RAHS Motto

by Alfred James

The Royal Australian Historical Society's motto Veteris non inscius ævi was proposed in 1901 by William Yarrington. The Reverend William Henry Hazel Yarrington was a councillor of the Society from 1901 to 1918, President in 1903 and 1910 and a Fellow from 1920 until his death three years later. The words are taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses; they are written in hexameter verse and form part of line 11 of book XV. Literally they mean 'one who is not unacquainted with the history of the past'.

The opening 15 lines of book XV may be translated thus:

At this point a leader is sought who is able to carry so great a burden and succeed so great a king. Then Fame, that fruitful herald, selects the illustrious Numa for the throne [Numa succeeded Romulus in 715 B.C.]. He is not content with knowing the practices and customs of the Sabines but with an enquiring mind seeks to discover what is Nature's general law. His will to do this leads him from his native town of Cures to Crotona, the city which once gave refuge to Hercules. There, when he asked who was the founder of this Greek city on Italian soil, one of the old inhabitants of the place, well versed in ancient lore, answered him thus: 'The son of Jove, enriched with the oxen of Spain, is said by good fortune to have reached the Lacinian shores (Lacinium was near Crotona) and while his herd was grazing on the tender grass he entered the friendly home of the great Croton where he rested after his prolonged labours'. And when he took his leave he said: 'In the time of your grandson this will be the site of a city'. And his promise was duly fulfilled.

The words are apposite in reflecting a principal object of any historical society and in referring to the British settlement of this country, specifically the city of Sydney. As a student at Sydney University Yarrington had won the University Prize for English Verse with his poem 'Captain Cook Meditating on Australia's Future' read at the opening of the Great Hall on 18 July 1859.

In the late 1980s the motto was surreptitiously dropped from many of the Society's publications and was only restored after the Annual General Meeting held on 16 April 1991 resolved overwhelmingly to restore the motto 'at the head of all official documents, letters, papers, etc. issued by the Society.'