‘Like a good deed in a naughty world’: gardens on the
Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia
Andrea Gaynor
History, The University of Western Australia
[email protected]
At a time when several mainland capitals face the prospect of severe water
shortages within a decade, and accusing fingers are pointed at thirsty
domestic gardens, Australians are being urged to abandon conventional
approaches to gardening in favour of ‘water wise’ ones. In this context, there
is much to be gained by an increased understanding not only of why people in
Australia garden, and why they choose to garden as they do, but also of the
range of possibilities for gardens in Australian landscapes. An historical study
of gardens - and their absence - in the Eastern Goldfields region of Western
Australia contributes to such understandings, not least through the stories of
longing, adaptation and attachment that emerge from settler responses to the
problem of gardening in a context of water scarcity.
The stories I am concerned with here are all tied, in one way or another,
to the discovery of gold in Western Australia at Coolgardie in 1892 and
Hannan’s (later Kalgoorlie) in 1893. As news of the discoveries spread,
fortune-seekers flocked to the area. At first they set up camp in tents or tin
huts, but soon many sought more permanent dwellings, and houses - even if
still clad with tin or canvas - began to appear in the streets of the main
settlements. Gardens, however, presented a greater challenge, as
conventional English-style gardening was impracticable in the goldfields
environment. Rainfall in the region may vary significantly from year to year,
with prolonged dry spells fairly common, though the long-term annual average
is around 260mm. Average evaporation is over 2.5m per year occurring
mainly from November to February, when hot, dry winds blow from the north
and northeast, often taking temperatures above 40 degrees. There is very
little surface water, and much of that is saline. South of Kookynie, the
groundwater is generally saline or even hypersaline, and thus useless for
either drinking or gardening.
Prior to the rush, the area was covered by open eucalypt and acacia
woodland, interspersed with low shrubland. As such, it was hardly a ‘desert’. It
was, however, subject to water scarcity. As the population increased, water
was sought in small dams and gnamma holes, or carted in - first via camel
and later by train. Tanks were another solution, though they proved to be both
expensive and inefficient. More water was sourced from condensed saline
groundwater: an ingenious solution in some ways, but the condensers – like
the mines – were hungry for fuel, and ultimately contributed to clearing of the
surrounding woodland.1 This deforestation exacerbated the harshness of the
environment, and probably also increased the amount and mobility of dust, as
the surface of the soil was further exposed to the wind. To the extent that
newcomers to the goldfields encountered a ‘desert’, it was a recent human
creation.
In the Victorian gold rush towns of Ballarat, Castlemaine and Bendigo,
public and private gardens were a source of considerable pride, representing
as they did the transformation of wilderness to paradise, and the ‘progress
and achievement of the inhabitants’.2 In the eastern goldfields of Western
Australia, similar desires could not be fulfilled, in any conventional way, until
the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme reached Kalgoorlie in 1903, bringing
water 552km uphill, via a pipeline and pumping stations, from Mundaring weir
in the hills east of Perth. On the 60th anniversary of the scheme’s completion,
the state Public Works Department assured West Australians that the ‘lawns,
trees, shrubs and attractive beds of perennials and annuals’ found in
Kalgoorlie’s Victoria Park and Kingsbury Park provided ‘a welcome and
necessary retreat from the arid landscape of the Goldfields’3 But how then did
residents cope with the landscape prior to the arrival of the pipeline and in
areas that remained beyond its reach? And more specifically, were
conventional ideas about the role and function of the garden modified in this
environment?
