PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Jackaroo
Thread: Jackaroo
View Single Post
Old 2nd Dec 2015, 16:54
  #66 (permalink)  
Herod

"Mildly" Eccentric Stardriver
 
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: England
Age: 77
Posts: 4,142
Received 224 Likes on 66 Posts
It's amazing the way one thing leads to another. This is a bit off-topic, but following India Four Two's post, here's the gen from Wiki.

The word "Canberra" is popularly claimed to derive from the word Kambera or Canberry which is claimed to mean "meeting place" in the old Ngunnawal language, one of several Indigenous languages spoken in the district by Aboriginal people before European settlers arrived, although there is no hard evidence to support this. An alternative definition has been claimed by numerous local commentators over the years, including Ngunnawal Elder, Don Bell, whereby "Canberra" or "Nganbra/Nganbira" means "woman's breasts" and is the Indigenous name for the two mountains, Black Mountain and Mount Ainslie, which lie almost opposite each other. In the 1860s, the name was reported by Queanbeyan newspaper owner John Gale to be an interpretation of the name 'nganbra' or 'nganbira', meaning "hollow between a woman's breasts", and referring to the Sullivans Creek floodplain between Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain. An 1830s map of the region by Major Mitchell indeed does mark the Sullivan's Creek floodplain between these two mountains as "Nganbra". "Nganbra" or "Nganbira" could readily have been anglicised to the name "Canberry", as the locality soon become known to European settlers.

And there was me thinking it was named after Lord someone -or-other.
Herod is online now