The symptoms of Ménière’s are variable and changing. But the ‘nasty noise’ in one ear is unmistakable. She is 57 on this occasion, 47 when the previous serious attack occurred. Just at the time when she began writing. But neither she nor the doctors know what her condition is yet. They are still clutching at straws – or more literally pulling at teeth. Were the earlier illnesses in her twenties the same thing, or unrelated?
A month later and Edith has still not entirely recovered.
‘Please forgive pencil. I’m abed but to be up shortly and a nice comfortable doctor assures me that it isn’t much. Everything sound except a blocked eustachian tube, my memory doesn’t run to its correct spelling.’
There is no treatment except for rest. Edith chooses camping by the sea for her recovery.
‘We are here, by the sea, under canvas, so you will guess that the Xray said we might go full steam ahead. There is nothing, as the doctors say, but what slackening off work will remedy. We have two tents (my other daughter is with us) and a shelter from the car for dining room. Our light comes from the car too, so given fine weather we shall put in perhaps two weeks.’
I can’t be sure if this ‘we’ includes James or not. There is only so much to be read into pronouns.
‘We are camped under big banksias and the bush is full of birds – the air like wine and our food tasting as food does eaten in the open – food for gods.’
It is Dorothy who has taken up the task of nursing her mother. It is fortunate the attack happened in the school holidays, when she has time off work. I wonder if Edith’s ill health was a factor in Dorothy’s decision to retire from teaching.
It seems unkind to stop her from reading. Reading does not involve movement, so it’s unlikely to trigger an attack. But I wonder just how much Edith does reduce her workload. There is no sign of a dip in her productivity, for either 1931 or 1932. Even so, the illness must take its toll, no matter how she continues on.
‘Just recently I’m too tired to write . . .’ she closes.
On 13 July 1950, a meeting of the Field Naturalists Club was held in Scots Hall, Russell Street, Melbourne. Edith and Dorothy were guests of honour. They had not been to a meeting for a while. Edith was rarely well enough these days to make the trip into town. Many of those assembled were old friends, but there were many more new faces, unfamiliar to them, a new generation coming through. But most of them knew her name and her work.
‘Mrs Edith Coleman’s amazing discoveries of the pollination processes in certain orchids,’ said James H. Willis, ‘made breathless reading from 1930.’
The Field Naturalists Club was unreservedly proud of the achievements of its female membership.
‘The FNCV noted with pleasure that one of its members had again been the successful candidate for the Australian Natural History Medallion, but this pleasure was heightened by the fact that a very worthy lady would receive the 1949 award – the first of her sex to do so,’ announced Willis. ‘No member of the Club has a more distinguished record than Mrs. Edith Coleman, and the volume and variety of her writing simply astounds one; she has a genius for accurate scientific observation, which is imparted in delightfully readable, descriptive phrases that bespeak also a wide knowledge of classical literature.’
The natural history medallion was proposed in 1939 to recognise those who had made an outstanding achievement in the field of natural history. The award was convened by the Field Naturalists, but nominations were drawn from over 30 natural history clubs from across Australia, the Bird Observers, the Bread and Cheese Club, the Gould League, the Microscopical Society, the Forest League and many others. Nominations could be for anyone, member or not, and stood for consideration over three years.
The first award, in 1940, had been given to the ornithologist and nature writer Alec Chisholm; the next to the palaeontologist Frederick Chapman. The award celebrated those who had ‘increased popular or scientific knowledge of Australian flora and/or fauna, including man’ through conservation, research, literature, ‘or any other means approved by the Award Committee’. Awardees included the ecologist David Fleay (1942), teacher Major H. W. Wilson (1943), the botanist J. M. Black (1944), ethnologist C. P. Mountford (1945), Queensland Museum director Heber Longman (1946), writer Philip Crosbie Morrison (1947) and the Western Australian palaeontologist Ludwig Glauert (1948).
And now, the first woman was to be added to that list.
‘Her own amazing achievements,’ Willis added, ‘can hardly be considered apart from the sympathetic collaboration of her daughter, Miss Dorothy Coleman.’
The natural history medallion was presented to Mrs Edith Coleman by Professor Turner for her outstanding work. The Ararat Field Naturalists sent their congratulations and best wishes to Edith by telegram, as did former president and club members, Mr and Mrs Stan Colliver. The evening concluded in appropriate style.
‘An excellent supper and conversazione ended a very pleasant and memorable evening,’ the Victorian Naturalist reported, along with ‘tasteful floral decorations of Victorian wildflowers’.
Mrs Edith Coleman of Blackburn, with angelica from her garden, photo taken by her older daughter Dorothy
In the 1950s, Edith began to experience discomforting symptoms – perhaps heartburn, or loss of appetite. She may not have noticed increasing nausea or tiredness. Her GP did not think there was anything to be concerned about but eventually he referred Edith to a leading general surgeon, a friend of the family.
