Edith seems to have reversed this pattern. Like a woman’s version of Kipling’s Purun Dass, she spent twenty years a youth, twenty years a mother and twenty years a writer, give or take. Perhaps Edith waited until her children were grown and independent, her housewifely duties reduced, before finding the time to engage in her own passions.
Was Edith too busy for writing while she cared for her family? Did she rise early to coax the wood stove into life before first light and get the coffee percolating or water boiled for tea, while James dressed in the neatly pressed shirts and suit that had been laid out for him the night before? Did she prepare a typical Australian breakfast, perhaps, of bacon and eggs fresh from the black Australorps in the backyard? I know she made time for a quick trip into the garden, to pick fresh flowers for the house.
It’s likely that Edith’s days were dictated by the regular cycle of weekly activities binding women across the Western world. ‘Wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday, mend on Wednesday, churn on Thursday, clean on Friday, bake on Saturday, rest on Sunday.’ There are regional variations. Australian housewives who did not churn might garden on Wednesday and mend on Thursday instead. It was washday that took precedence and the earlier it was done in the week the better.
The thought of a pre-machine-age washing fills me with horror: lighting the copper before dawn in the backyard wash house, hefting wet fabrics in a steaming pot with a stick, scrubbing stains by hand on the washboard. Then dumping the boiling clothes into a concrete trough, rinsing whites with Reckitt’s blue, and pushing them through the wringer – careful not to catch a finger.
Neighbours raced to hang their sheets first – rumours abounding that some hung their sheets up before even washing them. I wonder if Edith had a clothesline strung between gum trees, dripping tannin in the rain. Or one held up on a prop, always at risk of being knocked over, fully laden, into the dirt. I don’t believe Mrs Mary Sproule’s exhortation that washing day was ‘the least trying of all her working days’, or that the steam of the washing effortlessly completed the work of a beauty parlour.
Ironing day wouldn’t have been much better, not with heavy flat irons heated on the wood stove, and the risk of getting stove black on the collars. Sewing seems a preferable task – reattaching buttons, darning holes in socks and running general repairs on the clothes and household items. I have a soft spot for treadle sewing machines. I learnt to sew on one, careful not to run it backwards. But sewing loses its appeal when everything must be homemade – floor coverings, curtains, bedspreads and sheets, children’s clothes and wedding dresses, even furniture upholstery. Only the wealthiest could afford shop-bought goods from the local stores appearing along Blackburn Road or the larger stores in the city.
‘Mrs Barnett’s paper and sweet shop in Blackburn Road,’ recollected A. W. Steel. ‘The Post Office just over the railway gates and Pope’s grocery . . . Prior’s butcher shop came later. Spencer Pearce and his mother had a greengrocery.’ And there was a blacksmith’s shop on Whitehorse Road. Even a pioneering motoring family like the Colemans had a horse, whose name ‘Dandy’ remained attached to the stable long after the horse had gone. The small local shops provided for immediate needs while butchers, bakers, grocers and icemen ran regular deliveries down the streets – a trade that continued in some areas right up until the 1980s.
Then Friday for cleaning and Saturday for baking. I have a vague memory of Edith offering household cleaning tips, but when I look it’s only in reference to strewing rose petals and meadowsweet, or bridewort (now Filpendula ulmaria), through the house. Hardly the kind of prosaic practical housekeeping tip of Mr Beeton’s illusory wife. I’m more confident about the baking. Her grandsons tell me that Edith was skilled at baking and jam-making, a talent that Dorothy inherited. Visitors recalled being served ‘luscious cake with chipped toffee on top’. With little in the way of refrigeration, excess produce had to be bottled, preserved or made into jams from the fruit trees in the garden: figs, apricots and plums. Other fruit was foraged – mulberries from the old lime kiln at Sorrento and blackberries from Healesville, often from the roadside.
And, finally, Sunday was the day to dress up in their finest and go to church. I can find little trace of the Colemans in the history of the St John’s Anglican Church – no obvious signs of donations or records of participation. They attended this church for many years before some unknown disagreement with the minister kept Edith and James away. Edith loved the language and poetry of theological tracts as much as that of any great literature, but that did not deter her from analysing and critiquing them. Neither Shakespeare nor the Bible was above correction when they erred in botanical matters. I can imagine a clergyman finding Edith’s approach challenging. Dorothy, however, remained a lifelong churchgoer and assisted in the compilation of the history of St John’s.
Weekends must also have found time for sport. James was passionate about cars, boats, bikes, bowls, cricket and football.
‘I’m very keen on cricket,’ Edith wrote. ‘The prince of games.’
Perhaps Edith did not find the housework quite as onerous as less well-off women of the times though. Walsham had a ‘maid’s room’, a long dark room with a sink and, lined along one side, shelves for linen. In 1908 the family advertised for a ‘light general’ to look after a small family, with plenty of freedom and to be treated like family.
I am picking through fragments in Edith’s later writing to reconstruct
