Turramurra

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 [:16:26] [Syd] [NSW] [1943]
“Turramurra”	daramara	“High land”	hill	Tyrrell [:39:4] [Syd] [NSW] [1953]
“turramurra”	daramara	“high”	high	Endacott Place Names 1959 [:52:21] [] [nsw] [1923]
“Turrumburra”	darambara	“Lane Cove”		Richardson, H. Haywood [::] [Syd] [nsw] [n.d.]

TABLE 1: Stated meanings

We can only wonder now what the name might have meant, based on the sources in the records.

Meaning from the records

Probably among the first of the records were the following, collected around 1791: 

"Darra murra gal”	darama-ra-gal	“We-ran's tribe”	tree-PLUR-mob	Anon (c) [c:5:7] [BB] [NSW] [1790-91]
“Tarra-merragal”	darama-ra-gal	"The name of the tribe that Wiran belongs to in the district of Wanne"	tree-PLUR-mob	Anon (c) [c:8:7] [BB] [NSW] [1790-91]
“Weran”	Wiran	“[Names of native men]”	Wiran	Anon (c) [c:40:21] [BB] [NSW] [1790-91]

 TABLE 2: Records from the 1790s

Location of Wan

Wiran, we are informed from the above details, was an Aboriginal man living in the ‘district of Wanne’, which has been taken to be ‘Wan’ or ‘Wann’. This district extended from Darling Harbour to around Parramatta, on the south side of the Harbour or Parramatta River.

The suffix -gal in the Sydney Aboriginal language denoted a clan or group of people. Thus the Cadi-gal were the people from the Bay of Cadi (Watsons Bay), the Gamara-gal from Cammeray, and the Wan-gal (Bennelong was from this clan) from the ‘district of Wanne’.

Territories of the main Sydney clans

We may reasonably assume that Darra murra gal and Tarra-merragal are the same, especially given that the consonants /t/ and /d/ were not distinguished in many Aboriginal languages. And we may reasonably assume that today’s Turramurra is related to these names.

Places have ‘moved’

How is it that the present-day location of Turramurra is high on the North Shore, far from the south of the harbour as the early records suggest? The answer could be that in the very early days there were few named locations in the Sydney region, and their areas were consequently greater in extent than now. So Turramurra may not have so much as moved, but rather, later suburb subdividing and name creating has shrunk its territory and left it isolated from its original point of reference.

There are other somewhat similar examples of names not quite where they should be.

• Pittwater Road runs up the coast from Manly to Mona Vale. But there is another Pittwater Road, which runs from Gladesville to North Ryde and Macquarie Park. While this might not have been the same as the other track, it presumably also headed towards, and perhaps at one time ran all the way to, Pittwater. But it is far from that water haven now.

• Kissing Point Road runs from Parramatta to Dundas. This road either resumes, or there is another road of the same name, running from South Turramurra to Turramurra. Presumably the destination of this thoroughfare was once Kissing Point, which is actually to be found in Putney (see the point below the ‘tt’ in ‘Parramatta’ on the map above). While Kissing Point might be just across the Parramatta River from the ‘district of Wanne’, Kissing Point Road, in either of its stretches, is a good way away from Kissing Point.

• The grandly-named Great North Road runs from the Great Western Highway as far as Abbotsford, and then encounters the river. It seems this road in the beginning was an aspiration only, for no bridge was built to take it further on its grand journey. Well, so it would seem at first. But in fact the Great North Road did resume, magnificently and far away, with the aid of convict labour, on the other side of the Hawkesbury, headed for the Hunter River. The illustration below shows the truly ‘great’ roadworks achieved for this length of the Great North Road.

  

  Great North Road 

Turramurra?

Today leafy Turramurra is characterised by big eucalyptus trees as much as by anything else. However, that was nothing special, for in the early days of the colony trees were everywhere. Could Turramurra have meant ‘trees’?

