‘The city sits like a parasite,’ declared the influential American ‘country-lifer’, Liberty Hyde Bailey, ‘running its roots into the open country and draining it of its substance.’
It was the very toughness of country life that produced strength and resilience. And the Australian environment, which had forged through adversity a robust new breed of bush warriors from the most unpromising stock of convicts and malcontents, seemed proof enough. The temptation to slide into a softer, easier city life (with its stresses and anxieties leading to alcohol and drug abuse) had to be resisted, the campaigners argued. As Rodwell argues, agricultural education encouraged country children to stay on the land, but so too did a sympathetic appreciation of nature. Nature study was part of a long-term social planning tool that ran from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century. Town planning in Victoria included open spaces and nature reserves. Nature appreciation was part of a movement that established the groundwork for the modern conservation movement.
‘What is most encouraging in the results achieved so far,’ enthused John Dawson, Chief Inspector of Schools in New South Wales in his 1909 annual report, ‘lies not merely in the knowledge gained, but in the mental attitude engendered in teachers and pupils by this new “return to Nature” . . . Both for the teacher and the pupils it has brought an element of brightness and beauty into school life that was missing before. This brightness and beauty is not merely external – something to be found only in the more pleasing aspects of the schoolroom or garden – it is a mental condition also. Something of the old poetry of life is being recaptured and will be retained.’
I can see Rodwell’s argument about elements of control in nature study and how this might lead to eugenics. Concepts of ecological and species ‘purity’, selective breeding and social control run strongly through the conservation movement. But I can’t bring myself to condemn ‘nature enthusiasm’, all the same. Like Edith, I am utterly enchanted by the poetry of the earth.
Despite her apparent capability as a pupil-teacher, Edith’s path through her training was not smooth. The Education Department required head teachers to file all reported absences on a daily basis, filling their teacher records with mountains of peculiarly formal letters.
‘Sir – I have the honour to report that Miss Edith Harms 1st Pupil Teacher in this school was absent from duty on Wednesday last the 22nd March. Cause: a sudden illness which completely protracted her. Miss Harms resumed duty yesterday morning. I have the honour to be, Sir, Your most obedient servant.’
From her time at Camberwell, there are many such letters. In 1891 she required a fortnight’s absence due to ‘gastric catarrh’. Her surgeon reported that this condition had been ‘brought on by a cold and intensified by prolonged standing’. In April of the following year, she required leave of absence due to neuralgia and in November she was granted three weeks sick leave from Camberwell for gastric catarrh and cardiac weakness brought on by ‘confinement’ – maybe a euphemism for being kept indoors for too long in the company of too many children. Perhaps the doctors prescribed fresh country air. By 1892, Edith was applying for positions in country schools, noting that, ‘owing to ill health, I would like relieving work in the country’.
By this stage the Harms family had moved from their villa on Avenue Road, firstly to nearby Seymour Grove and then further afield, to a property on Bath Road in Burwood (now Glen Iris) where her father Henry had established a nursery. Today, Burwood lies in the heart of Melbourne’s busy eastern suburbs, but at the turn of last century Bath Road demarcated the outermost edge of the city. Even on aerial photographs from 1945, open paddocks and patchwork fields stretch south and east of the Hartwell Sportsgrounds near Edith’s former home. Today, the same view shows tight-packed rows of tiled roofs aligned on endless quarter-acre blocks all the way into the foothills of the Dandenongs.
For Edith this change in location meant commuting 5 kilometres back into town to work. In 1894 she again required a month’s leave from Camberwell to recover from ‘general debility’ on reduced pay. I do not know what this illness was – a continuation of the ‘weak chest’ that had plagued the family in England, or something else? Edith’s health issues remain hidden beneath the vague and cursory language of nineteenth-century medical certificates.
At the completion of her pupil-teacher training, she applied for position at Burwood School, closer to her home, but this application was not successful. Like most young teachers, Edith would have to serve her time at a remote country posting before working her way back to the more prized suburban positions.
The proliferation of one-class schools in tiny towns like Foster was due to the law stipulating children must attend a school within two miles of their residence. In 1872 the Victorian Education Act required that free, secular and compulsory education be provided for all children, the first state in Australia to do so. In the six years that followed, the Education Department built over 600 standard template schools across the state, and education
