I am constantly finding new maps to Edith’s life. I started with the map laid out in her articles, unfolding more and more sheets as I track and collate them from the archives. The newspapers trace a different map – her movements, her activities, letters to the editor – of a public persona. And then there is the family history: fragmented and worn with age but revealing an older, less traversed landscape. The photos, the letters are tiny detailed charts to a private world. And now I realise there is another map. The hundreds of specimens lodged in herbariums all over the country. Many of them are recorded in an online database, providing locations and dates of collection. They trace both Edith’s interests in orchid collecting and some of her movements.
The vast bulk of her specimens are orchids, and the vast majority of these are collected from the vicinity of Melbourne – around Blackburn, around Healesville, or down at the coast, Sorrento or Point Lonsdale. But there are visits to regional Victoria too: Wilsons Promontory, Casterton, Bendigo and Bairnsdale, Wonthaggi, Phillip Island and Ararat. Her first specimens are lodged in 1921 – almost precisely the time she started publishing – growing in frequency to a peak in 1926 before declining from the 1930s to just a few specimens every now and again. Most of her orchid papers are published in the 1920s too. Her collections chart the same terrain as her articles. I find few surprises here.
But there are anomalies. In 1925, an E. Coleman is in the Dromedary Hills of inland Western Australia, inspecting the native grass – a specimen of mulga oats, Monachather paradoxus. It’s more the kind of plant a grazier would be interested in. I can’t imagine why she would be there in a landscape that might leave you, like Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Kimberleys, ‘the colour of red mulga and hennaed with dust’. I look at the aerial photograph of the location, struggling to find so much as a dirt track running across the fractal landscape. There is no obvious attraction, no sign of habitation, for miles in any direction. Perhaps she was visiting her brother Hervey, who claimed a mining lease at Gwalia, south of Leonora, in 1909 and later farmed somewhere near Geraldton. The Dromedary Hills are halfway between: 500 kilometres in each direction. It’s possible. Or it might not be her at all.
Edith visiting her brother Harry’s wife Sara and boys in Western Australia, 1905
There are numerous collections from Busselton, south of Perth, mostly from her most well-documented visit, in 1929, but also earlier, in 1922, and later, in 1935. There is a photo of her in the family collections, with her sister-in-law and nephews, Harry’s children, at Pinjarra, just north of Busselton, where Harry was headmaster. It’s taken in 1905. It makes sense that Edith was regarded as such an expert in Western Australian wildflowers, now I know that she came here more often than just that one trip, at the height of her fame.
I struggle to align the maps of Edith’s family with those of her professional world. They just won’t match. I imagine that the trip in 1935 was to see her father before he died, but Henry died in 1931. Her brother Harry had left the Busselton region in the 1920s. Edith stays with the Goadbys in Claremont in 1929, but does not mention either of her brothers, Harry or Hervey, both of whom were living in Claremont at that time. I don’t know if this gap is real or just an artefact of a patchy historical record. Am I missing the links? Or is it Edith who is creating a distance between her personal and professional worlds?
Rica Erickson described Edith as ‘a woman aware of social status’. There are other hints of this. Edith always referred to her father as ‘an architect’, when the historical records describe him as a builder, carpenter and nurseryman. I am told that when visiting Blackburn by train, her nephew Ivo would change carriages, from second to first class, a few stations beforehand. It would not do to be seen arriving at Walsham by second class. I am not sure what to make of this, if it means anything at all, but it niggles at me all the same.
Edith may well have met Emily Pelloe when she was in Perth in 1928. Pelloe, too, is a well-known orchidologist and expert on Western Australian flowers. She published her brightly illustrated book of Wildflowers of Western Australia in 1921, followed by Western Australian Orchids in 1930. She mentions Edith in her book on orchids and gave Edith a personally inscribed copy when it was published.
‘Mrs Edith Coleman of Blackburn, Victoria, has made a special study of Western Australian orchids, and enjoys the honour of being the only woman to describe and name new orchid species in Western Australia. Mrs Coleman has contributed valuable additions to the known facts concerning the pollination of various species.’
Pelloe quotes at length from Edith’s studies of pseudocopulation, including from the papers by Godfery, but gives no personal details. Edith has annotated the cover of her copy of the book, including a list of the pages on which her own work is mentioned.
It was Pelloe’s comments on Edith that prompted Rica Erickson to write to Edith in 1931 offering ‘to send pressed specimens and sketches’ to add to Edith’s collection. This was the beginning of a correspondence that would last many years.
Australia’s fauna and flora are so often categorised as strange and perverse. One hundred million years of being girt by sea has given evolution an abundance of time to trace its own unique and original paths down lines long since lost on the other interconnected continents. ‘Old World’ standards are not so much ‘norms’ as homogenised waves of colonisation and expansion periodically brokered
