I have to admit they all seem more experimental than practical. I’m not entirely convinced that many became regular additions to the weekly menu.
I had always assumed Walsham relatively self-sufficient on a large block with ample room for a vegetable garden, chicken runs and mature fruit trees. I imagined Edith a bit like my own grandmother, a generation younger and farm-raised with wartime austerity, who bottled, pickled, preserved and baked any excess of fruit from her over-productive garden, stocking the local trading tables. I imagined Walsham in the early years as almost a similarly semi-rural life – even with a cow.
In 1911 Edith ran another ad for home help in the Box Hill Reporter:
‘Thorough GENERAL WANTED, small family, able to milk preferred 12/6, Mrs Coleman, “Walsham” Blackburn.’
It’s my fantasy to own a house cow: a nice little Jersey with dark eyes and long lashes. Particularly since I learnt that you don’t have to milk them twice a day. You can pen the calf separately at night, drawing off the surplus milk in the morning, letting the calf have the rest during the day. Cows are obliging like that, happily producing enough milk for two families.
Even so, I suspect a cow would be too much work. I have aunts and cousins who have kept small herds of dairy cows on their farms. I notice the strained look they give me when I mention the house cow. I decide to stick to chickens and bees, but I always liked the idea that Edith had a cow.
In 1933, Edith was holidaying on her youngest brother George’s farm at Myrtleford, in the Goulburn Valley.
‘I milked my first cow – twice morning and evening, and only left less than a cupful,’ she proudly declared in a letter. ‘I milked her again this morning but tonight I found I wasn’t quite so keen. It’s not much fun to labour patiently to finish one – beast do we say? – while the experts polish off half a dozen. Anyway, it’s one thing more that I have learned and it may come in useful someday, who knows? We have often wished we dared to attack some wandering cow when we needed milk.’
Disappointed, I must erase the cow that I had installed in the stables, next to Dandy the horse, from my mental image of early Walsham. But I’m shocked when the vegetable garden disappears. Her grandsons remember the garden at Walsham in wartime as being heavily productive with its fruit trees and vegetables. But this, it seems, was a relatively recent innovation.
‘We have never had a vegetable garden until a few months ago a baby one was started,’ Edith wrote to Rica in 1931. ‘We are very thrilled over it. We cut two of the youngest lettuce, surely, that were ever cut today and they did seem nice.’
The vegetables are not Edith’s passion, nor James’s either.
‘It is Dorothy’s (my daughter) special province. She has begged for one for some time. Her flower garden is much more orderly than mine. Perhaps it is her scientific trend. But we both work very hard at it.’
Farming was clearly a bit of a novelty to Edith. She declared her letter ‘a rather exultant gush from “The Land”’.
‘I told you, I think, of my great love for things ‘earthy’ and here I am on a farm, having some of the good things that are everyday luxuries with you. Home-made bread, cream and even home-made butter, and milk that is milk. Everywhere round are broad acres of golden grass, with patches of vivid green where millet or lucerne pastures make startling contrast. I lift my eyes to a big pool with cattle mirrored in its silver, and beside it two great gums make deep shade. Sunsets are sunsets here. I had not thought the Balnarring ones could be surpassed but with no hills or trees to intervene one gets such wonderful views and the sky is the real Streeton blue, for we are not far from the border – not very far anyway.’
All this makes me rethink the fruit trees at Walsham. Her grandsons tell me that Edith and Dorothy were fine jam-makers, and she mentions them busy with this annual task in a letter to Rica. But the fruit may not have come from her own trees after all. She envies Rica her ready access to cheap fruit. I wonder if Edith would have had the necessary farmer’s determination to exclude the possums and parrots from her garden fruit trees? Perhaps not by usual farming means, but Edith was nothing if not innovative.
‘In order to save a few figs for the family,’ she wrote, ‘I hung some “Wedge-tailed Eagles” on long poles, and attached them to the tree. They were made of large fungi (Boletus portentosus, of which there are many in the garden every year) with moulted fowls’ feathers stuck into them. Not a bird went near the figs for some weeks.’
