Aboriginal Wamboin

In a spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge the traditional owners of the country in which we live, Wamboin.

Aboriginal people have lived in the Wamboin area for many thousands of years. We will never know the full story as it was lost when European settlers occupied these lands in the 1820s, displacing the traditional owners.

What we do know is that people who were the direct ancestors of the current Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia entered this continent more than 50,000 years ago. A site on the Nepean River at the edge of the Blue Mountains of NSW (Cranebrook Terrace, 200 km NE of Wamboin) reveals Aboriginal people living there over 40,000 years ago. Some 21,000 years ago people were living at the Birrigai rock shelter near the mouth of the Tidbinbilla Valley, 40 km SW of Wamboin.

Deep cores from Lake George showed (in research published in 1981) a sudden change in the lake's sediments 120,000 years ago: a massive increase in charcoal deposits indicating an increase in fires, even though there had been no climate change that would have created this phenomenon. Eucalyptus dominated vegetation took over from the previously flora. This has been interpreted by some as a sign of the arrival of Aboriginal people, and their use of fire-stick farming. While most archaeologists reject this interpretation, it remains the basis for some people's claims of Aboriginal occupation of Australia dating back far longer than the generally accepted 50,000 years or so.

Who were the traditional owners of the Wamboin area?

So far as we know, neither Aboriginal oral history nor European written history provides conclusive information about the identities of the people who were the traditional owners of the Wamboin area at the time the white settlers arrived.

Jackson-Nakano (2001, 2005) argues that the Ngambri (or Kamberri), the people after whom Canberra is named, were the traditional owners of the Wamboin area, with their country stretching from near Cooma in the south to Yass in the north, and Bungendore in the east to the Brindabellas in the west. They spoke the Walgalu language. She discusses the Wamboin place name Amungula:

This area has been greatly reduced in modern times. It once stretched from south-west of Lake George (possibly from the lake itself, or at least from Bald Hill), incorporating the area now known as Kowen Forest as well as Molonglo Gorge and stretching almost as far as Sutton. In early parish maps of County Murray it was recorded as being in the Parish of Goorooyarroo, an area it once adjoined (see also Goorooyarroo, below). At present, only Amungula Creek bears the name of this once extensive Ngambri region. At one time, the Creek would have separated the Amangula region to the east and the Goorooyarroo region to the west.

It is also possible that both the upper ‘Yass River', known as Boongaroon, which lies behind Mount Ainslie, was, with Amungula Creek, a ‘song line', guiding visitors from the Pajong, Wallabalooa and Burrooa districts along designated routes through Ngambri country to participate in corroborees at Queanbeyan and areas to the east towards the coastal regions (Jackson-Nakano 2005, p. 4).

Others have a different view, suggesting that Wamboin lies within traditional lands of the Ngunnawal people, whose lands centred around Yass and Boorowa. To the east are the Yuin people; to the south the Ngarigo, to the west the Wiradjuri, and to the north the Gundugurra. David Horton's Aboriginal Australia map provides details.

Sources and further reading

Australian National Botanic Gardens n.d., Aborigines of the Canberra Region: a reading list, Australian National Botanic Gardens, http://www.anbg.gov.au/library/aotcr.html

Flood, J 2004, Archaeology of the dreamtime: the story of prehistoric Australia and its people, rev. edn, J.B. Publishing., Marleston, S. Aust.

Hiscock, P 2008, Archaeology of ancient Australia, Routledge, London.

Jackson-Nakano, A 2001, The Kamberri: a history from the records of Aboriginal families in the Canberra-Queanbeyan district and surrounds 1820-1927 and historical overview 1928-2001, Aboriginal History Monograph, Aboriginal History, Canberra.

Jackson-Nakano, A 2005, Ngambri ancestral names: for geographical places and features in the Australian Capital Territory and surrounds, A. Jackson-Nakano, [Canberra].

Koch, HJ 2009, 'The methodology of reconstructing Indigenous placenames Australian Capital Territory and south-eastern New South Wales', in LA Hercus & HJ Koch (eds), Aboriginal placenames: naming and re-naming the Australian landscape, ANU E Press, Canberra.

'Another factor leading to variable spellings is the fact that the sound in Aboriginal languages may be ordered into sequences that are unlike those of English. English has the velar nasal ng sound (as in sing and singer) but it never occurs at the beginning of a word, as it does commonly in Aboriginal languages. Word-initial ng is typically misheard by English (and other European) recorders. Sometimes it was ignored altogether; other times it is represented as another nasal n, ny, or m; or it may be heard as k, w, or y. Since Aboriginal words rarely begin with a vowel, and often begin with ng, and ng was a consonant that was often missed, one can suspect that placenames recorded with an initial vowel - such as Adaminaby, Arable, Adjungbilly, Ajamatong, Amungula - actually began with ng. Thus for Ironmungie (with anglicised spelling) near the Victoria- NSW border, with early spellings Inemongee and Eiemmondgy - apparently perceived as *ayanmandyi - we would plausibly reconstruct *Ngayanmandyi' (p. 132).

...

'When a palatal consonant such as dy/ty or ny followed a vowel a or u, an automatic transitional vowel i was often heard and reflected in the spelling, while the palatal consonant was written as if it were simply d/t or n. The spellings thus suggest an analysis ait, ain, uit, uin - with a diphthong plus consonant - instead The methodology of reconstructing Indigenous placenames of just a vowel followed by a palatal consonant (in our spelling system): ady, any, udy, uny. This is the source of spellings like Kalkite (-ady), Jindabyne and Goongarline (-any), Wamboin (-uny), and Yammoit (vs Namwich, with the glide I interpreted as the main vowel and the vowel u as a glide w, for what I reconstruct - at (5) below - as *Nyamudy for the placename usually spelled Namadgi). The name Wamboin, which is probably not a local placename but taken from the Wiradjuri word wambuny kangaroo, shows the vowel u, which has a common variant pronunciation as o followed by a palatal nasal, with a transitional glide that is interpreted by English speakers as combining with the preceding vowel to form a diphthong oi, while the palatal nasal ny is interpreted as a simple n' (pp. 132-3).

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