The Bible relates that one of the tasks occupying Adam’s early days in the Garden of Eden was to go about bestowing names on everything. It makes sense: being the first human and all that, he will have needed to start getting a handle on stuff so he could talk about it when Eve showed up. And if he didn’t know a human companion was a possibility – it was pre-Tinder, remember – he’d probably have been trying to talk to trees and plants anyway.
There’s something fascinating about the names the early settlers gave things they encountered while moving, Adam-like, into this area, which they saw as uninhabited land. So starting two hundred years ago, they renamed things and what we have now is a kind of colonial patchwork, with names jumbled together from all manner of different sources.
Just a quick look at the creeks around here illustrates my point: you have the names adopted from the Aboriginal originals as the settlers perceived them. You know the legend about how the kangaroo got its name: when Captain Cook’s crew first spotted one of the marsupials hopping along, they asked a nearby Aboriginal gentleman what it was (in the manner of the British overseas: “I say, ah, you there – what is that? Whattee iss thattee?) and received the answer, “kanguru” – which means “I don’t know.”
You can see the same sort of thing happening with the names of geographic features – especially when it came to writing them down. As the Aboriginal culture was oral, our doughty settlers had to make up the spelling as best they could. Gillamatong near Braidwood sounds legit – but Doughboy Creek is a puzzler.
‘Doughboy’ is probably best known as a US Army word for an enlisted man, or perhaps the Pillsbury Doughboy, a rather disturbing branding device representing ready-made bread dough.
So how did it come to be the name of a rivulet in New South Wales in the nineteenth century? There’s not much online, but this page says the creek was christened in 1840, probably “drawn from the aboriginal word for another locality.” But it also suggests that doughboy may refer to “a maize meal and soda dumpling or damper” cooked by an early explorer – or it may be derived from ‘dubee’, the aboriginal word for mud crab. So that’s clear then.
Mona Creek is easy: Mona is a large and historic farm just outside Braidwood which was part of the original grant of land to Thomas Braidwood Wilson; part of it was given up to create the town we know and love today. Later, his daughter married Robert Maddrell, who, being from the Isle of Man, renamed it Mona – Gaelic name of his home island. Mona Creek originates on the farm.
Mackellar Creek shares its name with a number of Australian institutions and streets. Charles MacKellar was a medical man who became a member of the Legislative Council of New South Wales in 1885 and served as Secretary of Mines, followed by a stint as a Senator in Melbourne before returning to the Legislative Council again. Or it could conceivably be named after his daughter, Dorothea, a poet and novelist whose poem ‘My Country’ is one of the best-known about Australia, her “sunburned country”.
Further along the Little River Road, Tantulean Creek probably owes its name to someone with a passing knowledge of the classics – Tantalus being the Greek mythological king who was punished for angering the gods by being forever hungry and thirsty with food and water just out of reach. If this is the origin, our classical scholar’s grasp exceeded his reach because he got the spelling slightly wrong: technically, it should be ‘Tantalean’. Although what is it about this streamlet that’s so tantalising?
Sometimes the early settlers appear to have been quite a literal-minded lot: there are those baldly descriptive creek names like Reedy, Deep, or Flood. Maybe these names just kind of adhered over time — a little more every time someone gave directions:
“Drive your cart for about five miles until you get to the creek with all the reeds.”
“Five miles . . . the creek with all the reeds?”
“Yes, the reedy creek”
“Ah yes – Reedy Creek”
Multiply this kind of thing by a few generations and you have a name. Simple.
So when you think about it, the names Adam came up with for the four rivers in Eden – Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel and Phirat – were no more weird than some we have here. And pretty soon he had other things to worry about, what with the serpent and the apple and all the hassles that followed.
That’s probably why we tend to just accept these names, odd in their variety and obscure derivations — there’s a lot to be getting on with right now. But every now and then we can still find out a little more about this place by (dare I say) fossicking about in the records to find these stories – I don’t think it’s time wasted in the least.