For some, a garden was a luxury they could not afford, and learned to do
without. For many single men in particular, days were filled with work, and rest
and recreation were found in the hotel, the racecourse and the street. If they
felt any need for greenery, it was met by the occasional picnic outing, or left
unsatisfied. Perhaps surprisingly, some found that their aesthetic wants could
be met by the mining landscape after sunset. Earnest Allnutt, visiting
Coolgardie in 1896, remarked that:
To sit after Dinner enjoying a smoke and a cup of coffee and have
before you a view of most of the Town and the surrounding gold mines,
interspersed with water condensing plants, which work day and night
and are very numerous, was to me most pleasant and very attractive.4
Residents of the wildflower country around Leonora also found beauty in
the landscape, even recognising it as garden-like. For Jean McGrath, arriving
in 1901 as an 8-year-old, ‘Leonora was the most beautiful place you could
wish to see. There were miles of beautiful Sturt peas; yellow and white
everlastings and flowers of every colour. They grew right up to mother’s back
door.’5 Similarly, in 1931, Bert Fawcett wrote to his family that at Sturt
Meadows station near Leonora, ‘All the wild flowers are in bloom and the
whole country looks like a garden’.6 Here, the conceptual division between
garden and nature was blurred, if not entirely abandoned: the landscape had
many of the qualities of a garden, but appeared to lack an element of
cultivation or artifice.
The boundaries between garden and bush were also blurred for Trixie
Edwards, who arrived with her family in Yundamindra, south-east of Leonora,
in the mid-1930s. There, they had a very limited supply of water, having to
cart it 10 miles from the nearest soak. Their mud and stone house apparently
didn’t have a garden around it, though their ‘garden’ was, in a sense,
distributed throughout the district. Trixie’s mother grew some vegetables mostly greens - down at the station tank, but Trixie and her siblings also ‘knew
every quandong tree in the district’, and in season would collect quandongs
as well as the young fruit of a climbing plant, called ‘silky pears’.7 For
entertainment, they would go walking in the bush, looking for flowers, fruit, or
clumps of Sturt desert peas. Although it is not clear whether they attempted to
manage the plants they encountered in the bush, the wild flowers and food
plants seemed to have formed part of a continuum with the vegetable garden;
if the bush was not, strictly speaking, a garden space, perhaps it was an
effective garden substitute.
In the more densely-populated settlements, where the woodland shaped by
Aboriginal practices had been cleared, there was less potential for seeing and
treating the surrounds as a garden. Environmental philosopher Isis Brook has
pointed to evidence that plants (in a generic sense) have a positive effect on
human well-being. She has also argued that particular, familiar plants play an
important role in helping migrants establish relationships with new places, as
they constitute a living, interactive connection with the old ‘home’
environment, and are themselves responding to the new place.8 Certainly,
some goldfields settlers seemed to need plants around them, but given the
lack of water, it was not possible to substantially re-create gardens from
previous homes. Instead, different plants - and fewer - were made to stand in
for more conventional, substantial gardens, satisfying psychological and
practical needs, and performing similar symbolic functions.
Many of those on the goldfields recoiled from an alien landscape.
Catherine Bond, a well-to-do English woman visiting the Goldfields as part of
a grand tour in 1896, was struck by the lack of vegetation around Coolgardie:
‘not a tree, not a shrub, not a blade of grass; always brown sand.’9 She
empathised with those who came just to make a fortune, then leave the dust
and sand forever ‘as soon as they have made their “pile”’.10 Similarly, Louie
Ware, writing for the Williamstown Advertiser, lamented that ‘On the
goldfields, everything is glaring and crude. No soft, lingering shadows, no
variety of coloring in the landscape, no greenness to rest the eye’. He missed
not only the ‘green fields’ of his Victorian home-land, but also the willows,
bush grass, and ‘cool, thick, rose-covered walls of the homestead, surrounded
by the tall, straight gum trees’.11 Some responded to this absence by making
micro-gardens; slivers of green on which to rest -- however precariously -- the
imagination. Margaret Edis recalled that as a child growing up in Kalgoorlie,
‘The only plant we had was a little tin of water witch and we used to sneak a
little drink for it every now and then.’12 Louie Ware himself, in a testament to
the potential intensity of the desire for plant life, wrote of
The pathos of the carrot-top in its saucer of water upon the window-sill,
