Eora

The Eora are an Aboriginal Australian people of New South Wales. Eora is the name given by the early colonising British military officers to a group of Aboriginal people belonging to the clans along the coastal area of what is now known as the Sydney basin, in New South Wales, Australia. The Eora spoke a dialect of the language of the Darug people, whose traditional lands lie further inland within the Sydney basin, to the west of the Eora.
Contact with the first white settlement's bridgehead into Australia quickly devastated much of the population through epidemics of smallpox and other diseases. Their descendants live on, though their languages, social system, way of life and traditions are mostly lost.
Radiocarbon dating suggests human activity occurred in and around Sydney for at least 30,000 years, in the Upper Paleolithic period. However, numerous Aboriginal stone tools found in Sydney's far western suburbs gravel sediments were dated to be from 45,000 to 50,000 years BP, which would mean that humans could have been in the region earlier than thought.

Ethnonym

The word "Eora" first appears in the Aboriginal wordlists recorded by First Fleet officers, where it was mostly translated as "men" or "people". The word has been used as an ethnonym by non-Aboriginal people since 1899, though there was "no evidence that Aboriginal people had used it in 1788 as the name of a language or group of people inhabiting the Sydney peninsula". Since the late 20th century, it has also come to be used as an ethnonym by Aboriginal people.

Source	Spelling	Translation
Dawes	Eeōra	Men, or people
Collins	Eo-ra	The name common for the natives
King	Eo-ra	Men or people
King	Yo-ra	A number of people
Southwell	E-ō-rǎh	People
Anon.	Eō-ra E-ō-rāh	People

Collins's wordlist is the only original wordlist that does not translate the term as "men" or "people"; however, in the text of his Account, Collins uses the word to mean "black men", specifically in contrast to white men:

Conversing with Bennilong... that all the white men here came from England. I then asked him where the black men came from?

In The Sydney Language, Troy respells the word "Eora" as yura and translates it as "people, or Aboriginal people". In addition to this entry for "people, or Aboriginal people", Troy also gives an entry for "non-Aboriginal person", for which she lists the terms wadyiman, djaraba, djibagalung, and barawalgal ''. The distinction between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, observed by Troy and the primary sources, is also found in other Australian languages. For example, Giacon observes that Yuwaalaraay speakers used different lexical items for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal persons: dhayn/yinarr for an Aboriginal man/woman, and wanda/wadjiin for a non-Aboriginal man/woman.
Whereas the primary sources, Troy, and Attenbrow only use the word "Eora" or its reference form yura in its original sense "people" or "Aboriginal people", from 1899 onwards non-Aboriginal authors start using the word as an ethnonym, in the sense "Aboriginal people of Sydney", despite the lack of evidence for this use. In two journal articles published in 1899, Wentworth-Bucknell and Thornton give "Ea-ora" as the name of the "tribe" who inhabited "Port Jackson" and "the Sydney district" respectively, and this definition appears to be copied directly in a 1908 wordlist. Attenbrow points out that none of these authors clarify the geographic area that they describe, and none state their source. Despite the lack of evidence for its use as an ethnonym, the word is used as such by Tindale in his Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, and Horton in his map of Aboriginal Australia in the Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, which has been widely circulated by AIATSIS.
Kohen proposes that "Eora" is derived from "e" meaning "yes" and "ora" meaning "country". Given that there is no primary evidence for the derivation of the word, this theory remains speculation. Contemporary linguistic analysis of the primary evidence does not support this theory either. The only primary source for the word "country", the anonymous vocabulary, records the word three times: twice with an initial nasal consonant, and only once with an initial vowel, although in that case it occurs immediately after a nasal consonant and almost certainly represents an inconsistency in transcription. Indeed, Troy gives an initial nasal consonant in her reference form nura for "place or country", which agrees with her and others' observation that "Australian languages do not usually have initial vowels".
Despite the lack of evidence for the use of the word "Eora" as an ethnonym, Aboriginal people in Sydney have also begun to use the word as such. For example, in the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council's Protocols for welcome to country and acknowledgement'', the Council gives this example acknowledgement of country:

The Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council and its members would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands within our boundaries, the 29 clan groups of the Eora Nation.

