84

Nyleta,
Grosvenor Street,
Toowong, S.W.1.
20th, December, 1939.

Dear Mr. May,

I thank you for sending me Bulletin No.7 of Place
names and their derivations which is of great interest to me,
especially one item which has, incidentally, some bearing on the
derivation of the place name Bundaberg. I was stationed for
some years in the said town without definitely ascertaining the
derivation of the name. Someone has said that it was named after
a tribe of blacks of the name Bunda, but the fact that Bunda
is a class name relative to the marital law of the Kabi tribe
puts that out of court. The information that I gathered
from various sources shows that although J.C.Thompson was the
District Surveyor at the time that the first survey of the town
was made, the actual survey was made by a surveyor named Gwynne
asssited by an unlicensed surveyor named Edwards. Edwards, who
was called Bunda by the blacks and who had a knowledge of their
language, gave the names to the streets. Of the subsequent
movements of Edwards I can only find that he went north and that
he died at the Barron River near Cairns. The fact that Bunda
Street, Cairns (as per Bulletin) was named Bunda after a surveyor
named Edwards fits in with the story that Bundaberg was named
from Edward's sobriquet. I would mention that the name, Bunda,