The Wasp and the Orchid Read online

  About The Wasp and the Orchid

  ‘Have you met Mrs Edith Coleman? If not you must – I am sure you will like her – she’s just A1 and a splendid naturalist.’

  In 1922, a 48-year-old housewife from Blackburn delivered her first paper, on native Australian orchids, to the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria. Over the next thirty years, Edith Coleman would write over 300 articles on Australian nature for newspapers, magazines and scientific journals. She would solve the mystery of orchid pollination that had bewildered even Darwin, earn the acclaim of international scientists and, in 1949, become the first woman to be awarded the Australian Natural History Medallion. She was ‘Australia’s greatest orchid expert’, ‘foremost of our women naturalists’, a woman who ‘needed no introduction’.

  And yet, today, Edith Coleman has faded into obscurity. How did this remarkable woman, with no training or connections, achieve so much so late in life? And why, over the intervening years, have her achievements and her writing been forgotten?

  Zoologist and award-winning writer Danielle Clode sets out to uncover Edith’s story, from her childhood in England to her unlikely success, sharing along the way Edith’s lyrical and incisive writing and her uncompromising passion for Australian nature and landscape.

  The WASP

  and the

  ORCHID

  THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF

  AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST

  EDITH COLEMAN

  DANIELLE CLODE

  Contents

  Cover

  About The Wasp and the Orchid

  Dedication

  Extracts by Edith Coleman

  Family tree

  Chapter 1: Edith Coleman of Walsham

  Chapter 2: The blackbird’s song is in her blood

  Chapter 3: Ships that pass

  Chapter 4: A teacher of great promise

  Chapter 5: Marriage among the flowers

  Chapter 6: Maternal devotion

  Chapter 7: Down to busyness

  Chapter 8: A perfect partnership

  Chapter 9: Across the continent

  Chapter 10: Fairy tales from nature

  Chapter 11: The most interesting race on earth

  Chapter 12: One of us

  Chapter 13: Come back in wattle time

  Chapter 14: Winter visitors to a Blairgowrie cottage

  Epilogue

  Images

  Acknowledgements

  Endnotes

  Index of names

  Index of species

  List of images

  Copyright page

  To my family for their support and inspiration: especially my grandparents and my parents but most of all to Mike, Lauren and Rachel

  Extracts by Edith Coleman

  ‘A garden wilderness: Old-fashioned favourites and familiar friends’, by Edith Coleman, 1929

  ‘Wind in the willows: Nature’s Æolian harps’, by Edith Coleman, 1930

  ‘Ships that pass: Fascination of Point Lonsdale’, by Edith Coleman, 1931

  ‘Forest orchids, Flowers of winter and spring’, by Edith Coleman, 1926

  ‘Fishy, maybe, but what a father!’, by E. C. Walsham, 1936

  ‘Some social insects: A caterpillar company – defensive tactics’, by E.C., 1929

  ‘Some autumn orchids’, by (Mrs.) E. Coleman 1922

  ‘Wasps and orchids: A remarkable partnership’, by E. C., 1927

  ‘A silent sentinel of the coast: Cape Leeuwin lighthouse’, by Edith Coleman, 1931

  ‘The poetry of earth: Return of the flowers’, by Edith Coleman, 1931

  ‘Magic rain carpets the “Inland”: Many and brave are the flowers of the inland – blooms of a “desert” that is no desert’, by Edith Coleman, 1938

  ‘A forest huntress: The praying mantis – her beauty, her skill and her way with lovers’, by Edith Coleman, 1935

  ‘Flowers of the eucalypt: A source of national pride’, by Edith Coleman, 1930

  ‘Winter visitors to a Blairgowrie cottage’, by Edith Coleman, 1951

  Chapter 1

  EDITH COLEMAN OF WALSHAM

  ‘If you love trim, tidy gardens in which roses grow as they are bid, my wilderness will make no appeal to you, for in it the roses long since took advantage of my pronounced dislike of the secateurs and wandered out of bounds. But if I lead them with a silken thread, as indeed I do, they reward my leniency with a wealth of colour and fragrance, and never were there sweeter roses than mine.’

