Koori (also spelled Koorie) is a word which some Indigenous Australians in New South Wales and Victoria use to identify themselves, and has become a well established term to mean 'Indigenous Australians from south eastern Australia'.
Many Indigenous Australians dislike the terms 'Aborigine' and 'Aboriginal' because these terms have been forced on them. They prefer to use words from their own languages. In some languages of south-east Australia (parts of New South Wales and Victoria), the words: coorie, kory, kuri, kooli, koole mean 'person' or 'people'. In the 1960s, the form koori came to be used by Indigenous Australians of these areas to mean 'Aboriginal people' or 'Aboriginal person'.
Encyclopedia
top
