A sculpture of Kingaroy’s Indigenous namesake has completed a small but – in the eyes of council – significant move.
In early June, the South Burnett Regional Council moved a steel-and-wire statue of a red ant from the entrance of the Kingaroy Heritage Museum toward the corner of the building close to the Edward Street turn-off, placing it within a fenced area and underneath a spotlight.
Council purchased the sculpture from its creators Andrew Cullen and Dion Parker for its regional art collection in 2019.
A spokesperson for council said staff moved the statue from one part of the heritage museum to the other to increase the public’s ability to see the artwork.
In its new location, the metal ant now appears poised to scale the museum’s walls, facing away from the street as opposed to greeting visitors head-on like it used to.
The histories of the statue’s namesake insect and the town which houses it have been intertwined since the 1870’s.
The settlers James and Charles Markwell settled in what is now Kingaroy in 1878, combining two of their paddocks in 1883 and naming the land ‘Kingaroy Paddock’ – a name suggested earlier by an Aboriginal aide of surveyor Hector Munro given the area’s purported glut of red ants.
In their 1910 and 1943 works, First Nations language researchers John Mathew and F J Watson gave insight into the town name’s meaning.
Both Watson and Mathew list ‘king’ as the Wakka Wakka word for either ‘common,’ ‘small’ or ‘black’ ant. Watson would go on to translate the adjective ‘hungry’ to ‘dhur’ri’ while Mathew listed it as ‘ju’roi’.
Nils Holmer’s 1983 Linguistic Survey of South-East Queensland instead claimed ‘genj’ to be the Wakka Wakka word for ‘red ant’, going on to state the term was also “the native name of Kingaroy”.
Holmer’s translation of ‘hungry’ was ‘djuroi’.
The town name ‘Kingaroy,’ then, could be read as a corruption of ‘king/genj dhur’ri/ju’roi/djuroi’ – hungry black/red ant.
