Awabakal

The Awabakal people , are a group of Indigenous Australians and their descendants from eastern Australia who speak the Awabakal language. Their traditional territory consists of the coastal area of New South Wales located between what is now known as the Hunter River and the Gosford region. This includes the Watagan Mountains to the west, Newcastle and Lake Macquarie to the north, and the Wyong and Tuggerah areas to the south.

Name

The term Awabakal was first coined by the ethnologist John Fraser in 1892, who assisted in the publication of a thorough study on the Awabakal language by Lancelot Threlkeld. In this language, awaba was the word for Lake Macquarie, meaning flat or plain surface. With the addition of the suffix -kal, a term was created which referred to the people native to that area.

It is not known exactly how the Awabakal people collectively called themselves, but from their word for man, kuri, the term Kuri-nggai (also written as Ku-ring-gai or Guringai), has often been used as a collective denominator of the Awabakal and several other linguistically related coastal tribes in this region. Although the anthropologist Norman Tindale has challenged the validity of this classification, he agrees that the Kuri-nggai was synonymous with Awabakal. However, the linguist, Arthur Capell, asserted with minimal evidence that Kuri-nggai was a language distinct from Awabakal, which was spoken by the Garigal clan from the Broken Bay region.

According to Lancelot Threlkeld, the Indigenous people who occupied the coastal region north from Port Jackson to the lower Hunter River "all speak the same dialect" (ie.