James Coleman racing one of the earliest motorbikes in Melbourne
The convenience of the motorcycle, however, was not without attendant risks. James and his friend Syd Day ran into a horse and buggy on a trip to Frankston.
‘Happily, the injuries were not serious,’ reported the paper, ‘but both men suffered from shock and the machines were considerably damaged.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Edith was not overly fond of these mechanical beasts.
‘It lives in my memory as a thing of noise and odor,’ she declared. ‘It looked, and smelt, like something that might have had birth in the nether regions; but once its possibilities were grasped, it was accepted, if not with favour, with compromise.’ She retained a ‘disrespect for motors that perhaps the children of a farmer have for pigs’. The addition of a trailer and a side car to the motorcycle was even less appreciated.
‘One prefers to pass in silence this painful period.’
The arrival of their first car was, by comparison, a treat.
In the many articles published by Edith during her professional career, she almost never refers to herself, her family or events in her life. She writes exclusively about nature, in which the occasional oblique reference to her own life must be extracted from the detailed observations of the natural world around her. The solitary exception is an article published in 1931 in The Age by E. C. entitled ‘Thirty years of motoring in Australia: A woman looks back’. Had I not known about James Coleman’s role in Victorian motoring history, I might not have recognised this article as one of hers. But even here she only mentions her husband teasingly, never by name. The only Jameses mentioned by name in her articles are kings, poets or gardeners. James the pioneer motoring enthusiast, champion bicycle, motorbike and car racer, remains something of an enigma.
Edith is not the only nature writer to leave her domestic arrangements unrecorded. Annie Dillard left her husband out of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, worried that readers wouldn’t be interested in reading a nature book by a ‘Virginia housewife named Annie’.
‘If I call it truth and leave out Richard and this house, then not only do I lose the selling points I think I need – but also I open myself to the charge of hating my husband,’ Dillard said. ‘But I think I must.’
There is something about nature writing, in particular, that seems to demand a solitary experience. It’s the ‘man in the wilderness’ tradition, started by Thoreau. It was Thoreau who inspired Ted Banfield to live on his tropical island – alone, one would assume, were it not for one of his books being dedicated to his wife and constant companion, Bertha. Donald Macdonald hardly ever mentioned his wife Jessie and daughter in his writing either.
I am not convinced that the absence of a husband in Edith’s writing is particularly significant. The absence of wives and children is a common practice among naturalists and nature writers alike. Edith’s fellow orchidologists, Oakes Ames, Richard Rogers and Colonel Goadby, rarely mention their wives even though their wives actively collected with them, assisted them with their work, illustrated their manuscripts. Why should we expect Edith to mention her husband?
There is an exception to this rule – this absence of domesticity in nature writing. Though Eleanor Alliston is rarely included in the canon of Australian nature writing, to my mind she was a more genuine castaway than Banfield, a far more committed proponent of the simple life than Thoreau. I remember being greeted by her on a Bass Strait beach, strong brown legs striding down the sand, impervious to the elements, inviting us in for tea and cake. She was the first person I had ever met who wrote books for a living. She wrote about her island life in Escape to an Island and Island Affair but romance novels were her bread and butter. She dictated while walking on the beach and typed while standing at a bench, decades before standing desks were a thing. She wouldn’t tell us her pseudonyms. Far from being written out of the story, her husband and children were integral to Eleanor’s island exile from society.
‘It was largely for the sake of our children (born and unborn) that we elected to come to this remote, inaccessible island,’ she explained. ‘We wanted to create a little world of our own moulding. And it seemed that we were able to provide the three younger ones with an early childhood of near perfection.’
I had forgotten until now that it was Eleanor Alliston who first inspired me to become a writer.
‘In 1903 there were not, I think, more than 20 motor cars in Victoria,’ Edith recalled, ‘but interest in them was quickening. In that year, three of the pioneers, while on a fishing trip together, conceived of the idea of forming a club to serve the interests of motorists. A meeting was called at the Port Phillip Club Hotel. By the end of the year their idea had materialised, and the Automobile Club of Victoria was formed with a membership of 56.’
On their second tour, the Tooradin Trio of Syd Day, Harry James and James Coleman sent out around 100 invitations to riders and drivers across Melbourne. The Herald reported that ‘the smell of petrol is over the land, and the air is split with the noise of throbbing engines’.
At the inaugural meeting of the Automobile Club of Victoria, James excluded himself from being an office-bearer by successfully moving that no-one employed in the car industry could hold office and thereby ensured that the organisation remained committed to the interests of the enthusiast, rather than those interested in commercial gain. James seemed content to remain behind the scenes, rather than play the frontman.
I have a photo of Edith, taken in about 1931, in the driving seat
