Seal's of Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land

The following advertisement appeared in the Hobart Town Courier on Saturday, January 5, 1850 (p. 4), and is a valuable reminder that Van Diemen’s Land continued to provide a reliable market for Regency gentlemen’s perquisites long after they had begun to go out of fashion at home:

ENGLISH SNUFFS
Just landed, and warranted Fresh and Genuine, at SEAL’s, LIVERPOOL-STREET, HOBART TOWN, consisting of—
Hardham’s No. 37
Prince’s mixture
Latakia
Old Cuba
Tonquin mixture
Brown and black rappee
Strasburg, black
Strasburg, red
High-dried Welsh, &c. &c.

According to Deliciae Literariae, A New Volume of Table-Talk (1840, pp. 55–56), Hardham’s No. 37 was named after John Hardham, “a native of Chichester, who died in the year 1772. He was bred to the employment of a lapidary or diamond-cutter; but abandoned that for the business of a tobacconist…The figures 37 seem to have been those which marked the number of his snuff-shop,” which was at the Red Lion, near Fleet Market in Fleet Street, London. 

The Prince’s mixture was naturally named after the Prince Regent, who was known to favor it—his mother, Queen Charlotte, having also come to be associated by name with her favorite line of snuff. 

Latakia is the name of the port city of Syria whence this variety of powdered tobacco ultimately came. 

Old Cuba is self-explanatory. 

Tonquin mixture is, in fact, a reference to the principal ingredient, i.e. the tonka bean. 

“Rappee” is derived from the French râpé (grated), and was a coarse, pungent snuff made from dark tobacco. 

Strasburg snuffs, meanwhile,—as opposed to Strasbourg—were sold in rather dandyish, not to say effeminate “Paris paper-boxes” (i.e. not tins), and by 1850 the comparatively cheap Welsh and Irish snuffs were known to be heavily adulterated with (inter alia) common peat, common salt, common starch, sawdust, fustic, extract of logwood, umber, sumach, chromate of lead, bi-chromate of potash, and various other ochreous earths.

Bark! Bark! Bark!

I have been scouring the rich corpus of advertisements in the Australian colonial press, ca. 1852–54, for answers to two particular questions relating to the sculptor Thomas Woolner’s extended visit to Melbourne, the Victorian goldfields, and Sydney, which covered that period: (a) Was there a reasonably competent local frame-maker active in either town? And (b) Where did Woolner buy the books he read on the voyage home—several of which are extremely interesting, and published only comparatively recently in London?

I am coming up with mixed results, but a by-product of this search is the discovery of some genuinely baffling notices in the advertising columns, such as the following two notices that appeared regularly in the Hobart Town Courier early in 1852—in this case on Saturday, February 21 (p. 4):

Ex RATTLER.
Looking-Glasses Re-Silvered.
The undersigned begs to intimate that he has just received an assortment of Plate-glass and material for silvering Looking-glasses.
N.B. Orders punctually attended to, packed and sent to any part of the colony [of Van Diemen's Land].
ROBIN L. HOOD.
Carving, Gilding, Looking-glass, and Fancy Picture-frame Manufactory.

BARK! BARK! BARK!
WANTED, by the undersigned, TWO HUNDRED TONS BARK; to be delivered early in December next.
Nathan, Moses & Co., Hobart Town, Sept. 6.

The Rattler dropped anchor in Port Melbourne in January 1852, and it seems most likely that this was the origin of the shipment of glass and silvering material, and not the manufacturer. Who, then, was Robin L. Hood? And what on earth did Nathan, Moses & Co. need two hundred tons of bark for? (The answer, courtesy of reliable Nat Williams: Huge quantities of bark were needed for leather-tanning.)

Friends of the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library Art Show, Stony Creek, Conn.

Thank you for inviting me to judge this year’s Friends of the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library art show.

It is always a great pleasure to discover within one small community such a variety of art-making—and a veritable battalion of artists, something in the vicinity of sixty-seven adults. I congratulate you all.

For most of my first forty years I lived in Australia, which is the reverse of Connecticut. You may therefore detect an instinctive preoccupation with marsh-scape that emerges from your judge’s decisions. This is mainly because on the driest continent marshes are comparatively rare, and “thimble island” almost unheard-of. So I was to some degree as intrigued and delighted by the strong sense of place that comes through the work you see here, as I was impressed by its overall quality. I was also intrigued to discover that many of the works in this show remind me of the work of some fine Australian artists, whom most of you will never have heard of. Anyway, let me begin with the ten honorable mentions.

