‘Don’t let Effie come to see me until my grave is growing green.’
Edith smiles. She isn’t fond of that poem, but it has given her an idea. She will plant the roof with succulents – house leeks and orpines, crassulas and sedums – beautifully patterned rosettes with leaves of green, blue, violet and metallic tints, and trailing green cushions all starry-flowered. Those beds were always overcrowded and looking for room to expand. Like Lindsay’s Magic Pudding they could be cut and cut again at pleasure. And succulents would need no water that might run into the dugout. Within a few hours, she might have an ‘instant’ garden at no cost and little effort.
James grunts as he hits a rock and reaches for the heavy crowbar. Well, little effort for some, anyway.
LIKE BADEN-POWELL, DONALD Macdonald believed that a well-prepared, self-sufficient boy made a fine soldier. The Boer War had taught both men that a war could be all but lost by professionally trained English soldiers to a ragtag guerrilla army of veld-hardened and determined farmers. The pastoral life in the new world was not some kind of sylvan idyll, but instead bred tough and rugged survivors.
‘All the boys of Australia may grow with one aspiration,’ Macdonald wrote, ‘the defence of their country – ever in their minds. This is the greatest, the grandest aspiration in all the world, the undying resolution that as long as we have life, and strength, and courage no harm shall come to Australia.’
Australia, Canada and New Zealand could be seen as training grounds for future troops loyal to empire. Nature worship, and the study of nature in schools, was not just about farming and agricultural economy, it was also about preparation for the ultimate sacrifice. Country life was virile, while city life was degenerative. Writers like Paterson, Lawson and O’Dowd reinforced this view in the Australian imagination.
Many believed that the harsh bush setting had had a beneficial effect on Australia’s settlers despite inauspicious convict origins. The land promoted their intrinsic hardiness and resilience and weeded out faults. Australia’s rugged environment had brutally purged the immigrants of their homeland weakness, creating a stronger, healthier, more vigorous population. Survival of the fittest, dog eat dog: the language of exploration, colonisation and settlement is shared with the masculine world of conquest, warfare, rape and battle.
‘Boys, in nature, race and war, were powerfully bound together in the preaching of the nature writers,’ says historian Tom Griffiths.
Perhaps some nature writers, but not all of them. It depends who you read.
‘I trod the hill of yellow grass; the land was veiled in the smoke of the still-burning bush-fire that was wallowing in red seas from some desolate shore to the end of its journey. Above the dry grass the blue smoke wandered, and in the mystical twilight I cried, “O Patria Mia! Patria Mia!” and my naked brown feet kissed the dear earth of my Australia and my soul was pure with love of her,’ declared Eve Langley in The Pea Pickers.
While Macdonald was deliberately attempting to reach boys, Edith was speaking to the girls and women. While Macdonald wrote of Boy Scouts, Edith made ‘a special appeal to Girl Guides’, noting that the ‘brotherhood’ of sawfly larva might better be termed a ‘sisterhood’.
Just as it did for Macdonald, though, the war permeated Edith’s writing from 1940 to 1950. But she had a pragmatic, small-scale response to that great catastrophe. Someone once told me about an analysis of Depression-era street films which showed that, during those difficult days, men walked more slowly, losing their positions and sense of purpose, while women walked faster, picking up the pace with an accumulation of small economies and earnings. When the men lost their jobs, the burden of maintaining the family fell on women. I can see this response in Edith’s writing. When men and boys are sent to war, there is little that woman can do but step up to take their place as providers, at work and at home.
What else can we do, in the face of an overwhelming potential catastrophe, over which we have little or no control? What we always do in such times, I suppose, cling tight to the small things that give us pleasure, do what we can at home, and prepare ourselves for the worst.
Edith wrote about the impact of the war on the use of tobacco, the Bulgarian rose-growers, the need to grow more flax, and to find substitutes for condiments restricted by the war. She wrote about the enormous and unexpected consequences of synthesising indicin on dyeing, the production of mono-nitro-toluol, and subsequently TNT.
Edith’s version of the story reads like a wistful alternative history.
‘Had the early Britons not discovered that a blue dye could be obtained from its [woad’s] juices: had that blue not been eclipsed by a blue from the Indian plant Indigofera: had methods of synthesising indigo from coal-gas never been discovered, two terrible world wars might never have come upon us.’
Perhaps things might have been different.
There is resignation in Edith’s war years writing, and stoicism, but no preaching. There is no doubting her patriotism, or that her writing is pervaded by a profound sense of duty and obligation. She quotes Hans Christian Andersen’s story of ‘The Flax’ as a metaphor for empire: ‘We are twelve pieces, but one and the same.’ This dogged determination to make do, to ‘carry on’, does not manifest in any fervent patriotic nationalism, no stirring calls for strength and courage. Her call to arms is not to boys, but to all Australians, and it is not to man the barracks, but to put one’s back to the plough. She calls on farmers, large and small, to grow flax, but also women and children who ‘might supplement the work of the flax farmer by sowing idle land, and even school gardens, with experimental plots of flax, which would be of value in indicating the suitability or otherwise, of their districts for wider
