'Woronora' is an
Aboriginal placename. Records show the spelling of the name has varied since it first appeared in the 19th century, the earliest being
Wooloonora (Dixon, 1827, quoted in Walker 1974:66), followed by
Wolonora (Dixon, 1837), and
Woronora (Mitchell, 1835). The name was first applied to the
Woronora River, a tributary of the
Georges River, before being given to a
hundred, an electoral district, a local road east of the river, and finally the suburb itself. The following meanings have been suggested for
Woronora: • 'black rock' (Appleton and Appleton 1992) • 'black rocks' (Walker 1974;) • 'river-of-no-sharks' (Bolton 2000) Variations such as 'black cliffs' and 'sharkless waters' have also been suggested by local residents. The Aboriginal language known variously as
Dharug, Eora or simply 'the Sydney Language' was spoken around Woronora at the time of colonisation (Troy 1994:61). Lists of Dharug words gathered around the turn of the century provide a number of possibilities regarding the number of
morphemes and likely constituents of the placename. An analysis of the number of syllables in Dharug words recorded by Mathews (1901) shows over 50% contained two syllables, and just under 40% contained three, while only 1.45% contained one syllable: It therefore seems likely that
Woronora is made up of two disyllabic elements. In light of what historical Dharug information is available, the meaning of the suffix of
Woronora seems most transparent. A range of phonetically similar words are present in the sources: •
ngurra 'camp' (Troy 1994:67; Mathews 1901:158) •
ngurang 'place' (Troy 1993:78) • 'place;
gno-rang,
no-rar' (Kohen 1990:238) We may tentatively conclude therefore that
*-ngurra could function as a
locative suffix in Dharug. The stem of
Woronora is much harder to specify. Unfortunately, no word list contains a word
*wooloo,
*wolo, or
*woro, but the following orthographically similar words are present: •
wal-lan 'rain' (Ridley 1875:105; Kohen 1993:224), it is difficult to establish whether the name was misheard from Aboriginal sources three times (producing the
Wooloo-,
Wolo-, and
Woro- variants), or whether the change in spelling was a product of changing European pronunciation without reference to Aboriginal people. The latter is quite likely considering that until the 1840s, and possibly beyond, it was the only official placename from the mouth of the river southwards (Dixon 1841), and thus must have been written and pronounced frequently in reference to a large area. Assuming therefore that the original placename most closely resembled
Wooloonora, and acknowledging the inadequacy of our records due to language loss, three potential definitions present themselves: •
*wulan-ngurra 'rain place' •
*wolaru-ngurra 'wallaroo place' •
*wala-ngurra 'then place' Cultural information could be the deciding factor in defining
Woronora. Was there a Rain or Wallaroo
Dreaming in this part of Sydney? Could reported dialogue of the Dreamtime ancestors make sense of 'then place'? Or was there another noun unknown to us relating to black rock/s? Unfortunately the consequences of colonisation for the Dharug people in terms of land loss, dispersal and language loss mean this will probably never be known. ==Geography==