This item is Chapter 20 of

Language, land & song: Studies in honour of Luise Hercus

Editors: Peter K. Austin, Harold Koch & Jane Simpson

ISBN 978-0-728-60406-3

http://www.elpublishing.org/book/language-land-and-song

Why Waway? The Proctor map and the getting of song in New South Wales

Jim Wafer

Cite this item:

Jim Wafer (2016). Why Waway? The Proctor map and the getting of song in New South Wales. In Language, land & song: Studies in honour of Luise Hercus, edited by Peter K. Austin, Harold Koch & Jane Simpson. London: EL Publishing. pp. 287-303

Link to this item:

http://www.elpublishing.org/PID/2020

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This electronic version first published: March 2017 © 2016 Jim Wafer ______________________________________________________

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20Why Waway? The Proctor map and the getting of song in New South Wales

Jim WaferUniversity of Newcastle

1. Introduction1

Luise Hercus has made many contributions to the survival and continuity of Australian languages, not the least of which is her work on Aboriginal song traditions, in particular those of the south-eastern quadrant of the continent. Equally significant are the contributions she has made to the documentation of Aboriginal placenames in Australia. She is the co-editor of three volumes on the topic and author of numerous relevant publications. Thus it is fitting that the present tribute to this remarkable woman brings together two themes that mesh so closely with her own interests: the mythical origin of song in central and eastern New South Wales (NSW), and the placenames associated with this mythology.

2. The making of a bardIn 1904, the surveyor R. H. Mathews published an account (1904: 364) of how song was obtained by the Wiradjuri people of central NSW:

The Wāwi is a serpent-like creature which lives in deep water-holes and burrows into the bank, where he makes his den. He has a wife and children who camp close to him but in a different place. A ‘doctor’ or clever man can go and see the Wāwi, but must not go near his family. When a man is going on a visit to this monster he must paint his body all

1 I am indebted to the colleagues and friends who have read the various drafts of this paper and provided input and feedback, including David Nash, Deborah Bird Rose, Amanda Lissarrague, Petronella Vaarzon Morel, Tony Newman, Marie Makinson and Gionni Di Gravio.

Wafer, Jim. 2016. Why Waway? The Proctor map and the getting of song in New South Wales. In Peter K. Austin, Harold Koch and Jane Simpson (eds.) Language, Land and Song, 287-303. London: EL Publishing.

Jim Wafer288

over with red ochre. He then follows after the rainbow some day when there is a thunder-shower, and the end of the rainbow rests over the water-hole in which is the Wāwi’s abode. The man then dives under the bank, where he finds the Wāwi, who conducts him into his den and sings him a new song for the corroboree. The man repeats the song after the Wāwi until he has learnt it sufficiently, and then starts back to his own people. When they see him returning, painted red and singing, they know he has been with the Wāwi. The bard then takes a few of the other clever men with him into the bush and they strip pieces of bark off trees and paint different devices upon them with coloured clays. The pieces of bark ornamented in this way are taken to the corroboree ground, and all the men dance and sing the new song. This is how new songs and dances are obtained. The Wāwi has the magic power of varying his size from a few inches up to prodigious proportions. The black streak in the Milky Way, towards the Southern cross, is one of the ancestors of the Wāwi. He encourages snakes and adders to bite the black people.

There are, as we shall see, quite a few references to this creature in the early records. The only one that provides any information about his geographical location, however, occurs in a list of placenames in the Hunter River-Lake Macquarie language (HRLM) that was published by the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld in 1834.

3. Waway at Lake MacquarieThrelkeld’s account appears in his list of Names of Common Places (Threlkeld 1834: 84), under the entry for ‘Wau-wa-rán’. The first part of the entry reads as follows:

Wau-wa-rán, The name of a hole of fresh water in the vicinity of Lake Macquarie, betwixt it and the mountains Westerly: said by the blacks to be bottomless, and inhabited by a monster of a fish much larger than a shark, called Wau-wai, it frequents the contiguous swamp, and kills the aborigines! There is another resort for these fish near an Island in Lake Macquarie, named Bo-ro-yi-róng, from the cliffs of which, if stones be thrown down into the sea beneath, the tea tree bark floats up, and then the monster is seen gradually arising from the deep; should any natives be at hand, he overturns the canoe, swallows alive the crew, and then the canoe whole, after which he descends to his resort in the depths below!

