‘That there were few deficiencies in his diet is evident,’ she wrote. ‘Regard his teeth, his alertness, his keen vision, his fleetness of foot, his superb carriage. Never saw you a slouching aboriginal among those who had not yet suffered at the white man’s hands.’
This Indigenous diet, Edith argues, pre-empted the Hay diet, which separated foods into alkaline, acidic and neutral. Having no capacity to store food required people to be constantly alert to food in their environment, to literally ‘live off the land’.
‘To him, the inhospitable land was an open book, which he read as he ran, whether tracking an enemy or in following the trail of food.’
As with so many cross-cultural contacts, humour seems to be the mediating emotion. Edith found the Arrernte reluctance to handle even harmless spiders comical, while her reaction to being offered a witchetty grub of ‘repellent corpulence’ to eat caused equal amusement in return.
‘I came to regard these happy people as comrades, “cobbers” shall we say, for they shared my love of trees and flowers, birds and beasts,’ Edith said.
This interest in food, I suspect, reflects the interests of her informants. And I suspect that her informants are largely women. Despite her use of the masculine pronoun, the skill and stories Edith describes – of winnowing seeds, grinding nardoo, digging for roots – mostly belong to the women.
‘The natives at Hermannsburg brought in many food plants for my collection,’ Edith recalled. ‘They understood their value as food, but their interest, as pressed specimens, to the botanist was incomprehensible. In little groups they laughed and chatted about me as I prepared green specimens of the wild plum (their korputa) for the press. There was a hush as I turned the screw, and they waited expectantly for the sound of crushing fruits. Then came a burst of shrill laughter and much chattering in Arunta. Yes, white people are passing strange.’
The universally shared human experience – humour and food. The scene Edith describes reminds me of one of Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poems: ‘The Food Gatherers’. The growing darkness around a flickering campfire. The centrality of hunting, cooking and feeding in family life. The powerful connection to nature and all other living things. And the simple joy brought by shared meals around an open fire.
Edith’s trip to Hermannsburg left a lasting impression on her. She mentioned the Arrernte people in several articles afterwards. Her focus was twofold, aesthetic and pragmatic. She mostly wrote about their use of food plants, but she commented on their beauty as well.
With 1940s naïveté she advocated the use of Australian decorations in the garden – drawing inspiration from nature, including Aboriginal figures.
‘Little mia mias and figures of aborigines will convey, far more vividly than pictures can do, the grace and natural dignity of the first Australians. A little native boy or girl would grace any Australian garden,’ Edith declares. ‘I have seen nothing more satisfying than the figure of Claud, an aboriginal boy at Hermannsburg as he bent over a rock pool, or knelt billy in hand, ready to dip water from the soak he had scratched with his fingers in a dry river bed. (The aborigines have beautiful hands.)’
‘A native girl wading in a lily lagoon for the roots that form part of her diet is a thing of beauty. Such graceful movement, arrested and made permanent for a lily pool in the garden, would indeed be “a joy for ever”,’ she concludes before moving on to a sculpture of a basking frogmouth.
It’s hard to read this without shuddering at the memory of caricatured concrete Aborigines, fading and cracked, in suburban front gardens of the 1970s. But that particular mass-produced kitsch, together with an understanding of the damage of cultural appropriation, lies in the future, beyond Edith’s lifespan. Her prototypes are classical, evocative of Aphrodite Kallipygos or Silenus and the infant Dionysus, as her references to Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ attest. Like William Ricketts’ garden in the Dandenongs, Edith is, somewhat clumsily, attempting to integrate classical ideals of beauty here with an Indigenous inspiration. She is promoting an artistic endeavour growing out of Australian Impressionism – the development of a distinctive Australian aesthetic.
More than anything else, though, in this particular article, Edith is promoting a more specific artistic endeavour. She is describing Dorothy’s work.
After her return from the inland, Dorothy was asked to decorate the window of the Tourism Bureau in Melbourne with the wonders of the local bush. It was a perfect job for the naturalist/artist and educator, but not without its challenges.
Dorothy had long used modelling materials while working as a biology and botany teacher. She constructed relief maps and biological models from clay to use as teaching aids, but their fragility was a constant problem in the classroom.
‘A delicately modelled botany specimen would with the slightest tap lose a leaf; or in a nature group, honey birds would unaccountably forfeit their tails.’
This fragility had plagued her work.
‘Moving about in a window required the touch of a fairy,’ explains Mrs Whitford Hazel. ‘A few wagtails minus their tails determined her resolve to set about experimenting for another substance that would be kinder to a clumsy move.’
Through trial and error, and much experimentation, Dorothy happened upon the combination that would become Nucraft, a durable modelling medium that required no firing. Much of her subsequent career would be spent using her material to make models, particularly birds for florist shops, as well as selling and marketing Nucraft for others to use. Eventually, she sold Nucraft to Cheshire’s of Melbourne.
Peter recalls Dorothy’s models scattered throughout the house, garden and outhouse at Walsham as reflecting her development as an artist in technique as well as theme: inspired by her travels to Hermannsberg and elsewhere, by Australian wildlife alongside traditional themes of fairies and gnomes.
‘In her studio opening out on to a lovely garden where shrubs are grown especially to encourage the birds, Miss Coleman finds inspiration comes uninvited: and if her models have flown away
