‘But she never drove!’ protests her grandson. ‘It was always James and Dorothy who drove.’
Despite the picture, Edith makes no mention of driving herself. In a letter from this time she writes that, despite how tired and busy Dorothy is with her teaching, she still has time to take Edith to the St Kilda Town Hall for the two-day Wildflower Show.
‘Dorothy drove me over,’ says Edith, ‘and spent the evening of the first day there. On the next she drove me then sat in the balcony, or in the car part of the time, correcting papers!’
I can understand the photo – the driving seat makes a natural portrait – but why did such a capable, confident woman never learn to drive herself?
Motorcycles were followed by motor cars and James soon saw the potential for an importer’s warehouse. In 1904 James travelled to France to purchase six l’Éclair cars for the local market.
Edith and James travelled over thousands of miles of Australian roads ‘good, bad and execrable’, hardly daring to stop the car for fear it would not start again. The pain of a stalled car lay not just in the inconvenience of hours of repairs, but in the ridicule endured in the process if failure happened to have an audience.
‘For the motoring pioneers,’ Edith recalled, ‘were regarded with ill favour by those who had for so long held undisputed right over the middle of the road. How exultantly they pushed us off when there was an exceptionally bad bit at the side and how cheerfully they allowed us the middle of a freshly-metalled section. Horses, too, were restive, and one had frequently to smooth matters with an irate driver.’
James, for one, was not deterred. He knew the future lay in cars. People just needed convincing that they were safe and reliable.
Edith in ‘The Lugger’, about 1931
On 25 February 1905, a crowd of sixty thousand gathered at Melbourne Haymarket to witness, with cheers and perhaps some puzzlement, the conclusion of the first Sydney to Melbourne Motor Car Race. No doubt Edith would have been among them, ready to welcome home her ‘begoggled knight’ James, joint winner on points with seven fellow competitors, in his little Swift 7HP.
‘No Greek or Roman women were prouder of their gallant men as they set off in search of fresh worlds to conquer,’ Edith declared. ‘It needed . . . some courage to mount the awesome things, but men who had raced on the old safety bicycles were perhaps not lacking in courage.’
It was the year of the big car races. Organised by Harry James and sponsored by Dunlop, the races’ function was to awaken ‘the public to the capabilities and reliability of the automobile for transport’. The course was a challenging one chosen specifically for several sections of notoriously bad roads. The cars had no ‘lamps, hood, horn or speedometer, nor . . . windscreens, electric lights, self-starters, four wheel brakes, or detachable wheels’. At a cost of between £500 and £750, they were still expensive, but became more and more accessible in price. Most of the competitors were men, notwithstanding the ‘plucky driving’ of Mrs B. Thompson, who completed the course in a very respectable time.
Endurance, rather than speed, was the primary purpose of the race. The drivers competed for points awarded for punctuality and lack of stops. With an average speed of around 19 miles (30 kilometres) per hour the pace was far from snappy. In fact, ‘reckless driving’ was frowned upon and the cars were forbidden to exceed 12 miles per hour in urban areas.
‘The return was frequently less triumphant,’ Edith recalled of these early motoring days, ‘when a weary knight pushed toilsomely before him a heavy lifeless burden, too crestfallen to give a lucid account of “her” misdeeds.’
A journalist described the finish line from the return race, later that year, from Melbourne to Sydney.
‘One by one the travel-stained cars arrived at the finishing point at Strathfield,’ the paper reported. ‘A motorist, goggled and coated in the approved fashion, who has just finished a 500-mile journey along dusty roads, is not a particularly picturesque object. Those who were to be seen at Strathfield as they came in fresh from their exciting race, themselves and their cars reeking with dust, presented a weird sight. No-one seemed to envy them as far as the experience through which they had passed was concerned and one local resident confidentially remarked to another that he didn’t think “this’ere motorin’ business was what it was cracked up to be”.’
In the early days of motoring, a motorist speeding over the 15 miles per hour limit was overtaken and booked by a policeman on a bicycle. I slow my car down to 30 kilometres an hour. It feels like crawling. I open the windows and try to imagine driving without power-steering, without ABS brakes, without a roof or windscreen, without suspension. In 1931 Edith said you would have to be a Wells or Bellamy to imagine the developments of the car industry in another thirty years’ time. What happened to the Jetson-inspired flying cars I dreamt of in my childhood? I close my windows with the tap of a button and barely touch the accelerator of my automatic, turbo-charged, fuel-injected, climate-controlled, computerised car with its stability control, power-steering, anti-locking brakes, crumple-zones, reversing cameras, proximity sensors, airbags and self-levelling suspension on high-tech pneumatic tyres. The car effortlessly, almost silently, slides up to 110 kilometres per hour and I realise that they are already here.
If the purpose of those early rallies was to promote interest in this new form of transport, they certainly succeeded. Within thirty years there were almost half a million cars on the road, 142,000 trucks and vans and 75,000 motorcycles. The motoring industry was one of the biggest in the country, which generated over ten million pounds in taxation revenue. But this uptake was nothing compared to the way
