Sara Hardy

To begin a biography with, “I was her once…” certainly arouses attention, not to mention the prospect of empathy. This biography leapt at me from the sales desk at the back of the room during the launch of Sylvia Martin’s Passionate Friends. Sara Hardy was actually there doing a double act with Sylvia reading some of Mary Fullerton’s poems. I picked it up because I was attracted to the cover, but I also thought my gardener wife might be interested. Like most people, I vaguely associated Edna Walling with flagstone paths and pergolas in cottagey bush gardens. But I knew next to nothing about her.

Having just glanced at the opening lines I was hooked, and that’s always a credit to the author. Sara Hardy’s Country Life views of Devon and Dartmoor allowed me to hear, and then feel comfortable, with her voice. She invites us to follow Edna on a garden photo shoot and then to events in Melbourne and encounters with intriguing and stylish women such as Alice Anderson and the tenacious Vida Goldstein. I’d already been introduced to Vida Goldstein by Sylvia Martin in Passionate Friends. Meeting her again, from a slightly different perspective, helped to give depth to this period of women’s struggles. Sara has an effective way of employing a kind of cinematic technique (used so well by Argentinian writer, Julio Cortazar) where a line, or eye, sinuously tracks the movement of its interest.

Returning to voice, either Sara’s empathy with Edna’s letters or her rhythmic Devonian Englishness has a presence ( awfully jolly) that I would normally find tiresome but here it seems appropriate. For example (death of dog Brian):

He was very old, and it was only to be expected, but it was awfully sad when it actually happened. He’d had a jolly good life…. p.161.

As well as the cinematic, Sara Hardy often employs the theatrical. She sets a stage and then plays out a scene with obvious relish, be it a fire, party, fund raising performances at Sonning (p.177) or just an interlude with a lost dog (p.225). This performative dimension again, seems entirely appropriate, given the way the book begins and ends with Sara being Edna. The final reveal (p.199) is literally masterful.

Edna’s longed-for English Village aesthetic is characterised (a sure sign of displacement) by the process of naming: Sonning, Bickleigh Vale. But so destructive is the power of this aesthetic (even today) with its associated crops and livestock that most of the Australia landscape has been significantly transformed, even devastated, by it. With often the best of intentions, English settlers (and gardeners) have presided over this destruction with a degree of arrogance (perhaps ignorance) only just beginning to be articulated by voices such as Charles Massy Call of the Reed Warbler and Peter Andrews Back from the Brink as well as Indigenous voices such as Victor Steffensen Fire Country. A significant dimension to the maintenance of this destructive aesthetic is the garden and the domination of nature that it has come to represent.

By the 1940s Edna Walling was beginning to grow out of what I would call her English settler arrogance. She was beginning to respect the native biota and appreciate the innate beauty of the natural bush. But despite her revelations and regrets about her earlier preference for planting exotics, as well as the limitations of native nurseries, I didn’t get the impression that she ever properly understood the diversity of Australian soils and conditions: that native plants belonging in one ecology can’t just be dropped into another, and how important it is to work with nature rather than try to control or dominate it. Perhaps I’ve misjudged her, but earlier in the book, I would have aligned myself with Joan Anderson (p.141) in my critique of a woman who planted mainly English and European species. Nevertheless, Edna was sensitive enough to express her rage at the destruction of Sydney (p.165) and Victorian bushland and to offer alternatives to the insensitive treatment of highways (p.171). She was also open to what Sara Hardy points out as a major revelation; the idea that native bushland could be perceived as a garden. By implication, there is humility in the understanding that it’s nature that is the gardener.

I don’t mind admitting that when we came across the wildfire garden on top of that mountain…tears rolled down…(p.207)

When it comes to lesbian sexuality, I’m disadvantaged (being male) but throughout this thread of books that I’ve been reading, leading one to another, it’s fascinating to glimpse the extent to which so many dimensions of sexuality are socially constructed. In this book, just as I’d begun to wonder about the extent to which Edna Walling was aware of the celebrated conjunction of ardent sexual desire and garden design, as embodied by Vita Sackville-West, Sara revealed the passionate note from Edna to Esmé. Understandably, Sara is excited by this discovery but for the first time, I felt like an intruder peering into a private space. To her credit, Sara leaves it at that.

It occurs to me that Edna Walling, like Sara Hardy, and like so many English and European women who (for different reasons) have made Australia home, ultimately, remain at heart – exotic species. Transplanted, yet deeply yearning for a more familiar landscape with its supporting microflora and seasonal predictability. Sadly, in my reading of this book, Edna Walling never found home. She spent her life trying to invoke it by recreating an imagined English village and landscape with names, colours and even (ironically) misplaced Australian plants.

I liked the design of this book, the cover, paper, font and the full-page, grey-scale illustrations, not to mention the use of fragments of Edna’s drawings. I was surprised to find an editorial lapse (grammar p. 135) and an annoying lack of caption contrast (p.130 and p.260). But these are minor irritations in an otherwise beautifully engaging and thoughtful book. Just as it occurred to me that it would be useful to have a list of Edna Walling gardens, I turned the page and there it was.… (altro)