Edith withdraws the camera. She can’t help but feel somehow responsible for their plight, the sad degeneration that ‘civilisation’ has wrought on a once proud and fearless tribe.
The train moves off, the figure disappearing into the distance, and they head into an impressionistic repetition of sandhills, limestone plains and the grey vegetation of bluebush, saltbush and spinifex until they reach Kalgoorlie.
EDITH TRAVELLED A great deal. She says she drove thousands of miles with James in their early days. But I don’t know where. There are only hints here and there of destinations and locations in her articles and letters: Eden and Goulburn in New South Wales, and regional areas of Victoria – Wilsons Promontory in 1926, a trip to Bendigo with Gladys in 1918.
Dorothy, too, was a keen traveller. In 1940, The Age social notes report that she had ‘just returned from an enjoyable motoring holiday to Sydney and Canberra’. Her travels are linked to Edith’s. Often it was Dorothy who drove Edith where she needed to go. I had assumed that Edith’s trip to Sydney, discussed in ‘Along an Agreeable Road’, was taken with James. But a little note in the paper disabuses me of that notion.
‘Mrs J. G. Coleman, Walsham Blackburn, and her daughter Miss Dorothy Coleman, with Miss Freda Price, will leave for Sydney on May 17. They intend making the journey there and back by motor, and expect to be away for nearly three weeks.’
Letters to the botanical artist George V. Scammel reveal plans to collect orchids in the Blue Mountains depending on ‘distances and the state of the roads’. They had hoped for seventeen days to see something of Sydney and the surrounding areas but in the end had only three days in the city as ‘the road was so alluring’, with orchids no doubt.
I cannot untangle Edith’s trajectory from the paths of her daughters. They are invisibly intertwined in so many ways. Ultimately, I can only rely on Edith to tell me about her experiences, about her travels. And she writes in detail about only three trips: the trip to Sydney via the Princes Highway; one to Central Australia; and the first, to Western Australia on the Trans Australian Railway in 1929, following the trail of her wasp-pollinated orchids.
NM class steam locomotive on the Trans Australian Railway near Quorn, as used on Edith’s trip to Perth in 1929
Edith’s arrival in the west was greeted in the papers with infectious enthusiasm.
‘Australia’s greatest orchid expert.’
‘One of the foremost of our women naturalists.’
Edith’s pioneering work on pseudocopulation was only in its first year. Her career was still in its infancy, and she had only just begun writing regularly for The Age in the last two years. Her fame spread remarkably fast.
‘Mrs Edith Coleman of Melbourne arrived in Perth by the Great Western Express on Sunday morning,’ announced the West Australian. ‘Mrs Coleman is an orchid specialist and regular contributor to the Melbourne Press of articles dealing with Australian native flowers. Prior to her departure yesterday for Busselton, where she will be the guest of Mrs E. Bryant at the Manse, Mrs Coleman was entertained by Colonel and Mrs Goadby, at their home at Cottesloe Beach. It is Mrs Coleman’s intention to attend the Wildflower Show to be opened in the Town Hall Perth on September 24.’
Her host, Lieutenant-Colonel Bede Theodore Goadby, had been born in India, but arrived in Australia in 1895 at the age of 33 as a Royal Engineer, charged with laying mines across the entrance of Albany harbour. Explosives were not his primary passion. While at Albany he sent seeds to Sir Joseph Hooker at Kew, from which they grew the boomerang trigger plant Stylidium crassifolium, with its pretty whirligig wings, and the many-starred Crowea angustifolia. After World War I, Goadby returned to Perth with his wife Mary Emma, and pursued his passion for orchidology. He didn’t look much like a retired soldier.
‘Slight, white-haired, courteous, with quick but uncertain movements,’ Rica Erickson described him. ‘His papers and collections in fair order and neatness, but not always arranged to make it easy to find a particular item immediately, depending more on his memory than his system to retrieve it.’
Edith stayed the night with the hospitable Goadbys at their pretty Harvey Street residence near Cottesloe beach. She doesn’t describe her visit to the Goadbys’ but I imagine it might have been somewhat similar to Rica’s first visit there.
‘Col. Goadby gave me afternoon tea (Mrs G. being momentarily away),’ Rica said. ‘He managed the tray very well – but forgot the water boiling away – being so absorbed in the topic of orchids. A man of humour who delighted in teasing his wife in a youthful manner – after her return and reprimand re the teatray. Her reply to his remarks with amiable repartee; turning his teasing on him. Both very keen to help – very alive and satisfied with their family circle.’
I can only assume that Edith’s conversation with the Goadbys was dominated by her nascent work on pseudocopulation in orchids. If her theory was correct, she reasoned, the phenomenon should be widespread and found in many Australian orchids that appeared to have extravagant floral displays but no nectar for their insect visitors. Goadby was solicited for the cause. In a letter written just a few months after her visit, Goadby confirmed her findings.
‘I am sure you will be interested to learn that Cryptostylis ovata is treated exactly in the same manner by the ichneumon fly, Lissopimpla semipunctata, as described by you in your papers,’ he wrote, although he remained reserved about Edith’s pseudocopulation theory. ‘I don’t yet accept the “sex instinct” theory.’
A fortnight later, though, he’d changed his mind.
‘Since writing to you last I had an opportunity one morning of making some further observations on C. ovata under very favourable conditions, and what I saw converted me entirely to your views.’
I wonder who told the papers about Edith’s visit. Was it the Western Australian naturalists she was visiting? Or was