I have always liked triptychs and three-part works, as well as square or nearly square formats, so playful number 60 stood out. Likewise, anyone attempting to seduce me should know that intense color will do the trick: With its inner fire and maybe hint of Rothko, number 42 obviously deserved recognition. I approve of fairies, so I had to include here the site-specific “faerie fish-tail reading a fishy fairy tale,” number 14. The quayside photograph, number 83, is for the foot-fetishists of Stony Creek, who are not always catered for in art shows. Nor should we forget the decorative arts, and I admired the splendidly shapely shell-wreath, number 116. The essential curiosity of those thimbles that have houses built on them jumped out at me from the beautiful photograph that is number 98. Pleasing memories of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, and the faintest whiff of patchouli led me toward the Hippy-flavored number 20. Sculpture is the senior visual art, and imaginary birds delight me, so I give a prize to eccentric “Fiona” and her assertive progeny, number 46. There is a Zen Buddhist in our midst, and I salute the essential twinned brushstrokes of the person who created the visual poem in number 16. Finally, number 34 made me want to hear the Stony Creek Drum Corps, who have obviously inspired a young artist who shows great promise.

Prizes for four media-specific categories were awarded: prints, photographs, watercolors, and oil paintings. The large view of thimbles across straw-colored estuarine marshes struck me as a smooth professional production, and a generous nod toward the art of watercolor, so number 10 wins the prize in the print category.

Eerie silence, thoughtfulness, simplicity, and dry wit distinguished the wintry small view across harbor-ice, number 68, which wins the photography section—amid strong competition.

The watercolor was hard to judge, there being so many different approaches to the medium here, from the pyrotechnic swagger piece to tiny introverted views. My choice here was therefore very personal, Number 70, the view in saturating afternoon light through big rooms with small windows, and over a porch, to a stretch of water in the distance on the other side, carried me home to the lakes of East Gippsland, and claimed the prize in watercolor—again, with very strong competition, a photo finish one might say.

Coming as I do from a western democracy, I felt it was important that the winner of the first prize should not automatically pick up the prize for oil painting. So for that category I selected the modest, small, but deliciously fresh, autumnal, Dufy-esque town roof-scape along route 146—is it the Market?—a classy picture, beautifully done.

First, Second, and Third Prizes are tricky creatures. In the end, one is swayed by the collision of at least several artistic choices that seem either unusual or distinctive or delightful, and of course the taste buds do kick in. So, in ascending order, for the third prize I chose Night Passage, The Thimbles, number 53, especially pleased and heartened to find that in your midst there appears to be a conceptual artist hard at work. Part of me was also charmed by the fact that this artist obviously uses charts and maps, as did seventeenth-century Dutch and English topographical artists, but that’s another story. Congratulations therefore to number 53.

The second prize reminded me so very much of a senior Queensland painter called Bill Robinson, whom I like and respect very much. Like Bill, this artist plays games by making simple choices of subject and directing your eyes in slightly vertiginous, possibly wobbly directions. I am talking about the person who drew number 74, a rock-plopping, water-side, heavy-paper, pastel rock-scape. Congratulations to him or her.

Finally there are two things you should know about me. First, I grew up in a chlorophyll vacuum, without intense greens, and therefore sharp greens, high-key greens, electrical, toxic-level, Technicolor greens provide me with moments of considerable excitement. Conversely, American visitors to Australia begin to suffer chlorophyll withdrawal symptoms after a while. (This is useful knowledge.) Second, in my work at the British Art Center in New Haven, in theory I am supposed to know a lot about eh Pre-Raphaelites, those rather irritating young Englishmen who in 1848 turned landscape painting on its head. Therefore, I was delighted to discover a super-saturated Post-Pre-Raphaelite rock-bordered marsh-scape with tall, bunched and threading sea grass in the foreground, and a thrilling cry of green hanging over the middle distance. Therefore to the painter of number 57 I give the first prize—with warm congratulations to all his or her fellow prize winners, and to everyone else who took that unnerving step of entering their work in the first place.

I thank you for giving me a very enjoyable morning in Stony Creek.

Shan-shui

What goes into a painting of shan-shui—mountains and waters, or what we in the west call “landscape”—and how well it is painted, both depend upon how the painter balances the contrasting requirements of external and internal “manifestation.” Both are the product of careful observation and study, of imitation and personal revelation. This appears to be a fundamental theme in texts about shan-shui in the Northern and Southern Song (960–1279 C.E.), but it is also present in much earlier texts about poetry.

In his Poetic Exposition on Literature, for example, Lu Ji described how the poet prepares to write: He observes phenomena in the world around him; he celebrates the good example provided to him by his predecessors; he immerses himself in both; finally he lifts the brush. For Lu Ji, observing things “remotely,” and experiencing the passage of time or becoming intimately aware of the changing of the seasons, are two ways of describing the same thing. But they are not enough. He must study and imitate the example of other poets. Both are necessary to prepare him for his work. In other words, his is the work of culture, and culture is a product of history, including literature.

Likewise the painter must observe the appearance of things and study their inner nature in order to be able to paint shan-shui. The texts, most notably Ching Hao, continually emphasized the painter’s obligation to unite observation and study, to fuse sense and thought. Together these enabled the painter to produce an image of shan-shui which rose over the transient world of appearances and revealed to the viewer its underlying truths. In the texts, the membrane separating paintings of shan-shui, in which the painter exploits observation and knowledge, and the actual shan-shui that is captured in his painting was very thin. The best paintings should move the viewer as much as the real thing, and in both cases shan-shui contained a number of standard elements.

