By what stretch of the imagination a sixteen- and seventeen-year-old can be called ‘little girls’ I cannot imagine, but they raised £35 for the fund.
According to the school history – largely compiled from the recollections of those who had been young girls at the time – Agnes Cross was sufficiently progressive that ‘the mother of three part-aboriginal daughters felt no longer the need to conceal her husband whose colour would have betrayed his origin’. These students, whoever they were, must have been classmates of Dorothy and Gladys. What impact, if any, that experience had on their later connections with other Aboriginal communities, I can only speculate.
By 1915, Edith’s parents were living in Healesville, in a house also called Walsham and built by Henry. The Colemans, too, purchased property here, just across the Old Fernshaw Road, and had their own cottage, ‘Goongarrie’, where they stayed for weekends and holidays. It was the perfect place for Edith to indulge her passion for nature.
But Lottie’s health was failing, and she was worried about Henry. She had long suffered from goitre, a condition often associated with other complications. In April 1917 she wrote to Harry in Western Australia saying that she was planning to leave Healesville and move nearer to the girls ‘as she was getting too crippled to go about her household duties, and when Father got sick she was in a fix’. Barely a fortnight later she died.
‘How Father will stand the parting after so many years of her companionship,’ worried Harry to his Aunt Lizzie. ‘It will be a great blow to him. They had both just completed their 72nd year and 51st of married life.’
Harry clearly adored his mother: ‘The memory of her pure unselfish life is a holy possession.’
Edith recalled her as ‘the sweetest, most unsophisticated person I have ever met, not simple, but natural, frank and free’.
As for their father, Henry was not lonely for long. He moved back to the city and remarried twice in later life, first to Mary, who died suddenly three years later, and then to the wealthy Jenny Relph. In his eighties, he developed dementia and moved to Western Australia to be cared for by Harry.
Edith’s parents, Henry and Charlotte, at Walsham in Healesville
But Goongarrie remained a favourite retreat of Edith’s, and of the rest of the family. Blackburn might have been falling under the sway of topiary gardens and ticky-tacky houses, but Healesville stayed far from the madding crowds amid the ironbarks and blackwoods, the stringybarks and cedar woods, with a treasure trove of orchids beneath their feet just waiting to be discovered.
Not all of the articles in Edith’s scrapbook are her own. Inside the front cover there is one written about her work by a journalist at The Argus.
‘Mrs. Coleman was first attracted towards the study of Australian orchids by Mr. Donald Macdonald’s Bush Notes in “The Argus” a good many years ago, and since then she has read much and observed more.’
I suppose it’s a plausible source of inspiration. Donald Macdonald was a well-known nature writer, who rose to fame for his dispatches from the Boer War, and settled down to work in 1904 at The Argus, writing the weekly ‘Nature Notes and Queries’, followed by ‘Notes for Boys’ from 1909.
Macdonald’s newspaper nature writing is perhaps more picturesque than educational. He facilitates the input of information from his readers, more than providing the expertise himself. I can see how his articles would have caught Edith’s attention. Many of his early articles wax lyrical about the beauty of the English landscape and gardens. And his columns are full of strange and quirky phenomena, in need of investigation.
His mentions of orchids are slim and passing – an article on tropical varieties and a query about the identity of a greenhood. Perhaps the article on tropical orchids inspired Edith’s interest in pollination? Perhaps the greenhood enquiry sent her to a plant guide, seeking to identify her own greenhoods, which, in September, would just have started flowering? I try to connect the articles with Edith’s writing but the link is not strong.
I’m just not convinced this is the real source of Edith’s inspiration.
If anyone was inspired by Donald Macdonald’s columns, it was Edith’s daughters. Dorothy is so often mentioned as Edith’s collaborator and co-naturalist that at first I only noticed Dorothy’s contributions to his column from the age of thirteen to sixteen. She wrote about spiders, wattle scale, rabbits, fishing and sea elephants. It was Dorothy who wrote to Macdonald about the orchids of Blackburn – noting that they had found a bird orchid, then known as Chiloglottis gunnii, as well as specimens of pink, blue and purple Thelymitras.
‘A few days ago we found the curious tree-orchid growing high up on the truck of a musk tree,’ she wrote in 1916, ‘and we are puzzled to find a way of planting it, for its tuberous looking roots seemed scarcely attached to the tree on which it grew.’
By reply, Macdonald referred Dorothy to Mr Pescott for advice. Dorothy would already have known Edward Pescott, president of the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria. She had joined the club, as an associate member, two years before, at the
