Glenorie

Your Amateur Researcher (YAR) happened to go to Glenorie recently, a rural suburb in the northwest of Sydney. On the way he wondered about the name. Was it Aboriginal? It looked more Scottish.

On arrival he had the chance to consult Google. This is what came up:

‘The name Glenorie, a suburb in Sydney's northwest, has two possible origins. One suggests it's an Aboriginal name meaning "much water," while another proposes it's named after a town in Scotland. The name was officially adopted in 1894, after being suggested by a local resident along with another name, Hazeldore, which was rejected.’

Wikipedia said much the same, including:

‘At a meeting in December after an “animated discussion” the majority of members decided on two names from a list: ‘Hazeldean’ and ‘Glendorie’. ... One local source identifies the name as an Aboriginal word meaning ‘much water’. Other sources claim Glenorie was named after a town in Scotland (though no actual place has been identified).’

Glenorie, in the north-west of the Sydney Basin, is in Dharug country.

Let us explore the possibility of an Aboriginal origin, beginning with the initial 1893 suggestion of ‘Glendorie’. First, we note that the word ‘Glendorie’ can be divided into two parts, ‘Glen-dorie’, and further note that the second part resembles a common suffix in the Wiradhuri language, Wiradhuri country lying relatively nearby just the other side of the Blue Mountains and stretching across much of New South Wales. This suffix was referred to in an appendix about the Wiradhuri language, in a book published in 1892, the book and reference being:

Fraser, John. "Grammar and Vocabulary of the Aboriginal Dialect Called the Wirradhuri." In An Australian Language as Spoken by the Awabakal, the People of Awaba or Lake Macquarie (near Newcastle, New South Wales), Appendix D 56-120. Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1892.

On p.56 of this work, in a part of the text dealing with nouns in the Wiradhuri language, there is a table, reproduced below, identifying ten ‘cases’, or forms of nouns affecting their meaning, in which the matter of special interest here, item 8, has been picked out in blue:

	Case	Terminations	Meaning
1	Nominative		the simple form.
2	Nom. agent.	-du, -dyu, -gu, lu, -ru	the agent form.
3	Genitive	-gu	‘of’; ‘belonging to.’
4	Dative	-gu	‘to,’ ‘ for,’ ‘towards.’
5	Accusative	the same as nom. 1.	the direct object.
6	Vocative	prefixes ya to nom. 1.
7	Locomotive	-dyi, -li, -ri	place from which.
8	Conjunctive	-durai or -durei	‘together with.’
9	Locative	-da, -dya, -ya, -la, -ra	‘in,’ ‘on,’ ‘ ‘at.’
10	Instrumental	-durada	‘by means of.’

The ‘case’ highlighted, featuring the suffix or ending -durai or -durei, was called in this work ‘conjunctive’, with its function explained as meaning ‘together with’.

Kamilaroi is another language of inland New South Wales, just to the north of Wiradhuri country, and it has a somewhat similar suffix, as described on p.14 in:

Ridley, William. Kamilaroi and Other Australian Languages. Sydney, [New South Wales] Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1875.

From “yul” (food) come “yularai” (full, satisfied) and “yulŋin” (hungry); from “kolle” (water) “kolleŋin"(thirsty). From “yinar” comes “yinararai"(having a wife); from “giwir” comes “giwirarai" (having a husband) ; from “gulir” comes “gulirarai” (having a spouse)—three terms for married.

The suffix -arai (having) is applied by the blacks to the English word milk, to make “milimbrai” (milkers, i.e., cows giving milk). [bold blue type by YAR].

Modern linguistics scholars call this suffix, or ending, ‘proprietive’, and give its function as meaning ‘having’, just as Ridley described it in the passage just cited. When a consistent modern spelling is adopted, these suffixes would be rendered as -arayi, as well as sometimes as -barayi, -darayi, -garayi, -warayi. So this second part of ‘Glen-dorie’ or ‘Glen-orie’, could mean ‘having’. But what about the first part, Glen-…?

The first thing to realise is that Aboriginal languages generally do not permit ‘consonant clusters’,  that is words with two or more consonants together. Here and there languages do allow this, but generally Aboriginal languages do not. So ‘Glen-’ would normally have to be rendered as, say, ‘Galen-’. The next point is that Aboriginal languages are also generally written in modern times using only three vowels, a, i, u, so ‘Galen-’ would today be transcribed as galin-.

At this point it is necessary to recall that both internet sources, Google and Wikipedia, gave an interpretation of ‘Glenorie’ as meaning ‘much water’. Below is a table of a selection from many similar records for words for water in the Wiradhuri language, together with one from the nearby and related Ngyiamba language, the first two columns in the table to be considered in particular:

Australian	respelt	English	EngJSM	source
"kolle"	gali	"Water"	water	Curr 3 #190b Rouse [3:371.1:34.11] [Wira] [nsw] [1887]
"Câlle"	gali	"Fresh water"	water fresh	Mitchell, T.L.: 5: Lachlan R [:379.5:26] [Wira] [NSW] [1839]
"kulli"	gali	"Water"	water	Mathews NYMBA 1904 [:227.1:2] [Nymba] [NSW] [1904]
"kullen"	galin	"Water"	water	Curr 3 #190b Rouse [3:371.1:34.12] [Wira] [nsw] [1887]
"Calleen"	galin	"Fresh-water"	water fresh	Larmer (RSNSW) UpLchn [:227.3:5] [Wira] [NSW] [1834]
"kalindyu"	galin-dyu	"NOM AG: water"	water-ERG	Günther (Fraser) [:58:82] [Wira] [NSW] [c.1838]
"kaling"	galing	"NOM: water"	water	Günther (Fraser) [:58:81] [Wira] [NSW] [c.1838]
"kaliŋ"	galing	"water"	water	HALE pace WATSON [:510:3] [Wira] [NSW] [1842]
"gulling"	galing	"Water"	water	Mathews WIRA 1904 [:300:67] [Wira] [NSW] [1904]
"kaliŋ"	galing	"water"	water	KAOL Ridley [WIRA] [:124:26.2] [Wira] [NSW] [1875]
"kullung"	galang	"Water"	water	Curr 3 #190j Cameron [3:387.1:34] [Wira] [nsw] [1887]

The words galin and galing are so similar they can effectively be regarded as records of the same word, while gali, also very similar, might be a dialectical difference. All are very much like the respelt and retranscribed form of ‘Glen-’ (galin) noted above.

Now taking the two parts of Glen-orie together we have, on the assumption of an Aboriginal origin,  galin-(d)arayi, and these would be interpreted as ‘water-having’. As the somewhat curious term ‘having’ might in more colloquial terms be expressed as ‘got’, we could be talking about a place ‘that’s got water’, an idea effectively the same as ‘much water’, the original translation as found on the internet.

Is there in fact much water in Glenorie? Not especially. It rains there, like anywhere else. There is a watery spot nearby where Cattai Creek sometimes floods the road. The sign there today has Maraylya; in 2020 it showed Glenorie.

Although the ‘Glen-’ of Glenorie leads one in the first instance to jump to the conclusion that Glenorie is named after a place in Scotland, the possibility of an Aboriginal origin is hard to dismiss—in the face of an uncanny coincidence of the two halves of the name yielding an interpretation from the historical linguistic records (water-having) with a meaning matching the one (much water) given by folklore.

Jeremy Steele

3 August 2025