The models were later joined by a large clay eagle made by Dorothy, saving all the apricots and the Sturmer apples by the back door.
My image of early Walsham shifts and transforms. No cow then, or vegetables, but the fruit trees can stay. I’m pleased about the fig tree, for it still leans over the back fence behind the apartments, laden with fruit which perhaps the birds now have a chance to enjoy undisturbed.
The heroine is riding her glorious palomino horse through a field of golden yellow. The sun is setting ruby-pink in the background and waves of dreamy blonde hair drifts slo-mo behind them. It’s the great romantic highlight of the movie.
‘Canola,’ snorts a friend in disgust. ‘Why would they film a paddock full of weeds?’
One person’s picturesque romance is another person’s environmental disaster, allergy emergency or genetically modified apocalypse. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Australians tend to be hypersensitive to weeds. We have a particular postcolonial eye for ‘before’ and ‘after’. Our vegetation maps are classified as pre-1780 or post-1780. There is a biological line in the sand of our history – what should have been, pre-European settlement, and what is – the post-settlement ecological disaster of extinction, clearances and introduced species. It is a characteristic of many postcolonial New World cultures, particularly where European settlement has wrought savage changes to both the human and non-human populations that previously inhabited the lands. America, the Pacific and Indian Ocean islands, Australia and New Zealand.
The line in the sand is less obvious in the Old World regions – Africa, Europe and Asia – where modern humans evolved, originated and dispersed in repeated waves of migration, where agricultural and then industrial societies first developed 3000 years ago. The line in the sand is blurred across time, its impact no less severe but occurring in a slow, steady continuum across centuries. There is no ‘before’ and ‘after’.
We take some German visitors bushwalking, pointing out the invasive pine trees that have been ringbarked, ready to pull down and burn.
‘Why would you do that?’ asks our friend, genuinely puzzled that we don’t like such beautiful trees. We struggle to explain the way the pines thrust through the eucalypt canopy, their dark green angular shapes disrupting the smooth grey green of the native forest. We point to the carpet of pine needles blanketing the understorey, killing everything within a 20-metre radius except for a tussock of tough blady grass.
‘But it is lovely and soft,’ he protests, lying in the pine needles to demonstrate.
On the way back to the house, he stops to pick something out of the grass. It’s a millipede.
‘So cute,’ he enthuses. ‘Look at all those little legs.’
It’s autumn and the Portuguese millipedes that infest much of South Australia are beginning to hatch in the rich organic soil. They first came ashore in 1953 in Port Lincoln: contamination from some international cargo ship. I grew up with plagues of them sweeping the landscape. After the rain, thousands march across the paddock in search of food, over the verandah and up the walls, through the slightest crack or crevice, into the house where they curl up and die in corners, up walls to drop from ceilings at unexpected moments. They are entirely innocuous creatures, feeding on decomposing vegetable matter and aiding the nutrient cycle. But they smell awful and are almost universally detested.
I understand my German friend’s disconnection. I feel the same way when I visit Europe. To my antipodean eye, it is a landscape full of weeds and damage. Human impac
t is visible even on the most remote Scottish island, telltale lines of agricultural lazy beds exposing an ancient history of human industry. They defy my concept of nature. I instinctively search for ‘wilderness’, knowing that it is a myth, a construct, in an endlessly dynamic and changing biological world. But everything in my world is divided into ‘weed’ and ‘native’, ‘before’ and ‘after’, ‘belonging’ and ‘not belonging’ – a continuously discomforting intellectual distinction for a sixth-generation white Australian.