The location of the ‘hole of fresh water’ called Wau-wa-rán (or Wawaran in a contemporary spelling) identifies it plausibly as Freemans Waterhole, although I have not been able to document the link with any stronger evidence than the caption on a postcard from the Oak milk bar at that location:2

2 The postcard has been reproduced online at https://www.facebook.com/OakMilkBar?filter=1, accessed 2015-04-06.

Why Waway? 289

In 1830 the Aborigines called this area ‘Wauwarran’ which was a well known overnight resting place for stock, teamsters, their bullock wagons and the intrepid traveller on their tortuous trek to Wallis Plains (Maitland). Later around 1842 it was settled by J. Freeman (Snr) and his family and then became known, as it is today, as Freemans Waterholes.

Bo-ro-yi-róng is Pulbah Island, and in this case the documentation is better. In 1841, W. S. Proctor published a map of Lake Macquarie that incorporated a number of Aboriginal placenames. Pulbah Island’s original name, according to the annotation on the version of the map held by the NSW Department of Trade and Investment,3 was Burragorong – clearly a mis-hearing of the same word that Threlkeld spelt as Bo-ro-yi-róng.4 Pulbah’s settler name is also of Aboriginal origin: pulpa is simply the word for ‘island’ (Lissarrague 2006: 134).

In the case of Pulbah Island, there is no obvious connection between the original placename and the monster that lives in the surrounding waters, whose name Threlkeld writes as Wau-wai (Waway in a modern spelling). But Freemans Waterhole’s Aboriginal name, Wawaran, immediately suggests a link with Waway. My hypothesis is that this toponym combines the name Waway and the word for ‘plain’, which is waran (Lissarrague 2006: 141). I interpret this name to mean ‘the plain of Waway’. Presumably, the last syllable of Waway and the first syllable of waran have coalesced to avoid the difficulty of pronouncing three consecutive syllables that begin with wa (as in *wawaywaran). This etymology is plausible also when one considers the topography of the place known today as Freemans Waterhole. It sits close to the top of a narrow plain that falls away gently from the precipitous drop of the Watagan Ranges.

These considerations constitute a set of clues that may assist in analysing the word that is often taken to be the Aboriginal name of Lake Macquarie, that is, Awaba. Threlkeld himself does not provide a name for the lake, although his entry for Nik-kin-ba (Threlkeld 1834: 83) could perhaps be taken to refer to it. The entry reads as follows: ‘From Nik-kin, Coal, a place of coals. The whole lake twenty-one miles long by eight, abounds with coal.’

The name Awaba appears to have originated with Proctor, who mapped the lake in August of 1841. His sketch map was subsequently lithographed, with the words ‘AWABA or LAKE MACQUARIE’ printed across the length of the lake. This name was later taken up by Dr John Fraser, the Maitland schoolmaster who edited and published a compilation of the works of Threlkeld (and others) in 1892, under the title An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal, the people of Awaba or Lake Macquarie.

3 The NSW Department of Trade and Investment, which holds the annotated version and has catalogued it in the Department’s ‘DIGS Database’ (http://digsopen.minerals.nsw.gov.au/, report identification number R00079544, accessed 2015-04-06), tentatively attributes the annotations to (the Reverend) W. B. Clarke.4 This name suggests a connection with the word puruyi, ‘eagle or hawk’ (Lissarrague 2006: 135). So my tentative reconstruction of the placename would be as Puruyirung.

Jim Wafer290

Sketch map of Lake Macquarie (‘Awaba’) by W. S. Proctor (1841)5

(courtesy of the NSW Department of Trade and Investment).

5 This copy reproduced from Di Gravio 2013 (https://coalriver.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/awaba-or-lake-macquarie-in-1841/ [accessed 2015-04-06].

Why Waway? 291

Fraser was, as Powell & Hesline (2010: 134) have pointed out: ‘breathtaking in his inventiveness’.6 Awabakal was just one of a number of ‘tribal’ names that he admitted to making up, on the basis of morphemes from what he took to be the relevant languages. In the case of Awabakal, however, he succeeded, intentionally or unintentionally, in passing his invention off as the work of Threlkeld himself.

He achieved this not just with his title and contents pages, where Threlkeld’s name appears as the author of works about the language of the Awabakal, but also through some changes he made to Threlkeld’s texts. The same list of Names of Common Places that was included in Threlkeld’s 1834 grammar is reproduced entire in Fraser’s 1892 compilation, under the heading Geographical Names and with a few minor changes (such as corrections to the alphabetical order) but one major insertion, Fraser (1892: 50) which reads as follows: ‘Awaba, Lake Macquarie; the word means “a plain surface.”’ (We will return to the meaning of the word below).

