Dictionary

mia mia en · NOUN

Etymology

Borrowed from Kurnai mai-mai or Wathaurong [Term?].

Meanings

1. (Australia) An aboriginal shelter made from bark, a gunya.
   • Decorated with this mop of hair and the chaplet, the girl was led by her father to the mia-mia and put inside this with the four boys. 1914, Baldwin Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia, Cambridge University Press, published 2010, page 109:
   • "Dan is creeping through the bushes on the other side of the mia-mia." 1944, H. Lorna Bingham, Tuckonie's Warrior Friend, page 15, column 2:
   • 1913, William Henry Fitchett, The New World of the South: Australia in the Making, 2006 Elibron Classics, page 391, On the point of this “spear” they erected what looked like a mia-mia, a hut made of branches by the blacks ; across the road opposite to it the trunk of a tree was dragged, leaving a narrow track along which the escort must defile.
   • Exhausted, he threw himself down at the door of the mia-mia of the emu and lay there as if dead. 1932, W. Ramsay Smith, “The Flood and its Results”, in Myths and Legends of the Australian Aborigines, Dover, published 2003, page 160:

Forms

Synonyms

gunya · wurly · humpy