It is one of the reasons I am drawn to Edith’s nature writing. She is unapologetic in her Englishness and her love for the land of her childhood, entirely unaware that this should even be problematic. And yet she is entirely, unreservedly, unabashedly in love with Australian nature. Despite being an immigrant, she has ‘settled’ in the course of a single lifetime and claimed her place in a new land, not by virtue of labour, or transformation of the land, or territorial claims or property ownership per se, but rather by a profound depth of understanding and connection with the wildlife she encounters. Her writing is imbued with a deep respect for Australian wildlife that transcends who she is and where she comes from. There is a generosity to her writing that defies nationalism, while at the same time allowing for a proud appreciation of our unique fauna and flora. It’s a remarkable achievement and I envy the calm and confident way she has claimed her own niche in the local ecosystem.
She reminds me of ‘the Stray’ in Kylie Tennant’s The Battlers, who is struck by a flare of sunlight illuminating ‘a mass of purple flowers, a carpet of them, a brilliant torrent of flowers, pouring down the side of the road in colours of crimson and blue, violet and opal’. She refuses to condemn the weedy Echium plantagineum, even when she knows it is a weed.
‘“It’s a plant that’s struck it lucky,” the Stray said, thoughtfully. “It hasn’t got no right, but it’s there.”’
Edith agreed.
‘One might think that rain had never fallen in these parts, were it not for an occasional suspicion of green in small areas that had benefited from slight showers,’ she wrote on a trip through the drought-stricken north of South Australia. ‘Occasionally large patches of “Salvation Jane” (or “Paterson’s Curse”) made bright purple pools, which momentarily cheered the eyes.’ Even this ‘rough little plant’ served its purpose, providing stock with ‘a last resort in times of drought’.
Or as Emerson put it, ‘A weed is just a plant whose true value has not yet been discovered.’
European-born naturalists and nature writers had long expressed concern about the destruction of native vegetation. Agricultural clearing certainly played a large part in that, but it was perhaps the semi-industrialised destructiveness of mining that made a particularly compelling case for early travellers like Ellen Clacy in 1852:
‘We now approached Bendigo. The timber here is very large. Here we first beheld the majestic iron bark, Eucalypti, the trunks of which are fluted with the exquisite regularity of a Doric column; they are in truth the noblest ornaments of these mighty forests. A few miles further, and the diggings themselves burst upon our view. Never shall I forget that scene, it well repaid a journey even of sixteen thousand miles. The trees had been all cut down; it looked like a sandy plain, or one vast unbroken succession of gravel pits – the earth was everywhere turned up – men’s heads in every direction were popping up and down from their holes. Well might an Australian writer, in speaking of Bendigo, term it “The Carthage of the Tyre of Forest Creek”.’
For Edith, this concern required a careful balancing act. She often loved the organism, but not its impact. She revelled in the ‘glorious song’ of the blackbird and admitted that ‘we rather like the starling’ while simultaneously recognising and resisting the invasive flood of sparrows, starlings and mynahs. She had a tolerant eye for ‘weeds’.
‘A plant is said to be a weed only when it gets in the farmer’s way,’ Edith explained. ‘Personally I look upon many weeds with a friendly eye remembering an older adage: “A weed keeps other weeds away”. The point is to choose one’s weeds.’
Wise advice for the gardener, perhaps less helpful for the conservation biologist.
Edith delighted in the willows of Healesville with their ‘gossamer of tenderest green that drifted in the clear air like an emerald cloud’, commenting on their propensity to spread themselves by seed and cuttings, whereby the willow ‘sails away on its mission of finding new lands to settle’.
Willows are one of Australia’s worst weeds. Their roots choke the rivers, stagnating and redirecting the water, eroding the surrounding banks. Their fallen leaves blanket the rivers in autumn, saturating the water with nutrients and starving it of oxygen. Their shade chokes the native vegetation of light, strangling any rivals. They are immensely thirsty, incredibly invasive and intensely competitive. They cost millions of dollars each year just to keep in check. I would never plant one near my dam.
But I still wish I could, for they are beautiful.