and the basin with the tender shoots of wheat, which an uncontrollable
craving has caused one to grow in water. With what tender hands we
caress its frail, green, spikey leaves; how lovingly we press its cool
freshness to burning cheek - and the pathos of it all lies too deep for
tears. And the agony, and the passion of longing for wide greenfields
[sic] and cooling pebbly streams can never be expressed.’13
Some residents in more favourable, settled circumstances used
wastewater to cultivate small outdoor gardens of drought-tolerant trees,
shrubs and vines. One goldfields woman remembered that ‘despite the
scarcity of water Mother always managed to have a small garden - hardy
plants like dolichos creeper and geraniums. Every drop of used water went on
to the garden’.14 Goldfields forest ranger Charles A. White, a collector for
Baron von Mueller, encouraged residents to plant pepper trees and sugar
gums, offering in 1895 to distribute seeds of these species ‘to any one who
will promise to look after them till the plants are strong enough to resist the
droughts’.15 The pepper tree - a fast-growing drought-tolerant species now
seen as a potential ecological pest – seemed a godsend to goldfields
gardeners, and nurtured for rapid growth. Alicia Pell recalled that ‘our usual
method of bathing was to use a small basin of water to wash in and then pour
it over our body in the form of a shower catching it in a hip bath. Later it
succoured the precious plant or pepper tree.’ On arriving in Kalgoorlie in
1896, Pell had been dismayed by the ‘red red soil very cracked and sun
baked, and men’s camps dumped down anywhere, higgledy piggledy’ but
noted that ‘Occasionally one saw a very tidy camp even with a weary pepper
tree beside it, which stood out like a good deed in a naughty world.’ 16 Her
choice of analogy perhaps reflects a moral dimension attached to gardenmaking, as a symbol of settled domesticity that served to temper or balance
the unsettled, highly masculine landscape ravaged by mining.
Some also sought to supplement their diets from the garden, although
their efforts were not always successful. When the Turnbull family first arrived
in Gwalia (just south of Leonora) in 1912, they lived in a small house on a low
ridge overlooking the mine. Behind the house, their small back yard was
enclosed with filter cloth from the mine, to keep out goats and the dry wind.
The ridge was stony, with very little topsoil, so George Turnbull brought up
loads of red loam from nearby creek beds to form a layer of soil over the rock.
There was no water laid on to the Turnbulls’ house, so George would cart
water up from the mine in kerosene tins. Vegetables were the priority, given
the paucity of cheap, fresh produce, and the Turnbulls were able to grow
beetroot and peas during the winter, but it was hard work under such
conditions, and they only persevered with the garden for two or three
seasons, before turning instead to the Co-operative Store.17
Ranger White had plans for food production on a rather grander scale,
and by 1895 was busily planting carob beans in the districts around
Coolgardie.18 The Coolgardie Miner waxed lyrical about the carob tree,
approving of its potential as horse fodder, and its ability to ‘flourish and grow
fat and productive under circumstances which would cause a sheep-proof
wire fence to droop and weaken’. The carob was also elevated by virtue of its
place in scripture: the Miner pointed out that St John once lived in the desert
on carob beans and wild honey, and that carob beans were prized highly by
‘the ancients’ as food for stock and travellers in the desert. The bible was a
powerful source of desert imagery: when moving the Second Reading of the
Bill to authorise the construction of the pipeline to Coolgardie, Sir John Forrest
proclaimed: ‘it will be said of us, as Isaiah said of old, “They made a way in
the wilderness, and rivers in the desert”.’19 Others quoted further from Isaiah:
‘The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose’.20 Transformation of desert
into garden here formed part of a well-established narrative of redemption,
which perhaps constituted another lens through which goldfields gardening
could be viewed.21
One who seems to have had significant personal investment in making
gardens from the desert was Kalgoorlie Mayor H.G. Parsons. A graduate of
Oxford and lover of the classics, in 1897 he was undertaking ‘extensive lawn
and tree-growing experiments’, including the cultivation of a nursery of
‘vigorous young pepper trees’ at his property in the Kalgoorlie suburb of
Piccadilly. He also donated 100 grape vines for an experimental plantation.22
At this time the Council also asked the Conservator of Forests, J. Ednie
Brown, to suggest trees for planting in the recreation reserve and streets.23
Their intention in looking to plant street trees was probably not only to fulfil a
practical need for shade, but also to cultivate civic pride.
