Cbc Uictorian naturalist. 



Vol. XXXIV.— No. 5. SEPTEMBEE 6, 1917. No. 405. 



FIELD NATURALISTS' CLUB OF VICTORIA. 



The ordinary monthly meeting of the Club was held at the 

 Royal Society's Hall on Monday evening, 13th August, 1917. 



[The report of the meeting will appear in the October 

 Naturalist. — Ed. Vict. Nat.] 



ABORIGINAL PLANT NAMES: THEIR ETYMOLOGY. 



By R. a. Keble. 



{Read before the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria, i^th May, 191 7.) 



More than eighty years have passed since the white man first 

 occupied what was then the Port Phillip Settlement but is now 

 the State of Victoria. That period of kaleidoscopic changes 

 incidental to the evolution of a settlement of a few pastoralists 

 into a State of over a million inhabitants has not been con- 

 ducive to the welfare of the aboriginal race nor the preservation 

 of any of its antecedents. The sober emigration of the first few 

 decades presented unbounded opportunities to study their 

 habits, customs, and language, yet it must be admitted that 

 the few facts gleaned are for the most part meagre and im- 

 perfect, and were recorded long after they were actually 

 obtained. Always misunderstood, the blackfellow had been 

 subjected to a series of cruelties inspired more by ignorance 

 than by wilfulness, which reached its climax in the hysteria of 

 the golden fifties and precluded all possibility of preserving any 

 unit of the race in its entirety. By contact with the white 

 population the few survivors lost their individuality, and, as 

 regards the Victorian blacks, we are entirely dependent on the 

 early workers for what is known concerning them and their 

 language. As to the latter, papers* have been contributed by 

 Green, Parker, Thomas, Bunce, Hartmann, Bulmer, Hagenauer, 

 Howitt, and others, f which contain lists of words from various 

 Victorian tribes. These lists have usually been regarded as 

 unsatisfactory, and few attempts have been made to analyze 

 them. The following attempt concerns a few plant names 

 ascribed to the Wurunjerri-baluk, one of the many Victorian 

 tribes, and has recourse only to the syllabic components of 

 words attributed to that people. 



* Brough Smyth, " The Aborigines of Victoria," vol. ii. 



f See also Rev. John Mathew, " Eaglehawk and Crow," &c., &c. 



