Talk:Victor Harbor, South Australia

Spelling

The claim that South Australian Harbours are spelt without a "u" reflects the use of American shipping charts by the State Government in the late 19th and early 20th century is probably wrong. The towns official website notes that all three Harbours in South Australia are spelt without a 'u'. the website intimates that the spelling of all South Australian Harbours without the 'u' originated from spelling errors made by an early Surveyor General of South Australia. This explanation has widespread currency among local residents and is the explantation given to visitors at the towns information centre. If there are no objections I propose to correct the explanation in this article Tophonic (talk) 11:08, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

The use of "It can be surmised" and "probably" at the source makes me think that the "spelling error" reasoning is based on original research. It seems likely that the spelling simply reflected "spelling reform" as promoted by King O'Malley and others at the time that also gave us Australian Labor Party (see Australian_spelling#Spelling), but that's my own original research. Melburnian (talk) 03:50, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

More "original research" using Trove reveals that the two main SA newspapers had their own competing house styles, with the "Latinish" spellings (color, flavor, harbor, labor, rigor, vigor) of the South Australian Advertiser and the "Frenchish" (colour, flavour, harbour, labour, rigour, vigour) of the South Australian Register. Referring to the Oxford English Dictionary (20 vol.), one finds that usage in Britain has until the last century been to some extent ambivalent and perhaps (like -ize v. -ise) influenced by the Oxford v. Cambridge rivalry, a guess on my part but plausible. Doug butler (talk) 00:26, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

My own "original research" a couple of years ago consisted of contacting the SA Geographical Names Board. I received the reply that the spelling of half a dozen localities in SA, including Outer Harbor, Franklin Harbor (in more recent times the local council changed its name to the DC of Franklin Harbour), etc., is due to the fact that they were gazetted with that spelling. (I forget the others, but I still have the email somewhere in my archives, but can't locate it at the moment.) It seems that the parliamentary draughtsmen were perpetuating an old legal fiction going back to the 18th century or earlier, that the word harbor has been derived from the Latin (my Collins dictionary has it being derived from Old English herebeorg, from here troop, army + beorg shelter, and related to Old High German and Old Norse equivalents; see also e.g. the derivation of Cherbourg or Hamburg). The same spelling occurs in the names of various Acts of Parliament:

e.g. in the Harbors and Navigation Act 1993, it has:

Legislation repealed by principal Act

The Harbors and Navigation Act 1993 repealed the following:

Boating Act 1974

Harbors Act 1936

Marine Act 1936;

and of course in the name of the South Australian Harbors Board (1914-1966) which then became the Department of Marine and Harbors (1966-1986).

It's amusing to note that whenever this spelling issue surfaces in the media and puzzles the general public, who come up with bizarre theories about it being due to a spelling error by a lowly clerk, or some fictitious early mapmaker aboard an American ship, that the real culprits don't come forward and 'fess up - but perhaps it's too difficult for lawyers and parliamentarians to admit. Cheers, Bahudhara (talk) 15:23, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

There's no great mystery about this, and it wasn't anybody's error. "Correct" spelling is a modern invention, and in the nineteenth century many words had alternative spellings. Educated people would spell a word two different ways on the same page. Even today Australians write labour movement, but Labor party. For some reason the SA Marine and Harbors Board named Victor Harbor, Franklin Harbor and Outer Harbor without a u - what we think of today as American spelling. The name Port was much more common: Port Adelaide, Port Augusta, Port Lincoln, Port Pirie, Port McDonnell. (But the person they put in charge of a Port was called a Harbormaster.) In the cases of Victor Harbor and Franklin Harbor, the name became attached to the town and still is. However, South Australian Railways wasn't having any of that, and if you read the sign on the railway platform at Victor Harbor, to this day it reads "Victor Harbour". No-one was wrong, just alternative ways. Peter Bell (talk) 08:14, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

I agree that it wasn't anybody's error, and that in the nineteenth century many words had alternative spellings. The Americans weren't subject to the same fashions that affected the British-centred world: hence their spelling of an iron band that went on the wheel of a cart as "tire" is not, as I've seen occasionally asserted, part of their nation's movement to simplify spelling; it's the result of absence of a fashion that saw it transform into "tyre".

In 19th century UK, one fashion was to spell words as they would be in French, even if it involved "Frenchifying" words that didn't have a francophone equivalent. So the word "program" became "programme", for example. (John Howard revivified "programme" when he sent out a missive to the Commonwealth public service decrying American terminologies; he used program/me as an example. Thereafter, I enjoyed observing the pace at which bright-eyed public servants changed over to ...mme.)

My reading a long time ago led me to believe that in addition to the movement for spelling reform -- of which, as mentioned above, the flamboyant American King O'Malley was a disciple -- a wish for a more distinctive Australian identity led, among other things, to the adoption of many American practices across a wide spectrum of endeavour. Adopting them was perhaps a signal or "statement" of modernity ("woke", 100+ years early??) :-). I certainly retain the impression mentioned above that the spelling of the Australian Labor Party was a manifestation of that.

Please forgive my lurching away from the topic of this Talk page ... As to the spelling of Victor Harb*r, last year I saw a 19th century photo in the online image collection of the State Library of SA of people on the railway station platform (well before the building that stands there today; crinolines abounded). The large station name sign stated "Victor Harbor". I continue to keep my eyes open for it (it wasn't on a "Victor Harb*r" search unfortunately) and will get it eventually -- I'm likely to have taken a screenshot which lies among the terrabytes with a generic filename. Anyway, that means that even the stickling South Australian Railways played around with the name!

The above remarks are based on memories (clear ones) from my researches, on other topics, in an era when the idea of small computers, never mind an Interthingy or an encyclopaedia, made up of ones and zeros, was never imagined.* So I hope you'll excuse me if I don't have citations (yet).

* Apart from Chester Gould.

Cheers, Simon. SCHolar44 (talk) 07:10, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

The State Library SA Memory site is 503. The linked page is archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/20190306044758/https://www.samemory.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm?c=8786 HuwG 119.225.7.134 (talk) 07:35, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Victor Harbor, South Australia/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Hi, I haven't used this comment feature before, so please forgive me if I get this wrong, but I have found an error on this page. According to a Victor Harbour site run by the government (http://www.victor.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm?u=295) the name of Victor Harbor was originally Victor Harbor - it was changed to Port Victor for a while, but this was not the original name. -Conf Confusedcious 15:09, 21 June 2007 (UTC) Edit: Beg pardon, my error Confusedcious 15:17, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Last edited at 15:17, 21 June 2007 (UTC). Substituted at 09:56, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Flinders invading Victor Harbor

I have removed a reference to Flinders invading Victor Harbor as follows:

Traditionally home of the Ramindjeri clan of the Ngarrindjeri people, the bay on which Victor Harbor sits was invaded by Matthew Flinders in HMS Investigator on 8 April 1802.

Noting the sensitivities on this topic, I don't feel these words would reflect reliable sources and don't embody wp:npov. I'm writing a note here so that give a chance for anybody who disagrees to discuss.Mozzie (talk) 09:07, 5 August 2020 (UTC)