‘Almost every woman is at heart a nature-lover,’ she explained in a letter to The Age, ‘though most of us would shy at the title of naturalist. Yet a naturalist is no other than one who has cultivated the faculty of observation. The smallest garden will provide a budding naturalist with interesting studies.’
I keep seeing the mother reflected in her daughters’ lives, but I can’t tell which is the model and which is the mirror. I’ve been tempted to pigeonhole them, keep them to specialties: Edith the naturalist and writer, Dorothy the artist and Gladys the scientist. But this does them each a disservice.
All three were well trained in the sciences, Dorothy and Gladys through their university education, Edith through her own efforts. Dorothy taught biology at Tintern for many years and Gladys practised it as a research assistant. Edith, self-taught, demonstrated her excellence through publication.
All three were published authors. Dorothy, perhaps, was the least inclined to write, but nonetheless published a technical guide to model making and a paper on her discovery of the fairy lantern orchid. Gladys, it seems, wrote just as much as her mother, in her articles for children in the Leader and the Sydney Mail. Over 300 articles.
And all three were artists, but here, too, their work blends and overlaps. Dorothy was the most obvious artist, having devoted the bulk of her career to a successful modelling business. But Gladys was also a very fine artist, illustrating her own articles, Donald’s work, and Ewart’s Flora of Victoria. Edith, better known for the photography that graced her articles, was a capable artist, too. It was usually Dorothy who drew the pictures accompanying Edith’s articles, but the daffodil that accompanies ‘The Poet’s Flower’ is not signed DC and is not in Dorothy’s usual style. It is attributed to Edith.
‘Are there fairies in the bottom of your garden?’ Edith concludes in a delicately disguised ‘infomercial’ for Dorothy’s modelling work. ‘There are in mine – fashioned by clever fingers, and that divine spark, originality, to be a never-failing charm for children. Crowds of ideas are nudging my pen. I must seek a piece of clay and attempt to give tangible expression to some of them, instead of pouring them out on paper.’
Some of the orchid photographs are confusing. They look like photographic copies of watercolour paintings. I come across them in various archives, pasted onto cardboards and sent as Christmas gifts to Ethel Scouler and the Rogerses. They are finely detailed and precise. They don’t look like Dorothy’s work so I wonder if they are Edith’s.
It’s only later that I remember a comment about the Donald Thomson collection.
‘There are a number of beautifully coloured hand-tinted photographs by Gladys in the Collection,’ says Moira Playne. ‘They are of orchids, common heath, grevillea, wattle and the formidable tinted photograph of fungus in Plate 3.’
Daffodil drawn by Edith Coleman
One of Edith’s orchid photos (Pterostylis recurva), possibly hand-tinted by Gladys
I can see the inspiration flowing from Edith to her daughters, but also back again, as Edith is inspired by her daughters’ interests, education and achievements. They sit together like three muses of nature, art and literature.
But perhaps I am just being blinded by my own reflection, seeing in Edith’s life a parallel to myself and my two daughters, pursuing our own triumvirate of artistic, literary and scientific interest – the wistful imaginings of a mother for her children’s futures? Again, the influence flows both ways. I am happy to claim Edith and her daughters as role models for my own.
A forest huntress: The praying mantis – her beauty, her skill and her way with lovers
By Edith Coleman
Alas! Her name belies her. See her as she rests motionless on the Easter-daisy bush. Her folded forelegs, raised as if in prayer, give her an innocent appearance not at all in keeping with her actions. Her choice of feeding-ground was not made at haphazard. She knows as well as I do that day-long bees make murmur among the abundant flower-heads, and that pretty skipper-butterflies, flitting in happy abandon from flower to flower on these sunny days make good eating.
Watch! With almost imperceptible movement she stalks her quarry until within arm’s length. Out shoots a spiny forearm (seizing-leg), and in nine cases out of ten the poor victim is caught.
Once held between those saw-like teeth that edge the formidable seizing-legs, he may ‘all hope abandon.’
Holding her prey under one arm as in a vice she mercilessly drains juices and soft internal organs, leaving an empty shell where a few moments before was a living body, murmurous with the joy of sunshine and abundant food.
One must not, however, be too hard on this Diana of the forests. To live she must eat. She dines exclusively upon living prey captured with a cunning dexterity which wins my admiration . . .
An epicure, too, is this praying lady. She prefers to kill for herself the poor victims on which she will dine. Even when pinched by hunger she rarely accepts a dish of my slaughtering.
A cannibal to boot! For company I gave her a large green mantis whose cousins haunt the daisy-bushes in my garden. Next morning the beautiful body lay motionless and empty. My lady did little hunting that day – she does not kill in wanton sport.
I am forced to admire her courage in spite of a sympathy for her victims. She will stalk and capture a hawk-moth three times her size, and she seems quite indifferent to the stinging weapon of bees. It is possible that she discriminates between those that carry a sting and those that do not.
To observe at close quarters the construction of her fairy-like egg-casket, I placed one praying lady in a large wire cage.
A living bee was captured by the time I had quickly counted up to twenty. For the second bee, appetite being perhaps less keen, I was able to count thirty.
She
