Oh my god, feeling like I'm falling apart today

I wasted yesterday hanging out with my friend Karen and viewing wattle as it is #WattleSeason

then I had to work into the night to make up for the lost time. Went to bed at like 3:30am

#Grahamstodon lay on me while I was in bed and I somehow wrenched my shoulder in my sleep

now when I try to use my computer mouse, my little finger tingles. That can't be good

Trying to get by on a leftover apple scroll from yesterday, and a mug of strong Irish tea – my friend Em recently gave me a pack of Barry's that she had bought ages ago (on my recommendation) to please an Irish ex who turned out to be careless with my friend's tender heart

but I have to stop work soon anyway, as today is my friend Jess's funeral

Jess was immensely witty and charismatic, but she was chronically ill and suffered all her life. She was only just coming into her powers as a writer

Going back over her Instagram posts in bed at 3:30am, I was reminded how hard she fought for life and how fiercely she strove not to be defined by her physical frailty, to the point where I sincerely believed she could survive every health crisis and was genuinely shocked when she died suddenly

she had a post where she spoke about wanting to write another book, but being afraid that her health would not hold out. It is so bitter to know, months later, that it didn't, and that Jess must have been troubled by many more such thoughts that she never let slip in public like that

my whingeing about my own body shames me by comparison, just as I feel ashamed posting about my stupid cat's mania for food as the population of #Gaza is murdered with horrible slowness by lsraeI's deliberate starvation

how can we honour the dead and keep our own hearts from giving out in such times?

#Acacia #Wattle #WattleSeason #MaroondahDam #Maroondah #Healesville #Indigenous #Aboriginal #Etymology

When I visited Maroondah Dam on Friday I learned that despite the media coverage surrounding the proposed renaming of the Maroondah Hospital after the dead queen, ‘Maroondah’ is not a #Woiwurrung word.

In 1881 when the Maroondah Aqueduct was first used, a 77yo colonist named James Dawson campaigned to give the aqueduct, then named after the Watts River, an Aboriginal name. He wrote in a letter to ‘The Argus’, “May I suggest that the aborigines [sic] of Coranderrk should be appealed to, and a local name obtained from them and applied to the proposed reservoir…”

The Watts River is named for an assigned convict worker who managed Yering Station and drowned in the river in 1840. (The ‘Camperdown Chronicle’ reported Watts’s death as a suicide but the signage at the reservoir today suggests it was an accident during flooding.) Nearby Badger Creek is named after Watts’s bloody horse, which got stuck in the muddy creek one time and had to be winched out!

William Barak, then the #Wurundjeri ngurungaeta, was only too happy to point out that the river in Woiwurrung language was called Broong-ku-galk, meaning a rotten log, because there was so much dead timber on the riverbanks. (‘The Argus’ reported this using the spellings “Burngothalk” and “Pumburngalk”.)

Some kind of cultural wires were crossed, however: with the best of intentions, in 1881 or early 1882 Dawson went to Coranderrk where he met with Elders, one of whom told him that the location selected for the water catchment, including the neighbouring mountain, valley and stream, was called “Marroondah” (his spelling).

But they didn’t tell him what it meant or whose language it was: turns out it means “throwing” in Barababaraba (aka Parrapa), a language spoken further north by a people whose neighbours were the Wemba Wemba and Yorta Yorta.

According to historian Ian D Clark, Dawson’s informant at Coranderrk was either Barababaraba man John Terrick or Benjamin ‘Lanky’ Manton, a Wadi Wadi speaker from Swan Hill whose mother was Barababaraba. (One Kulin glossary lists “muruma” as the Wati-Wati word for ‘to throw’.)