Foremost among these were the eponymous mountains-and-waters, the defining framework for the representation of shan-shui. Together, according to Kuo Hsi, for example, these constitute a wholeness, a kind of body. The mountain has a head, a face, a neck, and limbs. Water flows in its arteries like blood. So although numerous motifs are mentioned over and over again, most of them are associated directly with one or other of these two essential elements. Rocks, cliffs, torrents and tributaries, valleys and peaks clearly serve to define the larger masses of the mountains and of the waters which flow among them. The painting of shan-shui will have as its principal structure one mountain to which its lesser neighbors cluster, a relationship which is compared again and again with that of the host and his guests, or the lord and his subjects or deputies.

After mountains and waters, trees occupy the most important place in the texts. Indeed they are sometimes treated like mountains. The ordering of trees may follow that of mountains (lord and vassals), and they are frequently described in similarly anthropomorphic or symbolic ways. Motifs of branches, foliage, bark, roots, moss and wispy lichens serve to define trees in the same way that mountains are a mighty accumulation of rocks and boulders.

Although they are frequently mentioned among the constituent elements of shan-shui, clouds belong to a different set of phenomena upon which the texts lay some emphasis. Few descriptions of mountains and waters lack some indication of atmospheric effects, and these serve to amplify the prominent forms of the mountains; to indicate the season or the weather; and to supplement the animating presence and action of the waters. Wind and rain, mist and vapor, low clouds and snow are some of the effects with which the principal forms of shan-shui are accompanied. Very often these effects are mentioned precisely for their transitory quality, since clouds are matter-and-energy in flux, whilst mountains and waters exist in a completely different state of materiality. Both are essential ingredients of shan-shui.

In the beautiful and much earlier Shan-shui lun by Wang Wei, for instance, atmospheric effects were mentioned only where they are in the process of changing. Mists rise. Clouds disperse. Rain gradually clears. Waves leave their footprint on the waters. The effects of atmosphere, here as elsewhere, help to indicate the passage of time in shan-shui, or to emphasize the transitory quality of the moment in which the viewer observes the various phenomena assembled around the host mountain. In other words shan-shui is far more than place; it is process, and time is an essential dimension of its existence.

Figures or signs of human activity are not always included in descriptions of shan-shui, but when they are, they are said to reflect the mood of the prevailing atmospheric conditions. Han Cho describes figures in an autumn landscape, for example, as mournful-looking, gazing at the moon. They do not belong to a narrative mode of representation, but rather serve as passive participants in the mysterious spiritual drama of the entire composition. A group of riders mentioned by Kuo Ssu embodies the true appearance of riders; we learn nothing of what they are doing, where they came from, or where they are going. Nevertheless, figures clearly belong to the structure of shan-shui.

In an important passage, Kuo Hsi speaks of the “three degrees of size” at work in a painting, and defines these as the mountain, the tree, and the human figure. This system, which appears to correspond with the three types of distance by which the viewer is oriented in space (high distance, deep distance, and level distance), states explicitly what is usually indicated through metaphor, that trees and mountains are directly comparable with the human body, that they form the kind of parallelism to which the cultivated Chinese mind was long accustomed. Shan-shui may therefore be described as a projection of human proportions and qualities on the order of the natural landscape, a form of microcosm set against an exactly corresponding macrocosm.

A strict hierarchy of techniques or sensitivities, the so-called six essentials given by Ching Hao, will enable the painter to achieve this end, and all of them converge on the line produced by his brush. It is his principal tool for producing forms, shapes, textures, atmosphere, while the qualities of tone and color carried by the ink, though important, are usually secondary. The painting of shan-shui was seen, therefore, as a process of building up texture from single lines, and by building up the illusion of spatial wholeness from the texture of the various motifs thus delineated. It was a process of filling the surface of the silk with carefully articulated detail.

Again and again descriptions of shan-shui, as in Wang Wei for example, speak of places filled with various types of motif, of paths filled with people, or tree-filled towers and terraces, and, most importantly, of mist enshrouding the area below the host mountain. In this example a spatial void—atmosphere—is understood to have substance, to be constructed by the mind of the painter through the brush, just as the substance of rocks or trees is refined or reduced to the characteristic essence of rock or tree. The idea is expressed in an epigrammatic way by Li Ch’eng-sou. In substance there is emptiness, he wrote, but in emptiness there is substance. This mutual interpenetration, like the co-dependence of observation and revelation, lies at the heart of the tremendous flowering of shan-shui in the Northern and Southern Song, and those later periods in which it was so celebrated.

