November 1933
Edith sighs deeply as she pours the tea. Thank goodness that’s over. Everyone had been so generous for the cause, one had to be grateful, but the timing could not have been worse.
John Shirlow had kindly sent a beautifully framed etching, from the first pull so that they might reproduce it and sell the original as well as copies. Dora Serle donated paintings – pale pastel impressions of colour and light. Her work was so popular at the moment. Another friend had sent six posters and some designs for cards. It was fortunate that Dorothy had so many artistic friends like the Lindsays and their circle. They had raised plenty of money for the animals, but Edith’s mind had not been on the task.
She can hear Dorothy outside calling the dogs for their dinner. Not that Gladys and Donald’s huge beasts need calling for food. Despite their size, the dogs were very well behaved – it must seem strange to them to be confined even at Walsham, after all their time free-range up north.
Poor Gladys had returned with Donald only last Saturday. She looks thin and tired, but there is no time to rest. Every day they are at the university, supervising the unpacking of all their equipment and their precious research materials. And in the evening there are endless functions and receptions that neither of them can be in the slightest bothered with, and yet they must go, and Donald receive the credit for all his work, when all he really wants is to be getting on with it.
Edith can’t imagine what it must have been like for Gladys, to travel all over northern Australia to lands never before traversed by a white person. On their first trip, a few years ago, they travelled by pack horse with Aboriginal guides, the only Europeans for miles. Edith had been terribly worried at first. What might happen if Donald fell ill or if the natives turned nasty? Well-travelled friends had assured her that Gladys would be quite safe with the northern tribes, but Edith couldn’t help but worry all the same. Would you say the same of a native girl among white men?
But Gladys is brave and resolute. She has been such a staunch mainstay for her husband, supporting him through his studies in New South Wales with her weekly articles on natural history in the paper. And then she illustrates Donald’s papers, even those on the most uninteresting topics – dissections of blood vessels for his snake venom research. But Gladys remains patient and sweet about it all, nonetheless. He is fortunate to have her. Still, Edith shudders to think of the risks her slender daughter took, looking barely more than a child herself–crossing swollen rivers rife with crocodiles, escaping a boat on fire, or scrambling up a tree to safety from a wild boar.
‘That Wolf is well named,’ says Dorothy, coming in from her chores. ‘I’ve never seen food disappear so fast.’
Edith passes Dorothy her tea. ‘Put your feet up,’ she says. ‘You’ve done too much today.’
But Dorothy just smiles and breathes in the fragrant steam. Nothing ever seems to faze her.
Edith sips her tea. There is no sign of Dorothy finding a husband. She is always so busy with her teaching, she has little time for socialising, except perhaps among her artistic friends. Edith once dreamt that one of her daughters might marry a cricketer. The naturalist took one off the list, but there is still Dorothy. Or a farmer, perhaps. Edith can just imagine Dorothy enjoying life on the farm, she is so hardworking.
But, then again, perhaps that would be like harnessing Pegasus. Perhaps Dorothy is better off with her freedom.
WHEN I FIRST started reading Edith’s papers, I was struck by the lack of mention of any Indigenous Australians, their relationships with, impact on or knowledge of the natural world. Indigenous knowledge has long been recognised (if not always fully acknowledged) by the earliest explorers and naturalists to modern researchers, as essential to the understanding of Australia’s flora and fauna. At the time Edith was writing, natural history and ‘pre-history’ – human culture before the advent of writing – were grouped together. Indigenous people were seen as part of the natural world: distinct, as it were, from civilisation.
Walsham sits on the land of the Wurundjeri-balluk people, whose language is Woi wurrung. They are one of the tribes of the Kulin nation. They camped along the creeks and rivers that Edith frequented, leaving traces of their presence in scar trees and middens. But by the 1900s, there were few of those traces left in Blackburn. There is no mention of the Wurundjeri-balluk people in Edith’s writing. Still, she could not have been completely unaware of the area’s Aboriginal history. Aboriginal artefacts were keenly studied by other members of the Field Naturalists Club, including Bob Croll. The ‘Aboriginal Problem’ appears regularly in the Melbourne papers in the early 1900s, peaking in the 1930s.
Edith had also lived in Healesville for many years. Up until 1924 the land around Badger Creek, now home in part to Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary, was the Aboriginal reserve Coranderrk, which the Wurundjeri people managed very successfully as a farm, selling wheat, hops and craft at Melbourne markets and even winning prizes at the International Exhibitions.
By the late 1800s and early 1900s, though, Coranderrk was under threat. The farming land was valuable. Perhaps the residents were too successful. The Aborigines Protection Act of 1866 demanded that half-castes under the age of 35 be ‘integrated’ into white society. The enforced loss of able-bodied workers crippled the community’s ability to work their farms.
William Barak, elder of the Wurundjeri-willam clan and tireless proponent for Indigenous rights, protested about his people’s lack of rights.
‘Could we get our freedom to go away Shearing and Harvesting and to come home when we wish and also to go for the good of our Health when we need it,’
