Camping, bushwalking, beach-combing and travelling were very much a part of the Coleman girls’ childhood. While Gladys wrote of fishing for yabbies, Dorothy wrote of their success at sea-fishing.
‘On Sunday three weeks ago we got forty between the three of us,’ she wrote to Donald Macdonald. ‘Many quite large and one very fine rock flathead among them (and Gladys and I are only beginners).’
The author of ‘Notes for Boys’ duly declared that he was quite delighted to hear of the girls’ success as anglers. ‘There is no reason why they should not do just as well as boys – better, perhaps, because girls have, I think, more patience than boys, and patience is often a necessary virtue in angling.’
I did not have more patience than a boy. I would not sit heron-like for hours. There were plenty of fish in the sea. We fished off grumbling, greyed jetties, in salt-sticky boats and from tin-thin dinghies slapped by wavelets. A crumble of bread brought the water to a seething silver boil, unbaited hooks laden with double and triple headers. We fished by the dozen, by the bucket, by the moment. An hour’s effort to feed a family.
The fish have gone now. Even in the distant places, off big boats in deep water. It’s the wrong bait, wrong hook, the wrong place, wrong time, wrong tide. But that’s not what’s wrong. Some still return, sunburnt and cranky, loaded with crates for the freezer. It’s not the same, though. Perhaps it’s better not to be patient, when you’re catching the last fish in the sea. Time to let one get away.
Donald Macdonald extended his successful ‘Nature Notes and Queries’ column to a new Tuesday column, ‘Notes for Boys’, in February 1909. The audience is self-evident, even though it is not immediately obvious why contributions from girls should be confined to a subsection ‘In the Open Air’.
‘I want to renew old and very dear associations, to keep young, also, if I can, to be always a boy – with boys,’ claimed Macdonald.
His passion for boys having ‘grand aspirations [for] the defence of their country’ expanded over the weeks to war stories from Elanda River, a ‘gun and rod’ camp for boys, dark nights in Ladysmith, heroic little white boys defending themselves from savage blacks, schoolboy tales of hunting and fishing and Baden-Powell’s scouting movement. MacDonald’s contributors, boys and girls alike, remain focused on the identification of parrots and herons, the best bait for bream, and the reproduction of snakes, lizards and turtles. It seems a strange perversity to twist a love of nature into preparation for war.
Such education was not just for soldiers, but for farmers too. There is plenty of evidence that nature study in schools was intended to promote and encourage an agricultural life in the country, working the land. And it is assumed that nature study, therefore, was directed at boys, while girls must have been confined to the studies of domestic science. And yet, photographs of garden classes in Victorian and New South Wales schools reveal an even mix of boys and girls. Plans of school grounds designate both girls’ gardens and boys’ gardens. Gardening was very much a part of nature study in schools and I can’t imagine that girls were ever excluded from that, for all they may have been written out of the history of nature study.
The long history of women in science has been characterised by a struggle to gain and then maintain access. Rising literacy levels and universal education made basic science accessible to women, but they were denied access to further education and employment prospects. Most European seats of learning did not allow women into their halls. Denied access to formal education, many women wrote their own and educated themselves. Writing books was something they were allowed to do.
In the early 1800s popular science education was dotted with texts written by women – Margaret Bryan’s Compendius System of Astronomy and Lectures on Natural Philosophy were in no way lightweight treatments of their subject matter. Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry offered to the general public, but ‘more particularly to the female sex’ became a standard text for decades, educating not just girls, but also those from underprivileged backgrounds, like Michael Faraday. Her association with the French botanist Augustin de Candolle inspired Marcet to produce Conversations on Vegetable Physiology and Conversations on Natural Philosophy.
But for every opened door that provided access for women to education and science, another was firmly locked. While the popularisation of science increased access for women, the professionalisation of science denied it. Aristocratic women, like Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia, and Catherine the Great may all have been patrons of the sciences but the academies they promoted did not allow female members.
The British Academy for the Advancement of Science allowed women to attend social functions but denied them entry to research sessions. Computing pioneer Charles Babbage objected, quite possibly because he knew how valuable a woman, Ada Lovelace, had been to his own mathematical work. Women were grudgingly invited to a few lectures. The women responded by taking a mile instead of the reluctantly proffered inch and turned up in force to all the events, outnumbering the men. Force of numbers ultimately prevailed.
In the early 1900s, Alfred Ewart, professor of botany at Melbourne University, thought it would be a good idea to employ a woman to the teaching staff. Botany, unlike medicine, had long been regarded as appropriate for women’s participation. But Ewart was not so much motivated by the talent of his female students as their cheapness. Women were paid half a man’s salary for the same work.
Despite this ‘advantage’, the appointment of women was slow among the senior ranks of academics. Georgina Sweet became Australia’s first female acting professor in 1917 but the zoology chair