The condition was not benign. Edith had advanced bowel cancer. It was too late to operate.
There is little sign that Edith’s productivity declined in her last year of life. She published twelve papers in 1950: precisely the average number of papers she had been publishing each year over her 29-year working life. She published six papers in the first six months of 1951. But publications suffer some time lag in production. Some of these could have been written before she fell ill. I don’t know when she was diagnosed, but early-stage bowel cancer is often symptomless. By the time the disease is noticeable it is usually well progressed. In 1950, inoperable final-stage bowel cancer patients were rarely expected to live beyond six months. She may well have only been diagnosed in December 1950.
A sketch of Edith by Dorothy
A charred and wizened hand grips my hair from an overhanging branch. I knock it away, panicked, and it comes loose from the tree, clinging to me with crooked fingers. We often find the stumps of dead mistletoe fallen from the trees above. I am struck by how invisibly they integrate themselves into the vegetation when alive, their leaves mimicking the shape and colour of their host, but shrivel like Dorian Gray when detached from their life-giving host. Some species mimic the needle-like sheoaks, others the heart-shaped juvenile eucalypt leaves, even the fleshy round leaves of mangroves. How and why mistletoes mimic their hosts is as much a mystery to evolutionary biologists as orchid pollination was before Edith’s work. Australia is home to such a diversity of deceptive mimics – orchids, mistletoes, spiders, ants and cuckoos. Perhaps it is the continent’s long ecological isolation, relatively free from disruptions by new species, that has enabled the evolution of such complex interspecific interactions.
In a healthy ecosystem, with older more established trees, the parasitic mistletoes seem to be kept in check, but in stressful or disturbed conditions they rapidly drain the strength of their victims.
‘Here at my gate,’ wrote Edith from Healesville, ‘are three stark trees (grey box and ironbark), mistletoe victims, and within the space of 100 yards up or down the path, and opposite, are scores of once lovely trees in all stages of infestation. Within a stone’s throw a grove of noble cedar wattles (Acacia terminalis) is succumbing, one by one, to infestation by the grey mistletoe (Amyema quandang), the most beautiful and most deadly of the mistletoes known to me.’
It is only when they flower, bright-red and bird-attracting, that I notice the clumps of mistletoes in our trees. The sticky fruit, with their viscid seeds wiped from beaks to g
erminate on new branches, are irresistible to birds. The precise mechanism by which the birds spread the parasite was the subject of a vigorous debate Edith conducted with P. T. Littlejohn. Her final paper on the matter appeared in the journal Emu in April 1951 just two months before her death.
Even as incurable cancer spread through her body, Edith retained her enthusiasm for intellectual debate and found joy even in the destructive parasitism of mistletoes.
‘In flowering time they were “sipping taverns” for innumerable nectar-loving species, and in fruiting time a veritable orchard for silvereyes, painted and singing honeyeaters, mistletoe-birds, parrots and, doubtless, many other birds,’ Edith wrote. ‘Those clumps were little worlds in themselves, as they are today on undisturbed forest lands, and as they are in some century old gum trees in my own garden where, daily, we see their usefulness to birds.’
In January 1951, one of Edith’s last papers appeared in the Victorian Naturalist – an obituary for her friend, Professor Oakes Ames, who had been farewelled with a simple ceremony with a few flowers, mostly orchids.
Edith corresponded, for a time, with his wife, the pioneering suffragette and artist Blanche Ames. Blanche’s letters, along with two by Oakes, are stored, still in their envelopes, in a reprint of his essay on ‘Orchid Pollination’. Edith had noticed, where many would not, the contribution his wife had made to her husband’s work.
‘You are understanding and kind to quote from Oakes’ last letter to you,’ Blanche replied. ‘His references to me are deeply moving and I shall value your letter dearly, always.’
There is a letter from Oakes, dated November 1948.
‘Last winter,’ he explains, ‘my poor old heart, emulating the spirit of the labour unions, established a strike and my body is no longer able to comply with the demands of my brain.
‘It seems a long time ago – 1937 – since those glorious days of a new dawn in orchid pollination, but through those days nobody has remarked on Blanche’s charming drawings of insects, her first and last. I think she contributed much to a fascinating study.’
Edith spent her last days at Longford Cottage in Blairgowrie, under the care of Dorothy. I imagine her looking out over the cottage garden, towards the surrounding scrub that leads into the dunes and towards the beach, some solace from the illness and pain that gripped her. I am reminded of a poem that Dorothy Hewett wrote as she convalesced in a cottage on the Mornington Peninsula.
The garden darkens
underneath my eyes
the light fades out
wagtail plover wren
all creatures that rejoice
under the sun
creep home to sleep
and shall I too
eventually disappear
in a garden hat and a cloak
possibly accompanied by a Platonic angel
leaving a note
I have been called away
from the dark cottage
but on what errand
and for what purpose?
the shadow of the she-oak tree
feathers the sky
the evening star
glows faintly from the sea
and all that I
have willed myself to be
is stilled.
