The Eora Nation — The People of This Place

“Eora” — from the coastal language of the Sydney peoples. It means simply: “Here. From this place. Us.”

When the British arrived at Port Jackson in January 1788, they encountered peoples who had been living in and around Sydney Harbour for more than sixty thousand years. These were not wandering peoples. They were sovereign nations with complex governance, defined territorial boundaries, rich ceremonial life, and an intimate and sophisticated knowledge of every headland, waterway, rock platform and seasonal shift of their country.

The coastal people of the Sydney region are known collectively as the Eora Nation — a term derived from the word eora, which the local people used when the British asked who they were. They answered simply and profoundly: eora. Here. From this place. We are the people of this place.

The Eora were not a single unified tribe but a confederation of approximately 29 distinct clan groups — each with their own territory, their own family boundaries, their own body decorations, hairstyles, songs, dances, tools and ceremonial life. They were united by shared language, deep kinship networks and common connection to Port Jackson and the surrounding sandstone country. When Bennelong of the Wangal people travelled to Parramatta in 1789, he did not understand the language spoken there — evidence that while the clans knew one another, they were genuinely distinct peoples.

Governor Arthur Phillip estimated approximately 1,500 Aboriginal people living within a ten-mile radius of Port Jackson in 1788. But the true population across the wider Sydney basin was almost certainly far greater, and dramatically reduced within decades of British arrival through introduced disease — particularly smallpox, which swept through Aboriginal communities in 1789 and is estimated to have killed more than half the coastal population of New South Wales within a single year.

The 29 Clans of the Eora — Their Country, Their Language, Their Place

Compiled from the original research of Colin Christian, Operations Manager, Sydney Charter Bus Australia — and sourced from the records of William Dawes, J.H. Watson, the Science of Man and other primary colonial and linguistic sources.

Clan	Language Group	Country — Then & Now
Cadigal / Gadigal	Eora	Sydney Cove to South Head — the heart of what is now the CBD, Darlinghurst, Paddington and the Eastern Suburbs. The grass trees (Xanthorrhoea, or cadi) for which they were named grew abundantly across their country.
Wangal	Eora	Concord — from Balmain and Birchgrove east to Silverwater and Auburn west. The northern boundary was the Parramatta River. Homebush Bay, now Sydney Olympic Park, was Wangal country — a major meeting place for peoples from across the region.
Burramattagal	Eora	Parramatta — the name Burramatta or Barramada means “the place where eels lie down” or “the head of the waters.” The eel was central to the diet and ceremony of this clan and the river that bears their name was their lifeline.
Wallumattagal / Wullumattagal	Eora	Ryde — the northern bank of the Parramatta River, west of Lane Cove River. Their name derives from wallumai, the snapper fish — reflecting the extraordinary richness of the waterways of their country.
Muruoradial	Eora	Mosman — the northern harbour foreshores of what is now Mosman, Cremorne and Neutral Bay.
Kameygal	Eora	Botany Bay — the northern shore of Botany Bay, between the Cooks River and the bay itself. The Kameygal were the people Captain Cook encountered at Kurnell on 29 April 1770 — the first contact between the Eora and Europeans on Australian soil.
Birrabirragal	Eora	Balmain & Birchgrove — the Bay, the peninsula. Birra is thought to derive from the name of a freshwater place in their country.
Cammeraygal / Gamaragal	Eora	The North Shore — Cammeray, Mosman, Manly. The Cammeraygal were the clan on the opposite (northern) shore of Port Jackson from the Cadigal. They were noted by the First Fleet for their fierce independence and resistance to British encroachment on their country.
Gorualgal	Eora	Georges Head & Mosman Headlands — the steep sandstone country of the upper North Harbour.
Cannalgal	Eora	Manly Beach — the northern ocean beaches of what is now Manly and Freshwater.
Borogegal / Borogegahl	Eora	Bradleys Head — the great headland of the upper harbour. Booragy or Búrroggy was the Aboriginal name for Bradleys Head — a man of this country gave his name to the French artist Petit as kuri Boregegal, meaning literally “man of Bradleys Head.”
Toongagal	Eora / Dharug	Liverpool — the south-western reaches of the Eora world, where the coastal people met the inland Dharug.
Dharawal / D’harawal	Dharawal	Illawarra & South Sydney — the Dharawal people occupied the country south of Botany Bay through to the Illawarra, their territory stretching along the coast from Botany Bay to the Shoalhaven River. Their language is distinct from Eora and is currently undergoing a significant revitalisation effort led by Dharawal community members.
Dharug / Darug	Dharug	Western Sydney — the great inland language group of the Cumberland Plain and the Blue Mountains foothills. The Dharug language is the parent language group of the Eora coastal dialects and is spoken across a vast territory from the coast to the mountains. Their descendants are today actively revitalising the language.
Ku-ring-gai / Guringai	Guringai	Northern Sydney to Pittwater — the Guringai people are the traditional custodians of the country that now includes Lane Cove, Pittwater and Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, one of the most significant Aboriginal heritage landscapes on the east coast of Australia, with over 800 recorded rock art and engraving sites.
Bong Bong, Waterfall, Scarborough, Bulli, Corrimal	Dharawal	The Illawarra escarpment clans — peoples of the great coastal escarpment south of Sydney, each with their own place names, stories and territorial knowledge of the country that now forms the Illawarra region.

