The naming of Temora

Local historian Bill Speirs gives an explanation on the naming of Temora ...

In chapter two of “Temora Yesterday and Today 1880-1980”, under the heading “What’s in a Name?”, respected local historian, Ron Maslin, speculates upon some of the stories bearing upon the circumstances in which the pastoral holding, which later gave its name to Temora, was itself named.

There is no question that John Donald McCansh, an employee of the Bank of Australasia and agent of one of its directors, Severus Kanute Salting, gave the name ‘Temora’ to the pastoral lease that he and Valentine Lawler pioneered in 1847 and leased in Salting’s name.

When public speculation upon the origin of the name, ‘Temora’, arose following the establishment of a goldfield on the pastoral lease, J.D. McCansh, who had moved to Deepwater Station in southern Queensland, wrote to the press to clarify the matter.

In September 1880 he told the Warwick Argus:

“I took up the country for a sheep run in 1847, my sole companion being Valentine Lawler, who was then lessee of a station (“Nimbi”) on Cunningham Creek. We could not ascertain the native name of the place as there were no blacks about, and rather than give it an English name, I called it ‘Temora’, the native name of a property near which I lived some years previously in another part of the Colony. I gave the station the name specially because it was aboriginal and I liked it. I did not know at that time, nor for years afterwards, that Temora was a name in Ossian’s poems.”

The circumstances surrounding the naming of the property ‘in another part of the Colony’, from which McCansh borrowed the name, are not known.
However, if the name of this earlier property actually had European rather than an indigenous inspiration, the poems of Ossian clearly provide a credible source.
By recording the oral poetic traditions attributed to the Gaelic bard, Ossian, and rendering them into English, in 1763 John McPherson preserved a sage entitled ‘Temora’.
The tale concerns a struggle for the high kingship of Ireland whose seat was traditionally at ‘Tara / Teamhair / Teamhrach’, or as McPherson spelt it, ‘Temora’, County Meath.

Significantly, neither the ‘Wiradjuri Dictionary’ (2010) nor the ‘Macquarie Dictionary of Aboriginal Words’ (2006) list ‘temora’ or any words similar to it.