Woiwurrung
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Remnant Woiwurrung Language Use
"Quadroon" Laws for Aboriginal Settlements
Inter Clan Relations
Gurnai Kurnai & Wurundjeri at War
The following was directly transcribed from a series of interviews with Wurundjeri Elder, Ian Hunter, recorded in 2004-5.
Remnant Woiwurrung Language Use
Traditional Names
Mum gave myself and all of my brothers our traditional names. And even some of our grandkids have all got our traditional names. Like I go by Warren-dbadj, meaning wombat. Norm, my older brother's Wonga - that's pigeon. The eldest brother's Garramool - meaning the foothills of the Great Dandenong Ranges. Then my younger brother Gary, he goes by the name of Murrindindi. Murrindindi means mountain home.
My son Ian, his traditional name is Djirri Djirri. Djirri djirri means willy wagtail. When you hear "djirri djirri" that's the noise that they make. My first grandson, his traditional name was Inga Linga meaning echidna. So mum used all the old traditional words that she could think [of] when she gave us all our names. My mum's older sister was Bullum Bullum, which meant the brown butterfly. And mum's name was actually Gumbri, meaning a dove that was not normal, meaning a white dove.
Mirrum - Kangaroo
I know for instance that we have used the word mirrum as our word for kangaroo. And it's amazing where a historian actually said to me one day, he said,
"Oh well of course you know, you'd be aware, that Bundoora means "place of many kangaroos."
And I said "I beg your pardon?"
He said "Yeah Bundoora means place of many kangaroos"
And I said, "Well, I don't know where you get that from."
He said "Oh it was written in a book".
Therefore, he's read it in a book, so he keeps repeating it. I said,
"No I'm sorry, but Bundoora was my great-great grandmother's older brother's name - Keelbundoora. So that's where the name Bundoora comes from, from him. Whereas our word for kangaroo is mirrum. So there's no mirrum in Bundoora." So that's where it gets confusing isn't it.
Yarra - Hair
Our word yarra, meaning hair. You've got an anthropologist [...] he asks,
"that river, that's flowing behind you mob there?" Inferring to point at the back of the people, through the people. And what the people would've had, men, plenty of hair on their faces. And of course the fella's gone,
"Ah, that fella yarra. We call that yarra" and again maybe even pointing to themselves. And the white fella's gone,
"They call that thing behind them, that river Yarra".
So again total misunderstanding. [The traditional Woiwurrung name for the Yarra River is Birrarung, meaning "river of the mists".]
Adapting Language
I recall listening to my Nan's sister talking about some of the use of old words [...] asking how they utilized the language to old Aunty Jessie. And she said they didn't change the language, they made it suit the new things, the old language. For instance it stuck in my mind what they called a saw was a Gee-gi gumbuli. Gee-gi means go away. Gumbuli means come back later, so a saw was a go-away-come-back.
Another good prime example of how our people, whether it be of our country, or any other Aboriginal people's country, how they utilized existing words to name new things that came into the country. One [example] that I actually use to give that inference to kids is the name of the sheep in "Waltzing Matilda". It's a jumbuck.
It's an Aboriginal word, but you can't have a word for a sheep because they don't exist. So what did the sheep look like to Aboriginal people, in the paddocks, drinking at the billabongs? These little white fluffy things ...clouds! So the word jumbuck in one group of Aboriginal people's language means cloud. So Aboriginal people were pretty good at doing that.
Quadroon Laws on Aboriginal Settlements
[quadroon - ‘a person who is descended from the full blood original inhabitants of Australia or their full blood descendants but who is only one-fourth of the original ‘full blood’
Native Administration Act 1936]
Mum [Jessie Hunter] was saying that when she was a girl she used to go and stay with her Granny, Granny Jemima [Jemima Burns]. At that point, when she was a young girl, before they shipped her down to Elsternwick. When she was a young girl at the age of about six or seven her father was a sheerer. So they moved away to the border of NSW and Victoria [...]
