The redback on the dunny seat

Yes, I've been a bit quiet again, mainly because I have been busy on a book that will probably be called Settlers. This will contain some 250,000 words of originally researched Australian social history, mainly in the colonial period, although, as I make very clear, Australian history is a great deal older than that. Australian history did not start when the English invaded Australia, any more than English history started when the Normans invaded England.

This blog entry is derived from part of that work-in-progress.  If and when I have a definite go-ahead from my publisher, I will add a note here, but it will probably come out in 2017.  About 60% of the text is now complete, all written since I floated the idea four months ago as Colonial Concerns.The following is a taster from that.

The Australian redback spider, Latrodectus mactans hasselti, is a close relative of the black widow spider. Its bite can be extremely painful, but it is not usually lethal. Over the years, legends have grown up about redbacks on dunny seats biting people on their nether regions, and I decided to look into it.

First up, the dunny seat is Australian vernacular for a toilet seat, the word 'dunny' probably coming from Scots dialect. The spider shown on the right is a huntsman, or as they called it in colonial times, a triantelope.

They are harmless, but people thought they were tarantulas (hence the name, a corruption of 'tarantula'), and when you look at them closely (left), you can see why people were and still are terrified of them. It is, however, a misplaced fear.

On the right, you can see a genuine Amazonian  tarantula that I came across a year or two back while blatting around the headwaters of the Amazon River. I am fairly sure that it was a pet that our guide had planted there for me to find, but I won't tell if he won't :-)

Back in Australia and the 19th century, settlers and colonists were well aware of the existence of poisonous spiders in other parts of the world, so they regarded Australian spiders with suspicion, even the harmless huntsman, as Louisa Ann Meredith knew in the 1840s: 

The tarantula is not quite so great a favourite with me, as I have strong suspicions of its bite being venomous. At first I understood them to be harmless, although servants and ignorant people hold them in great abhorrence, and, unless too frightened to approach, always kill them when discovered. Certainly the appearance of a full-sized tarantula is by no means prepossessing…

When disturbed they scramble along at a rapid rate, and are very frequent residents behind pictures or furniture against the wall, often causing terrific screams from one’s housemaid, which are somewhat alarming, until, on inquiry, the dreadful words “A Triantelope, Ma’am!” are gasped out, and the tragedy ends in the death, or, as I usually arrange it, the careful expulsion of the intruder…

Several persons of education and intelligence have assured me of their dangerous nature, but I have never yet witnessed an instance of it, and they are such patient and industrious fly-catchers, that so long as they confine their perambulations to the ceiling, or the upper portion of the walls of a room, I never disturb them.

— Louisa Ann Meredith (Mrs Charles Meredith), Notes and Sketches of New South Wales. 1844, 147 – 8.

Given these fears, I thought there must be some basis for it, so I started looking for early reports of spider bites occasioning death. I found plenty of deaths and escapes from snake bite, but none from spider, but then I found three in a row, and I am still not sure why it happened this way.

The first victim was a Bendigo chemist named Phillips was bitten while in “…the closet at the rear of his present residence”. You can read the full news report here:  The Age, 27 December 1862, 7, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/154966880

By chance, a doctor named King was in the house and he hurried out with a candle to find a small black spider on the seat. It had a flat body, with a red mark on its back, making it, without a doubt, a redback spider.

Phillips’ symptoms included strong pains in the abdomen, the bowels, pain in the spine and muscles, spasms, convulsions, delirium, shivering and sleeplessness. He was treated with cloths dipped in turpentine and applications of liquid ammonia before being calmed with ether, opium and brandy, and he later recovered.

The next two cases happened at Talbot, about 80 km south-west of the Bendigo and just a few months later. Carr’s first spider seems to match a redback in form, if not in colour.

The discrepancy in colour from the standard textbook redback may indicate that his specimen was a juvenile, or possibly the spider was preserved in some fluid that bleached it. The spider on the left above is a juvenile, the one on the right is more mature: notice the differences in colour. The coin in each case is an Australian 50 cents, 37 mm across.

Anyhow, here is the story, as distilled from a news report in The Age (Melbourne), 17 April 1863, 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/154965599:

Bites by Venomous Spiders. — In the current number of the Australian Medical Journal, Mr Robert Carr, of Talbot, details two cases in which most severe and constitutional disturbance was caused by the bites of venomous spiders. The tarantula is the only class of spider generally supposed to be poisonous; but it would appear that there is a brown spider, with a yellow streak down the back, the head being of a similar color, which produces, under certain circumstances or in particular constitutions, alarming symptoms, proving the absorption of a most virulent poison by those who happen to be so bitten.

