July 1905
The two girls race to the wooden footbridge crossing the creek, little more than a haphazard lashing of rough-cut poles and planks. Dorothy all long hair and limbs with Gladys stomping on sturdy little legs behind her older sister. Gladys’s hat flicks onto the path and, at her cry, Dorothy doubles back to pick it up, tucking it down over her sister’s short dark hair and taking her hand to continue together.
Edith watches them on the bridge, as they throw sticks into the swollen creek. The girls rush to the other side to see whose stick will win, Gladys shouting in triumph. Dorothy has laced some flowering mistletoe over her shoulder, glistening red and gold in the sunlight. Such pretty blossoms for such a vicious plant. There seems to be more of it in the trees this year, Edith has noticed. Not good for the trees, but good for the little spinebills feasting on its abundant nectar and sticky fruits.
The two girls in their white smocks could be in a Frederick McCubbin painting, framed by the round grey leaves of the juvenile Red Box trees, the gold of the early wattle glittering with winter dew. This was McCubbin country. How many people knew that The Bush Burial had been painted in his backyard, just across the road, in Wolseley Crescent? Not quite the rustic wilderness people expected. But it was no surprise to Edith that such a beautiful area had attracted the famed plein-air painters of the Heidelberg school: Tom Roberts, Jane Sutherland, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder and Clara Southern. Wilderness was where you chose to find it.
‘Mrs Coleman!’ cries a young girl, running up the path behind them. ‘Excuse me, Mrs Coleman, but I found this.’ She thrusts a flower towards her. ‘Is it an orchid?’
‘Oh, well spotted,’ Edith replies. She holds the tiny flower up close to better see the little cluster of purple orchids on top of their fat stem, rows of sepals jutting out like the verandahs of a tiny pagoda.
‘An elfin midge orchid,’ she declares. ‘Prasophyllum archeri. See – the flowers are upside down. And they trap their insects just here, like so.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Coleman,’ says the girl. ‘I’ll tell Mother.’ And off she rushes, muttering the orchid’s name to herself under her breath.
IN 1905, BLACKBURN was not much more than a small dusty township, with fewer than a thousand residents. It lay at a crisscross of the trainline and made roads connected by bush tracks. Orchards covered most of the area to the north, while the area to the south was known as ‘The Paddock’.
Long-time resident A. W. Steel described it as ‘always well cloaked in trees with an old house or two tucked away. My father’s daily route to the station was then a path down through the trees in a straight line from our front gate. The path developed a kink when the Colemans built on the west side of Blackburn Road between our place and the station.’
There was no electricity, no piped water, no sewerage and only a handful of gas streetlights along the main roads. Even the ‘made’ roads were dirt or metalled, rutted with wheel tracks, clay-slippery in winter and dust-powdered in summer. Broad paddocks opened out into distant views of hills and farms, shaded with patches of statuesque gum trees, under which lolled kangaroos in defiance of the hoofed beasts carving up their land.
‘Within a few minutes’ walk of the station,’ Edith recalled, ‘one could observe a wonderful variety of birds, many of them quite rare: and the student of insects, beetles or butterflies could add a wealth of material to his collection.’
‘The creek banks were clothed with indigenous vegetation. In spring and summer the air was full of perfume and song of birds – native perfume and native bird-song! Blue wrens, yellow robins, crested shrike-tits, grey and rufous fantails, harmonious thrushes and many other delightful native birds nested freely under cover of native vegetation.’
Edith’s eye was also caught by the unusual.
‘Our little creek sides were often gay with brilliantly colored fungus growths which suggested hot-house flowers rather than toadstools. The rich velvety bracket fungi was especially plentiful, and one often came upon a clump of the phosphorescent variety which remained luminous for days.’
And then there were the orchids.
‘One could gather large bunches of wild flowers, including many of our lovely little orchids,’ she wrote. ‘Only a few years ago the auctioneer held up a bunch of orchids as an added inducement to the would-be purchaser to make up his mind.’
‘Gathered, ladies and gentlemen, on this very block of land.’
And indeed, the cover of an old real estate brochure features a bunch of wildflowers, with donkey orchids prominent.
Edith found rare little rusty greenhoods, Pterostylis squamata, growing just outside her gate. She describes various midge orchids, the duck orchid, Cryptostylis longifolia, and the greenhood Pterostylis pusilla, which she cultivated herself. Even as late as 1922, parts of Blackburn could still be considered bushland. The Field Naturalists Club found it a suitable destination for a ‘ramble’. On one such trip, shortly after Edith joined the club, members noted ‘about seventy species of plants’, including several conspicuous bush and bitter peas and seven common orchid species.
Today, the only hint of Edith’s Blackburn is preserved in the Blackburn Lake Sanctuary, the centrepiece to the garden suburb and immortalised in McCubbin’s Bush Idyll. By the time her children were grown, Edith would have to go further afield for her explorations than the garden at Walsham.
A picture of the Coleman family taken at the northern end of the block at Walsham shows cleared land beneath remnant native trees. But the southern end of the block seems to have already been partially cultivated. Edith’s herb garden was started not on virgin soil, but on land ‘already occupied with rather neglected fruit trees over which Roses ramble, and among which Roses, Lilies, Irises and Violets were grown, as well as vegetables’. Had she had a
