Australian English Australian English (AusE, AusEng, AuE, AuEng, en-AU) is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to Australia. It is the country's common language and ''de facto'' national language. While Australia has no of ...

, a billabong ( ) is a small

body of water A body of water or waterbody is any significant accumulation of water on the surface of Earth or another planet. The term most often refers to oceans, seas, and lakes, but it includes smaller pools of water such as ponds, wetlands, or more rare ...

, usually permanent. It is usually an oxbow lake caused by a change in course of a

river A river is a natural stream of fresh water that flows on land or inside Subterranean river, caves towards another body of water at a lower elevation, such as an ocean, lake, or another river. A river may run dry before reaching the end of ...

or creek, but other types of small

lake A lake is often a naturally occurring, relatively large and fixed body of water on or near the Earth's surface. It is localized in a basin or interconnected basins surrounded by dry land. Lakes lie completely on land and are separate from ...

pond A pond is a small, still, land-based body of water formed by pooling inside a depression (geology), depression, either naturally or artificiality, artificially. A pond is smaller than a lake and there are no official criteria distinguishing ...

s or waterholes are also called billabongs. The term is likely borrowed from Wiradjuri, an Aboriginal Australian language of

New South Wales New South Wales (commonly abbreviated as NSW) is a States and territories of Australia, state on the Eastern states of Australia, east coast of :Australia. It borders Queensland to the north, Victoria (state), Victoria to the south, and South ...

Etymology

The word ''billabong'' is most likely derived from the Wiradjuri language of southern

, which "describes a pond or pool of water that is left behind when a river alters course or after floodwaters recede". According to the '' Macquarie Dictionary'' (2005), the original term ''bilabaŋ'' means "a watercourse that runs only after rain", with ''bila'' meaning "river", and possibly combined with ''bong'' or ''bung'', meaning "dead". The attribution of this last part of the word was contested in 2004 by Frederick Ludowyk of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, whose view was that that "-bong" or "-bang" was a

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

"signifying a continuation in time or space". Ludowyk writes that ''bong'' meaning "dead" is not a Wiradjuri word, but may have been picked up or assumed from the word "bung", which was originally a Yagara word used in the

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified form of contact language that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn f ...

widely spoken across Australia. Als
here
/ref> The word is first recorded in

in 1836, referring to the Bell River in south-eastern New South Wales, when explorer Thomas Mitchell records the Aboriginal name of the river as "Billibang". It is first recorded in its later, more general sense, by J. Allen in 1853: "This station is situated about half-a-mile inland, over a 'billy-bong' (the native name for a small creek or backwater)". It is not recorded in the first edition of the ''

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...

'' (prepared 1882–1888), published before the later contributions of the Australian academic Edward Ellis Morris. It appears in Morris's ''Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words'' (1898). A 2004 thesis suggests that the term could be of

Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic (, ; Endonym and exonym, endonym: ), also known as Scots Gaelic or simply Gaelic, is a Celtic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a member of the Goidelic language, Goidelic branch of Celtic, Scottish Gaelic, alongs ...

origin, derived from words for "lip" or "mouth" and "river".

Definitions and descriptions

Definitions vary. A billabong is often defined as an oxbow lake, an isolated crescentic

left behind after a river loop is cut off when the river channel changes course.

Merriam-Webster Merriam-Webster, Incorporated is an list of companies of the United States by state, American company that publishes reference work, reference books and is mostly known for Webster's Dictionary, its dictionaries. It is the oldest dictionary pub ...

defines the word as: "1. (a) a blind channel leading out from a river; (b) a usually dry streambed that is filled seasonally", or 2. "a backwater forming a stagnant pool" The

Cambridge Dictionary The ''Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary'' (abbreviated ''CALD'') is a British dictionary of the English language. It was first published in 1995 under the title ''Cambridge International Dictionary of English'' by the Cambridge Univer ...

describes it as "In Australia, a low area of ground that was part of a river in the past and that only fills up with water from the river during a flood". In a 2009 study, billabongs of the Channel Country (a region of outback Australia whose name derives from the numerous intertwined rivulets that cross it) are alternatively termed waterholes, and described as "enlarged channel segments along the main course of the river... typically occur

ing Ing, ING or ing may refer to: Art and media * '' ...ing'', a 2003 Korean film * i.n.g, a Taiwanese girl group * The Ing, a race of dark creatures in the 2004 video game '' Metroid Prime 2: Echoes'' * "Ing", the first song on The Roches' 199 ...

at the confluence of two smaller channels". Queensland's Department of Environment, Science and Innovation, in its Queensland Waterhole Classification Scheme, describes waterholes as "referred to by a range of different names (i.e. billabongs, lagoons and waterbodies)". Another source describes a billabong as "a large body of water", which may be formed from a section of cut-off river, but may also be formed from water left behind after a large flood. Billabongs are usually formed when the path of a creek or river changes due to bank erosion, leaving the former channel deprived of further inflow and becoming a dead-end gully holding only residual water that has not yet drained or evaporated. As a result of the arid climate of many parts of Australia, these "dead rivers" often fill with water seasonally but can be dry for a greater part of the year.