  December 1942

  The roses are still blooming at Walsham, tumbling down tangled brambles in floral abundance. Fragrance floats on the viscous hum of insect industry, distilling under the searing sun. Crackle-dry leaf litter collects in the curving paths that meander, creek-like, between islands of marigolds and foxgloves, herbs and delphiniums. The shady lace of gum leaves drifts overhead, barely veiling the cloudless sky.

  For two young boys visiting their grandparents, the garden at Walsham is a wonderland. Few would realise what lies behind the impenetrable wall of pittosporum lining Blackburn Road. The plain paling fence, stained with Condy’s crystals and sump oil, reveals no secrets. But through the unassuming gate lies the loveliest garden you would ever see, a memory garden. A riot of perennials flourishes in every bed – salvias and borage beloved of bees and spinebills. For John, the cottage garden is ‘full of colour and scent – always something in bloom with lots of insects visiting’: fuchsias and petunias, hollyhocks and hydrangeas, wallflowers and roses. For other visitors there is a ‘profusion of shrubs: the myrrh, the cinnamon, the calamus, the lavender, the thyme, the balsams and the other herbs’.

  The turtle pond is Peter’s favourite. A white-ringed eye rises, unblinking, from beneath the dark surface. Here and there, water bowls and feeding trays fill with the raucous fluff of feathers and beaks. Gleaming dark Australorps proudly declare the delivery of each egg from the poultry run out back. You could never be entirely sure what new creature you might find in their grandmother’s garden. Resolute bees swarming in the apple tree have their city protected from rain by a groundsheet. Stickles and Prickles, the famed echidnas, and their various successors patrol the yard stretching along the southern fence. Museum jars and glassed boxes reveal mantids and grasshoppers. A section of closed-in verandah, occupied for years by the possums Bill Baillie and Mandy, now contains phasmids. A glass-fronted, two-storey ‘Mansion House’ might hold two, twenty or two hundred pink-tailed white mice. Cheerful flocks of colour-bred budgerigars sing in the night rains from aviaries along the fence. Fat-tailed dunnarts might emerge from the pebbles in a small crate, or a hidden nest box covered in grass might reveal a sleeping blue-tongue lizard. Even spiders are warmly welcomed in this house.

  To the north of the weatherboard bungalow, native eucalypts join the extensive fruit, herb and vegetable gardens that have taken over the tennis court where the boys’ mother and aunt once practised. The boys’ grandfather, James Coleman, empties the barrow of manure he is carting from the horse paddocks across the road into the big compost bins, adding to the piles of leaf litter and the mountains of clippings trimmed back from wayward plants. Their grandfather is usually found here, keeping their grandmother’s garden under control – tending, weeding, tidying and raking, when he’s not playing bowls or tinkering in the shed. A barely raised hand and a tilt of the head acknowledge the boys’ arrival. Peter runs to join him in the orchard of apples, plums and figs.

  It’s an acre of paradise on the outskirts of Melbourne, just south of the train line to Healesville. The ‘garden suburb’ of Blackburn is more rural than garden, more bush than park. Nonchalant gums lean over wood and wire fences, shading long quiet roads between haphazard houses scattered on quarter-acre blocks, horses and cat
tle grazing equably in between.

  As John and his mother Gladys head for the back door, Auntie Dorfie emerges from her studio by the back fence, tinkling the silver bell on the doorpost as she passes.

  ‘Time for cake?’ she asks, always ready with a supply of sweet treats and entertainment for her nephews. As they step inside, Dorothy hurries down the hall to close the door of the ‘Busyness’ Room. She puts one finger to her lips and smiles.

  The boys’ grandmother, the famous Mrs Edith Coleman, is hard at work and must not be disturbed.

  IN 1942, EDITH Coleman was at the height of her career. Internationally lauded as one of Australia’s leading naturalists, particularly in the study of orchids, Edith was a writer who ‘needed no introduction’. She wrote prolifically, not only for scientific journals, but also for newspapers and magazines. Her academic peers said her ‘name ought to be Darwin’ and praised her insights into the mysteries of orchid pollination, which had left many before her, including Darwin, bemused.

