Both of Edith’s daughters attended university. Her grandsons, Peter and John, inspired perhaps by the mechanical aptitude of their grandfather, and biological skills of their grandmother, went on to study engineering and biology respectively, completing PhDs and lecturing in their chosen fields. But it was surely Edith who broke that ground for them.
I finally find a copy of Edith’s little known and elusive ‘first’ article, published in the Gum Tree, the ‘official organ’ of the Forest League. It pre-dates Edith’s first paper in the Victorian Naturalist by two years. The library at the Adelaide herbarium found the issue in their collection and sent me a scanned copy of Edith’s article. The cover is pure Arts and Crafts – with its hand-drawn fonts engraved into the black and white forest etching. Edith’s article itself contains no surprises. She begins with a quote from Marie E. J. Pitt’s poem ‘Spider Orchids’.
‘It was a charming fancy that likened some of our orchids to fairy dancers,’ Edith writes, ‘for to the imaginative mind there are no more fairy-like creations than these little Pucks and Ariels of the forest.’
The article bears all the hallmarks of her later works: the literary allusions, the vivid descriptive passages, the emotive appeal, the reassuring metaphors and the alluring enthusiasm of a gentle, trustworthy guide in unfamiliar terrain. Edith is in full flight here. There is no transition to witness. I have gained no particular insight into her development. The article simply sets the clock two years earlier on her appearance as a nature writer.
The illustrations, though, are intriguing. They are by Dorothy and Gladys Coleman: confirmation, surely, of the collaborative relationship between mother and daughters in the development of their mutual interests in natural history, illustration and publication.
The illustrations are unsigned, but already I think their characteristic styles are apparent – even at the age of twenty. Some of the illustrations are simple line drawings, quick, fresh and vital. Dorothy’s, I presume. I recognise her work from magazines, on her mother’s and Jean Galbraith’s articles, signed with familiar initials that never fail to catch my eye.
The others are shaded and detailed, intricate and precise – perhaps in ink; some might be pencil sketches. It’s hard to tell from the photocopy. These I think belong to Gladys. Gladys’s artwork is best known from her illustrations of Aboriginal artefacts, in the Donald Thomson collection.
‘The first stage of Gladys’ working methods for finished line drawings of natural history or ethnographic objects was apparently to draw in pencil as accurately as possible from the specimens,’ says Moira Playne, who has studied this collection and its artists. ‘Then she superimposed the drawing with black ink . . . She used a range of pen widths to achieve structure, texture, function and appearance.’
Not all of Gladys’s work is signed; her talents were collected and labelled under her husband’s name. Her illustrations also appear in Alfred Ewart’s monograph Flora of Victoria. I don’t know which ones they are, but her son John tells me that she illustrated and wrote the orchid section. Ewart admits that Gladys ‘assisted in preparing the section of Orchids’. Ethel McLennan organised the team of illustrators, nearly all of whom were women. Only a single colour plate in the illustrated text is attributed, to Mavis Arnold. It’s part of a long tradition, of women’s work subsumed under the name of their husband or supervisor.
I suddenly remember that I once wrote a section for my supervisor’s book. All his students, male and female, wrote the sections for their respective species, with few changes. I wonder how our work was acknowledged. I find that we are collectively, euphemistically, recognised for ‘having helped excise the errors from the first volume’.
Edith’s acknowledgements are blunt and unambiguous. She signs her article ‘By Edith Coleman, Illustrated by Dorothy and Gladys Coleman’.
There is a strange collection of orchid images in the State Library of Victoria. They are stereographic postcards, duplicate images reproduced side by side in sharp crisp monochrome. They are virtual 3D, used with stereographic glasses to provide the image with the illusion of depth. The orchids look alien, often taken in close-up, devoid of background, like creatures from the moon. The collection is ascribed to Edith Coleman, taken by the photographer Ethel Eaves, although it’s not entirely clear where they came from or how they arrived at the library, packed up in a Capstan Navy Cut cigarette box.
I suspect the orchids are mostly from Edith. Some have been gathered in Healesville. Others are labelled with names and locations: one from Miss Coleman, several from Miss Sutherland, Reverend Cox, Mr and Mrs Nicholls. Most of these are people Edith knew – members of the Field Naturalists Club. William Nicholls is acknowledged in several of Edith’s papers. Edith has used one of these images in her own paper, thanking Ethel for a copy. It is a wasp, Lissopimpla semipunctata (now known as L. excelsa), a female of the species which pollinates the small tongue orchid – the association that will make Edith famous. The specimen was lent to Ethel for photography in 1928.
I can find very little about Mrs Ethel Eaves. The Reverend Herman Montague Rucker Rupp, an orchidologist from New South Wales, was impressed by her photographic skills.
‘A Mrs Eaves of Melbourne sent me some splendid stereo pictures of it [a new Microtis species] . . . Mrs Eaves learnt her work from Mr T. Green, whose collection of stereos has been secured by the Royal Kew Gardens. I think the pupil bids fair to excel her master.’
It was Ethel Eaves who convinced the director of Kew Gardens to acquire Green’s photos, while her own work has been forgotten.
The first photographs to appear in Edith’s articles were taken by Green, who was a member of the
