Looking for something to read?

I know that some people like their blog-reading world organised into tidy categories, and so when you visit this blog you get lots of gardening content (although I do often veer off course and end up in the kitchen, cooking, or other times travelling with Pammy). Well, for this posting I really want to get away from my mainstream interests and tell you about a little thread of reading that all came about as a spin-off from another of my part-time hobbies, doing family history research.

My interest in my relatives and descendants started off as a common garden variety interest of collecting names, dates, long lost uncles and aunties, discovering where my grandparents and great grandparents came from. It has all been wonderful fun, and what has really kept my interest in the topic bubbling along have been the stories, the social history, the completely different times in which all my forebears lived.

In my case that interest in people's stories took me deep into colonial Australia. I've spent countless hours at a wonderful website called Trove, which is part of the National Library of Australia. At Trove, you can read every page of what seems like every newspaper ever published in Australia, since European settlement began. I don't think that's strictly true, as they are constantly adding new newspapers, magazines and other source materials, but it's already breathtakingly comprehensive in its range.

And so I've been reading newspapers from the 1820s, the 1850s, the 1920s etc and finding stories aplenty about my relatives and forebears. 

And so as a spin-off I have been recently reading stories of 19th-century Australia, and I thought I'd mention a few books that I've really enjoyed, just in case you're looking for something to read, or perhaps spot the cover in a secondhand bookshop somewhere and decide to give it a go. And at the end of this posting is a brand new book, published just yesterday, that I want to read next.

First up, 'The Convict's Daughter", by historian Kiera Lindsey. It's a true story, and I must admit that many of my favourite historians are women (my all-time favourite is Barbara Tuchman). I think it's their eye for the telling human detail that makes them a cut above a lot of men writing history. Set in the 1840s, this is a mildly "racy" story involving elopements, an angry dad with a gun, a wayward son with a powerful family, a court case that was THE court case of its day: an abduction trial, as the eloping girl, madly-in-love Mary Ann Gill, was just 15 years old. It was published by Allen & Unwin in 2016, so I'd look for it in a secondhand store or online.

Starting to see a pattern here? Female historian again, this time Carol Baxter. True story of the biggest bank heist of its time (1828). Fourteen Thousand Pounds, which you can imagine was a squillion back then. And it was stolen by ex-convicts from the bank of the well-heeled toffs, the Bank of Australia, not the people's bank (the Bank of NSW). So everyone who wasn't a toff was delighted by the news and the police had a hard time finding out who did it, or what happened to the money. That's the cover blurb version of what's good about this book, but it's the way Carol Baxter paints a portrait of several of these deeply incorrigibly dishonest convicts that stays with you. This one is an older book which I found in a secondhand bookstore, published in 2008, and that's where you might find it too.

Just to balance out my sexist bias a bit, two more books from the era, both by men. On the left, from 2007, Love and the Platypus, a novel about a naturalist in the Australian bush in the 1880s, trying to find out how platypus reproduce, and in the process discovering a lot about the local Aboriginal people, and meeting a young blind woman with some secrets of her own.

Mr Darwin's Shooter is a novel based on the real life of Charles Darwin's assistant/manservant, Syms Covington, who ended up in Australia as the postmaster in Pambula, on the NSW South Coast. This is a different view of both Darwin, how Darwin worked, and what the times were like.

Both books aren't recent publications, so secondhand stores and online shops are your only options.

Finally, and what has partly prompted this diversion away from broccoli, frangipanis and all things gardening, is a book I haven't had the chance to read yet, but which I plan to order, as it was only published yesterday. Another female Australian historian, this time Sarah Luke (a relative of mine, not sure how you describe a cousin's daughter? is that a second or third cousin?).

Here in Sydney the battle to save Callan Park, an extensive hospital facility on the shores of an arm of Sydney Harbour, has been a heritage campaign that has been waged for many years. The grounds are extensive, beautiful and the buildings historic. And for real estate developers who don't care a fig about such things, the whole complex at Callan Park is a goldmine that will finance their tacky yachts and mansions. 