When she was [there] she would write to her grandmother, [who was] living on the aboriginal station at Coranderrk, to ask for permission for her to go there. Once she'd asked her grandmother she would then have to write to (she remembered [it] vividly before she passed away) to a Mr. Parker, who was the Protector of Aboriginal People back in those times, in the late 1920's, early 30's, for permission to go and visit her grandmother.
When I [...] brought that up to her, she actually thought every kid had to write for permission of some government person before they were allowed to go visit their grandmothers. But that was a remnant left over from the half-caste policy of the Aboriginal stations, where unless you were full blood or half-caste you weren't allowed to reside on the Aboriginal settlement.
So therefore, she had to ask for permission to be on there. She said she never had any drama with getting the permission. And when I pointed out to her that not every kid had to do that she was somewhat taken aback.
But she said they were probably the best memories of her childhood, going and visiting her grandma and going fishing and going out, up the Badger Creek, [...] baking and cooking with her grandmother and going rabitting, going eeling and all that sort of stuff.
So to talk about it as something she shouldn't have had to do - the writing of permission - was to her taking away the other importance of the time. She said that was nothing. It didn't worry her.
I think she spent a lot of time with her grandmother, I think because there may have been some rift with her mother or something of that nature, because when I asked her in her later time, when I asked her about her mother she sort of shrugged it off and didn't talk much about it.
[...] And it [the quadroon law] was all to particular individual's gain. That's why they brought in the half-caste law of the settlements. Because [...] they were in parliament, but they were also landowners and they wanted to gain more land.
So they looked at it and they thought, hang on the trouble-makers (and I suppose they were right) weren't the half-castes and weren't the full bloods, but were what the would call the quadroons, because they had a lot of European blood in them.
Not only were they European, but they were becoming educated. So therefore they were standing up for their human rights. And if they were standing up for their human rights on Aboriginal settlements they were causing trouble.
They said unless you're a full blood or half-caste you weren't allowed to stay on the Aboriginal settlement.
But then the other thing that [caused] the settlements downfall was (or start to fall apart) were those quadroons at that point were the able bodied people. So If you didn't allow the able bodied people to live on the aboriginal stations then that was proof that they didn't need and couldn't look after the four thousand acres, four thousand acres at Healesville, they couldn't look after that.
The old people like Barak, and all those old people that my mum talks about, they weren't capable of looking after [...] that country.
Another undermining thing was they were expending money. So they weren't allowed quadroons on there, but they were allowed to have white workers on there. So the white workers were taking also a lot of the money and that was allocated through the superintendents.
I might add also that none of our people of the Melbourne clans and tribes ever suffered the indignity of the stolen generations - none of our people.
But they did suffer under that half-caste / full blood policy, in as much as once the kids were aged fourteen they weren't allowed to live on the station, like my mother was saying that she had to write for permission. Her mother, my grandmother [Martha Louisa Nevin] had to leave.
At the age of fourteen, if she didn't have a job or employment on the Aboriginal station she had to leave the station. Luckily enough she was employed as a household worker in Elsternwick, by a well to do family. So she done all right as far as being of Aboriginal decent was concerned.
But when I think about that I visualize the well to do families once a month, or once every few months, going to Coranderrk and inspecting the kids, as it was like a slave market [and them saying],
"Oh yeah, your teeth are ok. Oh yeah, you're [muscular], you can come and cut wood for me. Oh yeah, you can come and clean my bathroom. And you can come and maybe help the cook prepare the dinners and all those sorts of things."
Mum also stated that the old people would not allow any grog on the Aboriginal station. She said when Granny was alive nobody, but nobody, was allowed to take any [...] bitter or grog onto the Aboriginal settlement.
Inter-clan relations
Mammit, there's the other word that mum used to use for the other black fellas. I remember I did a talk, and then it was transcribed and I used the word mammit, meaning non-Kulin, not of our people, foreigners. And then I was asked to elaborate on it [...] and I said,
"Well, they were not our people, they were the other mob."
The way that any body, any nationality looks at another nation of people [...] So that word that mum always used, mammit - were the other people. Not that you were disrespectful to them, but you knew that they should know their place [...]
