wallaby

The word wallaby comes from the Dharug language of the Sydney region, where wolabi or walabi named one of the several macropod species inhabiting the coastal areas around Port Jackson. The Dharug people of the greater Sydney basin — the Eora, Cadigal, Gadigal, Wangal, and other clan groups — had distinct names for different species of macropods, distinguishing between what Europeans would later call kangaroos, wallabies, pademelons, and rock-wallabies by name, reflecting a taxonomic precision that registered ecologically relevant differences in habitat, diet, behavior, and size. The colonists, encountering a diversity of hopping marsupials they had no framework for, collapsed much of this distinction into two categories: kangaroo for the largest species, and wallaby — taken from the Dharug name for the mid-sized coastal macropod — for everything smaller.

The first recorded English use of the word appears in the late eighteenth century, in the journals and letters of early colonial observers in the Sydney region, where wolabi or wallabee was noted as the local name for the smaller macropods. By the early nineteenth century, wallaby had become the standard English term across the continent for any macropod smaller than a kangaroo, applied to species from Tasmania to Queensland to Western Australia to which the Dharug name had no original connection. This is a characteristic pattern in colonial linguistics: a word borrowed from one language group in one region is generalized to apply across the entire continent, erasing the regional specificity of the original and the distinctions that other language groups maintained.

The word's English life has been largely stable and widely recognized: wallaby appears in European natural history from the early colonial period, in international zoo collections from the mid-nineteenth century, and in popular culture worldwide as a recognizable marker of Australian fauna. The Australian national rugby league team is called the Wallabies, and the name is used in sporting culture with the same totemic quality that bears, lions, and eagles carry in other national contexts. The wallaby as a symbol carries associations of speed, agility, and distinctively Australian character — associations that were not part of the Dharug original, which was simply the name for a particular animal in a particular place.

Zoologically, the animals called wallabies in English are more diverse than a single word suggests: the family Macropodidae contains fifty-two species, of which perhaps half are commonly called wallabies, the rest kangaroos, tree-kangaroos, pademelons, and quokkas. The distinctions are size-based and conventional rather than reflecting any deep taxonomic division — a wallaby is simply a macropod that is not large enough to be called a kangaroo. This means the Dharug word has been pressed into service as a taxonomic category that is not a real taxonomic category, a common name covering an enormous range of distinct animals under a single label borrowed from a language that made finer distinctions. The word is generous in the wrong direction: too broad to be ecologically precise, yet too specific in origin to acknowledge the continent-wide diversity it purports to name.