A news story introduced me to the word pookila, referring to what apparently is more commonly called the New Holland mouse. Naturally I was curious about the word, but it doesn’t appear to be in any dictionaries, not even Wiktionary. A little googling got me to this Australian government document, which says:
Since circa 1995, the word ‘Pookila’ has been associated with the species. ‘Pookila’ is derived from the Ngarigo word for ‘mouse’ – bugila (Braithwaite et al. 1995; Hercus n.d.), although it deviates from traditional Ngarigo pronunciation (Braithwaite et al. 1995). The assignation of the word Pookila to the species was part of an initiative by the CSIRO to provide ‘Australian names for Australian rodents’ and to avoid the undesirable associations of introduced vermin often attached to the words ‘rat’ and ‘mouse’ that impede the conservation of native rodents due to negative public perception and associated challenges of securing funding for conservation (Braithwaite et al. 1995). However, the species is not known to have occurred on Ngarigo Country, and it is unclear why the language was chosen in Braithwaite et al. (1995) for the species. However, the name has since been associated with the species across its range, and the word is included on the Australian Government’s SPRAT database.
The word ‘tuwaranga’ means ‘mouse’ in palawa kani, the language of Tasmanian Aboriginal people (Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, 2023).
The naming strategy implemented by the Recovery Plan that aims to respect all Aboriginal names for the species (where known) will use a local name for local projects if this is identified and preferred by the Aboriginal community. Pookila will be used secondarily in broader communications about the local project to facilitate broader understanding of which species is being discussed.
Setting aside minor mysteries (why is bugila in itals and ‘tuwaranga’ in quotes? why is Pookila spelled with a capital letter?), this is extremely interesting; I certainly approve of trying to provide everyday names for creatures rather than forcing everyone to use Linnaean terminology, but I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just use bugila rather than a distorted version. (Also, the effort to avoid “mouse” seems silly to me.) Does anyone know anything about how it “deviates from traditional Ngarigo pronunciation”?
Separately, I’m disturbed by “palawa kani, the language of Tasmanian Aboriginal people.” In the first place, it is not actually a language as normally understood: “Palawa kani is a constructed language created by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre as a composite Tasmanian language, based on reconstructed vocabulary from the limited accounts of the various languages once spoken by the Aboriginal people of what is now Tasmania (palawa kani: Lutruwita).” In other words, it’s a conlang extrapolating from material like “five words, one sentence, and a short song.” It is certainly not “the language of Tasmanian Aboriginal people.” And why the devil is the name written without capital letters? Are they considered capitalist? All elucidation is welcome.
Apparently the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre decided to write all palawa kani words—including palawa kani—in lower case because that was being done with various revived indigenous languages on the Australian mainland. But since then, most of the Aboriginal community in Tasmania has come to prefer the initial capital letter for quite a lot of proper nouns that were established as part of palawa kani, so the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre has acquiesced and now writes those with a capital letter too: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-12/tasmanian-palawa-kani-place-names-change/104913992
As for the “mouse” avoidance, that’s not hard to understand for anyone familiar with the recurring Australian phenomenon of mouse plagues. “Undesirable associations of introduced vermin” indeed.
Ah, thanks for those satisfactory explanations!
There is a song on a really-nobody’s-nominee-for-their-best Jethro Tull album entitled “…And the Mouse Police Never Sleeps.” Wikipedia advises that the album made it to #17 in the Australian charts, trivially better than its #19 in the U.S. and #20 in the UK.
@JWB: Those are fighting words. It’s certainly my favorite JT album.
@Hans: I am happy, nay eager, to concede that you are not nobody, so you should consider the comment appropriately emended. And perhaps more generally I shouldn’t make overblithe assumptions about what sorts of opinions are or aren’t common in the fever swamps of your more fervent Tull devotees. (The hipster-sophisticate opinion may commonly be that it’s a toss-up between _Stand Up_ and _Benefit_ as to which was the last good album, but to hold that opinion is perhaps almost by definition to not really be a Tull devotee.)
i knew someone whose favorite Tull song, at least, was “Acres Wild”.
I’m not a Tull devotee—I haven’t even heard most of their albums all the way through. But since you ask, Songs from the Wood.
My first love was a Jethro Tull superfan. The fact that I had no interest whatsoever in the band (can’t even remember any of their songs now) was doubtless one of the things that did not endear me to her.
I wouldn’t call myself a JT superfan; I’m not impressed by what I know of their albums from the 80s and later and I haven’t even fully explored all of their music before the 80s. While I know other albums and like other songs by them, “Heavy Horses” is the only JT album that regularly gets into my rotation as a whole.
Pookila is not really a “distortion” of bugila – just an alternative way of writing the words in a language without a stop voicing distinction. They may have meant that Ngarigo was traditionally pronounced with phonetic voicing, but Australianist convention certainly allows for p, t, and k to be used even then.
I would argue that palawa kani is indeed at least a language of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people even if it is a conlang, as it was designed by Tasmanian Aboriginal people to be used by Tasmanian Aboriginal people – it’s just not a traditional language.
I would argue that palawa kani is indeed at least a language of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people
Sure, if they’d said “a” instead of “the” I wouldn’t have had a problem. And thanks for your well-informed comment; that’s the sort of thing I wanted to know!
I can’t find a digital copy of Braithwaite et al.’s Australian names for Australian rodents, so I can’t tell how much of these conventions are his. Hercus’s vocabulary of Southern Ngarigu is here (p. 243), and she uses bugila.
Ngarigu indeed has no voicing distinction, as with many Australian languages, so in principle either <p,k,t> or <b,g,d> would work. I don’t know what orthography they prefer, but the contemporary people spell their name Ngarigo with a g, not a k. I don’t know if they prefer <oo> over <u> for /u/.
