Has anyone else noticed that our airlines seem to have added flights to many more Australian towns? At airport departure screens there are now flights to places called Meanjin, Gadigal and Naarm.
I have travelled to many parts of Australia but had never heard of these places. So after some investigation I discovered that these are not new towns. Our airlines have taken it upon themselves to rename Australian cities with Aboriginal words. At least, we all get to vote on the Aboriginal Voice later this year but no one seems to have asked any Australians whether we should rename our country’s places en masse.
The renaming of towns almost always happens when a new ruling power wants to erase the record of their predecessors. When the Bolsheviks took over Russia in 1917, they renamed St Petersburg to Leningrad and Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad. They renamed these cities because they wanted to bury the history of Tsarism as they sought to establish a Marxist utopia. We all know how that turned out.
Similarly those seeking to rename Australian towns are doing so because they are embarrassed about Australia’s history. They tell a one-sided view of our past. Their history concentrates exclusively on the bad and discounts all of the good. They compare our ancestors against saints when they were just imperfect human beings like the rest of us.
How Australia should be judged is against other nations. On that score, Australia is one of the most harmonious, peaceful, prosperous and free nations in world history. I thank God everyday that I had the luck to be born in such a wonderful, albeit still imperfect, country.
If we do not appreciate our good fortune, we may lose it. There is no need to make wholesale changes to the names that were given to Australian cities because there is no need to run from Australia’s past. We should learn from our mistakes but we should also remember what our ancestors got right to make such a great country.
The attempted renaming of Australia is also ironic given that many of our apparently racist grandparents named towns and places using Aboriginal words. If our ancestors were as bigoted as implied, why did they name our nation’s capital Canberra (“meeting place”), or towns Parramatta (“eel place”) and Goondiwindi (“duck droppings”)?
There are almost 1000 Australian towns and suburbs that were named after Aboriginal words. There is no need to rename Australian towns to reflect our Aboriginal heritage. Australia’s pioneers already did that for us.
Those names were often chosen by people who had great respect for Aboriginals. One of the first Australians to use Aboriginal words to name towns was a marine officer on the First Fleet, Watkin Tench. He admitted that he was “first inclined to stigmatise” the Aboriginal language but that if Aboriginal words were “simply and unconnectedly considered, they will be found to abound with vowels and to produce sounds sometimes mellifluous and sometimes sonorous”.
Not all Australian pioneers were as respectful of Aboriginal culture as Officer Tench but many were. The wholesale condemnation of all our pioneers is a gross generalisation and injustice to the many that were not racist. In the end, it is just another form of bigotry.
The surreptitious renaming of Australian towns is not about changing the lives of Aboriginals it is about trying to change our country. It tries to make modern Australians feel that there is something so shameful about our past that we should not even repeat the words that were used to name our history.
This is why people are so cautious about voting for a Voice, which we are told is only a “modest” change by the same people who want to rename our nation without asking for permission. The Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews, a prominent supporter of the Voice, announced this week that the right to name roads and places would be taken away from elected local councils and given to Aboriginal land councils instead.
We should be proud of our nation’s history. We should cherish our Aboriginal, our British and our migrant heritage. The selective erasure of one leg of this stool will not build harmony and unity among Australian people. We are much better off recognising that we are one people that have come together from diverse backgrounds. That is the secret of our nation’s success and unity. There is no need to rename Australia.
