that great catastrophe. Someone once told me about an analysis of Depression-era street films which showed that, during those difficult days, men walked more slowly, losing their positions and sense of purpose, while women walked faster, picking up the pace with an accumulation of small economies and earnings. When the men lost their jobs, the burden of maintaining the family fell on women. I can see this response in Edith’s writing. When men and boys are sent to war, there is little that woman can do but step up to take their place as providers, at work and at home.
What else can we do, in the face of an overwhelming potential catastrophe, over which we have little or no control? What we always do in such times, I suppose, cling tight to the small things that give us pleasure, do what we can at home, and prepare ourselves for the worst.
Edith wrote about the impact of the war on the use of tobacco, the Bulgarian rose-growers, the need to grow more flax, and to find substitutes for condiments restricted by the war. She wrote about the enormous and unexpected consequences of synthesising indicin on dyeing, the production of mono-nitro-toluol, and subsequently TNT.
Edith’s version of the story reads like a wistful alternative history.
‘Had the early Britons not discovered that a blue dye could be obtained from its [woad’s] juices: had that blue not been eclipsed by a blue from the Indian plant Indigofera: had methods of synthesising indigo from coal-gas never been discovered, two terrible world wars might never have come upon us.’
Perhaps things might have been different.
There is resignation in Edith’s war years writing, and stoicism, but no preaching. There is no doubting her patriotism, or that her writing is pervaded by a profound sense of duty and obligation. She quotes Hans Christian Andersen’s story of ‘The Flax’ as a metaphor for empire: ‘We are twelve pieces, but one and the same.’ This dogged determination to make do, to ‘carry on’, does not manifest in any fervent patriotic nationalism, no stirring calls for strength and courage. Her call to arms is not to boys, but to all Australians, and it is not to man the barracks, but to put one’s back to the plough. She calls on farmers, large and small, to grow flax, but also women and children who ‘might supplement the work of the flax farmer by sowing idle land, and even school gardens, with experimental plots of flax, which would be of value in indicating the suitability or otherwise, of their districts for wider cultivation.’
There is no doubting the role of women in war.
‘The fine health of the English people in circumstances that might reasonably be expected to lower their vitality is largely due to its women,’ Edith wrote.
Edith’s patriotism is revealed through a profound love of landscape. She demanded no sacrifices, no blood on the sand. Her writing tugged at homesick heartstrings.
‘Sunny Australia!’ she wrote. ‘There may be some who would challenge the title but they are not those who have seen our land in wattle time. To others who missed the golden pageant we say, “Come back in wattle-time,” when the yellow fire of spring lights up our bush, and wattle-fringed water-courses vein the land in gold; when hill and valley and plain have been gilded by spring’s magic brush, and hundreds of acres of arid lands are ablaze – waves of gold as far as the eye can reach; when our waysides are symphonies in yellow and grey; when brown roads go winding through veritable forests of gold – gold of the sun, the despair alike of poet and painter.’
It is hard to imagine how much Melbourne, like so many other cities, had transformed in the first 30 years of the twentieth century. The open horse paddocks and orchards, which once divided the inner suburbs, filled in with houses and businesses. It amused me, as I waited for the bus next to a department store’s underground carpark, to remember my grandfather telling me how he used to watch the teams of horses laden with goods turning down this same underground loading bay. Motor vehicles drove this revolutionary change, but war left an even greater mark.
World War I had moved women out of their homes and into the workforce. In the Depression between the wars, the underpaid labour of women deprived men of jobs they’d once believed to be their right. Immigration from southern Europe and Asia added the virtues of cultural diversity and the ugliness of xenophobic racism. British immigration also increased after the war, particularly of women and widows, in search of better opportunities.
Women got paid for work, cut their hair and changed their clothes. Some even dared to adorn themselves in a ‘dashing suit of Lido pyjamas’ worn around Portsea ‘with remarkable confidence’. Even more adventurous, perhaps, was the girl who ‘disported herself in absolutely backless pale green bathers, the back of her torso from the shoulders to just below the normal waistline being of a pale brown colour’. How quickly the striped neck-to-knee bathing suits of the early 1900s were discarded.
The rumblings of World War II began well before its declaration in 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. To Australia’s north, the Japanese Empire had already begun its plan for Asian domination by waging war on China. It was Japan that would bring war to Australia’s shores, but it was Britain that took Australia into the battlefields of Europe. Within hours of the British prime minister announcing a deadline for the German withdrawal of troops from Poland, Australian prime minister Robert Menzies declared that ‘as a result, Australia is also at war
’.
