THE fourth verse of the hymn ‘In the Cross of Christ I Glory’, written in 1825 by John Bowring, and popular in some churches during Lent, begins with a fascinating old word – bane.
It has nothing to do with the last syllable of the surname of the sixth Governor of NSW (1821 – 1825) after whom the capital city of Queensland was named: Sir Thomas Brisbane, who was also a noted astronomer.
Thomas Brisbane sent John Oxley north to find a new site to which to banish the worst of the NSW convict reoffenders.
See, we should have closed the borders years ago!
Local Aborigines showed Oxley some prime sites. Despite their assistance, true to form the white-fellas named both the settlement and the river not after the locals, but after Governor Thomas Brisbane, a Scottish politician in Sydney, and the eventual state after a Queen in England.
But I digress … back to John Bowring’s hymn!
Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure,
By the cross are sanctified.
Peace is there that knows no measure,
Joys that through all time abide.
Bane is not the only word we use in church without knowing what it means.
And when it turns up attached to the tail end of a nasty little biter, as in “fleabane”, the mystery deepens.
We can also find bane tacked to other critters, though not in church: wolfbane, hensbane, ratsbane, etc. Urbane? What’s an Ur? Or bane can precede a word, usually something to do with plants: baneberry (poisonous), banewort, (wort is an old word for a plant or herb used as food or medicine). Baneful is an adjective meaning harmful: “the baneful effects of envy and jealousy.”
Used by itself, bane is a noun with negative implications: a curse, something that is dangerous, poisonous, potentially fatal, a persistent source of ill fortune: “the bane of my life.”
I suspect it is related to the more common “ban”, to curse, prohibit, banish, forbid. Some might currently say: “the bane of my life, Governments who seek to ban the unvaccinated!” (I’m triple vaccinated, certified, boosted, licenced, whooping coughed, baptised and married, and I’m still no better than the banned!)
Used in conjunction with blessing in the hymn we started with, “bane and blessing,” we sing about the two polar opposites of life and all the mixed stages in between curse and blessing, in other words, the bad and the good, the full range of life’s experiences, the sick and the healthy, the life-depleting and the life-enhancing.
And then there is the notorious weed, which has this year greatly multiplied in our midst – fleabane.
In the Middle Ages people believed that fleabane kept fleas at bay if strewn where cats and dogs lay, banished bedbugs if dried and hung as sachets off the end of the bed, and if its crushed and dried flowers and leaves were burnt like our modern mosquito coils, it cursed the flighty biters, along with midges and flies.
It has been reported that the Seminole Indians of Florida maintained that fleabane, if crushed and rubbed over one’s body, warded off unwanted wives.
I have no first-hand experience of this, so I can’t say if it works or not, but I’m sure it was something attempted as a last resort, certainly after marriage counselling.
Please do not try old Indian remedies without reading up on side-effects. Some claim that fleabane is better at attracting insects than repelling them. You could innocently end up with a superabundance of wives as well as a bed full of bedbugs and hairy fleabane stems.
It is not called Hairy Horse Weed or Asthma Weed for nothing. And remember, anything with bane in its name might be poisonous.
A plant that bans fleas? “False advertising!” some declare. “It’s a scam!” say others. And still others, “It doesn’t work at all.”
The problem really is one of recognition. Of the dozens of plants that have been known through the ages as fleabane, or are currently so-called, we don’t know which one, if any, repelled fleas.
Even today there are many different fleabanes. Some speak of native Australian fleabanes. There aren’t any.
There are plants in the Erigeron family of daisies that used to be called fleabanes but no longer are.
Most plants called fleabane today are in the Conyza family of the Daisy tribe, and look quite different from the old European fleabanes, foreign botanical intruders and pests that have infiltrated our borders, and some of which have been labelled as super plants and “unkillable weeds” as they gain immunity to commonly-used herbicides.
Brisbane City Council has a fact-sheet on at least one of the nine different Conyza species, mostly hailing from North and South America, which have become naturalised in every state and territory of our Commonwealth: Conyza bonariensis, commonly called Flaxleaf Fleabane, which appears to be the one we have here.
This major plant pest grows just about anywhere, and thrives after early summer rain.
“It has no beneficial aspects in Australia”, some knowledgeable body said.
It begins as a small rosette of leaves flat on the ground. Soon a hairy central stem makes a bolt for the sky, attaining a height of up to two metres, dividing into branches, flowering creamy-white, and releasing hundreds of fluffy cream-coloured wind-borne seeds to “fill the earth and subdue it” and to tempt my child-bride, as chief weeder at our place, to be drawn perilously close in her prime, to using bad language.