Probably Fraser’s most disingenuous sleight of hand occurs in his edition of Threlkeld’s 1834 grammar. In Threlkeld (1834: 113), in the section devoted to sentences that illustrate ‘the conjugation neuter verb’ (the copular ka-), we find: ‘Muskit tia katálla Port Macquarie ka. I had a Musket at Port Macquarie’. In Fraser (1892: 70), the same sentence appears thus: Musket tia katala Awaba-ka ‘I had a musket at Lake Macquarie’.

As Powell & Hesline (2010: 134) observe: ‘Fraser embellished Threlkeld to an extraordinary degree but because it has been Fraser’s version that has tended to prevail, Threlkeld has been thought to be the author of Fraser’s inventions’. Powell & Hesline (2010: 146, n. 119) add that ‘the term Awaba was known to Threlkeld but never recognised by him’. They adduce no evidence for this, and I have been unable to trace the word in Threlkeld’s texts. But it seems plausible enough that the missionary would have met with Proctor, the first to use the name in print, even though Threlkeld left the lake and moved to Sydney in 1841, the same year that Proctor visited the lake to undertake his ‘accurate examination’ of its geography – and to give it the ‘Aboriginal’ name it subsequently inherited.

But what of this name? How did Proctor come by the term Awaba, and what might it mean? We have to assume that he was given the name either by a speaker of the Hunter River-Lake Macquarie language (which, as we have seen, Fraser called Awabakal), or by a colonist who had got the name from a speaker. Clearly, it also has something to do with Lake Macquarie, even if it is not the name for the lake (at least, as a whole).

We can begin by separating the name into its component parts. The ba of Awaba is probably the placename suffix, spelt by Lissarrague (2006: 63) as -pa and meaning roughly ‘place of’. The first part of the name is thus awa; but in this language words typically begin with a consonant.7 If we assume that there was an

6 For further background on Fraser, see Gunson (1994: 303).7 There are about nine words in this language that begin with a vowel (Lissarrague 2006: 23), and these exceptions can be explained as words with an original initial glide (w or y) that has been elided.

Jim Wafer292

original initial consonant, its absence in Proctor’s transcription means either that he failed to hear it, or else that the speaker failed to pronounce it.

It was common in 19th century sources for a transcriber to miss an initial velar nasal (ng, /ŋ/). But there is also some evidence that initial glides (w and y) may have been dropped by speakers in some circumstances, such as casual speech, since a number of words are recorded both with and without them (for example wupa~upa, ‘to do’, wupi~upi, ‘to put’8).

What this means is that the most obvious candidates for the initial consonant of awa are ng, w and y. We can eliminate ng and y, because there are no known words in any of the sources for the language that have the form *ngawa- or *yawa-. This leaves wawa- – and the only words that begin with wawa- are waway and its derivatives.

My hypothesis, then, is that Proctor’s Awaba can be analysed as waway-pa, ‘the place of Waway’ – or ‘the place of waways’, since it is evident from Threlkeld’s reference to ‘these fish’ that there can be a plurality of waways. We know in any case that there is at least one waway at Freemans Waterhole and at least one at Pulbah Island.

The final consonant, like the initial one, is not apparent in Proctor’s transcription of the word Awaba. But there is a clear hint that the final a of awa is somehow unusual in the handwritten annotations to Proctor’s map, where an additional a has been inserted to give ‘AWAaBA’. This suggests that the annotator heard a long vowel in the second syllable of the word; and the sequence ay is easy enough to mistake for a long vowel when it occurs before a suffix.

A question that remains is whether the name Wawaypa applies to the whole of Lake Macquarie, as Proctor assumed it did. I think this is unlikely, for two main reasons. The first is that Threlkeld, who lived at the lake for more than a decade and a half, never recorded the name. The second is that, in Aboriginal languages generally, extended bodies of water, such as rivers and large lakes, tend to have different names for different sections of their whole extent.

The implication, then, is either that Wawaypa is an actual placename that refers to a particular section of the lake (presumably somewhere around the southern end, where Pulbah Island is visible from the shore); or else that Proctor’s guide had the requisite cultural knowledge to make the word up on the spot in response to a question from Proctor about the name of the lake. Another matter that requires clarification is the meaning that Fraser attributes to Awaba, namely, ‘a plain surface’. Neither of the terms for ‘plain’, ‘flat’ and so on that Threlkeld recorded supports Fraser’s interpretation;9 and, unfortunately, I am unable to come up with any convincing hypothesis about how Fraser derived this meaning. The best I can do is to refer the reader to my argument above about the meaning of Wawaran (Freemans Waterhole), where I analyse the second part of the word (waran) as ‘plain’. It is tempting to speculate that the connection with Waway led Fraser, or another party in the chain of transmission between Proctor and himself, to transfer this gloss to the name Awaba.

