It is also fortunate that Edith has a very distinctive style of writing. Occasionally I find her articles published under Naturalist, Maman Cochet, E. C. Walsham or Edith Woking. Perhaps there are other pseudonyms I haven’t found.
The articles in women’s magazines are harder again. Women’s magazines are rarely collected, kept or indexed, let alone digitised. I find a reasonably complete collection of The Australian Woman’s Mirror in the University of Queensland’s library. I have the dates of eight articles, but no page numbers. I order them from the stacks and search through them by hand. I find 28 articles. Not all are complete, though. Several editions are missing page 60 – maybe the nature pages were on the back of the recipes.
The Australian Woman’s Mirror, 1935 – the series has recently been digitised on Trove
Peter Harms has an anthology of nature writing that reproduces one of Edith’s articles from Your Garden magazine. I hadn’t known she published in this magazine. On a trip to the State Library of Victoria I track down fourteen more articles.
There must be more. I find new ones all the time – a little paper in an early edition of the children’s magazine Bird Study or a mention of her work in Orchid Review. I have long since given up hope of compiling a complete bibliography of Edith’s work. I have found 354 articles so far and am still counting.
The Melbourne Public Library in the 1930s
I meet a writer who is studying Australian nature writing and I tell her about Edith’s work.
‘Oh,’ she says, with a dismissive half-smile, ‘I’m only looking at lyric nature writers.’
And I wonder how she knows that Edith’s writing is not lyrical, without ever having read her work.
I shouldn’t take offence but I do. I know exactly what she’s saying. She’s making a distinction, marking territory. ‘This’ is nature writing and ‘that’ – what Edith does, what I do – is something else.
I suddenly realise that this is why people sometimes say that Australia lacks a tradition of nature writing, even though I think we have plenty. Alec Chisholm’s 1964 anthology of Australian nature writing contains over 100 authors. Suzanne Falkiner recently revisited our nature-writing heritage in Wilderness and Settlement. Nature writing regularly features on the shelves of bookshops, although most of it comes from overseas. It’s not that we don’t have nature writers, but we have the wrong kind of nature writers. These are not deemed to be ‘lyric’ nature writers, they are not of the belletristic tradition. They are ‘straight’ natural-history writers, or even – science writers.
It’s possible this is just a form of cultural cringe, a legacy of a long-held Australian inferiority complex and an assumption that what comes from overseas must be better. But I think it’s more than that. It’s a problem with what we mean by lyrical.
There’s an assumption that the language of science cannot be poetic, that somehow knowledge must obviate the poetic in language. Language is always about knowledge, whether aesthetic, emotional, intellectual or even scientific. I can see no reason why science cannot also be poetic if you wish it to be.
The quality of lyricism, of poetic language, of poetic devices, is independent of content or approach. The application of poetic devices – juxtaposition, fragmentation, metaphor and allusion, assonance and consonance, rhyme and repetition – may be particularly well suited to the purposes of poets, novelists and essayists, but these techniques can be applied to any form of writing. A chemistry paper can be written in iambic pentameter. A scientist can appreciate aesthetics. A conservationist can bewail the fate of their lost species with all the heartfelt despair of a poet. Science does not always include poetry, beauty or love, but it does not preclude them either.
Lyrics are words that sing. Words that make me read them aloud, just for the joy of hearing them spoken. Edith’s writing does this for me. Not all of it, not every word. But quite a lot.
It’s not that Edith’s writing, or that of many other Australian nature writers of her era, lacks lyricism. What it lacks is the personal. Ever since Thoreau we have equated nature writing with a form of memoir – nature as source of inspiration, healing or enlightenment. Man in nature, not nature on its own terms. Before Thoreau the ‘I’ in nature writing was only ever the observer, rarely the subject.
Aldous Huxley argued that the great diversity of the essay form can be analysed within ‘a three poled frame of reference’: sliding between the personal and autobiographical, the objective-factual and concrete-particular and, finally, the abstract-universal. The personal essayist tends to ‘write fragments of reflective autobiography and look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description’. In other words, memoirists tend to fall in the first category, scientists in the second, and philosophers in the third. Edith quite clearly belongs to the objective-factual and concrete-familiar, along with so many of the classical nature writers, particularly in the British and Australian tradition. ‘New nature writing’ slides closer to the first pole, of the personal and autobiographical.
I slide uncomfortably on a greased pole between the two, anxious to avoid either extreme.
In the history and literary analysis of nature writing there are two names that predominate, Gilbert White and Henry Thoreau. I decide to re-read them, assuming that they must have influenced Edith. What impact would these giants of nature writing, dominating each side of the north Atlantic, have for a writer at the bottom of Australia?
I find Thoreau’s Walden in the American Literature section of the library, classified under American Essays
