December 1931
Edith pulls back the canvas flap on the tent and peers out into crisp morning light. She can hear the sea’s distant sigh, as if waking from peaceful slumber. No movement from the girls’ tent but the campfire crackles bright in the greyness. Someone is up – probably Dorothy. She has likely headed down to the rocks for some early morning fishing.
They are camped under some big banksias, just back from the coast at Blairgowrie, surely one of the most beautiful places on earth. Edith had lain awake last night, listening to the sounds of the bush. It reminded her of the first time she took the girls camping, in a little bell tent near the Yarra, and they made beds of crushed bracken which filled the tent with its unforgettable fragrance. In the night they were woken by a crash when a possum landed on the tent, and watched, giggling, as its moon-shadowed silhouette slid down the canvas side, scrabbling for a foothold.
The birds are already active in the banksias, in full song and full plumage. They seem larger and finer here than in Blackburn – and far greater in abundance: blue wrens, yellow-tailed tits, greenfinches, scarlet robins, golden whistlers and red wattlebirds. They ascend like clouds of butterflies from the tea-trees. As Edith watches from the tent, a wren hops around the campfire, head tilted, keeping an eye on her as it scouts for food. Another, larger, visitor is emboldened by the wren’s confidence and stalks in stage left, clad in its black and white tuxedo. The young magpie startles theatrically as it notices Edith, before fluffing its feathers and warbling in a fine tenor.
Later, Edith thinks, she’ll go down to the beach and see what the tide has swept in. The sea never fails to offer fascinating treasures from the deep – a baby cuttlefish, a giant hermit crab or thousands of thin-ribbed cockles swept up in piles of exquisite colour, before fading to monotony beneath the sun. But for now she has to remember her doctor’s instructions – complete rest and no work – as if she could stop her eyes from seeing and her mind from thinking. Despite three weeks of illness, there was nothing wrong, the doctors had said, but what slackening off work would remedy. Camping was always the perfect cure for life’s woes: air like wine and food that tastes as it always does in the open air, food for the gods.
Edith climbs back beneath the blankets. Better to wait until Dorothy returns and breakfast is ready. She reaches for the stack of books, her hand lingering over Wind in the Willows, before closing on the familiar form of Emerson’s essays. If his poetry was, at times, inarticulate, his essays could be reliably dipped into at any point to provide consistent inspiration.
‘No man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him,’ she reminds herself.
AT FIRST, I only knew of Edith’s scientific work. Without her science papers, I doubt that anyone would remember her at all. It is her discovery of pseudocopulation that has saved her from complete obscurity.
A scientific paper is a map to its intellectual landscape. Each article begins by charting the world of thought that came before – reviewing the already known, identifying what has been found, by whom and when, leading the reader inevitably to the edge of the known world, to the undiscovered. The centrepiece of the map is the newly found – the observation, data, result, discovery – a new location on the map held in place by a careful methodology, ensuring that others can find the same place, can replicate the same finding. What follows, in the discussion, is a description of the landscape after this discovery – what has changed, what new pathways have opened, where we could expect to go next.
Rock pools at Back Beach, Sorrento, early 1900s
And this one small map does not exist in isolation. It is littered with signposts to other maps, past and present, that chart slightly different terrain. Together this literature of interconnected maps can lead us into uncharted new ground, but it also allows us to walk back through time, into a lost landscape – of how we once saw things, before we knew what we now know. Scientific articles map not only where we are going, but where we have been: a continuous, interlinked historical trail of our intellectual journey.
I have followed this trail to find Edith. A delicate thread that can be traced both backwards and forwards in time, interweaving our various studies of life within one another. The thread is translucent and perhaps invisible to the untrained eye, but remarkably resilient.
It was in the archives of the Field Naturalists Club that I got my first inkling there was more to Edith than just pseudocopulation. Someone – A. Taylor – had compiled a handwritten list of 32 newspaper and magazine articles written by Edith for The Australian Woman’s Mirror, The Argus and The Age. The list was compiled in 1991 and sent to Rica Erickson who, I suspect, was thinking of writing a biography.
If scientific publications are intended for posterity, newspaper articles are not. They are ephemeral and transient, not intended to be kept beyond the day of reading, after which they might wrap the kitchen scraps, line a lingerie drawer, be pasted on walls or ripped into squares for service in the thunderbox. A local cafe has 1940s copies of The Australian Woman’s Mirror plastered on the toilet walls. I am sure I will find one of Edith’s articles there if I look long enough.
My plan was to find all of Edith’s articles. Twenty years ago it would have been impossible. But the major newspapers are now digitised by the National Library of Australia, processed for machine reading, and searchable in an instant.
