Biyal Biyal Story
For all that is now known, the Aboriginal people of Sydney first encountered by Europeans did not have a name for their language or even for themselves as a distinct group. They used the word yura (transcribed by First Fleet recorders as ‘eora’) to mean ‘people’, and the only people around apart from the Europeans were they themselves. They had distinct words for ‘man’ (mula, possibly mala [transcribed as ‘mulla’] and ‘woman’ (dyin [transcribed variously as ‘gin’, ‘din’ and similar]).
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R.H. Mathews, a professional surveyor but also an ethnologist and prolific writer on Australian Aboriginal languages at the turn of the twentieth century, used the name Dharruk for the people of the Sydney Basin in a paper on the Thurrawal Language, the last six pages of which, headed ‘The Dharruk Language’, included a word list of about 276 words together with 48 other words or expressions included in the text.
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While ‘Dharug’ (variously spelt) is claimed by some to mean ‘yam’, a search of the records for the Sydney region and southwards for words resembling the sound of the word ‘darug’ offered no confirmation of this, as the fourth column in the table below shows:
A check of words sounding like ‘darug’ northwards of Sydney to the Queensland border also produced nothing resembling yam (bone, dead, dive, dog, ear, goanna, grow, handle, palm, pierce, punish, shark, splinter, sun, three, vein, woman and some others). Mathews did not explain in his paper where he had got the name ‘Dharruk’ from, and the writer is unaware of anywhere else where he might have done so.
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Noted language scholar R.M.W. Dixon, on the subject of language names, in 1980 wrote as follows:
By far the most frequent linguistic form to be used as the basis for a language name in Australia is that meaning ‘no’. From Wira + dhuri ‘no + HAVING’ in Central New South Wales to Biyay + girri ‘no + HAVING’ in north-east Queensland there are names that involve the form for ‘no’ and the comitative [-having] suffix. Over a considerable area in northern Victoria and southern New South Wales the form for ‘no’ is simply reduplicated to make the language name — Yota-Yota, Yitha-Yitha, Wemba-Wemba, among others.
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It was with this awareness of how Aboriginal language names commonly come about that the writer, Jeremy Steele, and colleague Dr Keith Vincent Smith, came up with the name Biyal Biyal for the Sydney language (abbreviated in the table above as ‘BB’) as a way of referring to the Sydney language more picturesquely. In the Sydney language the word for ‘no’ is biyal. None of the recorders of the language (Dawes, Collins, Tench, Southwell and one or two others) specifically identified a ‘-having’ suffix, although some words that were recorded suggest it might have been -arayi, similar to -having in Wiradhuri and Gamilarayi (Kamilaroi) both being NSW inland languages not all that far away. While to suggest obscure-looking ‘biyalarayi’ as a name for the Sydney language might have seemed a leap too far, the reduplication of biyal was a less startling option, and a more appealing one given the existence of a documented use of such doubling in the case of the near language Wodi Wodi in the neighbourhood of Wollongong. So it was that Biyal Biyal was settled upon as a presumptive name for the Sydney language.
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Steele and Smith first met on 8 October 1999 when they both attended ‘Allowan’, a public seminar on the Sydney language in Sydney. Thereafter they worked in parallel and sometimes together, Smith concentrating on history and historical figures in the Sydney Aboriginal story mostly after the European upheaval of 1788, and Steele on language, first Biyal Biyal then Aboriginal languages more broadly.
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Neither is sure to whom the devising of the name can be fairly attributed. It began to be used by them both from about 2001. Steele prepared for a workshop at Macquarie University in July that year, in the title of which ('bayabanyi Biyal-Biyal yaguna: we will all speak BB today') the name Biyal Biyal occurs.
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Whichever of them it was, it was definitely Smith who, in an email dated 25 March 2002 and headed 'Biyal Biyal?', revealed his discovery that the name he and Steele had come up with was not so outrageous after all: Archibald Meston had been there before them.
Archibald Meston (1851–1924) is described in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as a journalist, civil servant and explorer, but from his mid-thirties he began to take an increasing interest in Aboriginal affairs, including ethnology and language. So it was that he wrote two articles of particular interest to the matter at hand. In these he referred to the Sydney language by the terms ‘beealba’ and even the very same ‘Beeal Beeal’, and it may be inferred from his writings that he was not himself inventing the terms but recording existing names for the Sydney language, perhaps of long standing, that he had come upon in his experiences or research. In the image below the relevant text of the published articles is encased in a blue box in the second column and reproduced more clearly in the third column:
