#Acacia #Wattle #WattleSeason #MaroondahDam #Maroondah #Healesville #Indigenous #Aboriginal #Etymology

When I visited Maroondah Dam on Friday I learned that despite the media coverage surrounding the proposed renaming of the Maroondah Hospital after the dead queen, ‘Maroondah’ is not a #Woiwurrung word.

In 1881 when the Maroondah Aqueduct was first used, a 77yo colonist named James Dawson campaigned to give the aqueduct, then named after the Watts River, an Aboriginal name. He wrote in a letter to ‘The Argus’, “May I suggest that the aborigines [sic] of Coranderrk should be appealed to, and a local name obtained from them and applied to the proposed reservoir…”

The Watts River is named for an assigned convict worker who managed Yering Station and drowned in the river in 1840. (The ‘Camperdown Chronicle’ reported Watts’s death as a suicide but the signage at the reservoir today suggests it was an accident during flooding.) Nearby Badger Creek is named after Watts’s bloody horse, which got stuck in the muddy creek one time and had to be winched out!

William Barak, then the #Wurundjeri ngurungaeta, was only too happy to point out that the river in Woiwurrung language was called Broong-ku-galk, meaning a rotten log, because there was so much dead timber on the riverbanks. (‘The Argus’ reported this using the spellings “Burngothalk” and “Pumburngalk”.)

Some kind of cultural wires were crossed, however: with the best of intentions, in 1881 or early 1882 Dawson went to Coranderrk where he met with Elders, one of whom told him that the location selected for the water catchment, including the neighbouring mountain, valley and stream, was called “Marroondah” (his spelling).

But they didn’t tell him what it meant or whose language it was: turns out it means “throwing” in Barababaraba (aka Parrapa), a language spoken further north by a people whose neighbours were the Wemba Wemba and Yorta Yorta.

According to historian Ian D Clark, Dawson’s informant at Coranderrk was either Barababaraba man John Terrici or Benjamin ‘Lanky’ Manton, a Wadi Wadi speaker from Swan Hill whose mother was Barababaraba. (One Kulin glossary lists “muruma” as the Wati-Wati word for ‘to throw’.)