Significance

To people

Many billabongs are of cultural significance and social importance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and used as sources of

fresh water Fresh water or freshwater is any naturally occurring liquid or frozen water containing low concentrations of dissolved salt (chemistry), salts and other total dissolved solids. The term excludes seawater and brackish water, but it does include ...

as well as other resources. Water is an intrinsic part of

Country A country is a distinct part of the world, such as a state, nation, or other political entity. When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may refer to a sovereign state, state with limited recognition, constituent country, ...

, and essential resource during

drought A drought is a period of drier-than-normal conditions.Douville, H., K. Raghavan, J. Renwick, R.P. Allan, P.A. Arias, M. Barlow, R. Cerezo-Mota, A. Cherchi, T.Y. Gan, J. Gergis, D. Jiang, A. Khan, W. Pokam Mba, D. Rosenfeld, J. Tierney, ...

dry season The dry season is a yearly period of low rainfall, especially in the tropics. The weather in the tropics is dominated by the tropical rain belt, which moves from the northern to the southern tropics and back over the course of the year. The t ...

s, and they have many intricate ways of understanding how to find water. The Ngan'gi peoples in the Daly River region of the Northern Territory continue to manage the billabongs' ecology in their Country. Water-holding frogs living in the billabongs can take up a lot of water before it burrows into the earth in the dry season, and Aboriginal peoples in desert environments can locate the frogs underground by various means. In the days since the colonisation of Australia, these were important landmarks for European settlers to identify, and many billabongs were given names relating to the local areas. A billabong retains water longer than the original watercourse and may be the only accessible water in a large area.

Ecological significance

Billabongs are significant because they do not have outflow and can hold water longer than sections of rivers especially during drier season, thus serving important ecological functions as waterholes and

habitat In ecology, habitat refers to the array of resources, biotic factors that are present in an area, such as to support the survival and reproduction of a particular species. A species' habitat can be seen as the physical manifestation of its ...

s for freshwater animal and plant species, including the water-holding frog. Many of these species' life cycles are related to the changes in seasons. Dangers to the ecological balance of billabongs include saltwater intrusion and

introduced species An introduced species, alien species, exotic species, adventive species, immigrant species, foreign species, non-indigenous species, or non-native species is a species living outside its native distributional range, but which has arrived ther ...

. Feral animals have caused salt water to flow into Arafura Swamp, a large freshwater basin in the Top End in the Northern Territory, in which there are many permanent billabongs.

Examples

* Arafura Swamp – many billabongs * Along Cooper Creek in Queensland, and other parts of the Channel Country *Corroboree Billabong, in Kakadu National Park *Kings Billabong, on the Murray River in Victoria *White Lily Billabong, in Kakadu National Park *Yellow Water Billabong, in Kakadu National Park

In the arts

Banjo Paterson's popular song " Waltzing Matilda" is set beside a billabong. Mary Grant Bruce wrote a series of books, known as '' The Billabong Series'', depicting the adventures of the Linton family, who live at Billabong station from around 1911 until the late 1920s. Both

Aboriginal Australians Aboriginal Australians are the various indigenous peoples of the Mainland Australia, Australian mainland and many of its islands, excluding the ethnically distinct people of the Torres Strait Islands. Humans first migrated to Australia (co ...

and European artists use billabongs as subject matter in painting. For example, Aboriginal painter Tjyllyungoo (Lance Chad) has a watercolour entitled ''Trees at a billabong''. American

avant-garde In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...

filmmaker Will Hindle produced a short film titled ''Billabong'' in 1969. They are mentioned in the title of the song " Billabong Valley" by Australian prog-rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

In commerce

Billabong is the name of an Australian brand of sportswear for surf, skateboard, and snowboard.

References

External links

{{commons category-inline, Billabongs of Australia Australian English Lakes * Fluvial landforms