A willow tree by fellow Field Naturalists Club member Robert O’Brien
There is a new weed in the paddock. It’s been there for as long as I’ve lived here, but I didn’t know what it was before. Now that I know, I see it everywhere – thick asparagus-like stalks thrusting up between the grass like an invading army. I march across the paddock with a bucket and spade, digging up the tubers, careful to remove them before the flowers, with their myriad spores, open. By the late afternoon, I’ve filled three buckets full from the small strip of land at the top of the hill. I look back towards the setting sun and I can see all the ones I have missed, as if they have popped up as fast I can remove them, their stubby silhouettes jutting out on the horizon.
This weed is an orchid. A leek orchid, known as the weedy or African leek orchid here in order to distinguish it from the many local Prasophyllum leek orchids. Most conservationists know it as Monadenia after its scientific name Monadenia bracteata, although it has recently been reclassified as Disa bracteata. One of the risks of using scientific names.
Monadenia came from South Africa to Western Australia and Victoria sometime in the eighteenth century. But it only appeared in South Australia relatively recently. It was first reported in 1988 by Enid Robertson from the Native Orchid Society of South Australia. Enid called for a concerted campaign to try to eradicate the species before it gained a foothold. Hundreds of volunteers spent countless hours working through various parks, digging up tubers, recording their size, age and stage of development, plotting the progress of the invader. But it was too late. By 1991 the weed had already been reported through many of the reserves of the Adelaide Hills region. Despite all the best efforts of local conservation groups, the orchid is now a regular part of the Hills vegetation, added to the list of species subject to constant vigilance and control activities: blackberry, bridal creeper, gorse, broom, thistle, capeweed, Salvation Jane or Paterson’s curse, onion weed, soursobs, watsonia, quaking grass, to name just a few of the worst offenders.
In truth, Monadenia is not as bad as some of the other weeds. It does not particularly invade disturbed soil, it does not blanket vast areas, choking other plants and creating a monoculture. In the paddock, which is slashed in late spring, it probably makes no difference, being one of a large number of introduced species that compete with a rich mix of native grasses. But I find a handful along a track in the middle of a bed of spider orchids in the bushland, spreading through the understorey into the same areas as native orchid species. Native orchids are already rare, often endangered, and steadily reducing in number through vegetation clearance. They don’t need any added competition from another South African weed.
‘Are you sure it’s a weed, not a native orchid?’ a neighbour asks as I point it out.
‘Definitely,’ I reply, describing the difference between the taller, thinner native leek orchids and this plump little invader.
‘Well,’ he responds, with a sigh of disappointment, ‘I’ll have to stop looking after them then.’<
br />
In 1935, Edith published her only book, the first systematic, yet popular, account of Victorian wattles. It’s little more than a pamphlet, 44 pages in length with a soft green and gold cover. I think she intended to write others, had mentioned the possibility of an orchid book, but nothing else materialised. The connection to the war and patriotism is unmistakable here. Come Back in Wattle Time reads not just as a call for the appreciation of Australian nature, but as a homeland calling for sons and daughters lost to foreign soils.
‘Every Australian would admit that, until he left his own land, he had not realised how deep-seated was his affection for the wattles,’ Edith wrote. ‘To catch the haunting perfume in an alien land was to be “sick for home”.’
While in Perth, I pick up a book on Western Australian War Memorials. Images of monuments and architecture dominate the book – stone statues, gilded honour boards and implacable blocks of granite, like giant unyielding tombstones. The gravitas and perpetuity of death.
But when I think of war memorials, I don’t think of these structures. I think of trees. I think of the avenue of honour that once lined the old highway to Ballarat, the Norfolk pines at the Port Elliot Soldiers Memorial Garden. Unlike the cold grey monuments, these are memorials to the resurrection of life, not to loss: living trees to tend and care for, growing tall and straight as the soldiers they represent. Nature’s balm for both the grieving and the returning injured.
Golden wattle (Acacia pycnantha) from Edith’s book, Come Back in Wattle Time
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 28