The dilemma in using terms "coined by 19th century anthropologists or modified from their original meaning " is discussed at length by the Aboriginal Heritage Office:

There is a move away from using words like Eora, Dharug, Guringai among some of those involved but still a sense by others that these words now represent a part of Aboriginal culture in the 21st century. It seems clear that with each new piece of research the issue remains confusing with layer upon layer of interpretation based on the same lack of original information. This is exacerbated where writers make up names for their own problem-solving convenience. In the absence of factual evidence, it seems the temptation to fill the void with something else becomes very strong and this does not appear to be done in consultation with Aboriginal people who then inherit the problem.

Language

The language spoken by the Eora has, since the time of R. H. Mathews, been called Dharug, which generally refers to what is known as the inland variety, as opposed to the coastal form Iyora. It was described as "extremely grateful to the ear, being in many instances expressive and sonorous", by David Collins. It became extinct after the first two generations, and has been partially reconstructed in some general outlines from the many notes made of it by the original colonists, in particular from the notebooks of William Dawes, who picked up the languages spoken by the Eora from his companion Patyegarang.
Some of the words of Aboriginal language still in use today are from the Darug language and include: dingo=dingu; woomera=wamara; boomerang=combining wamarang and bumarit, two sword-like fighting sticks; corroboree=garabara; wallaby, wombat, waratah, and boobook. The Australian bush term bogey comes from a Port Jackson Dharuk root buugi-.
In December 2020, Olivia Fox sang a version of Australia's national anthem in Eora at Tri Nations Test match between Australia and Argentina.

Example words

babunna
beenèna
Berewalgal
''doorow''
Country

Eora territory is composed of sandstone coastal outcrops and ridges, coves, mangrove swamps, creeks and tidal lagoons, was estimated by Norman Tindale to extend over some, from Port Jackson's northern shores up to the Hawkesbury River plateau's margins, around Pittwater. Its southern borders were as far as Botany Bay and the Georges River. Westwards it extended to Parramatta. In terms of tribal boundaries, the Kuringgai lay to the north: on the Western edges were the Darug; and to the south, around Kundul were the Gwiyagal, a northern clan of the Tharawal. Their clan identification, belonging to numerous groups of about 50 members, overrode more general Eora loyalties, according to Governor Phillip, a point first made by David Collins and underlined decades later by a visiting Russian naval officer, Aleksey Rossiysky in 1814, who wrote:

each man considers his own community to be the best. When he chances to meet a fellow-countryman from another community, and if someone speaks well of the other man, he will invariably start to abuse him, saying that he is reputed to be a cannibal, robber, great coward and so forth.

Clans

Eora is used specifically of the people around the first area of white settlement in Sydney. The generic term Eora generally is used with a wider denotation to embrace some 29 clans. The sizes of these clans could range from 20 to 60 but averaged around 50 members. -gal denominates the clan or extendeds family group affixed to the place name.

Cammeraygal
Wangal
Gadigal
Wallumettagal
Burramattagal
Bidjigal
Kamaygal
Norongeragal
Borogegal
Garigal

The Wangal, Wallumettagal and Burramattagal constituted the three Parramatta saltwater peoples.
It has been suggested that these had a matrilineal pattern of descent.

Lifestyle

The traditional Eora people were largely coastal dwellers and lived mainly from the produce of the sea. They were expert in close-to-shore navigation, fishing, cooking, and eating in the bays and harbours in their bark canoes. The Eora people did not grow or plant crops; although the women picked herbs which were used in herbal remedies. They made extensive use of rock shelters, many of which were later destroyed by settlers who mined them for their rich concentrations of phosphates, which were then used for manure. Wetland management was important: Queenscliff, Curl Curl and the Dee Why lagoons furnished abundant food, culled seasonally. Summer foods consisted of oyster, netted mullet caught in nets, with fat fish caught on a line and larger fish taken on burley and speared from rock ledges. As summer drew to an end, feasting on turtle was a prized occasion. In winter, one foraged for and hunted possum, echidna, fruit bats, wallaby and
kangaroo.
The Eora placed a time limit on formal battles engaged to settle inter-tribal grievances. Such fights were regulated to begin late in the afternoon, and to cease shortly after twilight.