World War II brought rationing of food, clothing and petrol. Everyone worried about family and friends in the fighting overseas. For Edith, the war was also a significant impediment to her scientific work. Petrol rationing greatly limited her mobility and overseas correspondence was blocked.
Dorothy and James set up a weaving station in the garage to make camouflage nets. Edith focused her efforts on fundraising for the Red Cross through seed and herb sales. One of her most successful enterprises was the production of candied angelica. In 1941, she’d written an article on the uses of angelica which was published in The Age. To everyone’s great surprise, the office was inundated with letters requesting further advice and seeds: 30, 40, 50 letters daily. Edith provided an additional article for the gardening column and offered a supply of seeds, with proceeds to the Red Cross Fund.
‘Mrs. Coleman had been lamenting her inability to help very much with Red Cross Work,’ related Kate Baker, ‘and “there you go see how things have turned out”. The Red Cross Fund profits materially by the Garden at Walsham.’
I’m not really sure why angelica was so popular. I’ve grown angelica, but could find hardly any use for it other than candied as a decoration for cakes, which seemed barely worth the effort. Candied angelica was once a popular sweet but my children turned up their noses. Perhaps the interest was medicinal – for soothing stomach complaints or cramps. During the war it seems to have been used mainly as a substitute for ginger in jams and sweets, perhaps even replacing tea and tobacco.
Another letter came from Preston’s Distillery.
‘Greatly interested and would like to purchase seeds and plants,’ Edith recalled them writing. ‘Might they send their representative out to see me and get my advice re cultivation next Sunday? I replied I regretted that my week-end was very much taken up. I could not spare time to meet their representative, further I had not seed for commercial purposes.’
Edith thought no more about the request and when a young man appeared on Sunday with a newspaper cutting from The Age in hand, asking for seed, she was happy to oblige – how much did he want?
‘Oh, as much as you can let me have,’ he replied.
Edith measured out fifteen packets and ‘one for luck’, charging 10 shillings. Feeling rather pleased with herself at this fine coup, she invited him to see the plants in the garden.
‘So in pouring rain . . . out we marched and he bought three roots (one of which I dug up with a solid chunk of good Blackburn soil) for 2/6d. Then came payment. A whole £1 was offered, 7/6d to be his donation.’
Edith was shocked. She called Dorothy. ‘He wants me to take 7/6d for the Fund. I can’t, can I?’
‘Well, it’s for a good cause, isn’t it?’ Dorothy replied.
Edith took the money and hastily found a collection of other treasures from her garden to give the generous young man, before they parted company on good terms.
A little later, another letter arrived from Preston’s Distillery, thanking Mrs Coleman for the assistance given to their chemist, Mr Phillips.
‘Mr Phillips was my guileless young man with the disarming smile!’
Another wartime restriction was on research activities near Sorrento. Bayside breaks around the expansive shores of Port Phillip Bay had long been popular with Melbourne residents, at first by steam train and buggy to St Kilda Beach and Brighton, then further afield by steamer or electric train to Black Rock and Carrum, and finally by motor car to Mornington and Sorrento on the far south side of the bay. The Colemans had frequented many such locations over the years, often camping, sometimes renting a holiday cottage owned by the Rowes looking out over the beach behind the town.
Having been brought up in a coastal town, James relished this return.
‘I was born within the sound of the sea and I would like to die within sound of the sea,’ he told his grandson.
Both Peter and John remember his great love of boats and the sea, his teaching them a range of nautically approved knots. He admired the ‘boat of his dreams’: the speedy little double-ended Tumlaren that raced across the bay on the weekends as well as the sturdy couta boats, built by the Laccos of Rye, that fished the choppy waters in all weathers.
Edith’s love of the sea permeates her writing, for all she is trapped on the shore and never seems to venture out onto the waters. I imagine how much more she could have discovered from a boat than from the beach. But James never realised his dream of owning a boat, and Edith confined herself to the discarded scraps washed ashore from the living ocean.
When Annie Montfort, a friend of Dorothy’s, offered them the use of her family’s cottage (in an area of Sorrento renamed Blairgowrie after the war), the isolated house in the dunes behind Back Beach became a favoured destination. Longford Cottage was one of the older houses in a sparsely populated area: with no electricity or running water it was no luxury retreat.
The writer Henry Handel Richardson recalled this area from her own childhood when, in the 1880s, she stayed near Back Beach, in a house just next to Longford Cottage. Her fictionalised account of the events provides a vivid description of the charms of the region.
