Surely Edith must have found time for nature study and books, even as a wife and mother? To her neighbours and passers-by she was Mrs Coleman, an ‘Englishwoman who has adopted Australia, who may appear to be reserved but has a winning openness of manner’. As a young child in the 1920s Mabel Roberts recalled taking new or unusual wildflowers to Mrs Coleman, who ‘always welcomed the local people and encouraged them to take an interest in the natural history around the area where they lived’.
Having recalled with so much affection the way in which she was raised, with her mother’s love of literature and her father’s love of nature, I can only assume that Edith would have done the same for her daughters. Too often it is assumed that women writers make poor mothers, bad wives, or lonely spinsters – Enid Blyton, Henry Handel Richardson, P. L. Travers, Dorothy Parker. If they succeed at their art it is at the sacrifice of domestic triumph. It is assumed that the selflessness of motherhood is in eternal conflict with the selfishness of art. It is a particularly vicious variation of Cyril Connolly’s oft-cited excuse that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’.
Such toxic mythology poisons the lives of women writers, guilty of being selfish if they prioritise their art, and second-rate if they don’t. It doesn’t seem to be as interesting to talk about the women inspired by their children. And yet domesticity may be both a burden and a blessing: a constraint and an unshackling. Dulcie Deamer was a talented, successful and productive writer with six children in tow. The incredibly productive Rica Erickson had four.
Writing was the only occupation I could succeed at while also being a mother at home. I learnt to write efficiently and intensively: during naptime, kindergarten and school hours. I am eternally grateful to my children for granting me the freedom, opportunity and discipline to write.
Gladys and Dorothy Coleman, about 1908
Gladys and Dorothy were probably about five or six when the family moved to Walsham. When they were about twelve and thirteen, they were given care of a tiny orphaned possum.
‘A soft, pink and grey ball of fur, with bright, bead-like eyes,’ Edith described their newest family member, ‘he hardly filled the cup of my hands when presented to me.’
They named the possum ‘Bill Baillie’, after the pet bilby in Ellis Rowan’s beautifully illustrated children’s book about Western Australian wildlife, which Edith had been reading with the girls. Bill, and later his mate Mandy, lived for many years in an enclosure screened off on the back verandah. They seemed happy and healthy enough, although Edith wasn’t sure.
‘I think that he would have preferred life in the bush,’ she concluded, ‘with all its dangers.’
Other pets were less welcome. Dorothy recalled raising a young rabbit that was brought to them, feeding it with a flannel soaked in milk as they had Bill Baillie. The rabbit made a lovely pet, so tame it would eat from her hand. But it was given away at eighteen months ‘to a girl whose father did not mind the mischief it worked in the garden’.
I wonder what other books Edith was reading with her girls. Was Gladys drawing on childhood reading when she later quoted lines from Annie R. Rentoul’s immensely popular ‘Bush Songs of Australia for Young and Old’? Were they reading the country life stories of Ethel Turner or Mary Grant Bruce, the fantasies of Jessie Whitfield or Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, or the bush tales of Amy Mack? As well as the English classics, I’m sure. I just wish I knew.
The girls attended Tintern Girls’ School, which was then located in a large two-storeyed house on Glenferrie Road next to the Presbyterian Church in Hawthorn. At the time, Tintern was primarily regarded as a finishing school – small and friendly: a family. There was no need to train girls for jobs. Clever girls, who might go to university, were sent to the Presbyterian Ladies’ College or the Methodist Ladies’ College.
Nonetheless, Tintern did have some impressive teachers. Botany and physiology were taught by Dr Georgina Sweet for a time, who later became Australia’s first female professor and head of biologyat the University of Melbourne. Her successor, Bertha Rees, went on to become a botany demonstrator at the university. Teachers like these undoubtedly inspired students like Ethel McLennan who was determined to pursue an academic career, despite the shortcomings of the school’s performance in senior mathematics.
From Dorothy’s sketchbook 1919
‘She sits alone, grappling with Senior Public trigonometry,’ relates the school historian, Lyndsay Gardner, ‘the last prerequisite she needs for entry to a science course at the University of Melbourne.’
‘Dr. Mac’, as Ethel was known, became associate professor of botany at the University of Melbourne, teaching and supervising Gladys. Just ten years older than Dorothy and Gladys, McLennan would undoubtedly have been a role model for them at school.
By the time Dorothy and Gladys were in their senior years, the school was being run by Agnes Cross, who, over the course of their education, transformed the school and drastically improved its educational outcomes, if not its discipline.
From the occasional solitary university aspirant like McLennan, the school began to produce a steady batch of girls with Intermediate and Leaving passes. By late 1919–1920, both Dorothy and Gladys would be among them. Throughout their senior years the girls regularly took honours in various subjects, Dorothy particularly for drawing, as well as competing in tennis and basketball.
Agnes Cross had a particular passion for literature – which no
