The name Yarranabbe — Yarranabbe

Yarranabbe is the older name of the place. It is a word from the language of the Gadigal, the people of the southern shore of Sydney Harbour, and it has been used for the peninsula now called Darling Point for at least as long as the colonial record allows us to know.

The earliest written record of the word that survives in modern English as Yarranabbe is in the language notebooks of William Dawes, the young British astronomer and lieutenant of marines who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788 and who, almost alone among the colonists of his generation, sat down to learn the language of the people whose country he had landed on. Dawes' two surviving notebooks — now held at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and digitally transcribed — contain several hundred Gadigal words and phrases, and a remarkable record of his conversations with a young Gadigal woman named Patyegarang, his principal teacher.

Among the place-names Dawes recorded was the word he wrote as Yeranibe Goruey, applied to the headland projecting into the harbour from the southern shore — the headland that the colonists would shortly afterwards begin to call, first Mrs Darling's Point, and then simply Darling Point. The Gadigal name and its English replacement coexisted, in different ledgers, for the first half of the nineteenth century; eventually the colonial name dominated the maps, while the older name was preserved in the title of the shoreline road and a small handful of other place-names on the peninsula.

What the name means, and what we don’t know

The precise translation of the word is not certain. Nineteenth-century sources give various readings, and modern Gadigal language-recovery work has approached the question carefully. What is clear is that the word names a specific place — the peninsula itself — rather than describing a landscape feature in the abstract; and that the word is part of a wider set of Gadigal place-names along the southern shore of the harbour, several of which survive in modern Sydney usage, including Cadi for the south head country, Wallahmullah for what is now Woolloomooloo, and Yurong for the eastern end of the city.

The point that needs to be made carefully is that none of these names was invented by the colonial record. They were already in use, in active oral circulation, when the British arrived; the colonial record simply transcribed them, often inconsistently and not always accurately. Yarranabbe is therefore not a Victorian-era romantic invention. It is a Gadigal word, and the present site uses it in the form that has survived into modern English.

The name in modern use

Today the word is preserved most prominently in Yarranabbe Road, which runs along the shoreline of the peninsula; in Yarranabbe Park, the small public foreshore reserve at the inner end of Rushcutters Bay; and in the Yarranabbe Wharf at the foot of the road. The name is in continuous local use, by residents and by the City of Woollahra, in addresses, signage and municipal records.

The peninsula sits within the traditional country of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and that connection is ongoing. We acknowledge them as the Traditional Custodians of the land where this address takes its name, and we use their word for it deliberately and with respect.