Tullamarine is a name familiar to all Melburnians.

It's a suburb and a freeway — and to many people it's still how they refer to the city's main airport (even though its official name has always been Melbourne Airport).

For a name of such significance, it's surprising how little is known about the meaning or origin of Tullamarine.

It's something ABC audience member Rohan Ely found himself pondering one night over drinks with friends.

Our Curious Melbourne questioner

Mr Ely, a former Melburnian who moved to Queensland in the 1990s, used to live in Tullamarine.

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"For years I travelled up and down the [Tullamarine] freeway going to Melbourne and back," he said.

But while he knew the history behind the names given to Melbourne's other major freeways, the meaning behind Tullamarine had always eluded him.

When it popped up in conversation as he chatted with friends one balmy Queensland evening, he realised he wasn't alone.

"A group of mates were having a few beers and talking about the highways and freeways that we've travelled on around Australia," he said.

"We could kind of relate most of them back to early explorers but we couldn't work out where Tullamarine came from.

"We did a couple of Google searches but we just got stuck on Tullamarine."

He said the only explanation the group could come up with was the freeway was named after the suburb.

But that just opened another can of worms: Who and what was the suburb named after?

So Mr Ely posed this question to Curious Melbourne:

"Victoria's freeways and highways are named after famous people: Hume, Monash, Calder. But who or why is the Tullamarine so named?"

Well, it turns out there is no simple answer.

Looking into official government records

The Victorian Register of Geographic Names lists two possible meanings for Tullamarine, but if you look closely there's a good chance the two are linked.

Here's the first one:

"In 1837 George Langhorne informed surveyor Robert Hoddle that Tullamareena was a small Wurundjeri boy."

Langhorne was a missionary who spent many years trying to convert Indigenous people to Christianity, while Hoddle was Victoria's first surveyor-general; the man in charge of geographic place names.

The second possible meaning of Tullamarine, according to the register, is that it is an Aboriginal word for a particular type of flower.

"Named after a flower, according to Howitt poem (Blake 1977: 261); Howitt in Blake 1977: 261."

A poetic explanation

A book published by Richard Howitt in 1845, entitled Impressions of Australia Felix, During Four Years Residence in the Colony, tells us more about the Tullamarine flower.

This book is a collection of poems and other literature from Howitt's journey to "Australia Felix", a Latin name meaning "fortunate Australia" that was used to refer to lush parts of western Victoria.

In the book there's a poem which describes Tullamarine as a "universally prevailing flower".

Attached to the poem is a footnote in which Howitt explains that he learnt of the flower when the story was passed on to him by a missionary working with local Aboriginal people.

The missionary told him about a beautiful flower which could be found "everywhere in the forests", and said an Aboriginal woman had named her baby boy after Tullamarine.

Howitt's book doesn't specify the missionary's name, but perhaps it could have been Langhorne. If that's the case, the boy could be the same one Langhorne mentioned to Hoddle.

But there was at least one other well-known Aboriginal man by the name of Tullamareena in the area at the time.

He was a senior member of the Wurundjeri tribe, and according to the National Trust was responsible for burning down Melbourne's first gaol after being arrested and accused of sheep stealing.

In reality, the gaol was not much more than a hut on top of Batman's Hill surrounded by a 2.4-metre fence.

It opened in 1837 but was burnt to the ground by Tullamareena and other escaping inmates in 1838, making it unlikely he was the "small Wurundjeri boy" Langhorne mentioned just one year prior.

The 1888 Tullamarine allotments plan shows the area before mass development. ( Supplied: Public Record Office Victoria )

So let's recap.

Explanation one in the Register of Geographic Names refers to a missionary, George Langhorne, telling his friend Robert Hoddle, the man in charge of place names, about a small Wurundjeri boy named Tullamareena.

The second explanation refers to a poet's conversation with an unnamed missionary (possibly Langhorne?) who shared the tale of a small Aboriginal boy who was named after a flower.

So it seems likely that Tullamarine is a variation of an Indigenous name, which may also have been an Aboriginal word for a flower.

