Since graduating from Melbourne University with a BA (in 1923) and a Dip. Ed. (in 1924), Dorothy had both pursued a teaching career and developed her interest in science. She taught science at Tintern, taking on botany and animal biology. Students of the time recall ‘dissecting frogs and rabbits and collecting botanical specimens from far and wide’. Dorothy generated a spurt of enthusiasm for biology in the girls of the 1930s.
She took her students to the marshes under the Bourke Road Bridge for plant ecology and on a camp at Goongarrie in Healesville, where they remembered spilling the cocoa, putting out the fire and burning the toast black. But Dorothy had ‘never a word of impatience’.
‘One sweet memory,’ recalls Lois Meyer, ‘is of her passing up pieces of apple to the possums in the wildlife sanctuary – she had the kindest heart.’
It is a common pattern for dedicated teachers who care about their students to work themselves too hard, to insist on perfection, to sacrifice their own time or effort for the sake of their students. Perhaps that was the case for Dorothy.
‘She is going as hard as she can, and gets very tired,’ said Edith in 1932. ‘Just now she is heartily tired of correcting exam papers. Her own work has had to be set aside for the time.’
By 1935, Dorothy had had enough of teaching and retired, presumably to pursue that work of her own.
As best I can tell, Dorothy first travelled to central Australia for some months in 1936. She was based at the Hermannsburg mission and took camping excursions out to the MacDonnell and James ranges, riding on a camel called ‘Wheelie’ in the company of ‘Old Tom’, the pack camel, and an Aboriginal guide, James, and his young family. On her return she wrote to the paper, seeking support for the Hermannsburg Mission Garden Appeal.
‘Only those who have seen the “red centre” can fully appreciate the difficulties to be overcome by the missioner and his staff in the long dry seasons,’ she wrote. ‘I was there before very hot weather had set in, and shared the comforts which followed the advent of water. I hardly like to think what it must have been like when shortage of water and lack of fruit and vegetables had caused much illness.’
The water had come courtesy of money donated by Victorians to provide a regular water supply. She encouraged readers of The Argus to donate money to assist, enclosing ten pounds of her own to the cause.
‘Green food and root vegetables grown in their desert garden have worked a miracle. Scurvy, which was so prevalent owing to vitamin deficiency, has been almost completely subdued,’ she explained. ‘May I join you in heartily commending the appeal for further aid to all who have at heart the welfare of this vanishing race.’
Travelling inland at this time was certainly an adventure, but not altogether uncommon. Parties of schoolgirls made trips to Hermannsburg, camping under the stars and taking turns to sing hymns in English and Arrernte with the residents. Writers like Ernestine Hill and Henrietta Drake-Brockman shared their outback adventures in Walkabout magazine – a high-quality travel magazine launched in 1934 to promote Australia and the South Pacific. But then, as now, there remained more than a frisson of danger to outback travel: two aviators went missing for three weeks in January of 1936. A few months later Lasseter’s grave was found at the head of the Shaw River after the prospector died of starvation on his search for gold.
The following year in late April, Dorothy returned inland ‘where she is continuing the botanical research which she started during her visit there last winter’. This time she took craft equipment with her – for basket making, weaving and rug making – skills she planned to share with the local Arrernte women.
Dorothy was a natural craftswoman. In addition to painting and drawing, she was a talented sculptor and modeller. Her Sunday school lessons at churches in Blackburn and Sorrento were illuminated with a small portable ‘story-box’. Each of the four sections could be rotated into view as the story progressed, revealing scenes of beautifully modelled figures, angels and animals. Her skills were also developed as a teacher in constructing classroom teaching models. As a result, she had a unique way of recording the memories of her travels. Not content with two-dimensional sketches, paintings or even photographs, Dorothy constructed scenes from her travels. These mementoes could be seen in the workshop in the garden at Walsham. A model of the Jenolan Caves included rock wallabies and birds. A model of Healesville featured ‘Wenda’ the Wombat, koalas and their families. A souvenir of Wilsons Promontory displays ‘an austere lighthouse standing on rocks backed by vigorous-looking country’. And among the many depictions of Australian animals, flowers and fairies there were other memories.
‘There is also a family of aborigines and a group of camels from the Hermannsburg Mission,’ wrote a visiting journalist, ‘modelled from those Miss Coleman saw in Central Australia; a white gum tree from behind which peeps a little piccaninny; a donkey – one of those from Hermannsburg – whose panniers hold tiny cacti and form an attractive miniature rock garden.’
Mrs W. Whitford Hazel, who wrote regularly for The Age and The Sun, described this particular model by Dorothy in more detail. It seems to be based on a visit to Palm Valley.
‘A group of palm trees with a few illumbas (ghost gums) in the distance, while straggling across the sands come four camels; ‘Old Tom’ carrying stores and ‘Wheelie’, Miss Coleman’s mount in Central Australia,’ she wrote. ‘Behind them trail James, the camel boy, his wife and piccaninny; and the desert setting is completed by a group of native women getting water from a soak and clumps of parakeelia, the succulent plant which is the salvation
