Everyone Says “Naarm.” Almost Nobody Knows Where It Came From.

Every name has an origin story.

So does Naarm.

The question is not whether the name should be celebrated.

The question is whether we have remembered where its story begins.

For years, Melbourne has embraced Naarm as one of the city’s oldest First Peoples names. It appears in speeches, government publications, universities, sporting clubs, corporate branding and everyday conversation.

Yet almost nobody asks the obvious question.

Where does the story of the name actually begin?

When you return to the earliest surviving written records, the answer is both simple and remarkable.

The first time Naarm enters the historical record, it does so through Derrimut.

Not through a government policy.

Not through a modern institution.

Not through a twentieth-century interpretation.

Through Derrimut.

A senior Boonwurrung leader of the Yalukit Wilam whose life became inseparable from Melbourne’s earliest years.

His diplomacy, cultural authority and ability to communicate across cultures helped form some of the earliest written understandings of Melbourne and its Country. Much of what survives in the historical record about Boonwurrung Country, language and place names survives because Derrimut and other Boonwurrung cultural custodians chose to share their knowledge.

Today, Derrimut is most commonly remembered as the man who warned the settlers of an impending attack. Yet that single episode has too often overshadowed the broader significance of his life. His story is far deeper than one moment. He was a Boonwurrung leader whose knowledge, leadership and relationships became woven into Melbourne’s earliest written history.

The story of Naarm reaches us through one of history’s enduring paradoxes.

Boonwurrung knowledge never depended upon colonial records. It lived through Country, language, memory, ceremony and family long before Europeans arrived. Yet today, when governments, institutions and historians ask, “What is the evidence?”, they almost always begin with the written archive.

Many of the people who documented First Peoples knowledge were also participants in the colonial system that fragmented living knowledge systems through dispossession and the disruption of language, law and cultural practice. The archives preserve invaluable evidence, but they capture only a fraction of what once existed.

Yet within those surviving fragments, one truth remains remarkably clear.

The earliest surviving written record of the name Naarm begins with Derrimut.

Within George Augustus Robinson’s journals appears a line that echoes across nearly two centuries.

“Naarm belongs to Derrimut.”

Read it again.

Naarm belongs to Derrimut.

Those four words are extraordinary.

The story of Naarm did not begin with an abstract language label or a modern map. It entered the historical record through a Boonwurrung leader whose knowledge was recorded during Melbourne’s earliest years.

From there, the historical trail continues.

William Thomas recorded related forms while living and travelling extensively with Boonwurrung people.

George Henry Haydon later recorded the word within the vocabularies of the Port Phillip district.

Robert Brough Smyth subsequently recorded Narr’m as the name of the place on which Melbourne stands.

None of these men created the knowledge.

They recorded fragments of knowledge shared by First Peoples cultural custodians.

They were following a trail that was already there.

A trail whose earliest recorded trace begins with Derrimut.

History is rarely erased in a single dramatic act.

More often, it is simplified.

That is what happened here.

The name survived.

The man at the beginning of its written history largely disappeared.

Today, millions of people know the name Naarm.

Very few know the Boonwurrung leader through whom the name first entered the historical record.

Perhaps it is time to remember that the earliest surviving written record of one of Melbourne’s oldest First Peoples names begins with him.

Because names matter.

They carry memory.

They carry relationships.

They carry Country.

Long before there were laneways, Parliament House, trams or skyscrapers, there was Country.

There was Derrimut.

There was Naarm.

And there was a story that deserves to be remembered.

Sometimes history’s greatest discoveries are not hidden in forgotten archives.

Sometimes they have been waiting in plain sight, preserved within colonial records that captured fragments of First Peoples knowledge while too often obscuring the people who shared it.

The story of Naarm did not begin in the archive.

But the earliest written record of the name begins with Derrimut.

Jaeden Williams-Briggs
Boonwurrung knowledge holder and Director, Biik Bundjil