Cats, polecats and good ideas

 Here on the east coast of Australia we still have a native predator called a quoll.

They're not very common but they can be found in remote areas in east Gippsland and on the edges of the Snowies.

In the nineteenth century the early settlers sometimes called them native cats, just in the same way wombats were sometimes called native badgers - due to wombats excavating large burrows like badger setts than any physical resemblance.

But quolls?

Well they don't really look like cats, more like European polecats.

European polecats are also pretty rare these days, but when I worked at the Field Centre in mid Wales, there was a guy trying to work out how many were left, and he had a couple in a cage that had been hit by cars.

So not only have I seen the pictures, I've seen live polecats and can confirm that they really do have a marked odour.

So, were the early settlers thinking about polecats when they called quolls native cats?

The answer's probably unknowable, but if we had more references to native polecats in the first have of the nineteenth century and more to native cats in the latter half we could say maybe with some justification.

So, using Tim Sherrat's querypic to search for the phrase native polecat what do we see?

Looks promising, with the phrase being more common earlier on.

But if we search for native cat we see something similar

which is not quite what  I expected. In fact if you graph the two queries together you find that native cat has always been a much more common usage

so, it was a good idea, but one that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Incidentally if you graph native cat against quoll you see something quite similar

with the phrase native cat predominating over quoll.

The Trove corpus of digitised newspapers only goes as far as 1950, so this means that the name quoll only came into common use sometime after 1950, which is exactly what you would expect, given that it was not until the 1960's that David Fleay campaigned successfully for the name quoll to be used in place of the older colonial name of native cat ...

Wm Docker and straw hats

 In our collection at Dow's we have glass bottle embossed Wm. Docker Sun Brand

which looks like a late nineteenth century or early twentieth century medicine bottle. I'm not alone in this, the WA Museum has a similar item in its collection - but unfortunately, no image:

which is fine, except for the fact that William Docker was known as a varnish and lacquer manufacturer, which begs the question as to why a bottle from a varnish maker was in a pharmacy.

When I documented it back in 2018, my best guess, and it was only a guess, was that the bottle had originally contained linseed oil, which is not only used in varnish manufacture, but was sometimes used as dietary supplement and also in in animal husbandry - in fact you can still buy linseed oil capsules today.

But I now have another idea. The bottle originally held dye for straw hats. 

And for that hypothesis I have to thank ebay.

As I've written elsewhere, ebay can be a useful research resource, as collectors and bottle hunters often advertise old bottles and ceramic pots for sale, although often unprovenanced.

Well I was idly surfing ebay and I came across these two items, which were described as straw hat dye bottles:

and they clearly the same as the Dow's bottle.

Hat dye for straw hats makes sense as it allowed one to add a little colour to one's outfit.

So did William Docker make hat dye?

Well google was completely unhelpful, wanting to sell me a straw hat, including those by a certain well known manufacturer of men's apparel, but Trove came up trumps, including this advert from the early 1920's

So, while on one level it's all hand waving - after all there's no label or evidence to connect 'our' bottle directly to hat dye - circumstantially it fits, and a country pharmacy might well be where one might go to buy hat dye ...

Search engines being helpful ...

 A good part of my work documenting the contents of Dow's Pharmacy involves chasing down and documenting old pharmaceutical companies and products.

Some are easy, some are difficult and some doubly so because either the name has been reused by a later, better known product - sometimes overseas - and sometimes because the name resembles a well known name and search engines increasingly have an auto-correct like capability.

I'll give you an example.

Over the weekend I did some family history work and needed to research a farm in Angus, Scotland called Burnmouth of Kintyrie.

Traditionally east coast Scottish farm names in the form X of Y mean either a house or smaller property associated with either a larger fermtoun or even a small community.

So to keep things simple I searched for the fermtoun name alone as they tend to persist while houses and smaller subdivisions can disappear, especially in the last fifty years or so as farms increasingly became larger, more mechanised and reabsorbed subdivisions.

So what did I find?

Well, everyone uses Google don't they?

Helpfully, by default, it assumes that I meant the more popular Kintyre, on the other side of the country, and not what I was looking for.

Microsoft Bing is not much better:

and bizarrely, the best is Yandex:

which is not the answer I would first have thought of.

Now, there's a problem here. I'm aware of the problems of search engines and know of various tricks to to sharpen a query, but a lot of people don't, and there's quite a bit of evidence that most people only look at the first page of results.

Search engines are basically advertising supported, which of course means that it is in their interests to be 'helpful' and provide answers that not only provide them with revenue but actually answer more common queries and take account of common typos etc.

Not what you really need when trying to research a particular item, location or whatever.

The problem is easy enough to work round, but I've the impression, and only the impression, that it's become more of a problem in the last eighteen months or so ...

Another use case for google docs on an iphone ...

 Way back in March, I wrote that I had finally found a use case for installing Google Docs on an iphone.

I've now found another use case for Google Docs on an iphone.

Here in regional Victoria we're currently in lockdown, as we have been, of and on, since March last year - while we've had quite long periods where we seem to be on top of the virus and can have something like the life we used to have, it's been punctuated by periods under lockdown when there has been an outbreak.

One of the lockdown rules we have in Victoria (and it may be different where you live) is that only one person in a household can go to the supermarket at a time, and then only once a day - a measure aimed at reducing community transmission.

Now, before the pandemic, we usually used to do our shopping together, and basically we didn't plan - we used to make it up as we went along, buying what looked fresh and good, plus the basics. 

This of course meant sometimes we bought too much, and sometimes we forgot things.

Come Covid, we couldn't be so slack about things, so we took to maintaining a Google Docs shared document to which we added items as we ran out of them, plus anything else needed - basically a living document.

