Woronora is a suburb in southern Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Woronora is located 27 kilometres south of the Sydney central business district, in the local government area of the Sutherland Shire. Woronora Heights is a separate suburb, to the south-west. Placename history 'Woronora' is an Aboriginal placename. Records show the spelling of the name has varied since it first appeared in the 19th century, the earliest being Wooloonora (Dixon, 1827, quoted in Walker 1974:66), followed by Wolonora (Dixon, 1837), and Woronora (Mitchell, 1835). The name was first applied to the Woronora River, a tributary of the Georges River, before being given to a hundred, an electoral district, a local road east of the river, and finally the suburb itself. The following meanings have been suggested for Woronora: 'black rock' (Appleton and Appleton 1992) 'black rocks' (Walker 1974; Neve 1970) 'river-of-no-sharks' (Bolton 2000) Variations such as 'black cliffs' and 'sharkless waters' have also been suggested by local residents. The Aboriginal language known variously as Dharug, Eora or simply 'the Sydney Language' was spoken around Woronora at the time of colonisation (Troy 1994:61). Lists of Dharug words gathered around the turn of the century provide a number of possibilities regarding the number of morphemes and likely constituents of the placename. An analysis of the number of syllables in Dharug words recorded by Mathews (1901) shows over 50% contained two syllables, and just under 40% contained three, while only 1.45% contained one syllable: It therefore seems likely that Woronora is made up of two disyllabic elements. In light of what historical Dharug information is available, the meaning of the suffix of Woronora seems most transparent. A range of phonetically similar words are present in the sources: ngurra 'camp' (Troy 1994:67; Stockton 1993:156; Mathews 1901:158) nura 'place or country' (Troy 1993:83) ngurang 'place' (Troy 1993:78) ora 'a place or country e.g. Woronora' (Kohen 1993:16) 'place; gno-rang, no-rar''' (Kohen 1990:238) We may tentatively conclude therefore that *-ngurra could function as a locative suffix in Dharug. The stem of Woronora is much harder to specify. Unfortunately, no word list contains a word *wooloo, *wolo, or *woro, but the following orthographically similar words are present: wal-lan 'rain' (Ridley 1875:105; Kohen 1993:224), wulan 'rain' (Troy 1993:71) wolora 'wallaroo' (Mathews 1901:158), wularu 'wallaroo' (Troy 1993:52), wolaru 'kangaroo (mountain)' (Ridley 1875:104) wurral 'slow' (Mathews 1901:159) warra 'breast' (Troy 1993:34) wural 'bashful, ashamed' (Troy 1993:66) wala