8 Lissarrague (2006: 144), Threlkeld (1857: 49, 55 and passim).9 These include waran, ‘flat, level, plain’ (Lissarrague 2006: 141) and ngarawan, ‘plain, a flat place’ (Lissarrague 2006: 127).

Why Waway? 293

However that may be, Proctor and Fraser between them have succeeded in entrenching the term Awaba as the ‘Aboriginal placename’ for the whole of Lake Macquarie – not just in the literature10 but also in the popular imagination, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. The present document is not intended to delegitimise this usage, but to demonstrate that the word Awaba, like all placenames, is the result of a historical process.

The point we have arrived at in this process is that we now understand, at least to some degree, how the name came to be conferred and what it might mean. Awaba, ‘Lake Macquarie’, is, if my argument holds good, Waway’s place, the abode of a creature of mysterious breed.

4. What is a waway?The word Waway itself appears not to be etymologically analysable.11 But among the surrounding languages there are a number that use waway, or a likely cognate, to refer to a monstrous water creature of some kind.

Many of these have been subsumed by Radcliffe-Brown (1926, 1930) under his generic term ‘Rainbow Serpent’. It is not clear, however, that this designation is appropriate in all cases, as we will see when we investigate the family resemblances between Waway and his relations. Radcliffe-Brown appears to have lumped together all monsters dwelling in or near water, including a number that have entered Australian folklore more broadly, such as the Bunyip and the Mindi.12

The words that are of interest are given in Table 1, ordered according to date and classified according to language, with the original gloss. Thirteen of the sixteen records refer to Wiradjuri,13 and it seems clear that, in this language, there were (at least) two different ways of pronouncing the word: as /wa(a)wi(i)/ and as /wa(a)wa(a)y(i)/. Grant & Rudder (2010: 455) prefer the former and spell it with long vowels, as waawii. But it is worth noting that the oldest accounts for Wiradjuri (Günther 1838, 1839, 1840) suggests a reconstruction as waway, or perhaps as waawaay, if we can take some of the later transcriptions as implying long vowels.

10 See, for example, Jervis (1945: 104), Reed (1967: 6), Bennett (1968: 17), McCarthy (1971: 5). 11 Richards’ collection of Wiradjuri words (Richards 1902: 119) appears to include hypothetical etymologies. In the case of Waa’wei, the words that follow the gloss are ‘drag (and) sink’, with the former verb presumably referring to /wa(a)/ and the second to /wa(a)y/. While such an etymology is not impossible, it is not confirmed by the sources at my disposal.12 Note that Radcliffe-Brown retracted his inclusion of the Bunyip in Radcliffe-Brown (1930: 344). See also Dixon, Ramson & Thomas (1990: 109-111) on ‘Mythical Creatures’.13 I am grateful to David Nash for drawing my attention to a large number of these references and also for sending scans of relevant manuscript pages by James Günther. My thanks also to Luise Hercus for referring me to the works by T.L. Mitchell and D. W. A. Baker.

Jim Wafer294

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)

Tabl

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Ref

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ces t

o W

away

in th

e la

ngua

ges o

f NSW

(by

date

)

Why Waway? 295

Some of the accounts in Table 1 (Mathews 1896, 1904, 1909; Radcliffe-Brown 193015) go into considerable detail in their description of the waway, so it is worth reproducing them. The earliest is Mathews’ (1896: 301) characterisation, where the waway is represented in the form of a ground sculpture in the Burbung initiation ceremony:

Extending from the foot of the tree containing the eagle’s nest, in the direction of the goombo, described farther on, was a representation of the wahwee, a fabulous monster resembling a snake. It lived in a large water hole, and used to kill and eat some of Baiamai’s people. They were unable to kill it. This carving in the soil was 59 feet long, and 12 inches wide across the body. Its tail was represented twisted round a belar sapling.

Mathews includes a sketch of this ground sculpture in the drawings that constitute plate XXVI (Mathews 1896: between 295-296) of his article. Mathews (1896: 315) comments: ‘Figs. 19 to 33 are devices of various patterns cut upon the surface of the ground, the most interesting of which is the wahwee, Fig. 30.’