‘The cottage was not on the front beach, with the hotels and boarding-houses, the fenced-in baths and great gentle slope of yellow sand: it stood in the bush, on the back beach, which gave to the open sea,’ Richardson wrote. ‘Directly they were clear of the township the road as good as ceased, became a mere sandy track, running through a scrub of ti-trees.’
Longford Cottage at Blairgowrie in the 1970s
Local historians believe that the house on the hill was owned by Dr Graham and ‘the only other house within cooee’ would later be known as Longford Cottage. Dr Graham’s house was probably a more substantial home than that of Longford Cottage, but Richardson’s description still gives an accurate impression of the attraction of that cottage, even in the 1930s.
‘The four-roomed, weatherboard cottage, to which at a later date a lean-to had been added, faced the bush: from the verandah there was a wide view of the surrounding country. Between the back of the house and the beach rose a huge sand-hill, sparsely grown with rushes and coarse grass.’
The barefoot walk through shifting sands to the beach was ultimately rewarded by the vista of Back Beach.
‘The sight that met you almost took your breath away: as far as the eye could reach, the bluest of skies melting into the bluest of seas, which broke its foam-flecked edge against the flat, brown reefs that fringed the shore,’ Richardson wrote.
For Edith it was a ‘naturalist’s paradise’, always turning up strange and beautiful treasures that she might write about: mouse-like heart-urchins, kaleidoscopic cuttlefish and translucent jellyfish.
‘For sheer beauty,’ she said, ‘I think nothing can equal hosts of newly stranded thin-ribbed cockles (Cardium tenuicostatum). They lay piled up in tens of thousands on the fringe of an ebbing tide, surpassingly lovely in their wonderful range of harmonious colour.’
It was here that Edith completed some of her pioneering work on the ‘Sorrento flea’ or mountain grasshopper (Acridopeza reticulata – now Acripeza), a beetle-like katydid, dull and inconspicuous until threatened, when wing shields lifted to reveal ‘hidden bands of shimmering crimson and electric blue’. As voracious herbivores of the invasive and toxic fireweed Senecio madagascariensis, the mountain grasshopper is generally seen as a beneficial insect. Dorothy, Edith, Peter and John spent happy days here collecting specimens in the sand dunes: a highlight being the discovery of a rare bilateral gynandromorph. The strangely lopsided half-male, half-female insect was kept in captivity for some time before being sent to William Agar at the University of Melbourne. Agar generously thanked her for the specimen and quoted her observations on its behaviour, but did not include her as a co-author on the paper he wrote describing it, nor cite any of her detailed papers from the previous years – even though they were the only papers published on the species.
It seems innocuous enough, but from a fellow
scientist it is a pointed omission. Given Agar’s known objections to the ‘feminisation of biology’, I suspect it is a deliberate slight. She should have kept her specimen and written the paper herself.
A gynandromorph mountain grasshopper found by Edith, with male traits on the left and female on the right
Ever since Australia had been occupied by Britain, the authorities seemed to have been spooked by the prospect of invasion by other powers, as if anxious about the legitimacy of their own claim. Like Shakespearean usurpers they shifted uneasy on a stolen throne: ‘Foul whis’prings are abroad: unnatural deeds/Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds/To their deaf pillows will discharge their secret . . .’
Unfounded fears of French, German or Russian incursions all paled in response to the first attack on Australian soil since the British invasion of 1788. Japanese bombing raids over Darwin, Broome and other northern locations were followed by submarine attacks down the east coast. Suddenly, the threat seemed very real.
‘Visits to Sorrento were suspended during the war period when invasion landings at Port Phillip heads were feared,’ recalls John Thomson. ‘Extensive coastal defences of deep trenches and extensive barbed wire fence systems were installed and manned.’
Edith had to wait until 1944 to resume her grasshopper research.
Edith’s articles from the war years have a strong focus on self-sufficiency, both in producing herbs for the front and in growing substitutes for foods that were in short supply. The ubiquitous cup of tea could be substituted with liberty tea (made from loosestrife), Oswega tea (from bergamot), Jersey tea (from Ceanothus), Hyperion (from raspberry) or Paraguay tea (from mate) which Edith found to be a ‘pleasant, stimulating beverage’. She was less confident of native Australian substitutes. Leptospermum, used by Cook’s sailors, might ‘provide a tolerable beverage’ although she thought more research might reveal better substitutes. Other tea substitutes had more varied application – betony leaves, or the Balm of Gilead, might also serve as a tobacco substitute, as well as having medicinal and scented roles. Edith experimented with coffee substitutes – dandelion and a roasted wheat drink – which seem to have been tolerated by her family with varying levels of patience. She even provided recipes for curry and snuff.
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 27