Aboriginal Humour
Aboriginal Place Names with Unromantic Translations
Colonists retaining Indigenous place names for towns are not always thrilled to find out what the Aboriginal language words actually mean...
Many supposedly traditional Aboriginal place names have funny stories attached to their real meanings. For example, Noosa (a resort town in Queensland Australia) was given its name when a colonist misunderstood a Gubbi Gubbi man who was actually saying "No sir!". I once stayed for a while in another place in Queensland called Goodna. Here's a funny bit of an urban legend I heard there from a family when they took me to pay respects at the nearby Bora.
Goodna was originally called Goona by the European invaders when they took the land from the Aboriginal traditional owners. During the dispossession process, they asked the Indigenous inhabitants what the place was called. "Goona," came the reply. And so the place was named on maps and signs and deeds and all that print-based culture business, and thus it was known by the new locals.
However, one day the true meaning of the word "Goona" was discovered, much to the horror of its inhabitants. How would you feel if you suddenly discovered your family had settled in a place called "Excrement"?
As local legend has it, the "Founding Fathers" (you weren't allowed to have founding mothers in those days) got together and proposed a solution to what they thought was a monumentally embarrassing practical joke played upon them by the displaced local Indigenous people. They decided to insert an extra letter to give the name a new positive feel, and renamed the area "Goodna".
This is funny to me. When I was a boy I moved around a lot, but I remember that we always called faeces "goonoos" or "kunus" or "gunnah" or "coonar" and so forth, depending on what the local lads were saying. As an adult in later life, I realised that across most Australian Indigenous language groups (about 500 in total) the word is pretty much the same. This fecal-linguistic transference occurs in Europe as well, with "merda" (Italian), "merde" (French), "mierde" (Spanish).
Anyway, in many Australian Indigenous languages there is no specific "g" or "k" sound, but something in between. Hence "kun" (Wik for poo) and similar words from other Indigenous languages vary in spelling, sometimes starting with "g", "c" or "k" for the same sound, depending on how it sounds to the foreign writer's ear.
This irregular orthography of "k" sounds can be seen in many Australian towns that have taken names handed down from former owners, such as Goondoowindi, Coonowrin, Coonabaribran, Goonawarra, Coongulla, Goornong, Cunderdin, Goona Gully, Coonamble and about a hundred other foreign settlements splattered across the land. In many cases these names represent (literally) the movements of ancestral beings. But you have to wonder if there's any truth to the urban legends about some names being practical jokes played on colonists.
This is a fairly tongue in cheek article, but on a serious note about Aboriginal place names, Kakkib Li Dthia Warrawee'a (Ya'idtmidtung Elder), in his book "There Once Was A Tree Called Deru" said that he wished he had a dollar for all the Aboriginal place names in Australia that translate as something along the lines of "go away white man."