His first of Carr's two cases was a miner named O’Connor, bitten on the scrotum at 6 am on 16 February 1863 “while sitting in a water-closet”. He felt the sting and complained of a tingling sensation, and only called for medical assistance at noon, when Carr found him in agony.

The scrotum, where stung, was red and indurated, but not much swollen, the penis was much enlarged, the prepuce œdematous containing a large quantity of white serous fluid, the organ presenting the appearance in fact of one affected with virulent gonorrhœa…

O’Connor had problems breathing, he was dizzy and he suffered loss of sight. Worse, he could not sleep, so he was dosed with opiates, camphor, ginger and laxatives. These, or the passing of time finally improved his situation.

This class of remedies I resorted to from having used them under like circumstances successfully in India, where all kinds of venomous insects abound. In two hours the breathing was relieved, and having persevered in the remedies for twenty-four hours, the patient finally recovered, and all bad symptoms disappeared by six p.m. the following evening. The legs, however, continued very weak, and there was a painful tingling sensation in both feet…

Carr's second case was a Mrs Lithgow, whom he called “very corpulent”. She was bitten under similar circumstances at 5 pm on 23 February, just 400 metres from the O’Connor residence. Bitten close to the groin on the inner right thigh, she had similar symptoms, and was in a critical condition by 11 pm.

I prescribed similar remedies to those stated in the first case, with like results. She sweated profusely. The breathing was relieved in four hours, the irregularity of the heart in eight hours. She dozed a good deal, but never slept till the evening of the second day, after which she quite recovered, the feet, as in the other case, being the last parts affected.”

So if you were wondering, yes, redbacks do sometimes lurk on dunny seats, and yes they can bite you, and yes, you may well wish you were dead, but no, you probably won't die, not unless you are weakened by some other medical condition.

PS: after some digging, redbacks apparently came from South Australia's arid zone, but they are intrepid stow-aways: I think they spread in drays an carts going to and from the goldfields.

A tale of lattice

A trellis is usually taken to be a light framework of wooden or timber bars, fastened where they cross, producing a screenwork of square or diamond-shaped gaps, generally filling a window or door space, and it gets its name from the trilicium, a Latin term for a warp thread made of three separate threads. Variant forms of this word are found in Middle English and Old French, but these days, people are more likely to speak of a lattice.

This is much the same thing as a trellis, but made from a thin wooden strap, a lath. This comes from the Old English lætte, through the Middle English laþþe, a word that was still in use in Shakespeare's time, when Falstaff declares to Prince Hal that he will "beat thee out of thy kingdom with a dagger of lath" in Henry IV Part 1, and it is a word which may still be heard in the expression 'lath and plaster'.

There is a similar word in German, laden, meaning a counter or shop, probably derived from the sense of lath as a plank, used to make a counter in a market place, but ladders were never made from lath, and even though ladders were often used in a barn, they have nothing to do with what Chaucer called variously a lath and a lathe, meaning a barn.This name comes from the Old Norse word hlaða, which is also seen in the rare verb 'lade', meaning load, and still seen in the past participle, 'laden'.

In times gone by, Kent was divided into a number of lathes, each with a lathe reeve, a bit like the shire reeve who gave us our modern sheriff, but what of the lathe that we use to turn wood and metal? The standard explanation ties this to the hlaða and 'lade', on the basis that this is similar to the Danish 'lad', a stand, seen in compounds such as savelad, a saw-bench, and væverlad, a loom (think /weaver-stand' to get the feel for this one).

Along this line of reasoning, the 'lad' is a pile built up in a regular way to make a stand, and so the lathe was a turning-lathe or turning-stand, and so became just a lathe. The fact that this is a little improbable has been happily ignored by etymologists in the past. It is just possible, though, that etymologists are less interested in technology than in words, and may have missed another possibility.

While we now use electric power, and before that, people used steam or even water-power to drive a lathe, in the middle ages, a lathe used a long and whippy arm over the bench, a treadle below, and a strap that went around the timber being worked. As the treadle went down, bending the boom, the strap made the timber piece turn.

Then when the treadle was released, the strap spun the timber in the opposite direction. Now the bending part of an arbalest or crossbow is called a lath, and it is just possible that our modern lathe was once a turning-lath, instead, or maybe the two ideas got mixed up.