Even More Pavlova

I seem to be doing New Zealand’s work of cultural differentiation from Australia for her. Yesterday I found that The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, edited by Tony Deverson and Graeme Kennedy for the New Zealand Dictionary Centre (2005) has finally hit the shelves of the Starr Main Reference Room in the Sterling Memorial Library here at Yale. However, I was shocked to find that they ascribe pavlova, n. (p. 832) simply to “orig. NZ & Aust.” I feel strongly that this is technically incorrect. My own researches have clearly demonstrated that the canonical pavlova was named in New Zealand, and co-opted soon afterwards by the envious Depression-era housewives of Australia. In her exhaustive The Pavlova Story: A Slice of New Zealand’s Culinary History, Helen Leach has evidently gone into same the question in far more exhaustive detail, but thankfully she appears to concur. I have not yet had an opportunity to read her book, but I am assured that my copy is on its way from A1 Books in the village of Westham in East Sussex. In due course, therefore, I should say that unless we uncover unequivocal Australian evidence in the form of some pre-1929 smoking meringue “orig. NZ & Aust” should definitely read “orig. NZ,” punkt, point, basta così. Meanwhile, pavlova, n., the brave promotional gambit of Davis Gelatine (a rather sordid jelly concocted with inter alia milk and orange juice), and pavlova, n., the American ice-cream (c. 1926) of which I can find no trace at all, evidently require separate definitions. None of which helps us to solve the problem of pavlova, adj., the mysterious color quite aggressively marketed by at least a handful of Melbourne department stores between 1926 and 1928.

Manavalums

Bits and pieces, odds and ends, this and that—whilst pottering about in my flat yesterday morning a single hold-all word for these vague but necessary collective terms, with special application in the kitchen, popped into my head: manavalums.

This did not happen by accident. Manavalums is a word that my dear father used quite often, usually in connection with stray and otherwise maybe unidentifiable crumbs of matter (not always food), with, I seem to recall, a slight but definite hint of distaste. Yesterday it was as if I was hearing his voice from years ago, speaking it in his gentle, and good-humored way—“manavalums.”

No doubt some of my readers already see into the heart of a small but intriguing problem, but for those of you to whom manavalums are a closed book I shall set it out here in case it emerges that my late father unwittingly held the key to a tiny instance of linguistic evolution.

Because, upon taking a few minutes after lunch to look it up in the Sterling Memorial Library—that incomparable treasury of arcana—I find that the term exists in a generous handful of slightly different forms, none of which, it turns out, ends in –ums:

For example, in their marvelous Slang and Its Analogues, Past and Present: A Dictionary, Historical and Comparative, of the Heterodox Speech of All Classes of Society for More Than Three Hundred Years, With Synonyms in English, French, German, Italian, etc. (1890–1904, Vol. 3, p. 278) John Stephen Farmer and W. E. Henley gave “manablins, subs. (old)—broken victuals, also manavilins” and compare it with the French arlequin, –ine and le bijou.

For these intriguing non-cognate French synonyms one finds the relevant entries in the enormous Trésor de la Langue Française, where arlequin, subs., B. 3. “en parlant d’un inanimé,” means something “tout ensemble formé d’éléments de couleurs varies, d’éléments triangulaires, d’éléments disparates [Vol. 3, p. 479],” while bijou, subs., masc. C. 1. means “À Paris, desserte des plats constituant un benefice pour les plongeurs [Vol. 4, p. 502],” maybe something akin to leftovers.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary lists the useful English term under “manavilins, manavlins, sb. pl. slang, also minavilins, malhavelins, manablins, manarolins, menavelings; of obscure origin”: (apparently a verbal substantive with the suffix –ing; [cfr. manarvel, v., nautical slang, possibly a back-formation from manavilins, etc., which means to pilfer small stores, Vol. 9, p. 295, citing The Sailor’s Word-Book: An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms, Including Some More Especially Military and Scientific ... As Well As Archaisms of Early Voyagers, etc., by the late Admiral W[illiam].H[enry]. Smyth ... Revised for the press by Vice-Admiral Sir E. Belcher (1867)]). Here the OED defines manavilins broadly as “small matters, odds and ends, articles supplementary to the ordinary fare [p. 296].”

Now this brief article—which was not revised or altered in any way for the great second edition of 1989—contains only four historical quotations, but they are noteworthy.

The first and earliest is a reference to the Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words, Used at the Present Day in the Streets of London; the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the Houses of Parliament; the Dens of St. Giles; and the Palaces of St. James; Preceded by a History of Cant (1859) by J[ohn]. C[amden]. Hotten (1832–1873), where it is given as manavilins.

The second is to James Templeman Brown, “The Whalemen,” i.e. part 1 of No. 2 “The Whalemen, Vessels and Boats, Apparatus, and Methods of the Whale Fishery,” which in turn belongs to Part XV “The Whale-Fishery” of Volume II in Section V of the vast Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States (1884–87), edited by George Brown Goode (1851–1896): “For supper in the cabin: salt beef and pork, warm soft tack, butter, sugar, tea, and sometimes hash, and probably pie. The boat-steerers have the same, and the foremast hands, salt beef, pork, and hard tack, and occasionally pie. To the abovementioned fare should be added, when they can be had, the “manarolins” [the OED adds here “?read manarvlins”] of the whale-men—that is, fresh meat, vegetables, milk, butter, eggs and fruits, which may be obtained when the vessel touches upon a foreign shore, but these are luxuries of life that cannot always be had.”

