Aboriginal Languages Australia

It is often claimed that the Aboriginal the name for Sydney was Warang . Your Amateur Researcher previously speculated about this in the...

A package holiday coach tour in August 2024 went from Broome in Western Australia to Perth. One of the places visited was the Pinnacles,...

The following is a typical summary table from the Bayala databases presenting a few of the words for ‘kangaroo’ across the country. The...

Who was Mathews? One of the principal figures in the recording of Aboriginal languages, particularly in the Sydney region, was Robert...

How did this translation come about? An Aboriginal singer-songwriter acquaintance sent an email inviting Your Amateur Researcher (YAR) to...

The following entry from the Macquarie archive gives basic information about the brolga but does not explain where the term ‘native...

Dieri is an Aboriginal language once spoken to the east of Lake Eyre in Cooper Creek country  in the Sturt Stony Desert in north-west...

Lancelot Edward Threlkeld, born in 1788, is, or was, exactly 150 years older than your modern-day amateur student of Awabakal, the Lake...

Picture the lonely austere missionary the Rev. Lancelot Edward Threlkeld, deep in Aboriginal country sometime between 1834 and 1837 in...

The Lake Macquarie missionary the Rev. Lancelot Threlkeld produced a grammar of the language where his mission was established. This...

THE ANNUAL REPORT OF THE MISSION TO THE ABORIGINES, LAKE MACQUARIE, FOR MDCCCXXXVIII Ebenezer, Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, December...

Body parts are the best documented category of words for many Aboriginal languages because they were the most immediate and most...

Just to the west of Hornsby, a northern suburb of Sydney, is Old Mans Valley. One might reasonably assume that the name was inspired by...

How did this translation come about? An Aboriginal singer-songwriter acquaintance sent an email inviting Your Amateur Researcher (YAR) to...

Meeting some Tasmanians It’s the year 1793, and the place later known as Tasmania. Ten years before the first European settlement to be...

It is something of a thrill for Your Amateur Researcher (YAR) when a little bit of the curtain shrouding the mysteries of the Tasmanian...

The word marama in the Tasmanian word lists caught the attention again today. The meaning given for it is ‘star’. DEEP TIME No-one quite...

One can only surmise what the euphonious NSW place name Trunketabella might mean. We yearn for a translation such as ‘pretty trinkets’,...

The Tasmanian Bayala database keeps throwing up small insights into the Tasmanian languages, and suggests the launching of a goose chase....

Affixes: prefixes, infixes, suffixes — the lot Joseph Milligan, who provided more extensive vocabularies than anyone else, famously...