How I was fooled!

I have been a victim of the great lamington hoax.  A few days ago a friend said to me that lamingtons were not Australian. They were a New Zealand concoction, like the pavlova.  I did some research on this and found an article in The Guardian six years ago which reported ‘experts’ who had discovered documents which showed that Lord Lamington had visited New Zealand before taking up his post as Governor of Queensland. He had been quite taken with the local cake called a wellington, a sponge covered in chocolate icing and coconut.  The latter was heaped on top to resemble snow-capped mountains.  The New Zealanders were flattered and renamed their cake the lamington in honour of the visiting dignitary.  They also had a painting called Summer Pantry, dated  1888, which supposedly showed a half-eaten wellington cake which they had helpfully ringed.  It is really very difficult to see what this thing is, possibly an apple, but once identified by the experts as a lamington, this is what we all saw.

  I passed this on to another dictionary editor who, being more astute than me, tried to find some evidence of this in NZ English. He found none. Returning to the article he noticed that it was published on April 1 and that the writer was Olaf Priol, which is an anagram of April Fool.

 Two years after the original article there was another which focused on the bickering between Australia and New Zealand over who owned what. There was pavlova of course, and weetbix which surprised me, and there was lamington.  I suspect there are probably more such articles if I had the energy to find them. And there was my friend who was convinced that lamingtons came from New Zealand.

 It just goes to show how a fiction can become entrenched as fact.