Edith’s writing, I realise, is a constant process of integration, of assimilation, of her literary heritage and her Australian setting. She is taking the stories and literature of the past and adapting them to her current home. ‘Manna in the Wilderness’ is more than just a botanist’s attempt to understand what plant is being described in the Bible. Edith analyses scriptural then poetic references before turning to the uses by apothecaries and the biology of the manna gums and the sweet sap-sucking lerps. But she concludes by linking the concept of some kind of heavenly food with the Aboriginal term ‘munna’ for food, which includes the sugary substance collected from lerps. She is connecting the old and the new, the familiar with the unfamiliar, connecting one history to another, adapting a European literary landscape for an Australian stage. Creating a new world of words.
I recognise this process, this writing in order to understand, in order to connect with a place, whether through history, nature or both. It is why I write. It is the only thing I can do – as an itinerant, a colonist, a traveller – to belong and to connect.
‘The more familiar I become with the landscape in which I exist,’ says Catherine Mauk, ‘and the more my stories accumulate in a place, the greater my sense of belonging. I believe this is how we learn to belong: we become alive in landscape.’
Dorothy returned from Hermannsburg because her mother needed her, John told me. At the time I didn’t think to question him about this. Dorothy did much of the housework and meal preparation at Walsham as well as being an enthusiastic and imaginative aunt to her nephews. She was Edith’s driver and collaborator on many field trips and the artist for her many publications. If it seemed a little unkind to make a daughter give up her own career, or her prospects, to care for her parents, I just assumed it was the way things were done then.
In the 1940s my mother-in-law had been the daughter who stayed home to care for her elderly parents until their deaths, while her sisters worked as kindergarten teachers, nurses and librarians. It was just the way things were. Years later, when her own children were older, she went to night school, studied librarianship and trained herself in the career she had missed. But even so, in her seventies she once told me she had dreamt of a bitter confrontation with her parents, which had never happened, about being made to stay home.
‘I didn’t think I was that angry about it,’ she said, surprised. ‘It’s just what was expected.’
I suppose it was, but, thinking about it, I’m not so sure why it was that Edith needed Dorothy’s help so much.
Magic rain carpets the ‘inland’: Many and brave are the flowers of the inland – blooms of a ‘desert’ that is no desert
By Edith Coleman
Few people associate beautiful flowers with the inland of Australia. To most of us the word conjures up pictures of burning sands, paths of streams that rarely run, dead and dying mulga, shifting sandhills, or stony plains that carry little or no vegetation.
The misconception is due to a general application of the word ‘desert’ to Australia’s vast inland spaces. Actually its use should be restricted to lands quite devoid of animal and vegetable life, as well as water . . .
With the exception, then, of some shifting sandhills and stony gibber fields, there is really very little naked land in the whole of the inland. Even the gibbers may be miraculously clothed in luscious grasses after rain. The word is not used carelessly. Growth in those fascinating regions seems indeed a miracle. As in other arid lands, an abundance of elaborated plant food lies near the surface, awaiting the magic touch of rain. It was my good fortune to witness a transformation wrought by that touch.
Crowds of small, plumed seeds, wafted by winds into little hollows and crevices of rocks, had lain sheltered from the burning sun, awaiting the whisper of rain.
In 14 days they had germinated, sent up yard-long stems, flowered, and fruited. Magic? Read further. Lands bordering the dry bed of the Finke River, which, three weeks earlier, had been brown and bare, were now carpeted with green plants. Prostrate creepers had sent out 10ft. long trailers, which linked plant with plant. Moreover, they were already in flower.
In a land where the next rain may be a year or two away, where fogs are rare, and even the frosts are dry ones, there is no time to lose.
The silver sands of the dry river bed were dotted with the green, lacy circles of flat-spurge (red soldiers) and other prostrate plants, all of less than three weeks’ growth, but already in flower.
One read in the green things that had patterned the earth so swiftly stories of wonderful adaptation to difficult conditions. Trained in a hard school, they survived only because they had learned to make the best of things, at times to make the best of a very bad job indeed. They learned to move with the very first drop of rain, and to keep moving swiftly, in order to perpetuate their kind before drought and searing heat should cut them down. Digging deeply to examine a root, one read the same story of marvellous adjustment to hard times.
In less than three weeks roots had been sunk straight down to comparative coolness, if not moisture, and here they secured safe anchorage against the strong winds that sweep over them. Lateral roots were absent. Nature has no use for the superfluous. She provides no mouths which she cannot fill. Why waste energy in developing