One major use of lattice in the past was to make chancels, screens used to separate officiating clergy from the masses, or a court from the general public. The chancel, and what lay beyond, would be guarded by a chancellor, who was basically just an usher at the bars (chancelli) of a court.

But while constables were coming down in the world, the fortune of chancellors was on the rise, and soon they were Lord Chancellors, lording it over just about everybody, controlling whole universities, and even having courts of their own, the Chancery courts that Dickens depicts so lovingly in Bleak House.

These courts were every bit as awful in their behaviour as Dickens describes them, so that pugilists used the expression 'in chancery' to describe a fighter who had his opponent in a headlock, while beating him in the face with his spare fist. It would be enough to get you in a lather, but that, it seems, is an unrelated word.

Why Crooked Mick's dog seems stupid

For some reason, people seem a little puzzled about Crooked Mick's dog.  I keep having to point out that it wasn't really what you might call a clever dog, in fact it was generally regarded as the silliest dog on the Speewah, especially when you consider its size.  And it was lazy, too.

More than one New Chum had to be advised against trying to saddle Crooked Mick's dog after some wag had asked them to do just that.  Not that anybody cared about the New Chums all that much, but people of sensitivity could see how appallingly embarrassed the dog became, since all the saddles were too small for it.  Excepting for Mick's horse's saddle, but no New Chum could even lift that, and the dog wouldn't've helped them either.  Too embarrassed, you see . . .

The dog's main intellectual limitation was, as I've mentioned before, in its total inability to light a fire unless you gave it matches, and they had to be safety matches at that.  But in spite of that, I'm inclined to think Mick's dog was brighter than people thought.

I came to this conclusion after one occasion on which I saw the dog sit, wag its tail for a bit in an odd way, get up, turn round, look at the ground, turn back, wag again, and so on.  Curious, I wandered over to have a look.  There in the dust was a textbook example of the diagram that always illustrates Pythagoras' theorem.  Well, almost textbook: I'd say that the right angle was about 3 degrees off, but the squares on the three sides were all very good indeed.

The dog spent about half an hour fiddling with it, but it never seemed to get that right angle any closer, and in the end it mooched off.  So I think that all the time people were laughing at the dog for being stupid, it was just being absent-minded.

Which is no excuse, really, because a working dog has to keep its mind on the task in hand, and that was where Crooked Mick's dog fell down.  I mean, take the time it had to boil the billy for Mick out on the edge of the Grassy Paddock on the Speewah.  There were no trees for miles, not even little shrubs, so the standard method was to light a grass fire, and run along holding the billy over the flames.

Well Mick's dog had the matches that day, so it got the water, started the fire without any problems, and ran along until the billy was boiled, but like I say, it was absent-minded.  When the billy boiled, the dog was five miles away, but it had gone and left the tea behind!

Maybe the dog had its mind on Fermat's Last Theorem or maybe it was dreaming of something new to do with Napier's bones, or perhaps it was the four-colour map theorem, which the dog solved, many years ago, by rounding up a number of geographers and eating all their coloured pencils, but that's another story.  And in any case, who needs a dog that can do original mathematics?

* * * * *

Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Some more unusual rocks

This past week, I have had a bit of a break, in between taking an 83 kword file and another 5.5 kword addenda file and hacking them down into a 77k file that I hope will be volume 1 (or 2 or 3) under the title Colonial Concerns.  This is Australian social history that I hope will prove acceptable to my publisher.

I still hope to write Not Your Usual Rocks, so we went off looking for petrified trees. There were two lots that I had read about, around Lake Macquarie, and I managed to find both sites. The Blackall Park one, however, was hard, and the area is so pillaged that I won't say how to get there: if you have a special need, contact me with an email address for a reply with how-to-get-there details.

This item on the left was in the area:  I suspect some joker was playing games. It is NOT what we were seeking.

On the right, you can see the real thing, as viewed at high tide.

And here is the same thing, seen at low tide. When the Reverend W. B. Clarke recorded these in the 1840s, there were 500, while in the 1970s, there were said to be 30 (the rest had been "souvenired").

We found just two. This is not a Good Thing.

I found Clarke's description of the area, which he calls by its local name of Kurrur-kurran, in the The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 August 1845, p. 2, which you can jump to from this link. In that same article, he mentions another site, at what is now Swansea Heads, and I will explain how to get to that one.

First up, choose a time of low tide. We went back on our last day to see what was visible of the "petrified trees", and it was nearly all under water.

Like this picture at the right.

