There are no records of Edith sitting any of the matriculation exams, no evidence that she gained a degree and no records, even, of her sitting any subjects at the university. She lies outside the established academy. James’s business prowess had positioned them comfortably in the ranks of the middle class. It would be her own merits, her skills as a writer, that provided her entrée into the ranks of the intellectual elite.
Years ago I worked in the spider laboratory at Melbourne University. I watched an orb-weaver hanging in her web: a pendant at the centre of a delicate tracery of silver, minute patterns gleaming mint-green on her rounded abdomen, as if she were made of the finest cloisonné enamel. A tiny male spider danced down my paintbrush towards his intended, pausing before carefully stepping onto her web. He waited, one leg waving, indecisive, in the air, one touching a strand of web, the others still secure on the brush, before deciding it was safe to proceed. The female golden orb-weaver (Nephila edulis) remained unmoved by this intrusion. Her courtship would either be a long and patient affair or, if unsuccessful, short and brutal. The male moved into position, his escape line attached, ready to drop from the web in an instant, and began the gentle strumming lullaby to soothe his mate into acquiescence. If his charm succeeded, the female would relinquish her central panopticon and hang beneath her web, allowing the male to approach and transfer his precious spermatophore with his pedipalps – tiny club-like appendages close to his mouth. If not, he would find himself embraced and wrapped with high-speed, multi-needled knitting in a tight cocoon for later consumption.
The male was successful. Relieved, I retrieved him from the web, and flicked a couple of fruit flies from the genetics lab into the upturned plastic cup that constituted his home. I marked the female’s frame as ‘mated’, slid the perspex panel closed and slotted her transparent frame back into the shelf with the other females who lined the walls of the laboratory. A couple of the tiny Drosophila flies made a burst for freedom through the door. I should have kept it shut. The neighbouring zoology labs were not so keen on spiders and flies. They liked their nature sliced beneath a microscope or smeared across a gel screen. One of the Nephila females had escaped from the confines of her frame and spread her web a metre-wide across the corner of the lab next door. She cleaned up any fleeing Drosophila with speedy efficiency. The molecular biologists were not amused and muttered empty threats about flyspray.
Edith had no gleamingly clean laboratories for her work. She tried to capture orb-weavers, web and all, transferring them to a window frame for closer observation. She kept her huntsman spiders in museum jars, their lids of perforated board perched precariously on top. The jars covered every surface of her bedroom: the dressing table, chest of drawers and the top of the wardrobe.
‘They spent many hours, day and night, in beautiful courtship displays,’ Edith recounted. ‘Shy advances and retreats appeared to be part of the ceremony. Running to meet each other, they would gently touch feet, then retreat hastily as if alarmed. Walking on tiptoes, body high off the floor, the male would advance, shaking his palpi, as one shakes drops of water from one’s fingers.’
Edith woke at intervals in the night to check on their progress, noting their behaviours. After the long courtship, copulation could take days.
‘Great power of endurance is suggested,’ Edith commented drily after tallying up 68.25 hours of copulation over eighteen occasions in one couple.
Her husband James leaves no opinion, but moved to the sleep-out for the duration of her spider work.
Perhaps university simply did not occur to Edith as an option in her youth. The Harms family followed a common migration trajectory, with uneducated, rural parents raising children who, in the first and second generations, would rise to steadily higher socio-economic achievements. Some branches of the family remained farmers, others went on to higher education and professional occupations. Migration, and the social changes of the nineteenth century, broke many of the generational shackles that had bound families to their ‘place’ in the old country.
I don’t know what the Harms family’s financial circumstances were after their arrival in Melbourne. Henry obviously made enough money as a builder, and later nurseryman, to keep his family comfortably and build a house in Healesville. Perhaps that didn’t extend to sending a child to university. It cost £21 per year to do a science degree in 1892 – as much as Edith was earning as a pupil-teacher. And qualification might not result in any particular advantage for a woman anyway. Bella Guerin ended up as a schoolteacher, as the majority of the first female university graduates did.
Family expectations also exert considerable force. Builders’ daughters from state schools were rare indeed at the university in the late 1880s. A century later, as the daughter of a boatbuilder at a rural state school, I did not even know what university was. I wondered whether I should be a boatbuilder, like my father, or a receptionist, like my mother. The careers advisor signed me up for a signwriting course at TAFE on the basis of good marks in
