Unfounded fears of French, German or Russian incursions all paled in response to the first attack on Australian soil since the British invasion of 1788. Japanese bombing raids over Darwin, Broome and other northern locations were followed by submarine attacks down the east coast. Suddenly, the threat seemed very real.
‘Visits to Sorrento were suspended during the war period when invasion landings at Port Phillip heads were feared,’ recalls John Thomson. ‘Extensive coastal defences of deep trenches and extensive barbed wire fence systems were installed and manned.’
Edith had to wait until 1944 to resume her grasshopper research.
Edith’s articles from the war years have a strong focus on self-sufficiency, both in producing herbs for the front and in growing substitutes for foods that were in short supply. The ubiquitous cup of tea could be substituted with liberty tea (made from loosestrife), Oswega tea (from bergamot), Jersey tea (from Ceanothus), Hyperion (from raspberry) or Paraguay tea (from mate) which Edith found to be a ‘pleasant, stimulating beverage’. She was less confident of native Australian substitutes. Leptospermum, used by Cook’s sailors, might ‘provide a tolerable beverage’ although she thought more research might reveal better substitutes. Other tea substitutes had more varied application – betony leaves, or the Balm of Gilead, might also serve as a tobacco substitute, as well as having medicinal and scented roles. Edith experimented with coffee substitutes – dandelion and a roasted wheat drink – which seem to have been tolerated by her family with varying levels of patience. She even provided recipes for curry and snuff.
I have to admit they all seem more experimental than practical. I’m not entirely convinced that many became regular additions to the weekly menu.
I had always assumed Walsham relatively self-sufficient on a large block with ample room for a vegetable garden, chicken runs and mature fruit trees. I imagined Edith a bit like my own grandmother, a generation younger and farm-raised with wartime austerity, who bottled, pickled, preserved and baked any excess of fruit from her over-productive garden, stocking the local trading tables. I imagined Walsham in the early years as almost a similarly semi-rural life – even with a cow.
In 1911 Edith ran another ad for home help in the Box Hill Reporter:
‘Thorough GENERAL WANTED, small family, able to milk preferred 12/6, Mrs Coleman, “Walsham” Blackburn.’
It’s my fantasy to own a house cow: a nice little Jersey with dark eyes and long lashes. Particularly since I learnt that you don’t have to milk them twice a day. You can pen the calf separately at night, drawing off the surplus milk in the morning, letting the calf have the rest during the day. Cows are obliging like that, happily producing enough milk for two families.
Even so, I suspect a cow would be too much work. I have aunts and cousins who have kept small herds of dairy cows on their farms. I notice the strained look they give me when I mention the house cow. I decide to stick to chickens and bees, but I always liked the idea that Edith had a cow.
In 1933, Edith was holidaying on her youngest brother George’s farm at Myrtleford, in the Goulburn Valley.
‘I milked my first cow – twice morning and evening, and only left less than a cupful,’ she proudly declared in a letter. ‘I milked her again this morning but tonight I found I wasn’t quite so keen. It’s not much fun to labour patiently to finish one – beast do we say? – while the experts polish off half a dozen. Anyway, it’s one thing more that I have learned and it may come in useful someday, who knows? We have often wished we dared to attack some wandering cow when we needed milk.’
Disappointed, I must erase the cow that I had installed in the stables, next to Dandy the horse, from my mental image of early Walsham. But I’m shocked when the vegetable garden disappears. Her grandsons remember the garden at Walsham in wartime as being heavily productive with its fruit trees and vegetables. But this, it seems, was a relatively recent innovation.
‘We have never had a vegetable garden until a few months ago a baby one was started,’ Edith wrote to Rica in 1931. ‘We are very thrilled over it. We cut two of the youngest lettuce, surely, that were ever cut today and they did seem nice.’
The vegetables are not Edith’s passion, nor James’s either.
‘It is Dorothy’s (my daughter) special province. She has begged for one for some time. Her flower garden is much more orderly than mine. Perhaps it is her scientific trend. But we both work very hard at it.’
Farming was clearly a bit of a novelty to Edith. She declared her letter ‘a rather exultant gush from “The Land”’.
‘I told you, I think, of my great love for things ‘earthy’ and here I am on a farm, having some of the good things that are everyday luxuries with you. Home-made bread, cream and even home-made butter, and milk that is milk. Everywhere round are broad acres of golden grass, with patches of vivid green where millet or lucerne pastures make startling contrast. I lift my eyes to a big pool with cattle mirrored in its silver, and beside it two great gums make deep shade. Sunsets are sunsets here. I had not thought the Balnarring ones could be surpassed but with no hills or trees to intervene one gets such wonderful views and the sky is the real Streeton blue, for we are not far from the border – not very far anyway.’
All this makes me rethink the fruit trees at Walsham. Her grandsons tell me that Edith and Dorothy were fine jam-makers, and she mentions them busy with this annual task in a letter to Rica. But the fruit may not have come from her own trees after all. She envies Rica her ready access to cheap fruit. I wonder if Edith would have had