“Te-ru-mo”	diramu	“Trees”	tree	Anon (c) [c:20:3] [BB] [NSW] [1790-91]
“Too roo ma goolie”	duru-ma- guli	“a Small cove”	treetype finger	Dawes (b) [b:42:6] [BB] [NSW] [1790-91]

TABLE 3: Tree

The ‘Anon’ notebook of the 1790s gave diramu for ‘trees’. And William Dawes, the greatest student of the language, recorded a cove called Durumaguli. All the same, the translation in the yellow column in the above table is speculative.

Nevertheless, as there are twenty or so ‘tree’ records beginning dara- or similar, the translation might not be all that far-fetched. The following six are samples of these records:

“Darane”	dara-ni	“White gum tree”	gum white	Anon (c) [c:20:6] [BB] [NSW] [1790-91]
“Dárrandea”	darandiya	“Black butted gum”	blackbutt	Lang: NSW Vocab [:4:105] [DG] [NSW] [c. 1840]
“Derebara”	diri-bara	“Iron bark”	treetype ironbark	Bowman: Camden [:22:145] [DG] [NSW] [1835?]
“dhurrawul”	Dara-wul	“cabbage tree”	treetype [cabbage palm]	Curr 3 #188 Miller [3:355.2:24] [Wnra] [NSW] [1887]
"Terr-a-gūrr-a- ring"	dira-ga-ra-ring	“Palm tree”	palm	Tkld KRE c.1835 [131:64] [Kre] [NSW] [c.1835]

TABLE 4: Other dara- ‘tree' records

The last three of these are from the south and north of Sydney. Although there are many different Aboriginal languages, those geographically close to one another often have related vocabulary. Consequently, in an exercise such as the present enquiry, it is worth checking further afield. Thus, from the inland, a partly related story emerges. 

“thurramurra”	Daramara	“Tar bush”	tar bush	Mathews NYMBA 1904 [:229.4:28] [Nymba] [NSW] [1904]
“Dthurramurralin”	daramaralin	“Turrahmoolan, or Dthurramurralin, is regarded as the agent or earthly prime minister of Bhyami”		SofM 19010821 [117.1 Greenway] [:117.1:60.2] [Kml] [] []
“Dthurramurralin”	Daramaralin	“The bullroarer”	bull roarer	SofM 19001121 [166: Thomas–Dubbo] [:167.3:30] [Wira] [NSW] [1900]

TABLE 5: Related records from Nyamba, Kamilaroi and Wiradhuri inland NSW languages

In Table 5, a ‘tar bush’ is a dense shrub, and although it is not a tree it is still flora. The other two records in the table relate to ‘bullroarer’, an instrument made of wood and hence from a tree. Unlike a spear or a woomera, a bullroarer, as stated by J. Maguire, had ceremonial connotations for Aboriginal people. And as Archdeacon C.C. Greenway noted in the table above, Daramulan was one of the Aboriginal quasi-deities or ancestral figures.

Here is what J. Maguire actually wrote in 1900:

“A Turra-murra-lin is an instrument made of a very tough, thin piece of wood, from six to nine inches long, by from two and a half to four inches in width, rounded at the wide end, with a sinew put through a hole in the narrow one. This instrument, like the message stick and the sacred stone, is kept in a secret place, and hidden from light by the chief or leader of the camp, it is considered to possess some mysterious and supernatural power. Women and children are not permitted to see any of these  things, if seen by a woman or shown to a woman by a man, the punishment to both is death.”

In summary, with regard to the present enquiry, nothing has emerged from the records cited above to lend credence to the claim that Turramurra means ‘high ground’. The name might, however, have had something to do with trees, particularly given the first record in Table 3, diramu, meaning ‘trees’. To this observation might be added the comment that while Aboriginal languages did not generally distinguish singular from plural forms, there are some instances when -ra was added to nouns, apparently as a plural marker. With this suffix added to diramu, the result is diramu-ra, and so very close to diramura, or daramara ... or Turramurra: ‘trees’.

Cautionary postscript:

While the above might sound to some extent plausible, it would also be possible to derive from the same records arguments for Turramurra meaning ‘big tooth’, ‘big foot’, ‘foot path’ and probably more.

Jeremy Steele

2 May 2016