It’s an acre of paradise on the outskirts of Melbourne, just south of the train line to Healesville. The ‘garden suburb’ of Blackburn is more rural than garden, more bush than park. Nonchalant gums lean over wood and wire fences, shading long quiet roads between haphazard houses scattered on quarter-acre blocks, horses and cattle grazing equably in between.
As John and his mother Gladys head for the back door, Auntie Dorfie emerges from her studio by the back fence, tinkling the silver bell on the doorpost as she passes.
‘Time for cake?’ she asks, always ready with a supply of sweet treats and entertainment for her nephews. As they step inside, Dorothy hurries down the hall to close the door of the ‘Busyness’ Room. She puts one finger to her lips and smiles.
The boys’ grandmother, the famous Mrs Edith Coleman, is hard at work and must not be disturbed.
IN 1942, EDITH Coleman was at the height of her career. Internationally lauded as one of Australia’s leading naturalists, particularly in the study of orchids, Edith was a writer who ‘needed no introduction’. She wrote prolifically, not only for scientific journals, but also for newspapers and magazines. Her academic peers said her ‘name ought to be Darwin’ and praised her insights into the mysteries of orchid pollination, which had left many before her, including Darwin, bemused.
England might have had its Gilbert White of Selborne, but Australia had its ‘Edith Coleman of Walsham’. Like White, Edith started her publication career late, at the age of 48. Like White, there is nothing in her past to indicate any particular talent or interest in nature or science. White was an English gentleman, with the usual pursuits of shooting and fishing, before he began his Natural History of Selborne and became England’s finest nature writer. Edith was a suburban housewife, with a brief experience of teaching, before appearing at her local Field Naturalists Club, impressing them with an authoritative exposition on orchids and swiftly becoming one of Australia’s leading orchidologists and nature writers.
White and Coleman both emerged as writers without forewarning, without precedent – fully formed like crisp bright butterflies from an unremarkable chrysalis.
Edith Coleman at Walsham, 1942
Today, Blackburn Road is no longer a dusty track near the end of the train line but part of the inner suburban sprawl in a city of over three million people. I park in a nearby shopping centre and walk the short distance down to The Avenue, hoping to find the house once known as Walsham. Traffic thunders over black tarmac. Pacing my steps from one end of the street to the other, I try to identify the property boundaries marked on a 1933 Melbourne Metropolitan Water Board reticulation map. There is still a church on the corner, with traces of turn-of-the-century architecture. The neighbouring house is a tumbledown Federation weatherboard, with runners of couch grass erupting through the verandah and a long gravel driveway that leads to a tiny garage that seems too small for a car. The right era, but wrong house. The next block should be Walsham.
I push back the leaves of the thick overgrown hedge. A patchwork of 1970s units fills the space with bricks and concrete. Walsham has gone, the once glorious garden divided up and built over, the grandsons grown up, having built careers and families of their own and now retired. There’s nothing left.
‘It is hard to think of her apart from that Blackburn garden,’ said her friend, Jean Galbraith, after Edith’s death, ‘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.’
I crush a handful of the leaves in disappointment, breathing in a pungent citrus scent. The hedge stretches along the street frontage, neatly clipped to head height. Beyond the reach of hedging shears, the shrubbery soars overhead in a great sweep, escaping clipped domesticity into rampant mature treehood. The trunks are thick and gnarled with age. It takes me a while to realise what I’m looking at. Walsham’s pittosporum hedge has survived.
Along the back lane, more traces reveal themselves. Old fig trees and peppermint gums that would once have shaded Edith’s garden overhang the faded paling fence, with telltale gaps indicative of past garages and gates. The cluster of fashionable coffee shops and hairdressers at one end must occupy the former orchard and vegetable gardens. Surrounded by hard surfaces, the skyline is still dominated by the old ironbarks that may well have watched the earliest encroachments of European settlement. Despite so many changes the past leaves its imprint on the landscape.
A reconstruction of Walsham
Back in my car I organise my notes before leaving. The square red-brick building in front of me looks familiar. I need to leave, I have other places to go, but something makes me wait. I get out of the car and walk around to the front of the building. From this side I recognise it. The Field Naturalists Club of Victoria has been housed here since 1995, the modern home of the very organisation where Edith first launched her career, in 1922. Twenty-seven years later she would become the first woman to be awarded the Australian Natural History Medallion for her outstanding work.
I came here nearly fifteen years ago, long before I knew where Edith lived, searching their archives for