Number three is to a passage in chapter xxii of his great novel Robbery Under Arms (1882–83), by Rolf Boldrewood, the pseudonymn of Thomas Alexander Browne (1826–1915): “There was a fence round this garden, some of the rails lying there rotten enough, but it takes time for sound wood to rot. He’d a stool and table too, not bad ones either, this Robinson Crusoe cove. No end of manavilins either.”

And finally we are directed to Edward B. Kennedy’s The Black Police of Queensland (1902), where in chapter VIII on p. 101 “odds and ends are described in the colony by the one useful old naval word ‘manavlins,’ a term which embraces every small thing.”

Now the online version of the OED has made some revisions, both to the definition of manavilins, and to the range of sources. Manavilins is now defined not as “slang,” but “slang (chiefly nautical),” viz. “scraps of food, leftovers; titbits; (more generally) odds and ends, supplementary materials.” And several new sources are added, most of them American, two of which now antedate Hotten. In their Life in a Man-of-War; or, Scenes in “Old Ironsides” During Her Cruise in the Pacific, by a Fore-Top-Man (1841), p. 169, H. J. Mercier and W. Gallop remarked that “de way dey overhaul a range of every pan, dish, and kettle, to find de manavalins, is nobody’s business.” Meanwhile, in his White-jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850), p. 158, Herman Melville speaks of “various sea-rolls, made dishes, and Mediterranean pies…all of which come under the denomination of Manavalins.”

Two comparatively recent sources do not add much, but point to a measure of persistence in the United States. In an article entitled “Duffs, Lobscouse, and Manavelins,” (Yankee, Vol. 44, No. 1, January 1980, p. 166), Thomas G. Lytle explained that “Whalemen ventured to all corners of the world, and when possible they dined on giant sea turtles, seal liver, bananas, coconut, caribou, porpoises, and foods of all the natives in all the lands they touched, from the Arctic to the tropics. Of course these manavelins were perishable and lasted only a short time.” In Graham Stuart Thomas’ Three Gardens of Pleasant Flowers: With Notes on Their Design, Maintenance, and Plants (1983), p. 9, meanwhile, we find the rather cloying remark, “Plants as a rule increase…and the giving away of manavilins is a blessed form of friendship in which we all take pleasure.”

To these published sources (and thanks to the astonishing power and spread of British Periodicals online I and II, as well as Google Books) we may now add a number of previously undocumented instances: (a) Sailors’ Life and Sailors’ Yarns, by Captain Ringbolt, the pseudonym of John Codman (1847), p. 150: “Hooking manavlins was a favourite amusement with him: not so much for gratifying his appetite, as for exercising his dexterity”;

(b) Captain John Harland, A Glossary of Words Used in Swaledale, Yorkshire (1876), p. 120: “Malhavelins, s. pl. small perquisites or dues.” An identical definition, incidentally, published in the same year, now makes it into the online OED, i.e. in Francis Kildale Robinson’s, Glossary of Words Used in the Neighborhood of Whitby (1876)—more than a coincidence, I think, but I am not sure which gentleman was availing himself of the other’s notebooks.

(c) Charles Mackay, The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe and More Especially of the English and Lowland Scotch, and of Their Slang, Cant, and Colloquial Dialects (1877), p. 275 “manablins… [i.e.] broken victuals”;

(d) N. Walter Swan, Luke Mivers’ Harvest (1879), p. 199: “There’s a parcel of minavellins I bought in Sydney wot we’ll want”;

(e) Roland Folger Coffin, An Old Sailor’s Yarns: Tales of Many Seas (1884), chapter VIII, p. 90: “I’d been shipmates with the steward in two or three ships, and so had got to chimin’ in with him in the way of yarnin’ and manavlin’s [sic]”;

(f) Henry Trader of Chirk, North Wales, “Manavlins,” Bye-Gones: Relating to Wales and the Border Counties, March 30, 1892, p. 282: “A friend of mine tells me that he has been accustomed from childhood to use this word for entrails or what are usually called “innards,” the pluck, heart, livers, lights, sweetbread, &c., of an animal. The word is a very strange one; it has a Welsh look about it”;

(g) Manavilins: A Muster of Sea Songs as Distinguished from Shanties, Written for the Most Part by Seamen, and Sung on Board Ship During the Closing Years of the Age of Sail, 1890–1910, by a certain Rex Clements, was published in London in 1928 by Heath, Cranton, Ltd.;

and, finally, (h) John Arthur Barry’s “Sea Stories, No. 3: John Hall, Master Mariner Millionaire,” (Strand Magazine, Vol. 21. No. 123, March 1901, p. 319) where, with racist disapproval, the Malay passengers aboard the Countess of Glenavon are “recipients of many dainty remnants from the saloon table, besides other ‘menavelings,’ that by rights should have gone into the boatswain’s mess.” Interestingly Barry settled in New South Wales in the 1870s, and served as local correspondent for The Times newspaper. His fiction exploited much local color, so together with those of Boldrewood and Kennedy this citation may be regarded as authentically Australian.