The Council was not the only party interested in making the desert
bloom. In 1898, Perth florists and seedsmen Messrs C.F. Newman & Son
sought to capitalise on, and further cultivate, interest in floriculture in
Kalgoorlie, sending a large consignment of trees, shrubs and flowers for
auction there. It included the ubiquitous pepper and sugar-gum trees, as well
as young Moreton Bay fig and kurrajong, miscellaneous climbing plants,
palms, oleanders, carnations, cannas, boronias, pittosporum, and a range of
hardy seedlings including pansies. The varieties were said to have been
selected for their likely suitability for the district, though ferns and orchids were
probably included on the basis of their appeal to the fashionable or the
nostalgic.24
However, not all garden plants were imported - or rather, not all were
imported great distances. The residents of Coolgardie had noticed an
attractive shrub growing in the vicinity, and discovered that if removed in
winter it transplanted well. Growing to around 6 feet in height, and ‘sporting an
abundance of lilac-coloured, tulip-formed flowers’, it was locally dubbed the
‘Coolgardie Tulip’. By 1898, several of the town’s leading citizens had
cultivated this plant in their front gardens.25 The plant was also of interest to
the scientific community: J.G. Luchmann, curator of the Victorian National
Herbarium, asked to be supplied with some of its seeds, and Ranger White
sent pressed specimens to England, France, Germany, America, and
botanical societies elsewhere.26 Known then as Hibiscus (or Fugosia)
Haekaefolius, it is almost certainly the plant we know today as Alyogyne
hakeifolia. The Kalgoorlie Miner described the shrub as ‘one of the most
handsome indigenous shrubs we have for cottage gardens’, and noted with
satisfaction that ‘if properly attended to for the first few months (it being
indigenous) will successfully resist all droughts and changes of weather’. 27
For cottage gardeners in Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, the emphasis was
not so much on re-creating a landscape in the image of the ‘old country’, as it
was for some in Ballarat,28 but on meeting cultural and physiological needs for
shade, food, greenery and beauty, as well as conveying that sense of
domestic order that formed part of Victorian notions of civilized living.
Necessity saw drought tolerance given preference over nostalgia in plant
selection, although it may be that settlers gained most satisfaction from
species that were familiar, or reminiscent of familiar species: if they saw
echoes of willows in pepper trees, and Dutch tulips in Coolgardie ones,
perhaps such plants formed a living connection between old homes and new.
There are few sources that now provide first-hand evidence of the way in
which late nineteenth-century goldfields residents created and thought of their
gardens, but one such source is the journal of Maude Wordsworth James.
Maude and her two youngest children – Tristram and Yolande – moved to
Kalgoorlie in 1897 to join her husband Charles, a civil engineer. After a short
stint in a rented house in town, the family moved to the new suburb of
Mullingar, a block of 16 ‘residence areas’ with a ‘touch of the country’ about it.
At Mullingar, Maude noted, there was ‘more green than one would expect, in
consequence of the few trees there are being jealously guarded by the
Mullingarites’.29 The trees helped to reduce the dust, and formed the nuclei
around which gardens were created. The garden around the James’s canvas
home was a co-production, in which the children were very much involved.
Maude wrote:
Tristram is the gardener-in-chief, Yolande, herself the fairest flower - is
his assistant - And I am their chosen companion and put enthusiasm
into all their little plans for the improvement of the camp and its
surroundings. We wander about with baskets, securing quartz and
crystals from various leases, and adorning the grounds with them…
The trees on our area are cherished, and all have been christened with
due ceremony. Lady Maude is a gumtree with a gravelled walk leading
to it, a box turned upside down for a table under it, and a few chairs,
and some afternoon tea things which Tris gave me and which are in
frequent demand. In fact it is my only reception room. And with the
clear blue sky above us as a panoramic ceiling, the terracotta earth for
a carpet, which to the artistic eye forms a pretty scheme of colouring,
the white quartz stones we have collected all around and the green
Australian gums in the distance – What can one wish for more?30
In addition to the native trees, the garden contained a ‘she-oak sort of shrub’
that doubled as a Christmas tree, a Boronia, grape vines and passion fruit
cuttings. It was also home to their trio of West Australian parrots, which
constantly attracted wild relatives from the surrounding bush.