  England might have had its Gilbert White of Selborne, but Australia had its ‘Edith Coleman of Walsham’. Like White, Edith started her publication career late, at the age of 48. Like White, there is nothing in her past to indicate any particular talent or interest in nature or science. White was an English gentleman, with the usual pursuits of shooting and fishing, before he began his Natural History of Selborne and became England’s finest nature writer. Edith was a suburban housewife, with a brief experience of teaching, before appearing at her local Field Naturalists Club, impressing them with an authoritative exposition on orchids and swiftly becoming one of Australia’s leading orchidologists and nature writers.

  White and Coleman both emerged as writers without forewarning, without precedent – fully formed like crisp bright butterflies from an unremarkable chrysalis.

  Edith Coleman at Walsham, 1942

  Today, Blackburn Road is no longer a dusty track near the end of the train line but part of the inner suburban sprawl in a city of over three million people. I park in a nearby shopping centre and walk the short distance down to The Avenue, hoping to find the house once known as Walsham. Traffic thunders over black tarmac. Pacing my steps from one end of the street to the other, I try to identify the property boundaries marked on a 1933 Melbourne Metropolitan Water Board reticulation map. There is still a church on the corner, with traces of turn-of-the-century architecture. The neighbouring house is a tumbledown Federation weatherboard, with runners of couch grass erupting through the verandah and a long gravel driveway that leads to a tiny garage that seems too small for a car. The right era, but wrong house. The next block should be Walsham.

  I push back the leaves of the thick overgrown hedge. A patchwork of 1970s units fills the space with bricks and concrete. Walsham has gone, the once glorious garden divided up and built over, the grandsons grown up, having built careers and families of their own and now retired. There’s nothing left.

  ‘It is hard to think of her apart from that Blackburn garden,’ said her friend, Jean Galbraith, after Edith’s death, ‘with its trees and herbs and old roses, its birds among the fuchsias she had planted for them, its paddock of gums at one side.’

  I crush a handful of the leaves in disappointment, breathing in a pungent citrus scent. The hedge stretches along the street frontage, neatly clipped to head height. Beyond the reach of hedging shears, the shrubbery soars overhead in a great sweep, escaping clipped domesticity into rampant mature treehood. The trunks are thick and gnarled with age. It takes me a while to realise what I’m looking at. Walsham’s pittosporum hedge has survived.

  Along the back lane, more traces reveal themselves. Old fig trees and peppermint gums that would once have shaded Edith’s garden overhang the faded paling fence, with telltale gaps indicative of past garages and gates. The cluster of fashionable coffee shops and hairdressers at one end must occupy the former orchard and vegetable gardens. Surrounded by hard surfaces, the skyline is still dominated by the old ironbarks that may well have watched the earliest encroachments of European settlement. Despite so many changes the past leaves its imprint on the landscape.

  A reconstruction of Walsham

  Back in my car I organise my notes before leaving. The square red-brick building in front of me looks familiar. I need to leave, I have other places to go, but something makes me wait. I get out of the car and walk around to the front of the building. From this side I recognise it. The Field Naturalists Club of Victoria has been housed here since 1995, the modern home of the very organisation where Edith first launched her career, in 1922. Twenty-seven years later she would become the first woman to be awarded the Australian Natural History Medallion for her outstanding work.

  I came here nearly fifteen years ago, long before I knew where Edith lived, searching their archives for her papers. And that paper trail has led me right back to where I started.

  Edith’s garden may have been lost, but I can’t help thinking how appropriate it is that the organisation to which she devoted so much time is now located just down the lane. Without the welcome of clubs like the Field Naturalists, people like Edith – women, mothers, farmers, hobbyists, amateurs, enthusiasts and local experts – would have struggled to contribute to science and the public debate on the environment and conservation. How much poorer science would have been – we would have been – without them.