Intriguingly there is not one instance of any of these delightfully varied forms of manavilins to be found in the current run of Australian Newspapers Beta, though it is definitely present in Webster under manavelins or manavilins and, elsewhere, cross-referenced under menavelings, viz. “odds and ends of food; leftovers, also fancy or made dishes.” This last is the surprising sense that it had somehow assumed among the New England whale-men so closely observed in the late 1870s and 1880s by James Templeman Brown, and therefore perhaps a reflection of the scarcely conceivable austerity of their mode of living whilst at sea.

I am not quite sure how Dad turned the naval and/or more broadly sea-faring and/or Welsh / Border / Yorkshire / New England and thence to Australian colonial usages of manavilins or menavelings into manavalums, but let us assume that this may be a unique instance of nautical terminology comingling with the conventions of the legal profession in its old Latin-loving guise, at least in the mind of one well-beloved man who was wholly devoted to both. For Dad’s sake I shall continue to use manavalums, and shall also keep my eyes peeled in case his word ultimately proves more widespread, and therefore requires further documentation.

In any case, given that half of the historical references to manavilins currently cited by the OED are to Australian sources, I should think that an appropriately worded article should be added to the otherwise excellent Australian National Dictionary, which specializes in and indeed celebrates our glorious array of linguistic manavalums.

Statistics

To my astonishment thanks to the miracle of Google Analytics I find that in the past few months this modest blog has been visited by readers in the following countries: U.S.A. (573, spread across forty-two states, i.e. all except for Alaska, Arizona, South Dakota, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, and West Virginia), Australia (223, all states and territories), U.K. (183), Germany (35), Canada (32), France (25), Spain (23), Italy (19), Argentina (17), Malaysia (14), Brazil (13), New Zealand (10), Poland (10), Mexico (9), and Singapore (9). Seven have logged on from each of Japan, Switzerland, and Norway; six from Russia, India, and Greece; five from South Korea, Romania, and Indonesia. Four came from Hong Kong, Austria, Ireland, Chile, Thailand, the Netherlands, and Turkey; three from South Africa, Finland, Portugal, Hungary, and Colombia; two from the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Peru, China, Lithuania, Slovenia, the Philippines, Tunisia, Slovakia, and Denmark, while sole inquirers have logged on from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, Ecuador, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, Armenia, Taiwan, the Palestinian Territory, Georgia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, Bermuda, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Jamaica, and Croatia—1353 visits in all, from 1014 “unique visitors” spread across seventy-three countries on all five continents, amounting to 2701 “pageviews” which lasted on average two minutes and sixteen seconds each. No doubt these results are puny compared with far busier blogs elsewhere, but they do give me particular pleasure. I thank you all for logging on. Indeed these statistics raise the baffling question in my mind as to what on earth my readers make of what they find here, since such a large proportion of the posts relate to the (to us) engrossing story of our pioneering ancestors in Australia. Yet aren't pioneering stories pretty much the same wherever they unfold? Ups and downs; successes and failures; lives cut short, and others lived into venerable old age. There is also the intriguing question as to how some of this flattering attention might be converted into a little pocket money, but let us not become greedy or impatient. Though the prospect of quiet retirement to somewhere pretty and writing full time appeals to me very much, I shall try not to let it seduce. Not yet, anyway.

On a scale of one to ten...

In recent weeks I have been bothered by a tiny sebaceous cyst on my neck. It has acquired the bad habit of getting infected and is uncomfortable, messy, and unattractive. It probably needs to go. Fortunately, having now navigated several stages in the current American health care system, a capable young surgeon has agreed to do the honors in a few weeks’ time.

Here at Yale—and I should think that the same is true in many other clinical situations—your consultation with a qualified medical practitioner commences with a nurse who verifies your identity, takes your temperature, measures your blood pressure, takes your pulse, ascertains the amount of oxygen in your blood, and, finally, asks you if you are experiencing any pain. This is far more than a mere formality, because if the answer is “yes” that person asks you to specify on a scale of one to ten, where ten is the equivalent of unbearable agony, exactly how much pain you are feeling.

No doubt this measure is supposed to provide the doctor, and the system, with some initial indication of the seriousness of the problem, however it seems to me that there are several fundamental problems with it.

In my case, I find it difficult to think of the slight discomfort caused by my fellow traveler the sebaceous cyst as anything that meets the real requirements of the term “pain,” since it is self-evidently not serious in the larger scheme of things.

Yet, as I struggle to find a suitable numerical expression for the apparently genuine discomfort I feel, I can quite easily see that the effect of nominating one or two would be to mislead the nurse and doctor into thinking that I regard the matter as no more than a triviality. This is not the case. Although I feel comparatively little pain, it is the inconvenience and bother created by this stubborn little thing, and not pain as such, that makes me want to get rid of it.

