billabong

The word billabong comes to us from the Wiradjuri language spoken in the area near the Murrumbidgee and Lachlan Rivers.  The first element billa means ‘water’ but no one is quite sure what the second element is. One theory is that bang/bong means ‘dead’.

In colonial times everyone was clear on what a billabong was. It was a subsidiary course of a river, an anabranch or a broken meander.  Anabranch is short for anastomosing branch, which was originally a medical term to describe a connecting cross branch between two blood vessels. The term transferred to botany and then to physical geography where it described a channel that left the main river and returned to it further downstream.  A meander is a loop that a slow-moving river makes.  A broken meander is one that is left behind because the river has changed its course, possibly after a flood.

As happened with creeks and rivers, these flowed when it was very wet and were quite possibly  dry beds in time of drought. The billabong was often a branch that reached a dead end where access to the river was cut off, although it could open up again in a flood. In ordinary times pools would form in the bed of the old watercourse, some shallow, some quite deep. Travellers found it irritating that they had to cross not only the river but the anabranch as well. And it was positively dangerous in flood time when your horse might  fall into a submerged hole.

This verse from Banjo Paterson in The Story of the Mongrel Grey relates to it:

‘Tis a special  gift some horses learn,

When the floods are out they will splash along

In girth-deep water, and twist and turn

From hidden channel and billabong.

Never mistaking the road to go,

For a man may guess – but the horses know.’

Henry Lawson also commented on it:

There’s no water so treacherous and deceitful as you’ll find in some of those billabongs. A man starts to ride across a place where he thinks the water is just over the grass, and blunders into a deep channel – that wasn’t there before – with a steady undercurrent with the whole weight of the Darling River funnelled into it; and if he can’t swim and his horse isn’t used to it – or sometimes if he can swim – it’s a case with him, and the Darling River cod hold an inquest on him, if they have time, before he’s buried deep in Darling River mud for ever.

So depending on the nature of the river and part of the country you were in, billabong might refer to the subsidiary arm of the river or to the large waterholes. Particularly in the north of Australia such waterholes were surrounded by lush vegetation and were teeming with wildlife.

‘The Billabong provided much of the food of the inhabitants. Yams and lily-roots grew there in abundance; and it was the haunt of duck and geese, and a drinking-place of the marsupials…  ‘ Capricornia Xavier Herbert

The terminology for watercourses in Australia is quite complex. You need to distinguish between ‘braided channels, swamps, gutters and billabongs’.  Rains runs down ‘from the slopes and gullies into parched channels, gilgais, gutters, billabongs; down to the dry lakes and swamps; into sanded rivers and the heads of great waterways’.

The word billabong is from the Wiradjuri language, but it is not clear if the Wiradjuri people used it as the name of a particular watercourse or not. Major Mitchell says he was told in 1836 that it was the Aboriginal name of the Goobang River near Condobolin, and a missionary James Gunther said in 1940 that it was the name of the Bell River.  It is not clear what was intended.

Travellers in the bush, be they drovers or explorers or swaggies, spent the night next to a billabong which provided water and shade, and, in the desert, was the Australian equivalent of an oasis.

‘Beyond, the view from the mountain top had shown a strip of plain with a line of billabongs down the middle of it, running southward to infinity, They would be following the billabongs, George said. They would camp on a billabong tonight. He spoke of the billabong country, travelled by him in youth, as a veritable Eden. ‘Full of ev’ryt’ng’ he said, meaning that it was a land of super-abundance.’ Poor Fellow My Country Xavier Herbert

And so it was that the jolly swagman camped by the billabong, usually  presented as an anabranch with water in it. Somewhere in the mid-1900s the primary idea of a billabong came to be that it was synonymous with a waterhole. Possibly the general understanding was guided by painterly images of a small waterhole surrounded by lush vegetation. Possibly this was exacerbated by the fact that most Australians were city dwellers by this time and had little firsthand experience of anabranches, whereas ponds, lagoons, waterholes and billabongs inhabited the same mental set.  It is possible that in the bush a billabong still refers to an anabranch. In the city it is the waterhole fed by an underground water supply to be a permanent source of water.

And it has a bunyip in it.  We know the bunyip from a sighting reported in the Sydney Morning Herald by a correspondent from the Murrumbidgee.

‘It is described as being about as big as a six month old calf, of a dark brown colour, a long neck, a long pointed head, large ears, a thick mane of hair from the head down the neck, and two large tusks. It is said to be an amphibious animal, as it has been observed floundering in the rivers, as well as grazing on their banks.’

Children’s storybooks have remained more or less faithful to this image, although we seem to have lost the tusks. The bunyip is dark and hairy.  And the bunyip is now strongly associated with the billabong.