The second report is Mathews (1904), quoted in Section 2 above; he published an edited version in Mathews (1909: 487), preceded by an introduction that throws light on the context in which the Waway story was elicited:

The story of the Wahwee is current among the Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi, Wailwan, and other tribes of New South Wales. It was related to me by an old Kamilaroi black-fellow, named ‘Jimmy Nerang’, whom I met at the Bora ceremony held at Tallwood in 1895. The Rev. Wm. Ridley mentions the Wawi (my Wahwee) as a monster living in deep waterholes. I gave a drawing of the Wahwee represented on the ground at the Burbung ceremonies of the Wiradjuri tribe in 1893.16

Radcliffe-Brown (1926: 21) quoted the original passage from Mathews (1904) and in Radcliffe-Brown (1930: 342) compared Waway with a number of other mythical creatures that have different names but similar morphology and habits. He equates Waway with the karia and the (k)abulgan, and associates him closely also (Radcliffe-Brown 1930: 344) with the miriwula and the gauarge. Berndt (1947: 346, n. 39) adds yet another semantic relative, namely the ‘dʒi:r. I provide below contemporary spellings and simplified glosses of these terms, based on the modern dictionaries for the relevant languages.

15 Radcliffe-Brown (1926: 21) simply reproduces the account in Mathews (1904: 364), however the page reference given (162) is to Mathews (1905).16 Also in a modern edition in Thomas (2007: 143-145).

Jim Wafer296

Table 2: Mythical creatures equated or associated with WawayLanguage Creature Simplified gloss Source

Gamilaraay, Yuwaalaraay, Yuwaalayaay

garriya crocodile Ash, Giacon & Lissarrague (2003: 82)

Dhanggati gabulgan water creature, said to be a shark

Lissarrague (2007: 137)

Yuwaalaraay, Yuwaalayaay

mirriwuula spirit dog Ash, Giacon & Lissarrague (2003: 113)

Yuwaalaraay, Yuwaalayaay

gawarrgay spirit emu Ash, Giacon & Lissarrague (2003: 82-83)

Wiradjuri dyirr ghost, spirit Grant & Rudder (2010: 355)

What are we to make of this patchwork of sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory accounts of who or what a waway is? He is associated with sharks, snakes, rainbows, crocodiles and even dingoes and emus. He is described as animal, monster and spirit. He is referred to by a masculine pronoun and has a wife and children, but Mitchell (1904: 15) translates his name as ‘nymph of the wave’, ‘like Undine’. He is sometimes singular (Waway, the Waway) and sometimes plural (‘these fish’). He is a creature of the salt water (Lake Macquarie) and the fresh water (Freemans Waterhole).

This puzzle about the precise nature of the mythical creatures that Radcliffe-Brown associates with the Rainbow Serpent appears to be common throughout Australia, and some very fine-detailed work on it has been done in Arnhem Land, by Maddock (1978), Taylor (1990) and Taçon (1996). One of the implications of their research, at least for Arnhem Land, is that the Rainbow Serpent has two forms:

one form, always composite (Taçon 1996), that travels, mythically •uniting the different beings (including groups of humans) of which it is itself composed (Taylor 1990);another form that is localised and non-composite. •

These are no doubt ideal types; but the evidence that supports this model as the most elegant solution to the ambiguity of the Rainbow Serpent is persuasive – at least, in the case of Arnhem Land.

The question that faces us, then, is: does this model work in the part of South-eastern Australia we are dealing with here?

None of the accounts included so far suggests a travelling waway. But if we look a little further, we may be able to discern one going under a different name. The plan of management for Pulbah Island Nature Reserve produced by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (2005: 5; cf. 20) says:

Why Waway? 297

The Awabakal people consider the island [Pulbah] sacred and called it Boroyirong. They believed that the monster Rogoyarran protected the island. It was Rogoyarran’s emergence from under ground which formed both the island and lake. It was believed that the monster would overturn the canoes of anyone attempting to land on Pulbah Island.17

The name Boroyirong presumably comes from Threlkeld (see above), but I have been unable to trace the origin of Rogoyarran. The report contains two versions of this story (2005: 5, 20), and the second cites Gunson (1974) as a source. Gunson (1974 v. 1: 65) reproduces Threlkeld’s original account of the ‘wau-wai’ story, but I have been unable to find a reference to Rogoyarran.