‘Just as this issue goes to press, word has been received of the death (suddenly) of Mrs. Coleman, at Sorrento,’ said a hasty note in the Victorian Naturalist.
Edith died on 3 June 1951 and was buried at Sorrento. On 12 June, the Field Naturalists Club held its annual general meeting at the National Herbarium. The weather was terrible and so only 80 members were in attendance. They observed a minute’s silence for the loss of one of their most prolific and productive members. Jean Galbraith wrote Edith’s obituary for the Victorian Naturalist:
There is no need to outline Mrs. Coleman’s work in natural history for readers of the Naturalist. They, like readers of many other papers, know her writings too well for that to be necessary . . . But, because she was unable to go out much during the later years of her life, she was personally unknown to many members of the Club, and we who knew her feel that we should like to share that knowledge with our fellow-members.
I was almost a school girl when I met her, while she was a recognized expert, and she helped me in many ways, yet she always treated me as an equal, and not as the learner I was. We loved the same things, and that was what mattered to her. I shall always remember her keen interest in all living things, and her enjoyment of beauty. Memory keeps our friends alive for us, and memories of her crowd forward as I write.
I remember my first visit to her Healesville cottage, and how lovingly she showed me its trees; outings when she found orchids that I should never have seen; a day when she drew me into her Blackburn home, saying, ‘Come in. I want to hear you say “Oh!”’; and showed me a bowl of blue Lathyrus pubescens against a cream wall.
It is hard to think of her apart from that Blackburn garden, with its trees and herbs and old roses, its birds among the fuchsias she had planted for them, its paddock of gums at one side, and its evidences of loving co-operation between mother and daughter everywhere.
Very characteristic of her was a sentence in one of her newspaper articles of perhaps twenty years ago: ‘It may be only frayed nerves or it may be a very real grief – there are few hurts that do not yield in some measure to the balm of a garden.’
I like to remember a walk with her, when, after finding and enjoying many orchids, we stopped at a fence of a little bush garden, watching the Spinebills among its salvia flowers.
‘Sometimes’ she said, ‘when I see a garden like that I find out who it belongs to, and post them some roots or a packet of seeds. They don’t know who sends them, but I like to think of their surprise, and of my seeds growing in so many different gardens.’
It is a good memory of a good friend.
The news rippled out through Edith’s vast network of correspondents.
‘I had a letter from her only about 10 days ago, chirpy and full of news,’ despaired Rupp. ‘Dear me, all my old friends are going – I suppose my turn can’t be far around the corner.’
Rupp had thought Edith was recuperating from illness. Instead he was tasked with writing her obituary for the Australian Orchid Review.
‘She will be sorely missed,’ Rupp concluded, ‘but her work has a place in that great fabric of scientific truth which is slowly being built up through the years and it shall not perish.’
Just weeks before her death, Edith was still writing, sharing her joy in the birds that visited Dorothy’s garden in Sorrento. It is the only time I recall her mentioning her own illness or health in a publication. Her final paper was published in July, on the page next to the obituary written by Jean, just two weeks after it was received. The paper has no conclusion. Like all of Edith’s work, it is a work in progress, a continuing pattern of observation and description. This ending was not hers to complete. It is our task to continue. In this the task of the scientist and the task of the writer align – the steady accumulation of knowledge developed with, built upon, created by a collaboration of the efforts of many. If Isaac Newton saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants, so too do writers.
‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,’ was how T. S. Eliot expressed it. He argued that writers cannot be judged in isolation, that their work, whether poetry or art, can only be understood in the context of all the artists who came before: art must be compared ‘among the dead’.
Edith certainly understood that. And her own contribution, like those of so many others, needs to be added to that host within whose legacy we make sense of our own contributions. Edith was no more important than other nature writers of her time, but her work is no less important than that of many others whom we do chose to remember. She belongs within the monuments of art, the dead poets and artists, subtly shifting and shaping the work that is still to come. Her contribution does not deserve to be forgotten.
George Eliot’s famous testimony to the character of Dorothea in Middlemarch stands as memorial to many, particularly women, whose efforts are overlooked and lost.
‘That her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.’
I am not the only one to have been inspired by Edith’s work and life. Others continue her work in orchid pollination, in the mysteries of mistletoes and the study of echidna hibernation. Some of them chose their careers specifically because of Edith’s work. And although it was her science that first intrigued me, it is her life that now inspires me: her doggedness, her unswerving self-confidence, her airy learnedness achieved entirely on her own merits, on her own terms, without the crutch of any institutional imprimatur or patronage. No excuses, just a passionate, overflowing love of language and nature. She did not accept the limitations of her age, gender or position in life. She took inspiration from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote that ‘The moon is no man’s private property, but is seen from a good many parlor windows.’
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 30