Talk:Bulimba House

Naming of Toogoolawah

The article on the township of toogoolawah seems to contradict this one - it claims the name means crescent shaped tree and referred to a specific tree at bulimba, not the river. 58.6.232.191 (talk) 06:19, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Naming, particularly naming with what appear to be Indigenous names, is complicated. Settlers often did ask local Indigenous people about local place names but there probably were some communication barriers involved. What the settler heard as the name and perhaps the meaning may not be reflected in the way they wrote the name down using the English alphabet and subsequently the way they and other settlers pronounced it. And what the settler thought was a place name might have actually been some other comment "good place for fishing' rather than being a place name at all. So the sounds of the word "Toogoolawah" might sound like a word used by Indigeneous people in the Brisbane area to mean one thing but to sound like a slightly different word with a different meaning in the Esk area. Even in English (just one language) we have the same word which can have many meanings. In some cases, the Indigenous meaning may have been recorded well over a century ago when there were many local speakers of that language OR it may be a question asked in modern times to local Indigenous people who have lost a lot of their language or their language has evolved (just as English has also evolved over time). If you look at place name entries in the Queensland Place Names database, you will see that while the Qld Govt makes an effort to establish the origins of place names (whether English in origin or Indigenous or one of the many other languages, e.g. we have a lot of places named after WW1 battlefields in Europe like Pozieres), often they don't know the origin/meaning of the name or list 2 or more different meanings. There are very few "absolutes" in origins of placenames. Kerry (talk) 06:09, 8 December 2024 (UTC)