I am not the first person to attempt a biography of Edith Coleman. As I dig beneath the surface I realise that others have worked this patch before me. Their efforts have broken the ground and prepared the soil. Kate Baker, Lynette Young, Rica Erickson and Loris Peggie have all felt that Edith’s contributions deserved remembrance, and some of them have compiled, to greater or lesser extents, archives and manuscripts about her from which I can work. Unpublished manuscripts and resources lie dormant in various archives, waiting for the right conditions to germinate.
When I travelled to Canberra to search the Australian Academy of Science’s archives, I was hoping to find something on a woman of science. But instead I found Kate Baker’s unpublished manuscript in the National Library of Australia, on figures of Australian literature. Kate Baker was a flag-bearer for Australian writers, an indomitable battler who would not stand to see the worthy forgotten. It is Baker who saved Joseph Furphy’s legacy for us. And it is Baker who recorded Edith’s thoughts about her childhood and parents. Baker considered Edith to be a writer first, then a naturalist.
Edith’s oldest brother, Harry, had joined several other apprentices in his father’s business, which included decorating the coffins they made with ornamental brass nails. Edith later described her father as an architect, although it was Harry who was sent to learn architectural drawing, which he did not enjoy, soon returning to building.
Harry had a history of illness and chest complaints throughout his teens. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He spent one year in bed and was sent to Torquay to recuperate. Doctor Sels in Guildford suggested that Harry go to Australia or Florida, where the warmer climate would be more favourable.
In late 1886, Harry boarded the steamer the SS Arabic, with a letter of introduction from Reverend Charles Dodgson (better known as the author Lewis Carroll) to a Queensland sugar farmer and an arrangement to meet friends, the Exeters, who had already gone to Melbourne. The steamer sailed for New Zealand, via Tenerife and Hobart, with coal piled over the deck for the six-week journey. Harry was ticketed to Sydney, but managed to transfer at Hobart (with some difficulty) to Melbourne instead, where he was met by the Exeter family and soon got a job with a grocer, Hatch, near the Junction on High Street in Kew. He sent home good reports, that his new life in Australia suited him well.
When the youngest children were small, they attended a dame or granny school in Woking – a sort of kindergarten where the children were set to master ‘the ABC and counting of beads’, before being sent to the village school, a few miles distant. George recalled walking with Edith, Harriett and Hervey through the snow in winter.
‘I can remember Father coming to pick us up on occasions when there was a snowstorm. He would lay the four of us on the bottom of the cart and cover us up with a horse rug. On one occasion we were caught in a terrible storm and the young horse wouldn’t face it and backed into a ditch! We thought it was great fun.’
The move to nearby Guildford in 1886, to a terrace house tight-packed in Denzil Road, must have been quite a change for the younger children. Guildford was considerably larger than Old Woking and the children’s new schools were very different in approach. No longer were they all together in the one class, under the instruction of a kindly master and his gentle assistants. At Holy Trinity and St Mary’s National School, the boys went off to one school with male teachers and the girls had female teachers at another. Little George did not like his new master. He hated school, in fact. The gaffer had once beaten him unconscious for falling asleep in class during The Merchant of Venice. The Bawdy Bard was enough to send anyone to sleep, George complained. Why could they not study Pope or Scott?
The Harms family in early 1881: Hervey, Annie, Charlotte and Harry (back), parents Lottie and Henry (seated), George, Harriett and Edith (front)
For Edith, it is the plants that best recall the delights of her Surrey childhood. The dandelion brings memories of ‘the fairy-like beauty of its seeds, with their sphere of parachutes – the clocks of blowballs’. ‘The cowslip necklaces of our childhood’ were made in yellow clusters of Primula veris that grew wild with daisies and buttercups. She remembers ‘old-fashioned musk (Mimosa moschatus)’ as being in every English cottage garden.
‘One of the happiest memories of my childhood is of a day spent at St Anne’s Hill, once the home of Charles James Fox, the statesman,’ Edith wrote. ‘Though it had passed into other hands, the herb garden was left much as it was in Fox’s day. It was a garden such as Bacon might have described, in which sweet herbs grew no higher than the paths, and might be walked upon – to give off ravishing odors. They were herbs rooted in British traditions, all growing as perhaps they grew in that first garden planted eastward of Eden – before the hand of man had begun to curb their natural tendencies, and to coax them to fit the size and pattern of his garden.’
The sensory richness of this childhood memory is obvious, as is its impact on her later life and work.
‘I did not know all of their names on that far-distant day,’ she added, ‘but there were basil, balm and borage, feverfew, fennel and thyme, chervil, chives and hyssop, tansy, tarragon, lad’s love and wormwood, rosemary, rue and yarrow, sages, lavenders and mints, lavage and smallage, coriander, camomile, cumin and caraway, anise, marjoram, melilot, woodruff and many more, all of which are growing in my own garden today. In warm sunshine their sweet odors lay hold of my heart. Not only
