Higher up and the hillsides drip with filigreed ferns and verdant vegetation. Out of the bracken, giant ferns rise on black shaggy stumps, styling themselves as trees beneath the canopy of their eucalypt protectors. Before long the trees stand tall, smooth and straight, close packed like an army of silent titans, the roadway snaking around their impassive ankles, cars grumbling past like fleas on a dog’s back. It is, then as now, a breathtaking display spiralling up through the tallest hardwood forests in the world.
‘Today a run over the Blacks’ Spur is a small achievement,’ recalled Edith about this memorable excursion thirty years later, ‘but motors had not then reached their present stage of mechanical perfection. From memory, I should say that most of them were single-cylinder cars – half-forgotten names today. Mr Rand’s 12–16 h.p. Decauville was probably the largest car in Victoria at the time. With our efficient cooling systems we hear little nowadays of over-heated engines, but they were prevalent then, and a number of cars were compelled to pull up near the Devil’s Elbow to cool off. Nor were brakes altogether trusty, and some of us carried a large stone in readiness to block the car if one refused to hold.’
Alan Mickle from Narbethong remembers the first car to come over the Black Spur.
‘It was a high-wheeled motor buggy painted brilliant red. It was terrifyingly noisy, it shattered the stillness of the bush for miles around. Every dog in the district woke up and began to bark furiously. A bush fire raging over the countryside could not have caused very much more commotion.’
Edith first met James when she went into a shop in Melbourne to buy a bicycle. It was 1897. Perhaps she needed it to ride to and from her new posting at Burnley State School. The manager of the store, a persuasive young man with a charming Cornish accent, was keen to assist his new customer. James Coleman and Edith Harms were married in Christ Church, South Yarra, on 7 April 1898. They lived in the bayside suburb of St Kilda, in a single-fronted four-room brick cottage on Longmore Street. Within a couple of years they were blessed with two little girls. Dorothy Gwynne was born in 1900, followed by Gladys Winifred in 1901, both of whom were christened in the church their parents had married in.
James, born in a small seaside village in Cornwall, had coincidentally arrived in Australia in the same year as Edith’s family. At the age of twelve, he immediately gained work as a butcher’s delivery boy, then a sales assistant in a shoe shop, becoming the manager of the store at nineteen.
I don’t know what to call Edith now. Edith Harms, Edith Coleman, Edith Coleman (née Harms), Mrs Coleman, Mrs J. G. Coleman? My grandmother always hated being called by her husband’s initials – as if it erased the last shred of her individual identity.
‘That’s not who I am!’ she’d insist.
But sometimes she would address letters to me by my husband’s name, even though I have not changed mine, have never been a Mrs but a Dr. Old habits die hard.
The convention in science is to refer to people only by their surnames. It’s common in biography too, although it doesn’t always work. In family history there are too many people with the same name. It feels impersonal, distancing.
Perhaps Edith would have preferred to be known as Mrs Coleman. It would be polite and respectful, the convention of her times. It’s how her correspondents addressed her in their letters, how she addressed others, even those who were obviously close friends. But this attribution feels very formal now. Edith Coleman who was Edith Harms. Edith is the only common link, the name that is hers alone, not her father’s or her husband’s. I hope she won’t mind if I call her that.
Bicycles had first arrived in Australia in the 1860s but, despite their popularity, it was not until the arrival of the cheaper ‘safety’ bicycles of the 1890s that they became big business. In 1895 Frank Stuart, of the well-known clothing store Lincoln Stuart’s was keen to cash in on this new craze. Stuart employed James at the Carbine and Collier Two-Speed Cycle Company at City Road, South Melbourne, where he manufactured the bikes under licence from their English inventor. Business boomed, and the local factory was barely able to keep up with demand. In addition to manufacture and sales, the factory also contained a 150-yard-long asphalt ‘beginner’s track’. Purchasers received lessons free of charge. Maybe James taught Edith to ride her new bike here?
James was a keen bicycle racer.
‘He carried road metal in his scalp all his life’ from his bicycle racing days, his grandson, Peter, tells me. Bicycles were big business but James had his sights set higher. He saw the first three motorcycles in Victoria unsold in a consignment of goods and persuaded the owner of the bicycle shop to let him buy them for sale.
‘The motorcycle has made its debút in the streets of Melbourne at last,’ wrote a local journalist in 1897. ‘On Saturday and Sunday afternoons the strollers on St Kilda Esplanade were somewhat startled by the approach of a cyclist with his feet motionless and apparently “coasting” before the wind. As it drew nearer, however the machine was seen to be without pedals, its rear wheel being driven rapidly by a piston while the rider, or rather driver, sat lazily in the saddle, with no more work to do than was necessitated by the steering.’
The display drew a large crowd. Perhaps this was how James sold his first two motorcycles for the road. The third he purchased himself.
‘The motor-cycle of the Carbine Co. was much admired,’ reported the Australian, ‘its best points being shown
