‘The house was named for the village my grandmother came from,’ one of the grandsons mentions.
‘Walsham’ clearly carried some meaning for the family. Both Edith and her parents used it as a house name. James named a street in a Blackburn subdivision ‘Walsham’. And Edith sometimes used it as a pseudonym on her articles.
Gladys, James, Edith and Dorothy at Blackburn, about 1910
In an idle moment I search for Walsham on the internet. But the only Walsham is North Walsham in Norfolk, 170 miles from Guildford. I check back through the family history. There is no trace of a Norfolk connection. Where or what is Walsham then?
I search for a Walsham in Surrey anyway. Perhaps it is the name of a house, a farm, or a wood? My search returns details of a Walsham Lock on the River Wey. A pretty little red-brick cottage, trailing ivy, reflects itself from still waters, surrounded by soft English countryside. I enter the details into a mapping program.
‘Do you mean “Walsham Lock Cottage, Warren Lane, Woking”?’ the computer asks.
Warren Lane, which leads to Warren Farm, the childhood home of Edith’s father Henry Harms. That leads to the lock, whose name we did not know before, where Edith’s brother Harry recalls them all swimming and diving for the lock keeper’s key, where Edith’s parents met, halfway between their respective farms. Yes, I think that is the place I mean. This is the Walsham whose memories Edith treasured enough to bequeath its name to her new home on the far side of the world.
Standing on the edge of busy Blackburn Road, I struggle to bring to mind the wide dirt strip that once lay here in its place, the open horse paddocks that stretched between the dappled shade of the stringybarks and ironbarks. As the cars rush past, I want to put everything in slow motion, drown out the drone of traffic that underpins the air, the rumbling vibration that comes up from the ground. It is all too busy, too hard, too noisy. I bring to mind country towns, with the lazy buzz of cicadas in the summer heat, the way a distant dog’s bark can drift all the way through the silence from the far side of town. I wander down the quiet lane behind Walsham and try to imagine what it was like as natural bushland, with a creek and abundance of wildlife. But the fenced yards of suburbia rise all around me. My imagination quails and retreats.
Edith saw these changes coming.
‘Twenty years ago there were few places of greater interest to the Melbourne bird-lover than Blackburn,’ she wrote in 1938. ‘Today the forest and the creek-side brush have almost disappeared, and with them most of the rarer birds that once visited our gardens in numbers. It is too late to reinstate our native birds in the nearer suburbs, but farther out something may be done to assist them in the uneven competition with alien birds.’
‘Our once popular little picnic spot is rapidly becoming suburbanised,’ she lamented. ‘Most of the timber within half a mile of the station has been cut down to make room for villas and bungalows with neat gardens and trim hedges.’
I think of the real estate advertisements spruiking community living with rural views in the newest farmland subdivision.
Map of Coleman properties around Melbourne
They always feature gum trees and happy children riding bikes through wetlands, close-ups of birds. They remind me of the open paddocks of Blackburn a century ago: sealed beneath layers of concrete and bitumen; views of the hills enclosed by encroaching brick walls; the few surviving trees gasping for air among the roar of the traffic. Like the ultra-realist pages of a Jeannie Baker picture book, the bushland is progressively loved to death by the relentless pressure of those who would escape into nature but succeed only in bringing their suburban nightmares with them.
I am still puzzled by the absence of writing in Edith’s early years. One letter to the newspaper for the first 47 years of her life. And then for the last 30 years an avalanche – more than ten papers a year.
Edith’s very first published words appear in 1913, in a letter to the editor of The Argus. She writes in response to an article proposing legislation to restrict the harvesting of egret feathers. Edith agrees but argues that education is also required.
‘Many of those who wear egret plumes err in ignorance,’ she explained, ‘imagining them to be obtained in the same way as those of the ostrich. Can we not make it more widely known that the parent birds are shot at breeding time, leaving the fledglings to die of starvation? . . . I think more enlightenment on this subject will bring forth just as ready response to an appeal for help for our feathered friends.’
Not only does she call for education, but she calls on women in particular, the women’s movement and the Women’s Political Associations to take the lead in this cause. The hallmarks of her later writing – to educate generally and to engage women in particular – are already present, nine years before her career truly began.
Alec Chisholm speculated on the fate of the young women naturalists and illustrators who made such an important contribution to Australian natural history, and yet failed to continue in their important work.
‘So it would seem that the inclinations of girlhood towards the “rhymes of the universe”,’ he despaired, ‘are frequently put to defeat when
