Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Dapto, Wollongong[1]

Planning News | February 2017

Maps can tell you a lot about a country and not just about the rivers and mountains. Place names are an integral part of land use. Sometimes they give us a clue to the history and the geography of a place, even if we’ve never seen it. They conjure up images, raise expectations and feed prejudices. The ones that are missing are often as interesting as those that are there. Land use planners have an important role in creating new names for the new places they create and by leading in renaming existing places to better reflect or balance our history and describe geographical features. 

Names change, places change and sometimes a lost place is reunited with its name: for example, it’s no good looking on a map of Russia for Stalingrad, Petrograd, Leningrad or Sverdlovsk.  Just as places change over time, so their names take on new associations; the Melbourne comedian Rob Quantock claims that his parents always insisted on winding up the windows when the family drove through Fitzroy and Collingwood in the 1950s. Sometimes there is only a name and no place! A year or so ago, the rain-making dreaming site, known as Kurlpurlunu, was rediscovered when two Warlpiri elders  who had visited the site as children, flew over the Tanami Desert in a helicopter and recognised some of the features, including a distinctive tree and a rock.  

 Of course, naming is political and it can be economic  – think of Eric the Red that well-known real estate shark who named Greenland, or of Melbourne Central station on the edge of Melbourne’s CBD. Sometimes it’s not even a name that gives meaning to a place, but a number. The developers of Southbank in Melbourne were keen for it to have a unique postcode – better for business. The residents of several small towns in Queensland, miles from the coast, are fed up with being charged cyclone-level insurance premiums and waiting days for the mail and would also like their own postcode.  

Parts of Australia have mellifluous and wonderful names that provide insight into the observations and concerns of the original inhabitants. (Think of ‘Eumemmering’, meaning ‘we are pleased to agree with you’). In other places the original names have almost disappeared and the map tells the story of colonisation, dispossession and homesickness. These new names are short on reflecting our long history of mixed migration, so non-English names, such as Mt. Kosciuszko, Sparta Place, Lake Amadeus and the Nullabor stand out – along with all those pieces of coastline named by the French!

 It seems a wasted opportunity to still be using Memorial Park, High St, and Pioneers’ Drive when we have such a rich mix of cultures to draw on.  Having exhausted all the British colonisers, Polish explorers, German botanists and European writers, composers and battles, we could go through some of the South American ones. (Sydney has devoted a small public space near Central Station to Simon Bolivar and his ilk). Shouldn’t there be more Chinese street and suburb names, on the route between Robe and the goldfields and in Sydney and Melbourne, beyond the rather separatist Chinatowns?  We have lots of Smith Streets around the country but not many called Ngyuen or Aslan and there are very few suburbs named after the suburbs of say, Istanbul, in contrast with the plethora of English and Irish suburban names.  We probably don’t need to go as far as Dutch and British cities, however, where, if you can afford the rent, you can now  live in streets named Gandalf, Aragorn and Frodo or in Preacher and Cassidy Closes. 

Better still, we could include more women’s names from both the indigenous and settler cultures. I’m frequently irritated by the geographic invisibility of women and, until recently, chafed over the virtual absence of even a female nature strip. Thank goodness then for; the subdivision near the romantic Northland Shopping Centre in Preston, with Hannah, Rita, Beatrice and Sheila Streets, the new subdivision in Watson ACT, with streets named after women such as Dame Roma Mitchell, and the Mary Gilmore Way in central NSW. It got too much for women in Spain, too, where it was recently revealed that only ten percent of streets were named after women. Those tended to be nuns or saints, that is, unrepresentative of the modern Spanish woman. Several cities have now replaced the names of fascist leaders with the names of women. (Madrid town hall publishes a terrific gazette of street names. They will have to revise this now of course!)

Most importantly, however, perhaps now is the time, with what seems to be a grass roots movement for Reconciliation and a growing appreciation of indigenous languages and cultures, to revisit more colonial names and revert to the original names, if they’re available. While there is a welcome trend across the country of councils naming new suburbs, roads, parks and buildings in urban areas in the local language; such as Birrarung Marr, Wurundjeri Way (in Melbourne), Bargoonga Nganjin (the new library in North Fitzroy) and Barangaroo in Sydney, there are still too many landmarks, such as Arthur’s Seat or Point Nepean, where you’re left wondering what the indigenous name was. We could adopt two names as a transitional stage like Kunanyi/ Mt Wellington in Tasmania or Rottnest Island/ Wadjemup.

It is highly unlikely that Reconciliation will lead to a wholesale restructuring of our administrative boundaries as happened in South Africa following the end of Apartheid, but they did end up with some good names and the map of South Africa has become a lot more interesting!  The former four provinces became eight, with revived names such as KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Gauteng and Mpumalanga while towns were renamed Polokwane, Makhoda, and Mokopane.. The town of Warmbaths changed to Bela-Bela, a Sesotho word for hot spring!

According to the South African Geographical Names Council, legitimate grounds for changing a name include offensive linguistic corruption of a name, a name that's offensive because of its associations, and when a name replaced an existing one that people would like restored. An article by Paul Daley in The Guardian  (Sunday 12th March 2017) makes a good case for changing the names of the electorates of Batman and McMillan (in Victoria) and Canning (in Western Australia)  because they have been named after  murderers. He also suggests that Lachlan Macquarie, ‘the supposed great humanitarian and renaissance governor’ is deeply unworthy of being memorialised so extensively and that we could rename some of his places. (Perhaps we could whittle them down to just the Macquarie Marshes).

There are lots of resources and personnel available to assist with researching local indigenous names. Many councils provide lists with the meanings of local names and the Victorian Office for Geographic Names provides guidance for spelling aboriginal names through its recently updated ‘Naming Rules for Places in Victoria; Statutory requirements for naming roads, features and localities –2016’ (Naming rules). https://www.propertyandlandtitles.vic.gov.au/naming-places-features-and-roads/naming-rules-for-places-in-victoria

In Victoria, the Registrar of Geographic Place Names, appointed by the Minister for Planning according to the Geographic Place Names Act 1998, is supported by The Office of Geographic Names (OGN) which liaises with naming authorities such as municipal councils, government departments and authorities to ensure the VICNAMES Register of Geographic Names is regularly updated and that proposals from naming authorities conform to the Naming rules. The Office also disseminates information from the register to interested stakeholders including the general public, cartography companies and government bodies. This latter service is very valuable and could support better dissemination of the meanings of place names.  The Permanent Committee on Place Names (formerly the Committee for Geographical Names in Australasia) and the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping has produced a thoughtful, though perhaps quaint, video with Ernie Dingo explaining the meanings of some place names.

The Victorian Office of Geographic Names has been running an ANZAC Commemorative Naming project across Victoria. To date 52 of the 79 municipalities have received grants to assist with the research of commemorative names. Perhaps a Reconciliation Project could be next? I’d really like to know the original names for the Murray River, the Stony Rises and Tower Hill.

Meanwhile, I’m off to Moscow where I don’t expect to find Pussy Riot Lane, yet.

Julian Golby,

‘Planning News’ February 2017.

[1] .  "I've Been Everywhere" written by Australian country singer Geoff Mack in 1959, was made popular by Lucky Starr in 1962. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjLONP5ts-4

In the 1970s, Aunty Jack Show, the comic character, Norman Gunston, wound up in Wollongong, in the Gong A Go Go club. Gunston introduced the Farrelly Brothers, singing this parochial version of ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’.