Meaning of Kalamunda

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’, hence spawning the Shire’s motto ‘A home in the forest’.

An almost identical definition is indeed to be found on the Shire of Kalamunda website:

The name Kalamunda comes from local Aboriginal words Cala (home) and Munnda (forest). Thus Kalamunda means ‘A home in the forest’.

Bibbulmun track, Kalamunda National Park

Is it as clearcut as that? What can we discover when we look at the languages of south-west Western Australia (known as Nyungar or Noongar)? To begin with, as Aboriginal words are generally short—mostly of two or three syllables when they have not been elaborated by the addition of suffixes to give more specific meanings—a longer word such as kalamunda might be assumed to be two words joined together. So ‘home in the forest’ would certainly fit that pattern.

In Nyungar, the word gala, spelt variously as karler, karla, kalla, kolla, kahla, carla and, in fact, virtually every way imaginable in the records of the mid-to-late 1800s, is given the meanings of ‘charcoal’, ‘fire’, ‘flame’, ‘burning’, ‘hot day’, ‘warm’, ‘firewood’, ‘smoke’, ‘summer’, and also ‘bright yellow’, as well as ‘country’ and ‘camp’. The basic idea is ‘fire’ and its attributes of colour (yellow), smoke

and heat, so also yielding ‘hot day’ and ‘summer’. A fire is one of the central features of a camp, as in ‘camp fire’, and the camp concept can embrace ‘country’, ‘place’, and ‘home’. Out of fifty such records, only two (both by Daisy Bates) actually mention ‘home’.

The second portion of Kalamunda is more difficult. First consider its pronunciation, either as /mahnda/ or /moonda/. The European sound-spellings would be manda and munda respectively. Meanings for manda are mostly ‘together’, ‘among(st)’ and perhaps ‘cloud’ (mandabu). On the other hand, the several records for munda offer ‘the bush’, ‘forest’, ‘woody country’, ‘dry’, ‘bracken fern’, ‘grass tree’, ‘the woods’, as well as ‘hair, lower stomach?’ (perhaps considered ‘bushy’). There are

also references to ‘tiger shark’, which seem unconnected to the rest.

So from what we know of Nyungar, it would seem that Kalamunda (properly pronounced /kahla-moonda/) most likely meant ‘fire (in the) bush/scrub’, or even ‘bushfire’, rather than the widely-accepted ‘home in the forest’.

Jeremy Steele

September 2017