While everyone in the West already is familiar with placenames ending in ‘ - up ’, visitors soon discover them there. One of the early recorders of language information for the south west, the Nyungar or Noongar area, G.F. Moore, explained: “Ap, or Up ... An affix used to denote a locality fit for, or used as, a resting-place; as Mangaga ap, the resting-place at Mangaga." Moore, George Fletcher. 1842. A Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language in Common Use among the Aborigines

Canowindra, between Orange and Cowra in NSW, is on the western side of the Wiradhuri nation or language group. As the March 2019 issue of Placenames Australia noted, the name Canowindra is clearly of Aboriginal origin, and was first recorded as the name of a pastoral property ‘Canoundra’ in 1829. The conventional view, commonly expressed in popular ‘name books’ and websites, is that it comes from a Wiradhuri word meaning ‘home’ or ‘camping place’. While European recorders mi

It often seems to us that most placenames have meanings which are unknown and mysterious. Does Warsaw have a meaning? Do Pisa , Calais , Berlin ? It would appear, however, that Kalamunda , in the foothills of the Darling Ranges outside Perth, is not one of these: we’re told that ‘everybody knows’ what it means. Wikipedia confidently tells us that the word is derived from two Noongar (an Indigenous Australian language) words: kala meaning ‘home’ and munda meaning ‘forest’, hen

Your Amateur Researcher received an email enquiring about the meaning of Eurimbla: I am hoping to establish the English meaning of Eurimbla , as in Eurimbla Avenue, Randwick. So far, I am wondering if it may have an Indigenous origin as a compound word from eurimanan (a large toothed monster, ie horse) and the ending derived from bulah , more than one, or many. The reason being that a Trove newspaper reference of 1857 announces the birth of a child to Mrs G W Lord at Eurimbla

Turramurra is a leafy suburb on the North Shore of Sydney. The meaning given for Turramurra in popular placenames booklets is ‘high land’ or ‘high’, as shown in Table 1 below. The original source or sources for such claims did not form part of the information provided in these works. Richardson (n.d.) gives ‘Lane Cove’ as the meaning, or effectively Turramurra itself. Australian respelt English EngJSM source “Turramurra” daramara  “High land; small watercourse” hill  McCarthy