When one of us did a supermarket trip or an online grocery order, we'd print the document out, scribble any last minute amendments on it, and then use it as either a shopping list or as document to work from to build an online grocery order.

Nothing that unusual in this, except that, as we had been historically crap at lists we would miss things leading to flurries of last minute text messages of the 'can you get?' kind.

Well, we can't do much about the online orders - shouting Rinseaid! from the kitchen works as well as anything else when it comes to last minute updates.

Supermarket trips are something else. Remember the one person once a day rule.

That means that you can't go back and get something if you forget it first time around.

The geeky answer we've come up with is to update the Google Docs shopping list online - no more illegible scribbled additions - and the simply view it on the phone rather than printing it out.

Now I'm sure we're not the first to do this - after all, despite not being very good with lists we've been emailing shopping lists to each other and using PDA's for shopping lists since the start of the century - I was once stopped in the Marks and Sparks food store in York some time around 2001 by one of the store security personnel for walking round a store with a palm pilot doing our shopping. For the record, when I showed them what I was doing they were absolutely fine about it.

What is different this time  from simply passing a document back and forth is the shared editing of a living document meaning that additions can be made in real time, rather than simply viewing a static instance of a document - which may of course be out of date.

Ok, it's incredibly geeky as a solution, but it works (for us at least).

Documenting offline ....

 

Well, for the moment, we're out of lockdown, which means back down to Dow's for a day of documentation.

So, off I went last Wednesday to record some artefacts - like the 1930's hair removal wax (pictured above) still in its packet - only to discover when I got there that the internet was down - probably just the router needing a reboot, but as I don't have a key to the router cupboard it might as well have needed exorcism after having been beset by demons from the deepest circle of hell for all I could do about it. It didn't work and that was how it was going to stay.

This didn't worry me as, I knew from previous experience that my methodology works offline, and so it proved again. Which was rather pleasing as it meant that the procedure was still robust and there had been no creep.

Perversely, I wished that I had thought to bring my portable internet modem as I'm still looking for a real world case to prove that it will work using a 4G connection in place of either an ADSL or NBN connection. No reason to think it won't, it's simply a matter of checking for performance or some unsuspected gotcha.

But for the moment I need to research some 1930's cosmetics ...

Fruit Bread and the great forgetting

 Last weekend we made some fruit bread in the bread maker.

We didn't do it from scratch, we used a pre mix kit that we had bought in Castlemaine some embarrassingly long time ago that we found at the back of the kitchen cupboard.

Why it was still there was quite clear - one look at the packet showed that we must have picked up a gluten free mix.

(gluten - clip from the wonderful Norwegian series Beforigners)

Now, neither of us have an intolerance to gluten so we'd obviously put the prospect of pea flour based fruit bread in the too hard basket.

Anyway, the time had come to use it or toss it. The instructions on the back of the pack helpfully said something like 'for information on how to make in a breadmaker, visit our website'.

So we did.

And of course there were no instructions. Gluten free bread mix was obviously a discontinued product.

So we busked it, adding some wholemeal flour and semolina to lighten it, and guessing at the amount of yeast required.

We were obviously pretty close as the result was not as brick like as it might have been.

Now there's obviously a limit as to how much text you can put on a bread mix packet, so putting the usage instructions on the web probably seemed like a good idea, as probably did taking the instructions off once the product was discontinued.

But there's a question here. Suppose that instead of bread mix it was the instructions for something a little more sensitive, say one of these  quasi pharmaceutical products such as these multivitamin and herb mixes you can get in wellness shops and organic grocers. 

What do you do if you find an old packet of the product and some the information has gone to the great bit bucket in the sky?

So when did toothpaste start to be sold in tubes?

 Artists oil paints had been sold in France in lead tubes since the 1850's - prior to then artists usually made up their own colours.

One of the colours sold in lead tubes was a rich brown - Mummy Brown - which was made up of ground up dead Egyptians. In fact in the 1870's the pre Raphelite artist Edward Burne-Jones was so shocked when he discovered the origin of Mummy Brown, he buried his tube of the paint in the garden and foreswore ever using the paint again.

However the idea of putting toothpaste in tubes took a little longer. 

In 1870, toothpaste was still sold in ceramic pots

but by 1897 it was commonly available in tubes

so when was it first put in tubes?

Well, wikipedia gives most of the story. There's some dispute about exactly when it started being put in tubes but it seems to have been around 1890. 

Either Johnson and Johnson or Sheffield Pharmaceutical were the first to market toothpaste in tubes sometime in the late 1880's. 

Both companies had previously marketed something very much like toothpaste in jars earlier on, and at some point both companies started putting toothpaste in metal tubes - initially first made of lead.

The idea seems to have been popular and as we see it was being sold in Britain (and by extension the British Empire) by Beechams by 1892 - the earliest mention I can find in Welsh Newspapers online is from the Carnarvon and Denbighshire Herald from July 1892. In Australia, the earliest advert I can find is from the Sydney Mail in October 1893.

(There's a little twist to the story of Burne-Jones and Mummy Brown. The story is recorded by Burne-Jones' nephew, one Rudyard Kipling.

Burne-Jones apparently found out the origin of Mummy Brown in the course of a discussion with some of his artist friends over Sunday lunch. One of his colleagues was of course George Wardle, who besides being William Morris's workshop manager,  did several engravings for Burne-Jones.

George Wardle's wife was Madeleine Smith, though she called herself Lena by then. We don't know who was present at the ceremonial interring of the tube of Mummy Brown, though it's intriguing to think Madeleine Smith could have been there ...)