““O Uommibatto”: How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed With the Wombat”, 2019-01-10 ():
Angus Trumble on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and company’s curious but long-standing fixation with the furry oddity that is the wombat—that “most beautiful of God’s creatures”—which found its way into their poems, their art, and even, for a brief while, their homes.
…the Pre-Raphaelites were not the first English to become enamoured by the unusual creature. Wombats captured the attention of English naturalists as soon as they found out about them from early settlers, explorers, and naturalists at the time of first contact. The Aboriginal word wombat was first recorded near Port Jackson, and though variants such as “wombach”, “womback”, the “womm-bat” and “womat” were noted, the present form of the name stuck very early, from at least 1797. Beautiful drawings survive from the 1802 voyages of the Investigator and Le Géographe. Ferdinand Bauer, who sailed with Matthew Flinders, and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, who was in the rival French expedition of Nicolas Baudin, both drew the creature. These were engraved and carefully studied at home.
Wombats were admired for their stumpy strength, their patience, their placid, not to say congenial manners, and also a kind of stoic determination. Occasionally they were thought clumsy, insensible or even stupid, but these isolated observations are out of step with the majority of 19th-century opinion.