Barramundi have not always had such an iconic name in Australia, and were once known as Asian sea bass.
In the 1980’s, barramundi was appropriated for marketing reasons. Prior to this, barramundi was believed to be an Aboriginal word initiated from the Rockhampton area meaning ‘large scale river fish’.
This is thought to have originally referred to another large freshwater fish, the saratoga.
The earliest recorded form is ‘burra-mundi’.