9

COPY:

Union Street,
Toowong, S.W.1.
November 24th, 1942.

Re the place name Dundathu.

Dundathu was originally the name of a sawmill and
its township situated on the bank of the Mary River some nine
miles below Maryborough. This mill was established by Messrs.
Pettigrew and Sim in about 1860 and abandoned about 1880, but
the locality and the adjoining river reach retain the name.

The name is derived from the local (Kabi) word,
dhan-dauwa-dhu, meaning "place of timber" , from dhan, a
contraction of dhagun, dauwa, dry or withered, and dhu, tree or
wood, the combined words, dauwa-dhu, being the nearest translation
of the English word timber, i.e. sawn timber.

It has been generally accepted, probably on the
authority of Tom Petrie's Reminiscences", that the name,
Dundathu, was identical with the natives' name for the Kauri
pine tree, which Petrie gave as dundardoom. This arose, no
doubt, from the fact that at Dundathu the first Queensland kauri
pine was milled and exported therefrom, and it became generally
known as Dundathu pine.

The habitat of the kauri pine, Agathis robusta, of
South Queensland, is Great Sandy or Fraser's Island and a
restricted area of the mainland adjacent thereto, including
the area about Tin Can Bay, from whence this log timber used
to be rafted to Dundathu and later, to Maryborough sawmills.

The aboriginals' name for the kauri pine throughout
the said area is "nunmula" (nunmoola).

(Signd.) F. J. Watson

Note:

I have long been in possession of the above information
but deferred recording it until I could obtain a statement,
from a reliable aboriginal source, substantiating the word
"nunmula", as the Wide Bay aborigines' name for the kauri pine
tree, which I have recently been enabled to do.

(Signed.) F.J.W.