It would be another 53 years before women, Adrienne Clarke and then Pauline Ladiges, were appointed as full professorial heads of the botany department in the discipline women had long dominated. Zoology would have to wait until 1991 to finally overcome Agar’s legacy.
Fifty years after the first female graduate, in 1933, women accounted for 27 per cent of all the enrolments at the University of Melbourne. All 24 professorships were held by men. Ethel McLennan was the sole woman among the nine associate professors, alongside three women (Jessie Webb, Edith Derman and Ruth Buchanan) among the 28 senior lecturers. Isabel Cookson and Janet Raff, as the only women among fifteen lecturers, completed the tally. In other words, women accounted for just 8 per cent of the full-time teaching staff at the university, but 45 per cent of the lowly paid, transient positions of tutors, demonstrators and senior demonstrators. Notwithstanding the hierarchical disparity, women accounted for 19 per cent of all academic positions in total. By 1986, they accounted for only 16 per cent across the board.
Today, 55 per cent of Melbourne University’s enrolments are female, and the university proudly boasts of having increased the percentage of women in academic positions to 48 per cent in 2012. But among the most senior ranks of professors, representation is stuck at 23 per cent. It has been 136 years since women were first admitted to the university halls and rapidly proved their worth. At least four generations of academic staff have cycled through their working careers in that time. This is not a problem in transition. Something else is clogging up the works.
At first glance, Edith and her daughters appear to neatly illustrate three different approaches to female achievement. It might seem that Edith waited until she had finished her maternal duties before embarking on her own career. Dorothy provides the model for the woman who succeeds in her artistic career by virtue of doing without a husband. Gladys, by contrast, follows the path of the woman whose work is subsumed by that of her husband or employer, which seems to be a common pattern.
‘Had our friend Mrs. Somerville been married to La Place or some mathematician we should never have heard of her work,’ the geologist Charles Lyell once wrote to his future wife. ‘She would have merged it in her husband’s and passed it off as his.’
Lyell’s observation was ironically prescient. The barely remembered Mary Horner was an impressive scientist in her own right. Her work on the land snails of the Canary Islands was likened in significance to that of Darwin’s Galapagos finches. She married Lyell in 1832 and is believed to have made a major contribution to his work.
But things are not always as they first appear. Perhaps domesticity and motherhood does not have to constrain creativity and career. I cannot tell whether Edith’s career was delayed by motherhood, or inspired by it. I do not know if Dorothy’s career would have suffered had she married or if Gladys’s career would have blossomed if she had not. And if they were men, would we even give a thought to the influence of their partners and families?
The botanist at the herbarium has sent me a list of the 90 or so orchid specimens that Edith sent to Dr Rogers in Adelaide. He searched for ‘Coleman’ and organised the list by year. The earliest records are for 1921 but they were not sent by Edith. They were sent by Dorothy.
A year later, in October, Edith sent Rogers several orchid specimens, including an unusual leek orchid, with a delicate lilac lavender colour. It was a new species. He named it Prasophyllum colemanae, although it’s also known as colemaniarum and, most commonly, colemaniae.
‘He should have called it colemaniarum,’ explains the botanist. ‘Because it is the plural form. He named it after the three of them – Mrs Coleman and both of her daughters.’
The Latin ending -ae is singular; -arum is plural. I check Rogers’ original paper.
‘Named in honour of Mrs Coleman and her daughters, enthusiastic collectors of orchids in Victoria,’ he wrote.
Not just one daughter then, but both: Dorothy and Gladys.
I had always assumed this orchid was named after Edith, but the story is more complex. It is Dorothy who has started the collecting, initiated this relationship, and it is Edith who continues it. Gladys, too, is part of this trio. I’m not sure if Dorothy sent any more specimens to Rogers. Most of the orchids are from Edith, Mrs Coleman or Mrs E. Coleman. There is an occasional specimen from a Miss Coleman in Blackburn and also a D. Coleman from Saddleworth in South Australia, but this is probably a mistranscription or another person entirely.
The lilac leek orchid is rare. Edith is the only person to have collected it – from Ringwood, in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs, and Bayswater and Anglesea, south of Geelong, along the surf coast. For many years it was presumed to be extinct. But a few years ago Mitch Smith photographed a blue-banded bee visiting a small colony of leek orchids, much further east, in Gippsland. They seem to be the same species. Edith’s legacy, and that of her daughters, has re-emerged.
Finding Dorothy’s specimens makes me check for other members of the family, and so I come across a dozen or so specimens of orchids collected by ‘J. G. Coleman’. They are from the early 1920s, from Melbourne and Wilsons Promontory, from a collecting expedition Edith said she did ‘in a party of four (Dr. and Mrs. R. S. Rogers, of Adelaide, my daughter and
