Just how Yo Yo Creek and the property nearby came by their name is one that has intrigued travellers in the Augathella region for decades.
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Plenty have speculated that it has something to do with the child's spinning toy by the same name, or the classical cellist Yo Yo Ma, or even that it might have been named by a rap aficionado.
Yo Yo Park station owner Bill Tomlinson told Placenames Australia that local folklore had it that the name was the result of the tendency of the water level in the creek to rapidly rise and fall again, in other words, the water level "yo-yos" swiftly.
An excerpt from the memoir of a policeman stationed in the area a few years after white settlement seems to confirm this supposition, according to linguistics expert Jan Tent.
He discovered that WRO Hill, an ex-police magistrate and gold warden, had done a two-year stint between 1866-68 as an acting sub-inspector in the Native Mounted Police at the Yo Yo Creek camp.
Consisting of two sub-inspectors, two constables and six indigenous troopers, the barracks lasted for about 15 years.
In his 1907 memoir Hill wrote that he "was first ordered to the Yo Yo Creek barracks, forty miles from Charleville, a queer feature of the creek being that after a heavy fall of rain it came down in a solid high wall of water, and woe betide any unfortunate who happened to be camping too near its banks."
Mr Tent, writing in the September 2018 edition of Placenames Australia said that while that explanation seemed to be "a perfectly logical and reasonable etymology of the toponym" it turned out to be wrong, because its use as a word for a toy that goes up and down couldn't have been known in the mid-19th century when the creek was named.
While the toy most likely originated in China and the first historic depiction of it comes from Greece around 500BC, the first use of the noun yo-yo to describe it comes from the December 1915 issue of the Philippine Craftsman, Mr Tent said.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was most likely derived from one of the Filipino languages. That respected source says the earliest citation of it as an adjective to show something going up and down is in 1958 and its first use as a verb comes from 1967.
Explorer Edmund Kennedy named the creek during his 1848 expedition to discover the course of the Victoria (Barcoo) River and his journal entry on the topic sheds some light on his choice of name.
He writes that they came across a group of Aborigines who ran away when tents were pitched for the night's camp on the creek, but came back soon after.
"Taking Harry with me, I went up to them, and found them to consist of an old man, his gin, and four sons; they were a most orderly set, but at first to everything we said to them they replied Yo-yo, by which perhaps they meant to signify their assent to all our interrogations," Kennedy wrote. "We exchanged presents and, although I was not able to obtain much information from them, I found that their language was the same as that of the natives of the desert."
According to Mr Tent, the traditional owners of the region are the Gunggari/Kuungkari people, who speak the Bidjara/Gungabula language.
"(Kennedy's) assumption that yo-yo meant 'assent' is not only logical, but correct," he said.
In The Australian Race, written by Edward Curr in 1886, common and widespread indigenous words are tabled, showing that the word for yes in the Maranoa, Weir and Moonie River regions was yo, while in the upper Warrego and Paroo Rivers it was yoe, in the upper Paroo River it was yoko, and in the Warrego and Paroo River regions it was yowie or ngowa.
"Yes words of this description, all probably derived from the same root, are found in not less than three-fourths of our languages." Mr Tent said.
He said they most likely had common etymological origins, adding that the Peak Downs district and Logan Downs Station have yaow as well as the reduplicated yo-yo for 'yes', adding that duplicating words for affirmation was common in most, of not all languages.
"Of course, Yes-Yes is an unlikely candidate for a toponym, and it is quite clear Kennedy derived his toponym from the local term for the affirmative, and not from a clan or language name," Mr Tent said.
In his journal the following day, Kennedy writes that "in the evening our Yo-yo friends paid us another visit".
"It is hardly surprising then that Kennedy came across a term such as yo-yo and used it creatively for a toponym," Mr Tent said.