Since the letter r never begins a word in the Hunter River Lake Macquarie language (Lissarrague 2006: 23), the word might perhaps be reconstructed as yiru-kuyuruwan, ‘Water Koyorowen’. This supplies a hypothetical initial syllable to give yiru, ‘water’ (Lissarrague 2006: 146) plus the word that Threlkeld wrote as Koyorowén (Lissarrague 2006: 121). This is the name of what appears, at least at first glance, to be a different kind of mythical being altogether, described briefly in Threlkeld (1834: 81) and in detail in Threlkeld’s reminiscences (Gunson 1974, v. 1: 61).18

Still, the creature’s location and behaviour suggest that this could well be Waway travelling under an alias. What this means, if the passage quoted above is well founded, is that he is a much more significant figure than Threlkeld realised. In fact, this story would imply that Waway is the creator not just of Pulbah Island but of the whole of Lake Macquarie.

This, in turn, presupposes a creation journey from the place of emergence (Pulbah Island) to the surrounding country, which specifically includes the rest of Lake Macquarie, and may extend to places beyond the lake as well, such as Freemans Waterhole and Ellalong Swamp (Needham 1981: 69). In fact, the waways of Pulbah and Freemans could well illustrate the kind of distinction that is so clear in Arnhem Land, between a travelling Rainbow Serpent and a stationary one. On the other hand, we do not really have enough information about the Freemans waway to be able to say for certain that it was not mobile.

The other defining characteristic of the travelling Rainbow Serpents of Arnhem Land is their composite nature, which is so clear in the forms in which they appear in the art of that region. The very few published images of the likely or possible Rainbow Serpents of the south-east do not appear to share this blended morphology. In the case of the ground sculpture sketched by Mathews, for example, the creature is unambiguously a snake, without extras.

So the case for a distinction between a waway that travels and unifies (Waway) and various localised waways in the Lake Macquarie region (and probably in the

17 The same story is told in different words on the NSW Department of Environment and Heritage’s website at http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/aboriginalplaces/PulbahIsland.htm [accessed 2015-04-06].18 I suspect that the final syllable in /kuyuru-wan/ is an augmentative suffix, so that the word probably means something like ‘big kuyuru’ (whatever the latter might mean).

Jim Wafer298

broader culture area of which it is a part19) is plausible enough, but the evidence is, as yet, inadequate. On the other hand, there is a different kind of distinction that emerges clearly from the foregoing records: a contrast between what appear to be ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ accounts of a waway’s characteristics and behaviour.

Waway is, on the one hand, a terrifying monster, and, on the other hand, a friend to those who know him, such as the ‘clever man’ in Mathews (1904). This kind of ambiguity is found also in Arnhem Land, where Van der Leeden (1975: 92) interprets it in terms of a distinction between exoteric and esoteric perspectives on the Rainbow Serpent, between ‘an outer (natural) appearance’ and ‘an “inner truth”’. The process of initiation appears to have involved instruction in his true nature (Radcliffe-Brown 1930: 343; Maddock 1978: 109).

5. ConclusionThe region in which Waway’s name was familiar covered perhaps half the area of New South Wales, at least, and he appears to have had crucial significance in rituals. Although he bears a family resemblance to the Rainbow Serpent of Arnhem Land, his constellation of characteristics is specific to the south-east. No doubt, one of the most important of these is his role as the inspirer of song.

The fragmentary nature of the sources pertaining to mythical beings in south-eastern Australia generally makes it difficult to reconstitute their ‘materiality’, i.e. their links to specific places and associated webs of meaning. The present paper has attempted to show that some degree of restoration is possible in the instance of one major mythical figure and a couple of the sites where he emerges.

19 For present purposes, this could be roughly defined as the area in which languages of the Central NSW Group (Dixon 2002: xxxiv) were spoken.

Figure 1: Pulbah Island, sun and moon-set (photo by the author).

Why Waway? 299

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(183

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10:

234)

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incr

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site

’ (L

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225

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Edm

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, Bla

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ls

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(183

4: 8

5)Li

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006:

114

)N

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n Is

land

Nir

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n bi

rd’

(Lis

sarr

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200

6: 1

29)

Thre

lkel

d (1

834:

83)

Puni

boro

royi

nba

(?)

Hea

dlan

d no

rth o

f Cat

herin

e H

ill B

ayPa

nipu

ruru

-yin

pa

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been

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iynp

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toot

h’-p

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men

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a ‘p

lace

of’

(Lis

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20

06: 1

39, 6

4, 6

3)

Thre

lkel

d (1

834:

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and

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uth

end

of

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gee

Wan

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The

poin

t at t

he e

aste

rn e

nd

of W

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wan

tji

Tabl

e 3:

Hyp

othe

tical

reco

nstr

uctio

n of

pla

cena

mes

from

the

Proc

tor m

ap

Jim Wafer300

Appendix: Other placenames from the Proctor mapProctor’s map, with the handwritten annotations20 on the version of it held by the NSW Department of Trade and Investment, contains a number of other Aboriginal placenames that can usefully be analysed in addition to Awaba. These are given in Table 3; entries in the ‘Location’ column are based on Di Gravio (2013). Note that several names are identical or similar to present-day local placenames (Eraring, Kahiba, Wybung Head) but in different locations. The reconstructed forms in the third column use the orthography developed by Lissarrague (2006: 16-21). Some of the glosses in the fourth column are imputed on the basis of cognates in Gathang.