This table draws on the original research of Colin Christian, Operations Manager, Sydney Charter Bus Australia, and on primary sources including the records of William Dawes (1791), J.H. Watson, James Meehan’s Map of 1807, the Science of Man, Macquarie Aboriginal Words and other colonial linguistic sources, as referenced in the accompanying written work. The suffix -gal means “people of” in the coastal Eora languages — so Cadigal means “people of the cadi (grass tree),” Cammeraygal means “people of Cammeray,” and so on.

The Songlines — Roads Before Roads

Every road you drive in Sydney was once a path. Every path was once a songline.

The songlines of the Aboriginal peoples of Sydney are not a metaphor. They are a technology — the most advanced navigational, ecological and social information system ever devised by a human culture without writing. A songline is an oral map of the landscape: a song that describes the route between two places so precisely that a person who knows the song can navigate that route in complete darkness, through terrain they have never physically visited, simply by listening to the words.

These songs encoded the location of water, food sources, shelter, sacred sites, the movements of animals, the timing of seasonal floods, the positions of stars that align with specific landscape features, and the social rules governing behaviour at particular places. They were passed from Elder to Elder over thousands of years. They were the internet, the road atlas, the legal system and the spiritual map of the entire continent — simultaneously.

Sydney’s Roads Were Aboriginal Paths First

The most extraordinary evidence of the Aboriginal peoples’ deep knowledge of country is visible from the air on any Sydney night. The road network of Sydney does not run in a grid. It follows the ridgelines and valleys, the watercourses and headlands, the low-lying corridors between wetlands — tracing the exact contours of the landscape that Aboriginal peoples followed for thousands of years in their trading, ceremonial and seasonal movements across country.

Modern Road or Route	Its Aboriginal Origin
Parramatta Road	Built directly over the ancient trading path used by the Gadigal, Wangal, Wallumattagal and Burramattagal peoples between the harbour and the inland river country. This path linked the coastal fish and shellfish country of Port Jackson with the freshwater eel and yam grounds of the Parramatta River corridor. The British convict track of 1789–1791 simply followed the cleared, well-worn route of millennia of Aboriginal foot travel. Today, more than three million journeys are made along this corridor every year — almost none of the travellers aware that they are following an Aboriginal road.
George Street	The backbone of Sydney’s CBD follows the line of an Aboriginal path along the ridge between Tank Stream (Warrane) and Darling Harbour. The Aboriginal people of the Cadigal used the Tank Stream as their primary fresh water source — it is the reason Sydney was settled at this precise location.
King Street & Enmore Road, Newtown	Among the oldest Aboriginal tracks south of the harbour, used by the Gadigal and their southern neighbours the Dharawal in seasonal and trading movement through the inner south and toward Botany Bay. D’harawal Knowledge Keeper Shannon Foster has documented the Aboriginal scientific basis of these routes — including the use of controlled burning to maintain open pathways through the bush.
The Pacific Highway — Sydney to Newcastle	The coastal highway north follows ancient Aboriginal trading routes between the Sydney clans and the peoples of the Hunter Valley — routes that passed through the sacred country of Ku-ring-gai, across the Hawkesbury and through Yengo, a landscape of enormous spiritual significance to the inland Dharug people. When wrecked sailors walked from Port Stephens to Sydney in 1796, they followed the Aboriginal track — and found it clearly marked and passable.
The Great Western Highway — Sydney to the Mountains	The route west follows ridgelines known to the Dharug people of the Cumberland Plain and the Blue Mountains — the same ridges that guide walkers and vehicles today. The crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 by Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson was guided in large part by following ridgelines the Aboriginal peoples had already thoroughly mapped and travelled.

Viewed from the air at night, Sydney’s road network looks like an enormous dot painting — curving, following the land, tracing the country. Not one of its major arteries runs straight. They follow the terrain the way water follows gravity, and water follows the paths the Aboriginal peoples mapped first. The city is built on the skeleton of Aboriginal knowledge of country.

Sacred Sites — The Art That Has Survived

Etched into the sandstone of Greater Sydney are more than 800 recorded rock art and engraving sites — a fraction of what once existed.