To some extent you find yourself wondering if you are not unduly minimizing the matter at hand by stopping short of describing it in terms of pain. Evidently many other patients throw themselves gleefully into the pain department, and most people will swear that their assessment is more or less accurate in respect of themselves, even though it should be axiomatic that any and all such assessments are entirely subjective. One stoical person’s mild twinge is another, more sensitive patient’s agony.

Further, how do you define excruciating agony if to the best of your knowledge, as in my own case, you are quite certain that you have never experienced it? Am I in fact greedily consuming medical resources that might better serve to alleviate far worse and more urgently pressing afflictions than mine? If we are quite honest, how often do we patients bump up our pain “reading” in an effort to gain the attention of the doctor, and what, at least in this highly reductive schema of degrees of pain, is the substantive difference between a five, say, and a six? Does this emphasis upon physical pain encourage the rest of us to dig deeply into the handbag of our experience and come up with something serviceable, when, in reality, the problem is not actually a matter of hurt at all? Are nurses and doctors alert to the difference, or is the system so overstretched that anything other than some sobering level of urgent physical pain automatically descends several notches on the scale of priorities—as indeed I suppose it really should?

In all of this I find my mind turning again and again to Job, the righteous man of the land of Uz, who endures blow upon blow, indeed terrible anguish. Arising from the astonishing clash in dialogue between God and Satan it is the body and mind of Job that are tossed into a deep hole of pain. Suffering, disbelief and rage come first, then blame, dejection, self-pity, and acute bitterness. Job begs for relief. His friends can only conclude that Job’s affliction is a punishment for some monstrous sin, but Job knows that he is righteous, and duly protests his innocence. But that is not the point. Half way through this story Job’s position is simply impossible. Elihu the Buzite now condemns Job for the larger sin of self-righteousness, and God himself rebukes Job for the weak presumption of seeking to justify himself before the face of his own creator.

Yet throughout his ordeal Job’s virtue remains essentially intact, a fact that is never by any means lost on God. Job weathers the storm. He struggles against what he sees as its moral dimension, but in the end he survives it. He is brought to an understanding of what he is, and what he is not, and, even in the extremity of his affliction, Job attains what these days we would probably call “acceptance.” He never fails to worship God.

Into this remarkable ancient Hebrew poem, I find it impossible to imagine any viable spot for a tiny sebaceous cyst, and that tedious question as to the scale of pain from one to ten—other than maybe in the fussy soliloquies of Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. With friends like these, incidentally, who needs enemies? 

In other words, that it is even possible in this world of almost infinite suffering to be rid of a mildly bothersome lump, an insignificant spot, seems wholly miraculous. And for that one can only feel the full measure of, on the one hand, humility, and on the other gratitude. In other words, the petulant art museum curator huffing and puffing with barely disguised irritation over ones and twos at the Yale Health Plan on Friday afternoon really should have owned up to zero pain, or else something along the lines of “Just whenever you can find a spare moment.” At least that is how it looks to me today.

The John Cooper (1840-41)

Our great great-grandfather, William Pearson, arrived in Port Melbourne on April 4, 1841, aboard the 659-ton John Cooper. The John Cooper sailed from Greenock (on the firth of Clyde, downstream from Glasgow) on September 15, 1840, via Cork (October 29), Lisbon (November 22), and Port Adelaide (March 8, 1841). It is not clear why the arrival of the John Cooper was not reported in the Port Phillip Herald, but fortunately it and its cabin passenger manifest were listed in the Geelong Advertiser on April 10, 1841. Augmented by information contained in the relevant immigrant and shipping lists the John Cooper manifest now assumes vivid clarity:

Master: Captain James Salmon. Officers: Angus Campbell; William Hawthorn; Edward Morrison; Charles R. McKellar (surgeon); and an unknown number of crew.

Cabin passengers: Captain Atkinson with his wife and six children; Mr. Barrett; Mrs. Blair and her daughters Mary and Anne; Mr. Buckingham with his wife and two children; Mr. Boyle; Mr. Campbell; Mr. Davidson; Mr. Fullerton; Miss Pringle; Mr. and Mrs. Spence; Mr. Stevens, Mr. Stewart; Miss Stewart; [Mr.] W. Pearson; [Mr.] H. Pearson; and Mr. Rose.

Intermediate passengers: Mr. Balfour; Mr. Chirnside; Mr. Churter; Mr. Hastie; Mr. Logan; Mr. McDonald; Mr. Mitchell; Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Stewart, and 13 children.