ReferencesAsh, Anna, John Giacon & Amanda Lissarrague (comps. & eds.). 2003.

Gamilaraay, Yuwaalaraay & Yuwaalayaay dictionary. Alice Springs: IAD Press.

Baker, Donald W. A. 1993. John Piper, ‘Conqueror of the Interior’. Aboriginal History 17, 17-37.

Baker, Donald W. A. 1997. The civilised surveyor: Thomas Mitchell and Australian Aborigines. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Berndt, Ronald M. 1947. Wuradjeri magic and ‘clever men’. Oceania 17(4), 327-365 (part 1); Oceania 18(1), 60-86 (part 2).

Dixon, Robert M. W. 2002. Australian languages: Their nature and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dixon, Robert M. W. William S. Ramson & Mandy Thomas. 1990. Australian Aboriginal words in English: Their origin and meaning. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Fraser, John (ed.). 1892. An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal, the people of Awaba or Lake Macquarie. Sydney: Charles Potter, Govt. Printer.

Grant, Stan & John Rudder. (comps.) 2010. A new Wiradjuri dictionary. O’Connor, ACT: Restoration House.

Gunson, Niel (ed.). 1974. Australian reminiscences and papers of L. E. Threlkeld, missionary to the Aborigines, 1824-1859. Canberra: AIAS (Australian Aboriginal Studies 40). 2 volumes.

Gunson, Niel. 1994. British missionaries and their contribution to science in the Pacific Islands, in Roy M. MacLeod & Philip F. Rehbock (eds.), Darwin’s laboratory: Evolutionary theory and natural history in the Pacific, 283-317. Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press.

20 As mentioned above, the authorship of these annotations is unclear. The NSW Department of Trade and Investment, which catalogued the map, tentatively attributes them to the colonial clergyman W. B. Clarke (http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/clarke-william-branwhite-3228).

Why Waway? 301

Günther, William James 1838. C136: The Native Dialect Wirradurri spoken in the Wellington District, 1838. State Library of NSW C136. Microfilm: CY 936, frames 350-515 (c 136). Online at http://www.acmssearch.sl.nsw.gov.au/search/itemDetailPaged.cgi?itemID=1046036 [accessed 2016-07-22].

Günther, William James 1839. Vocabulary of the Aboriginal dialect called Wirradhurri spoken in the Wellington District, etc., etc. of New Holland collected by James Günther, 1839. Royal Anthropological Institute MS 6. Microfilmed copy held by AIATSIS at MF 266.

Günther, William James 1840. Supplement to a vocabulary of the Native District called Wirradhurrei. State Library of NSW B 505 (CY Reel 980, frames 586-615).

Günther, William James. 1892. Grammar and vocabulary of the Aboriginal dialect called the Wirradhuri. In John Fraser (ed.), An Australian language, part IV (‘The Appendix’), section D, 56-120. Sydney: Potter.

Jervis, James. 1945. Lake Macquarie: Its discovery and settlement. Royal Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings 31(2), 101-125.

Leeden, Alexander C. van der. 1975. Thundering gecko and emu: Mythological structuring of Nunggubuyu patrimoieties. In Lester Hiatt (ed.) Australian Aboriginal mythology, 46-101. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

Lissarrague, Amanda. 2006. A salvage grammar and wordlist of the language from the Hunter River and Lake Macquarie. Nambucca Heads, NSW: Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Cooperative.

Lissarrague, Amanda. 2007. Dhanggati grammar and dictionary with Dhanggati stories. Nambucca Heads, NSW: Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative

Lissarrague, Amanda. 2010. Gathang grammar and dictionary with Gathang stories. Nambucca Heads, NSW: Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Cooperative.

Maddock, Kenneth 1978. Metaphysics in a mythical view of the world. In Ira Buchler & Kenneth Maddock (eds.) The Rainbow Serpent: A chromatic piece, 99-118. The Hague: Mouton.

Mathews, Robert H. 1896. The Burbung of the Wiradthuri Tribes. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 25, 295-318.

