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McGarvie’s list and Aboriginal Dyarubbin

Spelling Aboriginal Names in English

The Dyarubbin Project: Aboriginal history, culture and places on the Hawkesbury River

Real Secret River: Dyarubbin project

Saturday School of Community Languages

McGarvie, John

Steele, Jeremy

Wafer, James William

Real Secret River: Dyarubbin project team members (l to r) Leanne Watson, Grace Karskens, Erin Wilkins and Jasmine Seymour above Dyarubbin at Sackville June 2018

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Linguistics

McGarvie’s list and Aboriginal Dyarubbin

This essay follows on from Introducing the Dyarubbin Project: Aboriginal history, culture and places on the Hawkesbury River, New South Wales

Spelling Aboriginal Names in English

The spelling of Aboriginal names in English was a difficult affair for local Aboriginals and Europeans, both of whom grappled to find ways of standardising names.

The Dyarubbin Project: Aboriginal history, culture and places on the Hawkesbury River

The winner of the State Library of NSW Coral Thomas Fellowship in 2018-19 was a collaborative project, The Real Secret River: Dyarubbin. Based on a list of Aboriginal words recorded along Dyarubbin (the Hawkesbury River) in the 1820s by Reverend John McGarvie that is held in the Mitchell LIbrary, winning the Fellowship allowed the team behind the project to work on the recovery, recognition and revitalisation of the river's Darug and Darkinjung history, culture and Language.

Real Secret River: Dyarubbin project

Collaborative research project led by Professor Grace Karskens as the Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales 2018-2019. Once every place on Dyarubbin and its tributaries had an Aboriginal name, reflecting ways in which this Country was understood, used and experienced. Now only a handful survive on maps and in common usage. Using a list made by Reverend John McGarvie in 1829 that records the place names used by the Aboriginal people along the Hawkesbury River (Dyarubbin), a team of Darug people, historians, archaeologists and linguists identified the original locations, allowing for the recovery, recognition and revitalisation of the river's Aboriginal history, culture and Language.

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Saturday School of Community Languages

Public secondary school which operates only on Saturdays to give students the opportunity to study the language they speak at home, if a course in that language is not offered at their own school or college.

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McGarvie, John

Second Presbyterian minister in colonial Sydney, the first incumbent at Pitt Town and Ebenezer, and of St Andrews Scots Church. While living in the area, he recorded the names of places along the Hawkesbury River, or Dyarubbin, that local Aboriginal people shared with him. His papers are held in the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

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Steele, Jeremy

Non-Indigenous researcher who completed his Master’s thesis ‘The Aboriginal Language of Sydney’ at Macquarie University in 2005.

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Wafer, James William

Jim Wafer is an anthropologist with a specialisation in the sub-fields of anthropological linguistics and anthropology of religion.

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Real Secret River: Dyarubbin project team members (l to r) Leanne Watson, Grace Karskens, Erin Wilkins and Jasmine Seymour above ...

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By

Paul Irish

Contributed By

Paul Irish