Place names across Bundjalung Country

Read the meanings carefully

Names from Bundjalung language

• Bangalow — From the bangalow palm (Archontophoenix cunninghamiana), whose common name is itself Bundjalung. The town was called Codrington until it was renamed in the early 1900s.
• Coraki — Widely given as “meeting of the waters”, for the junction of the Richmond and Wilsons rivers that the town sits on — one of the more consistently reported meanings in the region.
• Iluka — Usually glossed as “near the sea”. Some references attribute the word to a language from elsewhere in Australia rather than to Bundjalung, so this one is genuinely uncertain.
• Kyogle — Commonly given as the Bundjalung word for the plains turkey or bush turkey. The bird still appears on the town's signage.
• Mullumbimby — Most often given as “small round hill”.
• Murwillumbah — Sources disagree. “Good camping ground” and “place of many possums” are both widely published; neither should be treated as settled.
• Nimbin — From Nimbinjee or Nyimbunji, spirit beings associated with the Nimbin Rocks south of the village. The rocks are a significant site and are not a tourist climb.
• Wollumbin — The Bundjalung name for the mountain James Cook named Mount Warning in 1770. Commonly translated as “cloud catcher”, and also recorded as referring to a fighting chief of the mountains. It is a men's sacred site; Bundjalung custodians have long asked visitors not to climb it, and the summit was declared an Aboriginal Place in 2014. The summit track has been closed since 2020, and the NSW Government has extended the closure to 30 June 2027 while safety and cultural questions are worked through with Aboriginal custodians.
• Yamba — Commonly given as “headland”.
• Ballina — Contested. Local histories give both an Irish origin (Béal an Átha, “mouth of the ford”) and a Bundjalung origin, often written bullinah and glossed “place of many oysters”. Both accounts are still in circulation.
• Cudgen, Cudgera, Chinderah, Bilambil, Billinudgel, Burringbar, Tyalgum, Tyagarah, Wooyung, Booyong, Yelgun — All Bundjalung-derived names still in use across the Tweed and Byron shires. Published meanings for these vary so widely that none is repeated here — the language centres are the place to ask.

Names brought from somewhere else

A good share of the region’s town names are Scottish, Irish, English or Italian, applied by surveyors and settlers over places that already had names.

• Byron Bay — Cape Byron was named by James Cook in May 1770 after Vice-Admiral John Byron — a navigator, not the poet. The Bundjalung name for the headland is Walgun.
• Brunswick Heads — From the Brunswick River, named in 1828 for the German House of Brunswick, the royal house of Queen Caroline.
• Casino — Squatters Henry Clay and George Stapleton named their run “Cassino” in the late 1830s, after Monte Cassino in Italy. The surveyor F. S. Peppercorne dropped one “s” when he laid out the town in 1855 (Richmond River Historical Society).
• Evans Head — After the headland, which carries the name of colonial surveyor George William Evans.
• Grafton — Named in 1851 after the Duke of Grafton, grandfather of the then Governor of New South Wales, Sir Charles FitzRoy.
• Kingscliff — A settler-era descriptive name for the cliff-backed beach between Cudgen Headland and the Tweed.
• Lismore — After Lismore, the island in Loch Linnhe in the Scottish Highlands.
• Maclean — After Alexander Grant McLean, Surveyor-General of New South Wales — note the town spells it differently from the man. The Scottish identity the town is now known for, including the Highland Gathering and the tartan power poles, came from its Highland settler families rather than from the name itself.
• Ocean Shores — A developer's name from the late 1960s, when the estate was launched by a consortium that famously included the American singer Pat Boone.
• Pottsville — After the Potts family, early landholders on Cudgera Creek.
• Tweed Heads — From the Tweed River, named after the River Tweed on the Scotland–England border.

Two names for the same place

Several places across Bundjalung Country now carry dual names, with the Bundjalung name restored alongside or ahead of the colonial one — Wollumbin/Mount Warning is the best known. In March 2024 the Geographical Names Board approved the dual names Walgun/Cape Byron and Nguthungulli/Julian Rocks, on a proposal from NSW National Parks supported by the Bundjalung of Byron Bay Aboriginal Corporation (Arakwal) and the Cape Byron Trust. Dual naming in New South Wales is administered by the Geographical Names Board, and a dual name is adopted with the support of the local Aboriginal community, so where one exists it is there because local people backed it.

If you are producing signage, a website, a map or a publication, the safest approach is to ask the relevant Local Aboriginal Land Council which form they want used, rather than deciding from a list like this one.

Frequently asked questions