But at low tide, there are some marvellous remnants to be seen.  In the shots that follow, there is an Australian 50-cent coin for scale: this is 37 mm (1.5 inches in primitive countries) .

To get there, drive towards Swansea, take a left towards Caves Beach, but pick up Northcote Avenue, then Lambton Parade and park at the end in the Reid's Reserve car park.  Find a track through the dune to a beach on the east (it's very sheltered by a reef, so often has lots of children and dogs). Go to the water's edge, swing right and head around, out onto the rock platform.

Then look for these:

Well, if that doesn't ring your bell, forget it, but there's something else to look for, liesegang markings.

The cliff at the back of the platform is part of the Reid's Mistake Formation. This is a tuffaceous sandstone with pronounced jointing and amazing folding.

Over the millennia, water has seeped through the joints, and soaked into the rock, producing these patterns. First, here is a ranging shot to show you where to go: from this part of the cliff, turn left and go along the concrete (there's some sort of drain there), until you get to here:

Now move in and look for things like this:

The first one (above) is rock covered by water. The second one (below) is dry.

 The last two are also dry, but I have loaded these as hi-res. Try clicking on them.

And please, enjoy!

Notes
I have just found a few useful side bits in Wikipedia under

* Lake Macquarie Petrified Forest, and

* Fennell Bay, New South Wales.

There are probably other leads as well, if you search on "Kurrur Kurran", but the first of these links tells us what happened to some of the missing material.

January 3, 2016: I am working on this title. I don't like it much at the moment, but that usually happens with my books.  I fix the  unlikable bits before anybody else sees them. It needs a new chapter 1.

Keeping cockroaches as pets

Let's start the New Year with a BANG. *

Household cockroaches cause strong and inexplicable reactions. In some thoughts about insects, I quoted this anecdote:

 I once unfortunately stated to a Queensland gentleman that my coat had been bitten by cockroaches at his brother's house, which I had just left.  'You must have brought them with you then,' was the fraternal defence immediately set up.  I was compelled at once to antedate the cockroaches to my previous resting-place, owned by a friend, not by a brother.  'It is possible,' said the squatter, 'but I think you must have had them with you longer than that.'  I acquiesced in silence, and said no more about my coat till I could get it mended elsewhere.
— Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, London: 1873, page 67.

Some cockroaches, on the other hand, are cute.  Yes, I know that sounds weird, but I share the general revulsion to cockies in the house, but these are different: they are bush cockroaches.

Because so many people have strong reactions, I want to share a quick and easy "cage" that you can use, to keep your pets secure. The two photos above were taken, using a bush cockroach that I kept in the "cage" for a couple of days. It had leaf litter for it to burrow in, and I kept this moist. Not soaking wet, just moist enough to save poor cocky drying out.

The photographs were taken like the one above on the right.. I always use a sheet of coloured card behind the things I am photographing. Usually, I use blue, but I felt like a change this day. You rarely see this sort of rough shot, because I normally crop, rotate and resize as necessary, but in every set, I include one pulled-back shot to show how I did it.

The key thing, though,is containing the cocky or cockies. The picture on the right is from page 177 of my Australian Backyard Naturalist, if you happen to have a copy, but it isn't necessary to buy it. Just get one out of a library though, because there are quite a few easy wrinkles like this one.

There are four bits: a plastic container with a rim; leaf litter and residents; a large-enough piece of fly-screen; and TWO (note that: two) sets of linked rubber bands, joined up by a double hook, made from a paper-clip.

In these photos, you can see one set of rubber bands holding the fly screen in place, while the other set is just lying there.

Rubber bands break: that seems to be one of the unstated laws of science. That is why you need two sets, so the cockies don't get out.

As for food, I often throw in a slice of raw potato, which provides food and moisture, but usually, my pets aren't there long enough to risk starving.


Sometimes, I keep mosquito wrigglers, and I don't let them go when they emerge as adults, so I use flywire there as well. Note the sticks that the adults can rest on: otherwise, they will drown. You need nice green water which provides food for the wrigglers.

Here, once again, I use two or even three rubber bands, just to keep my family happy.

The cockroach cage can also be used to keep slaters (alias pill bugs) and also mystery eggs that turn up in the garden I found one set of these and suspected they were lizards, so I transferred them indoors.

My suggestion: take this idea, purloin it, try variations on it, and if you find a neater way, please leave a comment here.



* Oh, yes, about starting with a bang: I was up until 3 am, having seen in the New Year with Sydney's fabulous fireworks.  Here's a sample of what you can see at that link:

So if there are any typos, I have an excuse!