Botany, too, had long been seen as a suitable career for a woman – both in illustration and in writing.
‘One is almost dazzled at the comparative brilliance of women in this work,’ enthused Alec Chisholm about botanical illustrators. ‘Take away women’s work and what a gap there would be in nature studies in Australia.’
Perhaps Edith was particularly wise to select a career in nature writing. And yet today, many people regard nature writing as being a blokey genre – particularly unwelcoming to women. Writers like Cheryl Strayed and Annie Dillard have publicly despaired of being the ‘only girls in the woods’.
‘The mythic frontier individualist was almost always masculine in gender,’ noted the historian William Cronon about the origins of America’s nature writing tradition. ‘Here, in the wilderness, a man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity.’ American nature writing, in particular, is perceived to have a strongly masculine imperative. It is said to date back to Henry David Thoreau, although in fact I think it has more to do with John Muir.
The alone-in-the-wilderness experience demanded by much modern nature writing seems antithetical to the domestic duties so often required of a wife and mother. But I am not sure how much of that ‘alone in the wilderness’ thing is just so much bravado. Nature doesn’t care if you are alone or not. Nature takes her place wherever she can, in a crack in the pavement, on a rubbish dump or in a back garden. A lot of nature writing feels like it is not really about nature as much as man-in-nature – with emphasis on the man.
When I think of the history of nature writing in America, I assume it has always been dominated by men. And yet, ‘roughly half of the nature essays contributed to the Atlantic Monthly during the late nineteenth century, the point where the nature essay became a recognised genre, were by female authors’. By the twentieth century, though, the contributions by women in retrospective anthologies had dropped well south of 30 per cent.
‘Is national forgetfulness simply a case of benign absent mindedness?’ asks Australian historian Clare Wright, whose work has restored to our collective memory the history of women in pubs, goldfields and revolutions. ‘Or is it a ruse?’
Are the women of history absent, unrecorded, lost, forgotten, obscured or erased? It’s a difficult question. In nature writing, at least, they were present. They have written their contributions, published their work. But we have not been listening. It’s well known that we hear men’s voices more readily than women’s: they interrupt more, step back less; we listen more carefully to men’s views, think that men are the ones who’ve made the best contributions; we accord them greater status. The women’s voices, I suspect, are being lost when we anthologise, analyse and criticise the literature. In this case, it’s not a question of what’s written, but who we have chosen to hear.
Edith had no concerns about how ‘wild’ nature was. An orchid is an orchid whether you find it in an undisturbed mountain forest or growing by the back doorstep. Sometimes you need to bring things in from the wild in order to really understand them. While camping for five weeks at Sorrento, Edith found a young echidna, only three months old, wandering beneath a mulberry tree.
‘He shared our tent and intrigued us with his fascinating ways,’ she wrote. ‘A small animated mat of fur and prickles, with almost invisible legs.’
They called their visitor Stickly-prickly, Stickles for short, and brought him home to Blackburn (with appropriate legal permits) to study.
Stickles had free range of the house and a suitcase for a bed on the sunny wired verandah. Outside, a disused aviary with earthen floors provided room for burrowing, while the garden offered opportunities for supervised ant hunting.
‘This son of Australia is an ardent sunworshipper,’ Edith observed. ‘He spends many half-hours, spread-eagled on sunny days.’
In time, Stickles was joined by Prickles, and later by other echidnas usually rescued from dogs. Edith moved from broad observations of behaviour towards more detailed discussions of hibernation, climbing skills, skin shedding and sense of smell. A portfolio of photographs reveals the undeniable charms of their temporary residents.
Adorable though Stickles might have been, Edith was under no illusions about his mental powers.
‘One is not impressed with such signs of intelligence as he shows,’ she noted.
By and large, the echidnas were released back into the wild where they were found whenever they showed any signs of discontent during their stay. Edith wistfully hoped that on their release, one of their wild kin might ‘teach him to forgot the indignity of this period of his existence as a domesticated echidna’.
Stickles the echidna at breakfast
‘I rail against the short-sighted custom of my childhood,’ Edith wrote, ‘which permitted boys to keep mice, but imposed inanimate dolls upon little girls.’
Edith’s daughters suffered no such restrictions. I imagine their childhoods to be more like that of Miles Franklin.
‘Santa Claus, the displaced European with his cotton-wool beard and minus the enchanting reindeer, is a bore,’ Franklin declared. ‘The open air furnished with miles of flowers, streams, orchards and mighty trees was my nursery-playground and there was a variety of living toys. To grow up in intimate association with nature – animal and vegetable – is an irreplaceable form of wealth and culture.’
Like Edith, Franklin had an aversion to keeping wild animals in confinement. While Edith kept wild animals for study, she would not keep echidnas that expressed a strong determination for their freedom and regretted raising the possums in captivity, even though
