It is a good memory of a good friend.
The news rippled out through Edith’s vast network of correspondents.
‘I had a letter from her only about 10 days ago, chirpy and full of news,’ despaired Rupp. ‘Dear me, all my old friends are going – I suppose my turn can’t be far around the corner.’
Rupp had thought Edith was recuperating from illness. Instead he was tasked with writing her obituary for the Australian Orchid Review.
‘She will be sorely missed,’ Rupp concluded, ‘but her work has a place in that great fabric of scientific truth which is slowly being built up through the years and it shall not perish.’
Just weeks before her death, Edith was still writing, sharing her joy in the birds that visited Dorothy’s garden in Sorrento. It is the only time I recall her mentioning her own illness or health in a publication. Her final paper was published in July, on the page next to the obituary written by Jean, just two weeks after it was received. The paper has no conclusion. Like all of Edith’s work, it is a work in progress, a continuing pattern of observation and description. This ending was not hers to complete. It is our task to continue. In this the task of the scientist and the task of the writer align – the steady accumulation of knowledge developed with, built upon, created by a collaboration of the efforts of many. If Isaac Newton saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants, so too do writers.
‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,’ was how T. S. Eliot expressed it. He argued that writers cannot be judged in isolation, that their work, whether poetry or art, can only be understood in the context of all the artists who came before: art must be compared ‘among the dead’.
Edith certainly understood that. And her own contribution, like those of so many others, needs to be added to that host within whose legacy we make sense of our own contributions. Edith was no more important than other nature writers of her time, but her work is no less important than that of many others whom we do chose to remember. She belongs within the monuments of art, the dead poets and artists, subtly shifting and shaping the work that is still to come. Her contribution does not deserve to be forgotten.
George Eliot’s famous testimony to the character of Dorothea in Middlemarch stands as memorial to many, particularly women, whose efforts are overlooked and lost.
‘That her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.’
I am not the only one to have been inspired by Edith’s work and life. Others continue her work in orchid pollination, in the mysteries of mistletoes and the study of echidna hibernation. Some of them chose their careers specifically because of Edith’s work. And although it was her science that first intrigued me, it is her life that now inspires me: her doggedness, her unswerving self-confidence, her airy learnedness achieved entirely on her own merits, on her own terms, without the crutch of any institutional imprimatur or patronage. No excuses, just a passionate, overflowing love of language and nature. She did not accept the limitations of her age, gender or position in life. She took inspiration from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote that ‘The moon is no man’s private property, but is seen from a good many parlor windows.’
‘We nature lovers,’ she told The Age in 1950, ‘may open our windows on all aspects of nature, even though we may sometimes abut on the preserves of the specialist.’
Winter visitors to a Blairgowrie cottage
By Edith Coleman
Even illness has its compensations, one of them being that one may sit idly in the sunshine to watch the birds without feeling culpable. And that is what I am doing while convalescing at Blairgowrie, three miles on the ocean side of Sorrento. This cottage was built 85 years ago, and here all down the years, birds have come, sure of water – a precious thing in non-reticulated parts.
Here among tea-tree covered dunes the strength and variety of the bird population is surprising. Birds that only rarely visit our Blackburn garden (blue wrens, white-shafted fantail, etc.) are here in force, while the white-plumed honeyeater which dominated the home garden we have not seen here.
Watching birds flock to the baths and food trays, one cannot fail to note how some of them differ in size, colour and song from their species at Blackburn. Victoria’s first naturalist, George Bass, thought the birds of Wilson’s Promontory and Western Port had a sweeter note than those of Port Jackson. While I would not say that the Sorrento songs are sweeter, they certainly differ so much that we say ‘Oh, listen to that blackbird or that grey thrush.’ Both of these birds are larger and more beautiful than those at Blackburn. Indeed, we often think they are superb specimens in finer feather, the blackbird with glossier black plumage and a deeper orange bill, which glows vividly against the black tea tree. The grey thrush, surprisingly large with a deep nut-brown mantle and light breast, is, one would say, in the pink of condition.
While some birds bathe singly or in pairs, thornbills and many others take the plunge together and,