Steerage passengers: Joseph Annand (36) of the County of Banff, his wife Jannette (38), their two sons Joseph (12) and John (3); and their two daughters Bella (8) and Eliza (6); James Bailley (38) of Lancashire, his wife Agnes (38) their two sons John (8) and William (less than 1), and their two daughters Elizabeth (6) and Margaret (3); the sisters Elizabeth (28) and Grace Carmichael (26) of Lanarkshire; Martha Chambers (18); Ellen Fogarty (29) of Morayshire; John Fogarty (18) of Aberdeen (bounty withheld); Robert Hamilton (28) of Lanarkshire (bounty withheld); Robert Jamieson; James Johnston (25) of Fifeshire; Thomas McBoreland (27) of Ayrshire; Michael Larkin (26) of Louth; John Nicol (18); Thomas Robertson (30) of Selkirk; Robert Smith (28) and Beatrice Smith (21) of Aberdeen (brother and sister); Elizabeth Telfer (19) of Douglas, and a further 19 unknown steerage passengers. Nobody died on the voyage.

It was later reported that the John Cooper departed for Sydney a month later, on May 3, 1841, with almost one hundred of “the most wealthy and respectable description, taking out an immense capital in money, besides livestock of valuable kinds,” arriving at Circular Quay nine days later, on May 12.

Of these we know only of Mrs. Blair and her daughters, who bravely continued their immensely long journey, as did Miss Pringle, and Mr. and Mrs. Spence. But they were joined by new or continuing cabin and/or intermediate passengers from Port Melbourne, namely Mr. Stewart, Mr. McDonald, Mr. Fullerton, Mr. Barrett, Mr. Robertson, Mr. Stewart, Mr. Shephard, and a further five steerage passengers. A corporal and three private soldiers of the 28th Regiment and a constable sailed also; they were responsible for escorting seventeen anonymous male and two female convicts. 

I would say that the local paper’s estimate of nearly 100 of the “the most wealthy and respectable description, taking out an immense capital in money,” was an exaggeration.

Cri de coeur

Perhaps the most irritating thing about living in an apartment building with such a comparatively high proportion of neighbors who happen to be medical students—in this case attached for at least several years to the Yale School of Medicine and the sprawling Yale–New Haven Hospital just down York Street—is that a high proportion of these self-confident young people wear their dirty white coats, even their green pyjamas, to and from work every day, crowding into our two airless elevators without any regard to the feelings of revulsion they stimulate among non-medical passengers. 

These protective garments are generally also festooned with wands of office: besmeared stethoscopes draped around the neck, clunky paging devices clipped to the belt, and an array of well chewed ballpoint pens poking forlornly from the breast and hip pockets. 

Yabbering obliviously into mobile phones, more often than not about their patients’ private affairs, even their rapidly diminishing prospects of recovery (May 13, 7.31 a.m., east elevator, going down), under normal circumstances it is unpleasant enough to share an elevator with a medical student, but even if they were completely silent—unlikely—it is those grubby white coats and green scrubs that offend one far, far more, and not merely because they shriek: “Make way for me; I am a medical student.” 

Instead, you find yourself outraged by the fact that in the course of an average working day these already unattractive garments soak up tens of billions of endemic, playfully airborne, hospital-dependent microbes issuing from the rheumy pipes and tubes of the chronically ill. And by this simple process of basic epidemiology grotesque, slime- and catarrh-dwelling, tendril-dragging germs gain direct access to our apartment building. 

It is of no consolation to me that medical students are mostly stunted, and that my nostrils are therefore located a good eighteen inches (on average) above the top of their head, because as everybody knows hot air rises, and one can almost hear the teeming bacteria jumping gleefully into mid-air out of the cheap white fabric (50% cotton, 50% polyester, with depressingly low thread count, I notice) and ascend ecstatically on miniature gusts and thermals. The only solution is to hold your breath. 

True, the medical student is not the only agent of contagion in this forlorn community of ours. And we are well aware of the need to wash our hands frequently, cover our mouths when incommoded by a fit of coughing, and take all appropriate measures to insulate friends, colleagues, and neighbors from any and all harmful viruses or bacteria with which we for the time being may find ourselves afflicted.

However, leaving aside the obvious question as to why on earth you would want to spend your working life surrounded by, on the one hand, an army of resentful ancillary healthcare workers, and on the other, desperately sick people, while at the same time manacled to a built environment of scarcely conceivable hideousness, don’t doctors and medical students have any convenient spot where they can hang up or at least store their grubby white coats at the hospital, or even, dare one ask, have them laundered?

One final point. By generally accepted convention the white coat of the medical practitioner used to be three-quarter length, the hem hovering modestly within easy reach of the kneecap. Now, however, it has shriveled into a meager jacket that comes to an abrupt halt at the waist, the sartorial equivalent of cutting the final scene of Fidelio (for brevity). 

I have no objection to the wearing of white coats in the hospital or clinical environment, but surely they should if possible be cut to the correct length. Let us assume that the Yale–New Haven Hospital can probably afford the extra bolts of white cotton. Much as neurosurgeons might hanker after white coats with an exceedingly long train (borne through corridors and into the operating theater by respectful junior registrars), most people would regard such a thing as perverse. Why, then, are we expected to take seriously the radically shortened white coat of current usage? Where, how, and by whom are these decisions taken?