A little later, another letter arrived from Preston’s Distillery, thanking Mrs Coleman for the assistance given to their chemist, Mr Phillips.
‘Mr Phillips was my guileless young man with the disarming smile!’
Another wartime restriction was on research activities near Sorrento. Bayside breaks around the expansive shores of Port Phillip Bay had long been popular with Melbourne residents, at first by steam train and buggy to St Kilda Beach and Brighton, then further afield by steamer or electric train to Black Rock and Carrum, and finally by motor car to Mornington and Sorrento on the far south side of the bay. The Colemans had frequented many such locations over the years, often camping, sometimes renting a holiday cottage owned by the Rowes looking out over the beach behind the town.
Having been brought up in a coastal town, James relished this return.
‘I was born within the sound of the sea and I would like to die within sound of the sea,’ he told his grandson.
Both Peter and John remember his great love of boats and the sea, his teaching them a range of nautically approved knots. He admired the ‘boat of his dreams’: the speedy little double-ended Tumlaren that raced across the bay on the weekends as well as the sturdy couta boats, built by the Laccos of Rye, that fished the choppy waters in all weathers.
Edith’s love of the sea permeates her writing, for all she is trapped on the shore and never seems to venture out onto the waters. I imagine how much more she could have discovered from a boat than from the beach. But James never realised his dream of owning a boat, and Edith confined herself to the discarded scraps washed ashore from the living ocean.
When Annie Montfort, a friend of Dorothy’s, offered them the use of her family’s cottage (in an area of Sorrento renamed Blairgowrie after the war), the isolated house in the dunes behind Back Beach became a favoured destination. Longford Cottage was one of the older houses in a sparsely populated area: with no electricity or running water it was no luxury retreat.
The writer Henry Handel Richardson recalled this area from her own childhood when, in the 1880s, she stayed near Back Beach, in a house just next to Longford Cottage. Her fictionalised account of the events provides a vivid description of the charms of the region.
‘The cottage was not on the front beach, with the hotels and boarding-houses, the fenced-in baths and great gentle slope of yellow sand: it stood in the bush, on the back beach, which gave to the open sea,’ Richardson wrote. ‘Directly they were clear of the township the road as good as ceased, became a mere sandy track, running through a scrub of ti-trees.’
Longford Cottage at Blairgowrie in the 1970s
Local historians believe that the house on the hill was owned by Dr Graham and ‘the only other house within cooee’ would later be known as Longford Cottage. Dr Graham’s house was probably a more substantial home than that of Longford Cottage, but Richardson’s description still gives an accurate impression of the attraction of that cottage, even in the 1930s.
‘The four-roomed, weatherboard cottage, to which at a later date a lean-to had been added, faced the bush: from the verandah there was a wide view of the surrounding country. Between the back of the house and the beach rose a huge sand-hill, sparsely grown with rushes and coarse grass.’
The barefoot walk through shifting sands to the beach was ultimately rewarded by the vista of Back Beach.
‘The sight that met you almost took your breath away: as far as the eye could reach, the bluest of skies melting into the bluest of seas, which broke its foam-flecked edge against the flat, brown reefs that fringed the shore,’ Richardson wrote.
For Edith it was a ‘naturalist’s paradise’, always turning up strange and beautiful treasures that she might write about: mouse-like heart-urchins, kaleidoscopic cuttlefish and translucent jellyfish.
‘For sheer beauty,’ she said, ‘I think nothing can equal hosts of newly stranded thin-ribbed cockles (Cardium tenuicostatum). They lay piled up in tens of thousands on the fringe of an ebbing tide, surpassingly lovely in their wonderful range of harmonious colour.’
It was here that Edith completed some of her pioneering work on the ‘Sorrento flea’ or mountain grasshopper (Acridopeza reticulata – now Acripeza), a beetle-like katydid, dull and inconspicuous until threatened, when wing shields lifted to reveal ‘hidden bands of shimmering crimson and electric blue’. As voracious herbivores of the invasive and toxic fireweed Senecio madagascariensis, the mountain grasshopper is generally seen as a beneficial insect. Dorothy, Edith, Peter and John spent happy days here collecting specimens in the sand dunes: a highlight being the discovery of a rare bilateral gynandromorph. The strangely lopsided half-male, half-female insect was kept in captivity for some time before being sent to William Agar at the University of Melbourne. Agar generously thanked her for the specimen and quoted her observations on its behaviour, but did not include her as a co-author on the paper he wrote describing it, nor cite any of her detailed papers from the previous years – even though they were the only papers published on the species.
It seems innocuous enough, but from a fellow scientist it is a pointed omission. Given Agar’s known objections to the ‘feminisation of biology’, I suspect it is a deliberate slight. She should have kept her specimen and written the paper herself.
A gynandromorph mountain grasshopper found by Edith, with male traits on the left and female on the right
Ever since Australia had been occupied by Britain, the authorities seemed to have been spooked by the prospect of invasion by other powers, as if anxious about the legitimacy of their own claim. Like Shakespearean usurpers they shifted uneasy on a stolen throne: ‘Foul whis’prings are abroad: unnatural deeds/Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds/To
