What's in a place name? Tamamareen, or Murphys Creek

Bronze sculpture of an Aboriginal fishing net, at the entrance to the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.
Photographed by Simon Hamlet, December 2017.

I have a fascination with aboriginal words, and place names.  A recent scan of a list of Aboriginal words for place names in Queensland, yielded the following.

Murphy’s Creek – named after Peter Murphy (servant/travelling companion of Patrick Leslie), but traditionally known to the Yugara people as ‘Tamamareen’ (means ‘where the fishing nets were burnt in a grass fire’).  [1]

This naming was also confirmed by the entry into the Murphys Creek State School site. [2]

Naming a place after such an event is surely a sign of how much time and effort went into making a fishing net.  I imagine the net was stored in a place near the creek and a fire came through and destroyed it.  The people may not have even been in the vicinity of that camp when the fire occurred, as the life of the Aboriginal people of the region included movement between camps at different times of the year.

How much effort went into net making? The Australian National Botanic Gardens notes the following uses for the Bulrush or Cumbungi.

This aquatic plant grows all over Australia. The underground stems (rhizomes) are rich in starch and can be cooked by steaming in an earth oven. After steaming, the rhizomes can be chewed to remove the starch and the remaining fibre used to make string. The young shoots were eaten raw as a salad. This plant was the most important food for people living along the Murray Darling River systems.  

Collect some reed, cook it, chew the result to collect the fibre, roll the fibre into string, construct a net with the string that has been made.  It is a huge amount of work!

The reed for making the nets is captured in the nearby place name, Cambooya. [3] The Condamine Alliance Aboriginal Vocabulary Lists [4] , list Cambooya as the word for water reed in the Barrunggam, Giabul, and Jarowair languages.

References

[1] http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/225674/Indigenous-Languages-SEQ-Placenames.pdf accessed October 2, 2017.

[2] https://murpcreess.eq.edu.au/Ourschool/Pages/Ourschool.aspx

[3] https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/16294748/gowrie-creek-waterways-we-are-anti-mining/22

[4] http://www.condaminealliance.com.au/cultural-resources accessed December 27, 2017.