Orchids that look like insects and smell like pheromones. Orchids that look like fungus and live in the dark earth. ‘Unconventional’ hardly even begins to describe the secret lives of orchids.
Edith travelled by train down to Augusta ‘at the mouth of the beautiful Blackwood River, and exploring the many delightful little coves which lie between Augusta and the Leeuwin’. Like the early plant collector and former resident Georgiana Molloy, Edith never tired of the richness of this region’s vegetation.
The region seems much the same today as Edith described it. The ‘winding road dappled with shadow’ still leads to the isolated Leeuwin lighthouse, with its cluster of keepers’ cottages. No keepers live here now – the lighthouse was automated in 1992. But the view of the windswept coastal vegetation and the sandstone buildings perched on this rocky southern promontory feels timeless and unchanged.
Edith told Kate Baker a story of her stay in Western Australia in 1929. On returning from Busselton to Perth she saw a kangaroo paw which was different from any of the others that she had studied there. When the steam train slowed for water, passengers were not permitted to alight, so Edith asked the guard if he could gather her a few.
‘He brought her the specimens,’ Kate related, ‘and asked her why she wanted them. She told him she was taking them back to Melbourne for classification. He then asked her when she was returning, and said if she called at the cloakroom of the station he would have some ready for her.’
She returned a week later than she had said she would and found ‘a glorious bunch of marvellous specimens waiting for me’.
‘Everybody on the train,’ she said, ‘helped me to keep that wonderful bunch of Kangaroos fresh.’ Two of the specimens she later pressed and sent to England.
The train no longer runs all the way to Busselton. It stopped taking passengers in the 1980s, I think, and is now reduced to a small weekly goods train that stops on the outskirts, in the industrial estate.
I drive south, following the train line along the coast out of Fremantle, glimpsing a verdant Indian Ocean, until I get lost in a confused maze of light industry and suburban dead ends.
At Busselton the sole reminder of the once busy train line is a small tourist track that runs along the elongated jetty. The trolleys no longer roll out to steamers or sailing ships, carting jarrah or potatoes to London or New Zealand. Today they transport tourists to an underwater observatory, to glimpse pillars of barnacles, encrustations of feathered ascidians and pillows of green and yellow sponges. Small colourful fish flicker across the windows like cut-outs suspended from a child’s mobile. I remember vast silver schools milling beneath the shadowed jetties of my childhood and wonder at their absence. These fish are all small and pretty – too small to eat. Above, on the jetty, hot-footing bikinis jostle with coathanger board shorts, their salt-crusted skin and athletic bravado contrasting with silent fishermen in knitted niqabs and reflective sunglasses. I retreat to the quiet backstreets, in search of the old railway station.
I’m told that it’s still here somewhere – encased within the boardings and bunting of a local shopping centre development. So much of this coastline seems to be bustling with building works, retail precincts and rejuvenating shorelines, glowing neon strips of cafes and chip shops along the foreshores. Finally, in the carefully indexed and catalogued photograph albums of the local history museum I find photos of old Busselton, including several pictures of Mrs E. Bryant, Edith’s host, sitting casually in an open-necked shirt with her husband, on the grass in the backyard of the Manse having a picnic, or posing in front of a fruit tree, in a loose gingham frock, hair barely contained at the nape of her neck and always with a broad welcoming smile.
And I am transported back to a calmer world, a slower pace – filled with sociable communities, empty sunny beaches, broad shady gardens, tennis parties and picnics.
I struggle to imagine Edith relaxing with Mrs Bryant under a tree in the backyard. And yet something tells me it is my image of Edith that is the problem here. I only know her from her articles, from formal portraits of her late in life, from her grandsons’ memories. Even in the family photos of her childhood, she is stiff and formal, although I know this is an artefact of the era and the technology, not an expression of her personality.
But I feel I am missing something. As I look at the smiling Mrs Bryant, I wonder if there is a different Edith from the professional persona I have met. Her wry sense of humour is obvious in her articles. Her articles are charming and engaging but also authoritative, poised and tightly controlled. They often conceal more of the author than they reveal. She is inhabiting an authorial persona in her professional work, but there are glimpses of a more relaxed character in the letters her colleagues write, and in the person described after her death. But I can’t hear this in her own voice. I can’t see it in her photos.
Of all her writing, Edith’s letters have proven the most ephemeral, but perhaps the most revealing. She must have written thousands in her lifetime, often writing several a day.
‘I am trying to get off about twenty letters so forgive
