Aboriginal Languages Australia

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...

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...

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

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’,...

Mooney Mooney is on the Hawkesbury River. There is a club there where lunch may be had, with a balcony offering a view over the water;...

When reviewing Wiradhuri records made by Archdeacon James Gunther around 1837, your database compiler chanced upon: This called to mind a...

‘KOALA’: what does it mean? A koala is one of Australia’s favourite treasures of the animal kingdom. It looks almost unbearably...

Yarrangobilly is in the Snowy Mountains, about 40 km west from the southern portion of the ACT. This places it in Ngarigo country....

The local zoo was looking for guidance for a name for a walking tour of the zoo, and offered its preliminary ideas: 1 Burraga Nura …...

A personal diary entry from January 1984 has the record: “Later we all set off by car headed for Twofold Bay150 km away approx. Did this...

THOSE WERE THE DAYS A generation after the upheaval of 1788 and the arrival of the First Fleet, and around 150 km north of Sydney,...

Bokhara In a press report in the Sydney Morning Herald for the last day of 2010, there was the following entry: Moderate to major...

Sometime in 1791, William Dawes recorded the verb ‘to tear’, as in ‘tearing a piece of paper’: This was to prove one of many instances of...