  It is comforting to think that Edith’s legacy lives on, just over her former back fence. This building houses the written records of her life’s work: more than 150 notes and articles that she wrote for the Victorian Naturalist over her career – five a year. These are the papers that ensure she is still remembered by a handful of scientists and naturalists who cite her work in their own papers.

  The articles in a small regional journal like the Victorian Naturalist are now accessed electronically, via citation databases. In the past they were distributed physically, new editions circling the globe in a trade between international learned societies. In this way, some of Edith’s discoveries were read by overseas scientists, republished, discussed and debated in international journals and meetings. She wrote for the Journal of Botany, Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London and Australian Zoology. These papers are indexed, databased, recorded and cited. Archived and accessible.

  But much of Edith’s other writing is, like her garden, more ephemeral. I have a photocopy of a handwritten list from these archives, of other papers she published in The Age and The Argus and The Australian Woman’s Mirror. These papers may well have been read by more people, shaped more people’s attitudes than all her scientific work combined, and yet they are all but lost now, undocumented and difficult to locate. Not all libraries archive newspapers and very few keep copies of popular magazines. Almost no-one indexes their contents.

  Edith’s writing reminds me of a time when we perhaps had a closer connection with nature. She inspired the children who grew up to become the vanguard of the modern conservation movement. She mentored a new generation of better-known nature writers – like Jean Galbraith and Rica Erickson. Through her work we can renew our acquaintance with our ‘lost’ nature-writing history. Her insights provide us with a uniquely immigrant connection with our landscape – one that was not rigidly prescriptive about ‘native species’ yet bore sad witness to the changes wrought to our ecosystems, a view that was unapologetically poignant and yet scrupulously scientific, a vision both literary and artistic, as well as critical and analytic.

  I first heard of Edith Coleman in the basement of the Museum of Victoria. Under the exhibition spaces where a thousand schoolchildren shrieked and shushed lay a labyrinth of darkened corridors, vaulted rooms of open shelving, locked cabinets and assorted drawers. Strange objects piled in corners, too big for cabinetry, covered in plastic, awaiting resurrection. Every now and again, a distant light shone from a doorway. At a cluster of desks beneath a high window, between swollen filing cabinets, sat the curators, the research scientists and the collection managers, tasked
with bringing order and knowledge to centuries of collected, and sometimes chaotic, specimens.

  My task, my first full-time job as a fresh young biology graduate, was to document the research of the natural history collections, to help with exhibition development. I needed to talk to curators, unravel the stories, identify themes and try to weave them into some kind of coherent narrative. The assignment was daunting but thrilling. The corridors echoed with stories famous and unknown, every one of them winding back and forth through time and place, around specimens and objects, in and out of history.

  Edith Coleman of Walsham was one of those stories.

  I spent half a day talking to Ken Walker, the curator of invertebrates. Pollination dominated our conversation: the shapes of bird tongues, the leg hairs of native bees, bee diversity, sociality and conservation, the symbiotic relationships between pollinators and their hosts. My head buzzed with raw material and I wondered how I could ever distil it into a few thousand words.

  ‘And then there is Edith Coleman,’ Ken mentioned in passing, just as I was leaving. ‘From the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria. She discovered pseudocopulation.’

  Pseudocopulation – who could resist a word like that? A pollination strategy whereby a plant mimics a sexually receptive insect, thereby tricking male insects into mating with it. Animal sex as a vehicle for plant reproduction, common in orchids. It sounded like something from an H. G. Wells story.

  My work at the museum led to a book, but the pollination essay didn’t make the final cut. Even so, I couldn’t let Edith Coleman go. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it was about her writing, her research or her life that appealed to me, but something kept drawing me back.

  I wrote a paper about Edith’s research for the Victorian Naturalist – the journal she had published in. She studied more than just pseudocopulation. She is still cited today as an authority on not only orchid pollination, but also on echidnas, mistletoe, stick insects, spiders and birds. I kept a folder of resources on her and toyed with the different ways I could tell her story. She joined my list of women of science – overlooked and underappreciated. I noticed her absence in discussions of Australian nature writing and puzzled over why people seemed to think that Australia lacked a history of nature writers when I had read so many.