But how did it become a suburb, a freeway and (colloquially) an airport?

Before the suburb there was a parish

Well, according to local historian Andrew Lemon, who wrote the 1982 book Broadmeadows: A Forgotten History, it all comes back to the missionary Langhorne and his acquaintance Hoddle, the government surveyor.

Mr Lemon said Langhorne "unsuccessfully tried in the 1830s to convert Aborigines to Christianity [and] was trying his luck with the local residents" by preaching and teaching in the area we now know as Broadmeadows, just a couple of suburbs across from modern-day Tullamarine.

"Robert Hoddle ... instructed his surveyors as they went out to begin to survey and map the land around Melbourne that they were to divide it into land parishes," Mr Lemon said.

"One of the early instructions that he had for his surveyors was to find the local Aboriginal names and use those for the land parishes.

"He had a list of names that was drawn up by one of the early missionaries, George Langhorne, and he tended to apply those names.

"So the name Tullamarine is one of those land parish names, and it's next to a number of other interesting Aboriginal names around that area, some of which are still in use."

Many people refer to Melbourne Airport as Tullamarine. ( Supplied: Melbourne Airport )

So it seems we can add another item to the list of places bequeathed the name Tullamarine, with Tullamarine parish preceding the suburb and the highway.

This is all corroborated in the 1977 book titled Place Names of Victoria written by Les Blake.

In it, Blake says Tullamarine was originally a parish in the county of Bourke.

It also refers to Langhorne's conversation with Hoddle about Tullamareena who was "a small boy then in the Wurundjeri tribe", as well as the 1840 poem written by Howitt about an Aboriginal woman who named her son after a flower.

Should Tullamarine be Tullamareena?

If you're wondering why there's a discrepancy between Tullamarine and Tullamareena, you're not alone.

Blake explains it best in the introduction of his exhaustive book of place names, putting the blame on the early settlers and explorers.

"One must walk very warily with names of possible Aboriginal origin," he wrote.

"Frequently, the shape of the white man's attempts at phonetic transcription was influenced by his own hearing of vowel sounds and consonants, and this depended on whether he came from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Somerset, Lancashire or London.

"Thus, one man wrote Nupo, another Napa; another heard Myrniong as Murrong. These quite common varied phonetic misinterpretations have been retained and further distorted by anglicising."

Blake also warned there's a risk of mistranslation due to cultural misunderstandings. For example, while Europeans name an entire river, Indigenous languages can have different names for the various sections of the river such as cliffs, waterholes or bends.

There's also the possibility that words have been taken out of common use or replaced for a period of time if, as in the case of Tullamareena, they were also the name of a person who had died.

"One should never be dogmatic about the meanings ascribed by white men to Aboriginal words," Blake wrote.

"Nor should one accept wholly the phrasing of the translation."

Map Tullamarine is a suburb in Melbourne's north-west.

Mr Lemon agrees.

He said there were five language groups in the area around Tullamarine, and while the languages were related, there were differences.

"Different tribes might refer to the same places with slightly different words or different pronunciations, so you shouldn't get too hung up on the spelling or the way the words look because similar words will be spelled differently," he said.

"So I wouldn't like to say whether Tullamarine was named for a flower or an individual, but it certainly does come from the original language of the people occupying the land."

The importance of understanding local history

Mr Lemon said it was important that people understood the history of their city, especially when it came to making plans for the future.

"We need to know what to value from the past," he said.

"History is really an important planning tool as well as just a matter of curious stories; we do need to know where these names come from."

He said it was great that Tullamarine was still the name that many people used for the city's main airport.

"There's been efforts over the years to say it's Melbourne International Airport, it's Melbourne Airport, but the fact that we continue to use that Tullamarine name is a reminder of where it all started when those were broadacres, when it was occupied by Aborigines, the landscape that's underneath the city that we keep on building," he said.

It makes you wonder what the English word for the Tullamareena flower is and whether it can still be found in the forests which over the years have morphed into suburbia.

But that's a question for another Curious Melbourne.