In Aboriginal culture, for you to bring an outside kid into your family, that's extremely respectful. Whereas, you would not be disrespectful to their parents, or uncles and aunts. But their uncles and aunts would know their place.
And that was even apparent in the way mum was telling me about the way things used to happen at Coranderrk, when she was visiting her grandma. In as much there would be people visit who wouldn't be allowed past the front door. They would give them refreshments, tea, scones, coffee [...] whatever they could give them. But if they wanted to stay, that's where they stayed - on the porch.
But mum said there were other people who were invited into the house. And even those people were really more respected than the people living in the house. Because [...] mum said, that at times when those older people, of our people, came Granny invited them into the house. Sometimes mum said she'd have to give her bed up for them.
So there was still in the thirties the old traditional ways - that's them and this is us [...] I try to explain that to some people [...] when I say that's why we call ourselves Aboriginal people, because of that. We don't call ourselves Aboriginal people because we got skin colour. We call ourselves Aboriginal people because we still respect some of those old traditions.
[...] Even though she had no great animosity - well my father was white. Even though she had no animosity toward the white people or Europeans, she said that the aggression that Aboriginal people of today had within their hearts came from their European background, because to take on the pride and the humility of an Aboriginal person is basically the humility. Not to demand, but to actually [...] ask.
On occasions where mum would witness aggressive Aboriginal people she would just put her head down and walk away from them. And she would call those people "octopus people". They were the people that wanted to grab everything, and wanted to hold and own everything.
And I suppose [they] had to maintain [...] their own existence, this is therefore why they had to become aggressive. I put it to mum that those people were still fringe dwellers in the 30's and the 40's and they were still living on the river, still suffering indignities from the outer community, or the greater community.
When they shifted into our country they still maintained those aggressions to the non-Aboriginal people. So mum looked at those people I guess as being people she didn't want to associate with, or didn't want to be seen to be supporting. And that again came from her grandmother, because to be an Aboriginal person is to realise humility.
[...]
When we went to Aboriginal functions mum would be very, very adamant not to allow us to become too close a friends to Aboriginal girls, who she didn't know their background. If they were cousins - no drama. But if they could've been cousins, but she wasn't sure of who they were she would make excuses for us to come away from there, away from those girls, and try to keep us busy doing something else.
[...] I think my older brother Norm brought an Aboriginal girl home - my mum would shun her, didn't want to have anything to do with her, because my mum had those old ways of her grandmother's.
And when I researched why...well it stands to reason. There were two reasons. Number one, the other people, who were not our people were mammit, the other mob, as old Barak put it - the other people, the unmarriageable ones, the foreigners.
And then the second reason why was if they weren't those Aboriginal people [...] If they weren't the other people, from the other tribes, or other nations of people, they could be related to us, because of the meager gene pool that was remaining.
Back in the 1860's, our people - after the initial influx of European settlement, that was when the establishment of the [Aboriginal] settlements - well when the Aboriginal people were gathered, the remnant people the gene pool remaining was so miniscule. That's what also was in her mind.
And that's what her grandmother put in her mind, even though her grandmother was not one of our people. She was brought up on our ways as a young girl from about seven or eight. So in her mind and in her heart she was Woiwurrung, because she grew up in our country and this was her country in her mind, even though she was not of our blood or our people's blood.
Gurnai Kurnai & Wurundjeri at War
The grass tree - that's what caused the big drama with our people and why our people were at war with the Gurnai.
Apparently down the other side of Wilsons Prom, where they grow a lot, and they're a good food source. You can cut the center out of them and eat them. Also the flower stalk of the grass tree you can also use that for fire.
But where the majority of them grow, the other side of Wilsons Prom was a no man's land. So the Gurnai Kurnai People were allowed there certain years. Other years our people were allowed in there [...] but the Gurnai Kurnai People, they reckon it was us who were caught there, but we caught them in there, so ensuring years of war between the [Wurundjeri and the] Gurnai Kurnai people."
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