Setting that important heritage issue aside for a moment, Sarah Luke's book, whose full title is "Callan Park, Hospital for the Insane" goes back to the original files to explore the extraordinary lives of not only the troubled patients, but also the staff whose job it was to help them. The original facility built in the late 19th century was a remarkably progressive place, too, as it included cricket pitches, a farm, an orchard and even a zoo. I want to find out more about it, now I know there is a well-researched new book on the topic.

This is a brand new book, released this week, so visit the website to find out more about it and, if you like, place an order. Go to http://www.scholarly.info/book/624/

Book review: The Unusual Life of Edna Walling

Australians don't need to be told about the current voting happening nationwide on the topic of marriage equality. From early reports and opinion polls, it looks like a healthy majority (60% or more) of us will say "Yes" to the idea of making marriage equality the law, as I did.

Haven't we come a long way as a society, at least in this regard? It was only a generation or two ago that the topic of same-sex sex was virtually taboo. As for same-sex marriage, it would have been too radical a concept for most.

Why am I discussing gay people in my gardening blog? Why not? There are millions of wonderful gay gardeners but there's a special reason for raising the topic this time. I'm doing a book review.

I've just finished reading Sara Hardy's biography of the remarkable garden designer, Edna Walling, a person who the average modern reader would happily accept as a wonderful gay gardener, but who because of the taboos of her time kept her private life to herself.

From the moment you see the cover then flick through the photos inside, a modern reader would probably see a familiar gay female persona. 

This is one of the sub-plots coursing through all 266 pages of this book. Would this same woman who felt most comfortable wearing trousers, kept her hair cut short, who smoked a pipe in the evenings and didn't conform to many conservative female norms, be out and proud these days? 

I suspect so, but we'll never know. However, from hints provided in the way she lived, from letters and surviving remembrances of her contemporaries, Edna Walling was certainly an unusual woman who achieved much in her time mostly through sheer hard work and ability, but also through force of personality and a determination to make it, despite it being a man's world.

I am sure she left a lasting impression on all who met her.

If you haven't heard of Edna Walling, that says something about the fleeting nature of fame. In her working years from the 1920s through to the late 1960s, she became Australia's leading garden designer, a very well-known name. She wrote best-selling books and countless magazine articles that gained their authority from the huge number of gardens she designed for clients ranging from the very rich and famous to lesser mortals who simply needed a good garden design.

For many years, and up to the current day, the fact that a home or property on the real estate market had an Edna Walling garden made it both more expensive and easier to get buyers interested.

The National Trust and Heritage Victoria have listed several Edna Walling gardens for preservation, including what must be her most extraordinary achievement: a whole village of cottages and gardens at Bickleigh Vale, near Mooroolbark, in Victoria.

At Bickleigh Vale, not content with just building her own cottage and garden, Edna went into serious debt to buy enough land to create a series of properties with Walling-designed gardens, complete with a carefully designed and planted winding country lane linking them all together. Her clever decision to make the sale of these properties subject to a caveat where she had a degree of control over extensions to the cottages and alterations to the gardens proved to be a valuable factor in creating the village over time.

For gardeners, there is plenty of detail to enjoy. I loved the chapters on Edna's early training at Burnley Horticultural College in Melbourne. Her early days at what was to become Bickleigh Vale village were lonely, hard slog. She built her own house out of local materials. It wasn't all straight and true and the roof leaked and had borers, but it was hers.

There are so many little stories within these pages that I know gardeners, and gardeners who see themselves as nature-lovers, will enjoy.

The author, Sara Hardy, has a conversational style that often makes it seem that she is telling you her latest story over a cup of tea. Her affection for Edna shines through, and the sections where she delves into Edna's personal life are handled with genuine respect blended with fascinated nosiness that stops short of descending into gossip.

This is not a new book. First published 12 years ago, it came to my hands via my wife Pam, who bought it earlier this year, read it, then handed it over to me. Hopefully if you are interested in a very good read about a thoroughly fascinating, original and notable Australian woman, it won't be hard to find. 


The Unusual Life of Edna Walling, by Sara Hardy
Published by Allen & Unwin, a Sue Hines Book, 2005
ISBN1741142296