‘Those who have not been in England for a few years will be astounded,’ James told a reporter for the Australian Motorist in 1930, ‘at the road services that have become available. There are numerous coach depots in London from which people can travel on regular time-tables to every nook and cranny of England and Scotland. The vehicles are fast, comfortable and beautifully appointed: the passenger usually finds himself in a swing-back chair, with excellent vision, and he can choose from his journey almost any inland or coastal town.’
James, it seemed, chose his hometown in Cornwall to visit.
The traffic in London was ‘indescribable’. He was struck by the steady stream of freight-land motor vehicles travelling at high speeds along the numberless truck roads out of London. At night the roadsides were dotted with campfires where the motor men gathered for their evening meals in a scene that reminded James of the teamsters carrying their goods on horse teams to inland Victorian towns out of Melbourne.
James’s earlier trips to England were for work, when Edith had small children to care for. But I’m surprised that by the late twenties, when the girls were older, she didn’t travel back to England with her husband. She always wanted to return to England. It is obvious in her letters that she was often planning to.
‘You did not say when you are thinking of visiting England,’ wrote a colleague in later years, ‘but I suppose it will not be till next year.’
And yet she never did.
Edith didn’t go back with James, nor when their younger daughter Gladys lived in England with her husband and their two sons. They could surely have afforded it. I don’t understand why she never returned.
Edith and James had such different interests: one with her love of natural history and literature; the other so passionate about cars, boats and bowls. Edith loved a rambling wilderness; James was neat and tidy. Edith was organic and biological; James was mechanical and practical. Maybe it was an attraction of opposites.
Both Edith and James worked in the garden. The grandsons remember their grandfather ‘keeping the grounds meticulously’, raking and cleaning the leaves from the terracotta gutters that lined the paths.
‘James cut any small patches of grass under the trees short, with great precision, using a scythe continuously whetted to a brilliantly sharp edge,’ recalls John. Peter remembers him chasing the milkman down the road for horse manure to fill the big compost bins. On the wall of James’s room, Peter remembers a matchbox inscribed with the words ‘When society does not satisfy and conversation wearies, there is always the garden.’ It sounds just like the kind of quote that Edith would use in one of her articles.
Edith acknowledged that James did the heavy lifting in the garden, but I am not sure she always appreciated his love of sharp blades.
‘Daddy does the heaviest work where he can spare time from bowls but he isn’t keen,’ she wrote to a friend. It was James who dug the trenches and mounds for her rock gardens, who lifted the bitumen on the tennis court to make way for the vegetables. It was also James who trimmed her wayward plants from the path.
‘Other members of the household stand for law and order, even in a garden, but no mother grieved more over the loss of her baby boy’s curls than I over the shorn tendrils of my truant border plants,’ Edith declared. Gardens, like marriages, are always a finely balanced relationship of give and take, an accommodation of different interests and needs, providing both space and intimacy, contrast and complement. In the garden at Walsham, Edith and James seem to have made quite a team.
The motoring industry had made James Coleman a highly successful businessman, allowing a financial security to his young family that would later provide Edith with a comfortable base from which to pursue her own future career. He needed a home suitable for raising a family. Both James and Edith had been raised in rural English towns, so perhaps this was the appeal of Blackburn, a recently formed garden suburb on the eastern fringe of Melbourne, readily accessible by the same train line that led up into the hills around Healesville, where Edith’s parents lived. That, and the prospect of cheap land bought up on the back of the banking collapse. James was ever a canny businessman.
The Australian Handbook of 1896 described Blackburn as ‘a rising township on the Blackburn Creek’ in a picturesque fruit-growing district. Its facilities included a railway, telegraph station and a post office, as well as a hotel, eucalyptus oil factory, brickworks, school, various churches and a public hall. From humble beginnings in the 1860s, Blackburn had undergone a rush of ‘development’ after the arrival of the Lilydale train line in 1882. The Freehold Investment and Banking Corporation purchased a thousand acres of land in the area and laid out a model town south of the railway line and dammed the creek to create Blackburn Lake, which irrigated the nearby orchards. Real estate flyers extolled the virtues of Blackburn’s ‘beautiful combination of hills, glades and glens forming a charming landscape of Australian bush’, their covers decorated with bunches of local wildflowers and photographs of villas beneath gum trees in an open rural landscape.
Blackburn Road in a 1914 real estate flyer for Frankham’s Paddock
The 1890s depression brought those plans to a close. The Freehold Investment and Banking Company went bankrupt in 1892, sending land prices plummeting and the banking sector into collapse. At this point, a savvy investor may well have bought up large tracts of land in Blackburn for a fraction of their previous value. James Coleman owned extensive areas of Blackburn south of the train line, including land on South Parade, which he later donated to the Blackburn bowling club, and land subdivided around Walsham Road.
In the State Library
