Charles Percy Snow, the novelist and scientist better known as C. P. Snow, wrote a famous essay calling for stronger connections between the arts (or the ‘literary intellectuals’) and the sciences. But like inaptly timed marriage advice, he instead bequeathed us a potent metaphor for eternal separation. The concept of ‘two cultures’ seems only to have become more entrenched. Science and literature stand back to back, eternally circling, viewing exactly the same world from very different perspectives, as if unable or unwilling to recognise the presence of the other.
Edith was a taxonomist and a botanist: a very specific and focused science. She was not afraid of the specialist language you need to ‘see’ the world she described. But she kept the door firmly ajar on the larger world, allowing us to move freely between the minutiae and the general, restoring our perspective when the proximity of detail threatened to overwhelm us. Her scientific papers are always accessible, as if she did not wish to leave anyone behind. Anyone can do this, her papers say, if you are patient, if you are observant.
Edith seemed oblivious to the ivory-tower battleground between science and literature, effortlessly striding across both terrains simultaneously, coaxing a broad audience of academics and enthusiasts along with her. Whatever it is she did, however you care to classify it, it is a thoroughly singular achievement.
I come across a poem by the East Gippsland writer Louise Crisp:
Purple eyebright ringed around closely
in heathy dry forest
lilac, pink or white
‘it comes and goes’
but when it’s gone, gladness
goes with it
the yellow spot behind the lower lobe
a guide to pollinating insects
And I fall through the gaps into something much bigger than just those few words. This different thing she does with those words, which is so close to what Edith did and yet so entirely dissimilar.
I teach my science students to leave no gaps, no logical leaps, no steps unexplained in their writing. It should read like a formula: A leads to B; then B leads to C; then C leads to D. It is thought made manifest. Science writing creates a chain that effortlessly links us through a mind-bendingly complex logical progression to a conclusion. Like guides building a walking trail up a mountain, we provide the chain so that others may safely follow, arriving at the same destination, admiring the view. Gaps are not helpful here.
But gaps set us thinking, send us off in new unexplored directions. They find the mountain no-one knew was there.
There is always more than one map to a landscape, an ecosystem, a species, a life. And there is always the map that has not yet been found.
Where does Edith fit into the taxonomy of Australian nature writing? I think she is too quickly dismissed, like so many others, as ‘straight natural history writing’, as a scientist who can’t write.
That we ignore ‘straight’ natural history as if it is not nature writing makes no sense to me. It’s all about definition. If you exclude the dispassionate, the ostensibly impersonal, the objective from the mix, then you exclude the most clear-eyed and incisive of our observers. This feels like a border war to me, a marking of territory, pulling rank and establishing hierarchies. I suddenly lose interest in this debate.
There is no taxonomy of nature writing. We’re all just a bastard breed of mongrels. There are no heirs, no lineages, no inheritances. The ‘vaunted crown to dust is turned’. There is no line of descent. It is a field open to all contenders. We hybridise, mimic, interbreed and adapt. There is no phylogeny, only ontogeny. We adapt and respond to the environment we find ourselves in and any similarities are purely circumstantial, reflecting no shared inheritance.
Nature writing is what you make of it and wherever you find it. It’s not a genre of writing, not a form or a style, not a lyric, or even a literature. ‘The fish is just a fish. The sharks are all sharks – no better and no worse.’ It’s a field guide, a nature documentary, a poem and an essay; it’s a scientific paper and a magazine article, a blog and a taxonomic description. The members of this family form no hierarchy. They shift and move in relation to each other, flowing from one into the other and back again. There are no defined species constructs here, precluding the genetic transfers of information. Nature writing defies classification, order and reduction. If anything, it’s an ecology, unrelentingly complex, interrelated, multi-scaled and eternally changing. It’s an attempt to grapple with the complexity of nature and our place in it. For me, nature writing is just that – writing about nature. However you want to attempt it, whatever form it takes. I don’t need anything else.
In the midst of my research I am contacted by Jim Endersby, who is writing about Edith and the discovery of pseudocopulation. He thinks her discovery originates not just in the technical annals of science, but in fiction and popular science. At the turn of the century plants were depicted as passive and unmoving. In fiction, however, plants, and particularly orchids, are depicted as active agents, frequently both predatory and sexual. H. G. Wells is the first, and best known, of this genre. ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ was the first of many tales of murderously seductive orchids. The other influence, of course, is Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, although his theory was not initially taken up by the scientific establishment, particularly in Australia. The legwork for the dissemination of Darwin’s theory was done by the great science writers, like T. H. Huxley, Alfred Russel Wallace and Grant Allen. Was Edith influenced in her thinking by her immersion in English literature: science fiction and nature writing? Did her status on the periphery of
