Wally Eliaschewsky and David Elliston had known each other since their childhood years in the 1950s and 1960s growing up in Narooma.
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After Wally moved back to Narooma to live and they were having one of their many chats, Wally asked how Trunketabella came to be named, and what it meant.
While David had been over the bridge at Trunketabella Creek countless times, and had travelled on the school bus with the girls who lived on Trunketabella Farm, he had never thought about it. The seed was sown.
When they first started on their journey of discovery as to the origin and meaning of the name Trunketabella, the first place to look was on-line.
That soon resulted in a mention of the place in a newspaper article from the mid-1860's. It was just mentioned as if everyone knew where it was, which is vastly different from today. In any case that tended to indicate that the name had been applied in earlier years, and not during the years that Thomas Sutcliffe Mort was the landowner of what we know now as the Bodalla Estate.
He acquired that land from John Hawdon who had settled at Kiora, to the west of Moruya, but who moved his cattle south, through Bergalia, and onto the floodplain south of what is now sign posted on the Princes Highway as Trunketabella Creek.
Hawdon then created four farms on that area, Trunketabella, Long Point, Greenway, and Gannon's Point into what the selling agent would later refer to as Boat Alley Reserve. Mort was that agent, and ended up buying Hawdon's holdings for his own more elaborate ambitions.
Whilst Wally was talking to the locals in the area trying to get some clues, David was visiting the National Library of Australia seeking to view first hand any likely looking documents relating to settlement of the area.
Nothing of value arose from those endeavours; most of latter day documents viewed, and personal enquiry answers, mistakenly pointed to Mort.
That clearly cannot be, as he arrived on the scene after the common use of Trunketabella was firmly established.
Similarly the assertion that Boat Alley was the former name of Bodalla is unable to be substantiated with any documentary evidence. Boat Alley was on the Tuross River. Bodalla is not, even as Old Bodalla, on the Eurobodalla Road.
Other enquiries to government bodies, historical associations, not for profit expert panels, and the like, were well received but no evidence could be found.
The Geographical Names Board was particularly helpful and produced a couple of very interesting maps, and a detailed report into the origins of the name but in the end the history remained beyond their searches.
The NSW Government Gazettes from 1832 were searched in the hope that some reference would appear in the 1850s, or even the 1840s, but that was to of no avail.
Many alternative spellings have appeared over the years, but they are mere distractions from the enduring manner by which the place is known.
There are graves in the two Bodalla cemeteries of people who no doubt would be able to help if we were able to speak to them.
It seems that the reason why Trunketabella is called that is lost either in mists of the Tuross River floodplain, or the passage of time.
What is fairly plain though is that Hawdon, or his herdsmen, must have named those four farms of the Boat Alley Reserve when they squatted there to establish his presence on the lush grasses to fatten his cattle, and produce the milk for cheese and butter production.
Trunketabella has a distinctly Italian sound to it, and the existence of the now disused Italia Mine, and Italian Mine Road west of Turlinjah adds to the possibility that one of the squatters in the area may well have been of Italian background and who named Trunketabella for "trunk and table" (a resting place or a campsite).
Or, as an aged Italian grandmother in Adelaide exclaimed when presented with the name "No, no, no. It is two words." In her view it was of the northern midland Italian dialect meaning trunko, trunka, or trunca = farming lands for crops and animals and tabella = flat, level.
Only Hawdon, or one of his companions on the drive south would know.