Mathews, Robert H. 1904. Ethnological notes on the Aboriginal tribes of New South Wales and Victoria. Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales 38, 203-381.

Mathews, Robert H. 1905. Ethnological notes on the Aboriginal tribes of New South Wales and Victoria. Sydney: F.W. White.

Mathews, Robert H. 1909. Australian folk-tales. Folklore 20(4), 485-487 (also in a modern edition in Thomas 2007: 143-145).

McCarthy, Frederick D. 1971 [1943]. New South Wales Aboriginal place names and euphonious words with their meanings. Sydney: Australian Museum/ NSW Government Printer.

Mitchell, John F. H. 1904 [1906?]. Aboriginal dictionary Woradgery tongue of birds, beasts, fishes &c, weapons and timber. Ravenswood, Vic.: J. F. H. Mitchell.

Jim Wafer302

Needham, William J. 1981. A study of the Aboriginal sites in the Cessnock-Wollombi region of the Hunter Valley, NSW. Cessnock: W. J. Needham. (Cover title: Burragurra, where the spirit walked: The Aboriginal relics of the Cessnock-Wollombi region in the Hunter Valley of NSW.)

NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. 2005. Lake Macquarie State Conservation Area, Pulbah Island Nature Reserve and Moon Island Nature Reserve: Plan of management. Sydney: Department of Environment and Conservation (NSW). http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/resources/parks/PoMLakeMacquarieSCAPulbahIslandNRMoonIslandNR.pdf, [accessed 2015-04-05].

Powell, Michael & Rex Hesline. 2010. Making tribes? Constructing Aboriginal tribal entities in Sydney and coastal NSW from the early colonial period to the present. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 96(2), 115-148.

Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. 1926. The rainbow serpent myth of Australia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 56, 19-25.

Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. 1930. The Rainbow-Serpent myth in south-east Australia. Oceania 1(3), 342-347.

Reed, Alexander W. 1967. Place-names of New South Wales: Their origins and meanings. Sydney: Reed.

Richards, C. 1902. Wirra’ dthoo-ree’. Science of Man 5(7), 114-119.Ridley, William. 1875. Kamilaroi and other Australian languages (2nd edn.).

Sydney: Government Printer. Sherrie, William M. 1906. The Woradgery tribe. The Argus (Melbourne), 23

June 1906, p. 5.Taçon, Paul S. C. 1996. Birth of the Rainbow Serpent in Arnhem Land rock art

and oral history. Archaeology in Oceania 31(3), 103-124. Taylor, Luke. 1990. The Rainbow Serpent as visual metaphor in Western Arnhem

Land. Oceania 60(4), 329-344.Thomas, Martin. 2007. Culture in translation: The anthropological legacy of R.

H. Mathews. Canberra: ANU E Press and Aboriginal History Inc.Threlkeld, Lancelot E. 1834. An Australian grammar. Sydney: Stephens &

Stokes, Herald Office.Threlkeld, Lancelot E. 1850. A key to the structure of the Aboriginal language.

Sydney: Kemp and Fairfax.Threlkeld, Lancelot E. 1857. Gospel of St. Luke [Evangelion Unni ta Jesu-ūm-ba

Christ-ko-ba Upatōara Louka-ūmba], 1831, rev. 1857. Auckland, Auckland Public Library, Grey MSS 82.

MapProctor, W. S. 1841. Heritage Map of Lake Macquarie (or Awaba) with

geological locations. Sydney: NSW Department of Trade and Investment, Heritage Map H0257 (R00079544). Outline sketched W. Procter from his examination in August 1841. Printed by W. Baker Lithographer, King St. Sydney; extensive notes possibly by W. B. Clarke.

http://digsopen.minerals.nsw.gov.au/ [accessed 2015-04-05] (Also available via the Coal River blog, as below under ‘Di Gravio’.)

Why Waway? 303

WebsitesDi Gravio, Gionni. 2013. Awaba or Lake Macquarie in 1841. Coal River

Working Party blog. https://coalriver.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/awaba-or-lake-macquarie-in-1841/ Includes overlay map with Google Earth at https://coalriver.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/overlay1841withgoogle.jpg [accessed 2015-04-05].

NSW Department of Environment and Heritage. 2013. Pulbah Island. http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/aboriginalplaces/PulbahIsland.htm

[accessed 2015-04-05].Oak Milk Bar Freemans Waterhole. 2012. Facebook page, entry of 27 October 2012. https://www.facebook.com/OakMilkBar?filter=1 [accessed 2015-04-05].