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As well as writing her magazine column for the "Australian Home Beautiful" and producing four books, Walling had plans for several more books and wrote many letters to the editor. She contributed hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles to such publications as the "Australian Home Beautiful", "The Home", "The Australian Women's Mirror", "Woman's World", "The Bulletin", "The Australasian", "Walkabout", "The Adelaide Advertiser", "The Herald" and "The Age".

Card to Daphne [Pearson] and Mervyn [Davis]
Card to Daphne [Pearson] and Mervyn [Davis]
Typed Letter

Sir,
Surely the Government is not going to ruin its good name of being top dog where National Parks are concerned by proposing a highway where it will upset the ecology of the wild-life sanctuary at West Burleigh...

To the Editor, The Australian, Canberra, 20 September, 1971

 

Walling wrote heartfelt letters to many newspaper editors opposing unsavoury developments. Amongst other things, such letters deplored the plans for a car park and restaurant on top of Mt Dandenong, lobbied for native plants to be used at all Olympic sites in the lead up to the 1956 games, asked for preservation of Myall lakes as a National Park and agitated against the flooding of Lake Pedder in Tasmania and sand mining on Fraser Island in Queensland.

Sir,
May I suggest that if it is tourists that they are after, it might be as well not to emulate the Gold Coast, but to be different from it, and start strenuously protecting the native features that are left on the Sunshine Coast.

Too much of it has already been developed leaving us with bare sites on which to erect replicas of the Gold Coast, pseudo-Americanism.

Most of the charm of Maroochydore has already been ruined. Why in the world those superb and unique paper bark trees should have been illuminated along the river is something to wonder at...

To the Editor, The Australian, Canberra Conservation, 5 November, 1971

 

I say, can you imagine anything lovelier than that road where the deep green native cherries, the white trunked candlebark gums, the sweet bursaria and the wattles are growing?

Extract from unpublished manuscript, "And As For Gardening"

"Famous People" was an album Walling had planned. It is unknown if this was to have been offered for publication. The photographs that make up this album are held by the National Gallery of Victoria. Subjects include: Pastor Sir Douglas Nicholls (Aboriginal leader), Daphne Pearson (war heroine), Algarenoff (Russian ballet dancer), Herbert Moore (artist), Estelle Thompson (author), Father Kennedy Tucker and Esme Johnson, amongst others.

Moira Pye and Jean Galbraith

 

It is unfortunate that "Gardens in Australia" is out of print but I have submitted to Rigbys of Adelaide a further record of my work entitled "The Architecture of the Garden" and if this should be published it might perhaps be of some use to the Institute, one day.

Walling continued to write even after her popularity waned. She received many letters of rejection from publishers but continued in the hope that there was still some interest in her views. She would be gladdened by the continuing interest in her work and writings which has occurred since the 1990s.

With Love, from Edna
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