Edith’s garden may have been lost, but I can’t help thinking how appropriate it is that the organisation to which she devoted so much time is now located just down the lane. Without the welcome of clubs like the Field Naturalists, people like Edith – women, mothers, farmers, hobbyists, amateurs, enthusiasts and local experts – would have struggled to contribute to science and the public debate on the environment and conservation. How much poorer science would have been – we would have been – without them.
It is comforting to think that Edith’s legacy lives on, just over her former back fence. This building houses the written records of her life’s work: more than 150 notes and articles that she wrote for the Victorian Naturalist over her career – five a year. These are the papers that ensure she is still remembered by a handful of scientists and naturalists who cite her work in their own papers.
The articles in a small regional journal like the Victorian Naturalist are now accessed electronically, via citation databases. In the past they were distributed physically, new editions circling the globe in a trade between international learned societies. In this way, some of Edith’s discoveries were read by overseas scientists, republished, discussed and debated in international journals and meetings. She wrote for the Journal of Botany, Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London and Australian Zoology. These papers are indexed, databased, recorded and cited. Archived and accessible.
But much of Edith’s other writing is, like her garden, more ephemeral. I have a photocopy of a handwritten list from these archives, of other papers she published in The Age and The Argus and The Australian Woman’s Mirror. These papers may well have been read by more people, shaped more people’s attitudes than all her scientific work combined, and yet they are all but lost now, undocumented and difficult to locate. Not all libraries archive newspapers and very few keep copies of popular magazines. Almost no-one indexes their contents.
Edith’s writing reminds me of a time when we perhaps had a closer connection with nature. She inspired the children who grew up to become the vanguard of the modern conservation movement. She mentored a new generation of better-known nature writers – like Jean Galbraith and Rica Erickson. Through her work we can renew our acquaintance with our ‘lost’ nature-writing history. Her insights provide us with a uniquely immigrant connection with our landscape – one that was not rigidly prescriptive about ‘native species’ yet bore sad witness to the changes wrought to our ecosystems, a view that was unapologetically poignant and yet scrupulously scientific, a vision both literary and artistic, as well as critical and analytic.
I first heard of Edith Coleman in the basement of the Museum of Victoria. Under the exhibition spaces where a thousand schoolchildren shrieked and shushed lay a labyrinth of darkened corridors, vaulted rooms of open shelving, locked cabinets and assorted drawers. Strange objects piled in corners, too big for cabinetry, covered in plastic, awaiting resurrection. Every now and again, a distant light shone from a doorway. At a cluster of desks beneath a high window, between swollen filing cabinets, sat the curators, the research scientists and the collection managers, tasked with bringing order and knowledge to centuries of collected, and sometimes chaotic, specimens.
My task, my first full-time job as a fresh young biology graduate, was to document the research of the natural history collections, to help with exhibition development. I needed to talk to curators, unravel the stories, identify themes and try to weave them into some kind of coherent narrative. The assignment was daunting but thrilling. The corridors echoed with stories famous and unknown, every one of them winding back and forth through time and place, around specimens and objects, in and out of history.
Edith Coleman of Walsham was one of those stories.
I spent half a day talking to Ken Walker, the curator of invertebrates. Pollination dominated our conversation: the shapes of bird tongues, the leg hairs of native bees, bee diversity, sociality and conservation, the symbiotic relationships between pollinators and their hosts. My head buzzed with raw material and I wondered how I could ever distil it into a few thousand words.
‘And then there is Edith Coleman,’ Ken mentioned in passing, just as I was leaving. ‘From the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria. She discovered pseudocopulation.’
Pseudocopulation – who could resist a word like that? A pollination strategy whereby a plant mimics a sexually receptive insect, thereby tricking male insects into mating with it. Animal sex as a vehicle for plant reproduction, common in orchids. It sounded like something from an H. G. Wells story.
My work at the museum led to a book, but the pollination essay didn’t make the final cut. Even so, I couldn’t let Edith Coleman go. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it was about her writing, her research or her life that appealed to me, but something kept drawing me back.
I wrote a paper about Edith’s research for the Victorian Naturalist – the journal she had published in. She studied more than just pseudocopulation. She is still cited today as an authority on not only orchid pollination, but also on echidnas, mistletoe, stick insects, spiders and birds. I kept a folder of resources on her and toyed with the different ways I could tell her story. She joined my list of women of science – overlooked and underappreciated. I noticed her absence in discussions of Australian nature writing and puzzled over why people seemed to think that Australia lacked a history of nature writers when I had read so many.
Every time I looked at her folder I wondered how a suburban housewife from Blackburn had embarked on such a remarkable career, so suddenly and so effectively. How did someone who had emigrated from England as a young girl develop such a passionate attachment to the Australian bush? What was it about