Maude and the children spent much of their time outdoors, interviewing
Dryblowers or ‘going in search of plants for the garden’. She wrote: ‘I often sit
outside and glory in the freedom from conventionality’. Maude showed,
however, some ambivalence towards the landscape. On the one hand , she
Fig 1: View of Maude’s garden at Mullingar, c.1899 [Courtesy Battye Library]
found ‘far more poetry in a goldfields life than one would at first suppose’, but
on the other, she missed Tasmania, and regretted that there was ‘little to
make us forget that we live in the midst of a desert’.31 She was a well-read
and imaginative woman, and her garden, though not conventionally
picturesque or beautiful, appears to have been especially valued as a means
by which to connect her family with historical and fictional worlds. In addition
to ‘Lady Maude’, the trees were named after writers, family, or historical
figures: Lord Bandon, Edna Lyall, The Poet Crabbe, Wordsworth, Saint Cyril
(after her eldest son), Sir Tristram and Prince Charlie. Particularly when the
children were young, the garden served as a springboard for imagination: they
hung stories from the trees, and wrote letters in their shade. After the sudden
death of her daughter Yolande, Maude continued to garden: in 1901, thanks
to ice plants and pepper trees, she was able to maintain ‘a goodly amount of
green’, and with stocks and migionette, as well as ‘the bush flowers’, she kept
her ‘camp adorned quite prettily’, and gave many flowers to friends as well. 32
Here, the garden was serving more conventional, pragmatic purposes. When
water from the pipeline became available, her garden took on a more
conventional form, with neat lawns and leafy shrubs.
Fig 2: Maude’s garden at Mullingar, c.1907 [Courtesy Battye Library]
Returning then to our key question, what can this brief survey of people and
plants in the goldfields tell us about the modification of conventional ideas of
the role and function of gardens in waterless lands? Many had come to the
goldfields to make money, not gardens, and although the lack of greenery
many have been regretted, there were few opportunities in the daily round for
working men and women to make good the deficit. Some found themselves in
areas of apparently natural beauty or abundance, and recognised their
garden-like qualities: for a fortunate few, some of the traditional functions of
the garden - as a source of beauty and food - were performed by the bush
around their homes. Others, living in less favourable circumstances, appear to
have found it psychologically difficult to cope in a dusty, arid environment
without some recourse to the softness and greenery of a garden. Some found
a substitute in the microcosm of a potplant or tray of wheatgrass. Others
sought out hardy species – including indigenous ones - and nurtured them
with wastewater.
Camp and cottage gardens, even if sparse, could be read as potent
symbols of settled domesticity and a civilised life, and may have invoked
biblical narratives of redemption. It appears likely that the traditional role of the
garden as a signifier of class status was maintained, perhaps amplified, in a
context in which water was expensive: only the elite were in a position to
invest in the creation of a garden on all but the smallest scale. Even these
people, however, were prepared to rationally reassess traditional ideas about
the appropriate content of the cottage garden, finding drought-tolerant
species, including indigenous ones, to enable them to approximate
conventional garden forms. This was a form of adaptation that was all but
terminated by the arrival of the Mundaring water. Thereafter, gardening
enthusiasts could cultivate lawns and more delicate species in defiance of the
desert: indeed, they were playing a part in redeeming it. Perhaps the most
interesting example of a modified role for the garden in a waterless land is
Maude’s whimsical garden at Mullingar. Comprised as much of stories and
dreams as plants and rocks, it was an unconventional garden for a ‘picnic kind
of life’,33 and provided a means by which she could both escape from, and
connect with, the arid goldfields landscape. In alien surroundings, the desire
to garden can be strongly felt, yet evoke creative responses within
environmental constraints.
Acknowledgements
This research would not have been possible without the assistance of Jane Davis, who
introduced me to Maude’s wonderful journal; Criena Fitzgerald, who provided me with a copy
of her interview with Trixie Edwards (undertaken as part of a project coordinated by Dr Pat
Bertola [Curtin] and Dr Pamela Sharpe [UWA] and funded under the WA 175th Anniversary
Grants Scheme); and Nicole Crawford, who assisted me with the preliminary research.
