The word "Canberra" is popularly claimed to derive from the word  or , which is claimed to mean "meeting place" in Ngunnawal, one of the Indigenous languages spoken in the district by Aboriginal Australians before European settlers arrived, although there is no clear evidence to support this. An alternative definition has been claimed by numerous local commentators over the years, including the Ngunnawal elder Don Bell, whereby  or  means "woman's breasts" and is the indigenous name for the two mountains, Black Mountain and Mount Ainslie, which lie almost opposite each other. In the 1860s, the name was reported by Queanbeyan newspaper owner John Gale to be an interpretation of the name  or , meaning "hollow between a woman's breasts", and referring to the Sullivans Creek floodplain between Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain. An 1830s map of the region by Major Mitchell indeed does mark the Sullivan's Creek floodplain between these two mountains as "Nganbra". "Nganbra" or "Nganbira" could readily have been anglicised to the name "Canberry", as the locality soon become known to European settlers.