Within half-an-hour of home “Kurnagar Lane”

Our first heritage “Within half-an-hour of home” post is being published on New Year’s Eve in Australia. It seems appropriate, for many reasons, that we should start the series by acknowledging the Wurundjeri people as the Traditional Owners of this country, and pay tribute to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Yarra region, and respect to their Elders past, present and emerging.

This Yarra Council street sign, within half an hour of home, exlains:

Kurnagar means “top of a hill” in Woi warrung, the language of the Wurundjeri people.

You can find out more about the language of the Wurundjeri people at the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages. 

You might like to check out their website and look at some of the great projects they’ve been involved in and the resources they provide.

Sadly, the end of 2019 means that we say farewell to the International Year of Indigenous Languages. But that doesn’t mean we’ve reached the end of the work that must be done to help conserve and educate about the importance of indigenous languages.

Tijjani Muhammad-Bande, President of the seventy-fourth session of the UN General Assembly, sums it up and invites our continued committment.

Now, that’s a New Year resolution we could could adopt!