I was out for dinner with some friends and we were discussing the fact that it was Moomba weekend. One of my friends told the group that Moomba actually meant "up your bum" in an Aboriginal language. We were all a little sceptical, even my friend who told us, so we as we all agreed that it seemed a bit far fetched to be true, we decided that we needed some further proof. After a brief Google search on my friends phone, she happily declared that Moomba does in fact mean, "up your bum." We all accepted this because we knew that my old friend Google wouldn't steer us wrong, and to be honest we were a little tipsy.
Later I checked into it a little further and found an article about whether this definition of Moomba was actually correct. The article outlined that Bill Onus, who was a former president of the Aborigines Advancement League, suggested the name as a joke because of it's interpretation to mean 'up your bum'. Over the years many have studied Victorian Aboriginal languages and determined that this meaning is correct, one such individual being the linguist Barry Blake. The article that I was reading however was still sceptical of this explanation, and offered many other plausible reasons as to why Bill Onus might have suggested the name Moomba. Overall the article agreed that since Bill Onus passed away in 1968, and only he can verify his reasoning behind the suggestion of the name, we will never know for sure if he did suggest the name as a joke, meaning 'up your bum,' or if he was actually offering a serious suggestion for other reasons. Since I am a fan of linguistic mix ups, I will from this day forward accept that 'up your bum,' is the true definition of Moomba.
Read more about the definition of Moomba in the article that I read on Crikey.
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