By 1924, the majority of residents had been shifted to Lake Tyers, severing their last remaining connection to country. A few stubbornly remained in the neat little cottages of the settlement. The last known resident, Lizzie Davis, died aged 104 in 1956 but was denied permission to be buried with her family. Much of the land was turned over for soldier settlements although not, presumably, for returning Wurundjeri soldiers.
Edith’s writing is a settlement narrative, a colonising narrative. She takes ownership of a new homeland, puts down roots, extends feelers, seeks to understand her landscape and make it her own. She did this on an individual level, as an immigrant to a new country. But was she also doing this as a white settler, as a colonist? Is this nature writing a form of taking possession, or writing over Australia’s past, of silencing other voices?
Wiradjuri writer Hannah Donnelly protests against ‘colonising narratives that fail to understand the true nature of the Australian landscape’, particularly its Indigenous significance. It’s a good point, but I’m not entirely sure what other kind of narrative a colonist, or a colonial descendant, can write. How long does it take for that particular stain to fade?
Edith was certainly taking possession of her land. Was she doing so at the expense of other voices? Possibly. But maybe not if her daughters had anything to do with it.
Near Currency Creek, south of Adelaide, an old river red gum, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, hangs over the road. A vertical scar runs down its flank, about five metres long. At some time in the past, Ngarrindjeri people carved a canoe from its side, careful to keep the bulk of the bark intact so that the tree survived. Their care paid off. The tree, hundreds of years old, grew strong and vigorous.
In 1998, someone ringbarked the tree, chopping away the bark that carries food and water around it. It’s the equivalent of slashing someone’s windpipe and leaving them to wheeze to death. The perpetrators scratched a message in the bark: ‘Coons did this’.
Every time I drive past this tree, I can hear them laughing at their own joke. As if jokes are always just fun, rather than a way to define out-groups and in-groups – sometimes harmless, sometimes insightful, all too often just savage and destructive.
I am at a loss to understand such facile spite. Ashamed that I even share a continent, a species, let alone a culture, with such people. And yet here it is. Again.
The tree hangs on, prematurely haggard and aged, grey fingers poking through wispy green tufts in the remaining canopy. They are tough trees, eucalypts, not easy to kill. And they persist, despite the loss of habitat, destruction of their ecosystems, extinction of cohabitants, changes to the water tables, climate and environment. Some, like this one, even outlast attempted massacre. They are survivors.
It is impossible to discuss the absences in Australian nature writing without discussing the space around Aboriginal voices. Nature writing is, by its very name, a written tradition firmly grounded in nonfiction genres of descriptive and experiential prose and poetics. It does not have particularly strong links to the oral storytelling that predates writing, and which provided the most significant mode of knowledge transmission in pre-European Aboriginal culture.
Not only writing, but writing in English – in and of itself it is an activity grounded in European cultural practice.
‘English is my language because of the history,’ says Alexis Wright, ‘and what I try to do . . . is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.’
This struggle with translation, with adaptation, goes both ways. Indigenous writers from David Unaipon and Oodgeroo Noonuccal to Melissa Lucashenko and Kim Scott have striven to tell the stories of their culture in the language of another. And Australian writers collectively struggle to tell the stories of their land in a language from another. The language of the parlour and the country lanes of England, as Mark Tredinnick described it, does not always suit this land and gives rise to an awkward disjunction between our heritage and our country. The poet and environmental activist Judith Wright felt this conflict keenly.
‘The land and culture I was brought up in . . . had nothing to do with the land my relatives had taken. It was wholly imported, a second skin that never fitted no matter how we pulled and dragged it over the landscape that we lived in.’
I’m not sure if Edith was aware of this dilemma, of ‘learning to belong to a place when the stories that perpetuate our understanding of who we are and how to be have arisen in other soils’, as the American-Australian writer Catherine Mauk explains. ‘When the stories layering this landscape belong to people with whom we have limited cultural or genealogical continuity.’
Edith may not have even thought to ask that question. But she gave us one answer all the same, in every article she wrote that is both distinctively of Australian nature and richly interwoven with an English literary tradition, of unabashed enthusiasm and in eloquent praise of both.
In 1923 Gladys Coleman was a bright, outgoing botany student at Melbourne University. By 1924 she had, like Edith, started writing articles for the local Leader newspaper, a semi-regular column called ‘Sketches from the Bush’.
It was at university that she met fellow student Donald Thomson, also studying botany and zoology. They married at the end of 1925 and Donald took up a newspaper cadetship at the Herald while Gladys