Wikipedia used the capitalized Pookila for Pseudomys novaehollandiae, presumably following governmental conventions. It also has Ngadji for P. chapmani and dayang for P. shortridgei, but it’s not clear that these are official in the way Pookila is.
This article on native-naming Australian rodents mentions several names, including pookila, all in lowercase. Most use <oo> for /u/ in the animal names, though not in the language names, e.g. “palyoora, from the Wangkangurru language” and “yirrkoo, from the Kunwinjku/Mayali”.
Palawa Kani tuwaranga was probably reconstructed from <tooarrana> ‘rat’ (Southern and Bruny Island languages/dialects) and <tarrangha munukana> ‘long-tailed rat’ (Oyster Bay), published by Joseph Milligan in 1857, republished by Plomley in 1976, and digitized by Bowern et al., here.
There are also other words glossed ‘rat’ and ‘mouse’. Maybe the assumption was that ‘mouse’ referred to marsupials.
Why? Actual rodents reached Australia three times, all millions of years before humans did.
‘Palawa’ = ‘Palaver?’
I’m afraid so.
I am separately interested in the alternative non-Linnean name “New Holland mouse” as a fixed-phrase survival of the otherwise-archaic “New Holland” as a name for part/all of the Australian continent. I wonder what other fixed-phrase survivals in current use there may be?
I see in the early history of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney that the first Archbishop had previously held the title “Vicar Apostolic of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land” (and also titular bishop of Hierocaesarea in partibus infidelium) until it was decided to match him up with a more forward-looking toponym in 1842.
“I’m afraid so”? WTF, David? You can see in the Wikipedia page, and its references, that palawa (or alternately pakana) means ‘Tasmanian aboriginal people’. (According to this page, it’s derived from the name of the first man in a creation myth.)
According to Wikipedia Hans is certainly not out on an island:
“AllMusic calls Heavy Horses one of the prettiest records of the band, praising both Martin Barre’s and John Glascock’s playing as Robin Black engineering and the special participation of Curved Air violinist Darryl Way.”
I am impressed by the hipsters here. Acqualung and Thick as a Brick are the only albums I remember anyone ever discussing or owning in the late 1970s/early 1980s (certainly the only albums that ever got featured on AOR). Those records did not encourage me to delve deeper into their work.
All it takes is for one of your college roommates to be something of a hipster, though I really don’t think he was trying to show off.
The 1899 volume _The Aborigines of Tasmania_ has as its Appendix F a “Tasmanian-English Vocabulary” which may unhelpfully lump together lexemes from different and not-necessarily-closely-related languages that were already largely gone by 1899 (it’s sort of a compendium of earlier wordlists from various sources, I think). But it includes “palawa” as meaning “Adult man (black).” Also some compounds like palawa proina (“fat man”), Palawapamari (“Coxcomb (a fine-looking fellow)”), and more intriguingly Palawa roiana (“Serpent (black snake)”). Nothing about divine kangaroos.
The page ktschwarz links to gives off a very “citation needed” vibe. It only takes a modest amount of cynical reading between the lines to suspect that the current form of “Tasmanian aboriginal” identity arose in the 1970’s in the context of political/cultural trends of that era. Which, whatever. Ethnogenesis is a thing.
To Vanya’s point, maybe there was regional variation within the U.S. but a few hundred miles southwest of him where I was growing up at the same time copies of _Aqualung_ and _Thick as a Brick_ were quite often supplemented by copies of _Living in the Past_, an anthology of pre-Aqualung work released post-Aqualung to cash in on the band’s big commercial breakthrough with the U.S. audience. And some of the stuff on that anthology got commercial radio airplay a decade or more later. (The argument for the pre-Aqualung stuff is that that was the sort of prog-rock that had some discernable and interesting jazz influence, which by _Aqualung_ and thereafter had been diluted down to homeopathic levels, with that shift coinciding perhaps not coincidentally with the departure and replacement of first the original bassist and then the original drummer.)
JWB, yes, this more academic article goes into a lot about the palawa/pakana division and how the idea of a “coherent and unified Tasmanian Aboriginal community” is a bit aspirational — nothing wrong with that, as you were saying.
gives off a very “citation needed” vibe
The citation (a bit obliquely given on that page) is to the account given by Woorrady to George Augustus Robinson in 1831, excerpted e.g. here; I guess “Parlevar” is implied to be Robinson’s nonrhotic transcription. And the page I previously cited says it was “the name” of the first man, but I don’t see a distinction between that and simply the word for “man”.
BTW the link I gave is to a compilation of all known Tasmanian language data.
Palawa kani was mentioned at Language Hat a year ago, via a link to Untranslatable.org. (I’m willing to lowercase the name of the language even in English text, but at the beginning of a sentence? That’s too much for me — although the Untranslatable page does it.)
There’s a chapter on it in the Oxford Guide to Australian Languages.
I’m relieved to be wrong. I haven’t had much time to look things up lately.
That looks like the stress goes on the first syllable, too.
Adam…
Very interesting post!
And thanks to Y for the link to that article on naming by Steve Morton.
If only a name could make a difference… Despite its glorious name, the monarch butterfly is still vulnerable and people in the USA cut down milkweed or apply herbicide wherever they find it (leaving aside the logging of oyamel forests in Mexico).
where I was growing up at the same time copies of _Aqualung_ and _Thick as a Brick_ were quite often supplemented by copies of _Living in the Past_,
Good call, I had forgotten that one. Certainly the song Living in the Past got a fair amount of airplay even in NH in the late 1970s.