Aboriginal Languages Australia

Lynette Oates has produced a comprehensive introduction to Muruwari, a language group straddling the NSW-Qld border south of Cunnamulla...

One of the indigenous people encountered by the First Fleeters was Morooberra. The Judge-Advocate, David Collins, who wrote one of the...

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...

The Rev. Lancelot Threlkeld ran a mission in the Newcastle, NSW, area in the period 1831-41, and while there studied the language that...

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...

Everyone knows the bush call ‘cooee’. Not so many know that it is an Indigenous word, and that it means ‘come’. It was recorded by...

On page 101 of the Rev. William Ridley's Kamilaroi and Other Languages (KAOL)* the following occurs in a list of 21 Dharawal words or...

The Rev. William Ridley (1819-1878) wrote an article, ‘Australian languages and traditions’ (AL&T), published in the February 1878 issue...

Reflecting on the wordlists from the Australian southwest, or no doubt from any area of the country, gives an occasional glimpse of the...

There are some transcontinental words, and bila is one of them. It means ‘stream’. WIRADHURI The following are from the Wiradhuri...

Daisy Bates provided the following sentence, with general and literal translations: dajä wâ gäbälä? Any fish in the river (or water)?...

The word for ‘heart’ is gurd. By extension, gurd is also used for someone loved: With the possessive suffix -ag to yield ‘heart-of’, the...

Lewis Jetta of the Sydney Swans celebrates his goal with an Indigenous Dance during the 2015 AFL round 17 match between the West Coast...

The sky darkens. There is a heaviness in the air. It feels damp. The clouds are massing. Then the rumbling of thunder starts and it...

barang crops up a lot. It seems to mean ‘carry’, ‘bring’ and the like. But is is also used in combinations, where it seems to have the...

WIALKI “Latitude 30° 29′ S Longitude 118° 07′ E The townsite of Wialki is … 341 km north east of Perth and 25 km east of Beacon. … Wialki...

The most common Nyungar word for ‘dog’ is durda: There were various spellings: Some recorders did not hear, or note, the ‘r’ sound: What...

What can ‘nest’, ‘barb’, ‘spear’, ‘leaf’, ‘hair’ and ‘shoulder’ have to do with one another? They all appear to be linked through manga /...

It often happens that a word appears in a list, with alongside it a simple translation, such as windu: ‘old’ There being several...