The Names Are Still There — Aboriginal Place Names of Sydney

Australia possesses a heritage of place names that pay tribute to Aboriginal traditions, culture and language — written by our Operations Manager, Colin Christian.

Australia possesses a heritage of place names which pay tribute to the Aboriginal traditions, culture and language. To many Australians and overseas visitors the names have a curious fascination, for they are unusual sounding but pleasant sounding to the ears.

It is a great tragedy that the meanings of so many place names have been lost and more so never recorded and documented. It is now too late. Had there been a common tongue throughout Australia before European settlement, or even three or four languages, then it would be possible to reconstruct the meanings even when a name’s origin has been lost. But there were more than 500 distinct dialects and sadly many of these have never been recorded.

In Sydney, many of the translations have come from the imaginations of linguists. When one reads a translation for a suburb it sometimes annoys me at the blatant guesswork and accepted translation of an Aboriginal word. As similar sounding words have different meanings from other clans, it has generally been accepted as the literal translation.

I read one book in a Sydney library about the traditional name given to Mosman — Goranbullagong — translated as Black Cockatoo sitting on a woomera. The name comes from goran or gohran (long or tall), bulla (two) and gong (stream or creek). The translation becomes obvious. Adding the word twice emphasises the meaning.

Some translations require a bit of imagination. The word curramurra means drowning — curra (rocks) and murra (hands or fingers) — so translating it as “stonehands” implies being weighed down and unable to stay afloat. So many place names are not even Sydney-based language but a name brought back from some trip up north, south or inland and the name given to a street or suburb. We also have to remember that what a name is now is not necessarily the name given to it by its traditional owners — but a corruption of a word and even a mispronunciation that has stuck and is now in use.

Many Aboriginal place names were given to a place perhaps hundreds or a thousand years ago and do not represent what is in the actual area, but an event that had taken place there. Usually the names are based around food and water sources. Some words (like most languages) have two or more meanings depending on context and where they are used in the sentence.

The Word Ngarra — A Single Word, Many Truths

Our historian and language specialist uses the word Narra — pronounced Ngarra, with the ng as in king or song — as an example of the extraordinary depth of Aboriginal language:

• Ngarra (adjective) — twisted or knotted
• Ngarra- (verb prefix) — to tie
• Ngarra (noun) — a bird’s nest (*note the twisting and knotting reference)
• Ngarra- (adjective prefix) — confused
• Ngarra (adverb) — together, or in your company

One word. Five meanings. Each of them connected — twisted, tied, nested, confused and together. This is not coincidence. It is a language of extraordinary internal logic, built over thousands of years of lived experience of a specific country by a people who observed that world with a precision and a patience that has no parallel in human history.

Original composition © by Colin Christian, Operations Manager, Sydney Charter Bus Australia.

Some Aboriginal Place Names Still in Use in Sydney Today

Place Name Today	Aboriginal Origin	Meaning or Connection
Parramatta	Burramatta / Barramada	“The place where eels lie down” or “the head of the waters” — the meeting of the tidal Parramatta River with the fresh water of the interior. A place of immense food, ceremony and strategic significance for the Burramattagal and surrounding peoples.
Woolloomooloo	Wulwulumulu	Believed to mean “young kangaroo” or “a place of plenty” — the steep wooded gully of what is now Woolloomooloo Bay was a sheltered and resource-rich place used by the Cadigal as a seasonal camp.
Toongabbie	Tungabbe	“Meeting place” or “place of plenty” — a significant gathering site on the edge of Dharug country, where freshwater, game and plant food converged in abundance.
Cabramatta	Cabramatty	Believed to refer to a species of tree or scrub found in the area — a reminder that Aboriginal place names were ecological catalogues as much as navigational markers.
Mosman	Goranbullagong	From goran/gohran (long or tall), bulla (two) and gong (stream or creek) — “the place of the two tall creeks.” The name was lost and replaced, but the landscape it described remains.
Botany Bay (Kamay)	Kamay	The Kameygal name for the bay that Cook called Botany Bay. Kamay is now also used as the official name of the Botany Bay National Park in recognition of the Kameygal people who have lived on its shores since long before any European set eyes on it.
Wollongong	Wollongong / Wullanung	“Sound of the sea” or “hard ground near the water” — Dharawal country, on the coastal plain beneath the great Illawarra Escarpment. The name has survived in use for over two centuries and is one of the most beautiful and recognisable Aboriginal place names in New South Wales.
Warrane	Warrane	The Cadigal name for Sydney Cove — the small cove at the head of which the First Fleet settled in January 1788 and which became the birth site of modern Australia. The name Warrane is now used alongside Circular Quay in formal acknowledgements.

The Living Culture — Still Here, Still Speaking