1
The human and environmental dimensions of this deforestation are examined by Bill
Bunbury, Timber for Gold: Life on the Goldfields Woodlines, 1899-1965, Fremantle Arts
Centre Press, Fremantle, 1997.
2
Suzanne R. Hunt, ‘Vegetable Plots and Pleasure Gardens of the Victorian Goldfields’, in Iain
McCalman, Alexander Cook and Andrew Reeves (eds), Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost
Objects of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p.276.
3
Pubic Works Department, Goldfields Water Supply Scheme: Commemorative ceremony ...
to mark the 60th anniversary of the official opening of the scheme at Coolgardie and
Kalgoorlie, Perth, The Department, 1963, p.16.
4
Earnest Allnutt, A Trip to the WA Goldfields, ca. 1897-1898 [manuscript], ACC 2533A,
Battye Library, Perth.
5
Jean McGrath, interviewed by Colin Puls, OH170, Battye Library, Perth, 1976, p.2.
6
Bert Fawcett, Letters to Home: Reflections of Rural Life in the 1920s, Geraldton, Anthea
Kalazich, 2000, p.60.
7
Trixie Edwards, interviewed by Criena Fitzgerald, 2003. The quandong is Santalum
acuminatum, and the silky pears are from Leichardtia australis.
8
Isis Brook, ‘Making Here Like There: Place Attachment, Displacement and the Urge to
Garden’, Ethics, Place and Environment, vol.6, no.3, 2003, pp.227-234.
9
Catherine Bond, Goldfields and Chrysanthemums, London, Simpkin, Marshall, 1898, p.24.
10
ibid., p.33.
11
Louie C. Ware, ‘Life on a Westralian Gold-field’, Part III. Williamstown Advertiser, 22
February 1908.
12
Margaret Dorothy Edis, interviewed by Victoria Hobbs and Shelley Gare, OH 96, Battye
Library, Perth, nd., p.2
13
Louie C. Ware, ‘Life on a Westralian Gold-field’, Part III. Williamstown Advertiser, 22
February 1908.
14
Kalgoorlie Tales & Verse, Kalgoorlie, F.A.W. Goldfields Branch, 1984.
15
Coolgardie Miner, 3 January 1895, p.2.
16
Alicia Pell, Reminiscences, 1897 [manuscript], Acc 676A, Battye Library, Perth.
17
Colin Turnbull, interviewed by Michael Adams, OH 406, Battye Library, Perth, 1980-82,
p.15.
18
Coolgardie Miner, 29 April 1898, p.6.
19
WAPD, 21 July 1896, p.151.
20
‘Desert or Garden?’, Desert Echo, December 1915.
21
although the desert also appeared in a positive light in the bible, as a place of prayer and
purification.
22
Kalgoorlie Miner, 10 April 1897, p.6.
23
Kalgoorlie Miner, 26 January 1897, p.2. He replied that sugar gums, pepper trees, tamarisk,
robinia, various pinus and acacias, white cedar, cork elm, and kurrajong would all be
appropriate.
24
Kalgoorlie Miner, 26 May 1897, p.4.
25
Kalgoorlie Miner, 9 December 1898, p.4. The leading citizens included Dr Swanston and
the wives of attorney and mine manager A.P. Wymond and Warden John Finnerty.
26
As it happened, the plant was already known to science, having been collected by Robert
Brown in 1802: Colleen Keena, ‘Alyogyne: An update’, Australian Plants Online, no.28, 2002,
farrer.riv.csu.edu.au/ ASGAP/APOL28/dec02-1.html
27
Kalgoorlie Miner, 9 December 1898, p.4. Eventually, this species was bred for cultivation
and is now available to gardeners in Europe, the UK and USA, although being less easy to
grow, it is not as popular as its close relative Alyogyne huegelii.
28
Hunt, p.272.
29
Maude Wordsworth James, Scrapbooks, 1897-1907 [manuscript], Acc 4793A, Battye
Library, Perth, p.12.
30
ibid., p.16.
31
ibid., p.78.
32
ibid., p.186.
33
ibid., p.182.