Yesterday’s announcement by NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner that a number of inappropriately-named landmarks and locations would be referred to the NT Place Names Committee for consideration follows a similar announcement from the Queensland government earlier in the week.

An on-line search for, say, “racist placenames” reveals any number of “Nigger Creeks” and “Black Gin Roads” among more banal names at locations scattered across the country. In the NT—as elsewhere—place names are the subject of long-standing, and oft-amended, legislation and policies.

The NT’s Place Names Act establishes the Place Names Committee , and, the place name Rules of Nomenclature and Guidelines encourage the use of Aboriginal names—fitting in a place where Aboriginal people make up to one third of the population— and the use of double naming for a single location, using both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal names.

The Place Names Committee has been charged by Gunner with addressing the more obviously offensive NT place names and examining a more comprehensive response to the recognition of more appropriate place naming practices that reflect contemporary, as well as historical, factors.

Gunner told the ABC’s The World Today that it was:

… really important to take a deep breath, work through all these things in a way that provides proper meaning and recognition of those languages that were here long before [white people] … It’s very clear to me that we don’t have a proper inclusion of the first people in our very basic culture. And I want to work on that.
He said that was likely to involve using Aboriginal names for places alongside their well-known counterparts, and did not rule out changing some places back to their original names.

Toponymy – the study of place names* – is for many of us an arcane corner of linguistic and anthropological study. Notwithstanding complexities of the issues it throws up it is a key to understanding our connections to land and place. One excellent example of the complexity of place-naming and connections to country is a 2009 paper by Brett Baker published in The land is a map : placenames of indigenous origin in Australia.

In his paper, ‘I’m going to where-her-brisket-is’: placenames in the Roper, Baker observes, in relation to local place-naming along the NT’s Roper River, that:

… places that are named constitute the manifest embodiment of the ancestral creator beings. What non-Indigenous people to the area call the ‘Hodgson River’, the locals think of simultaneously as the track of the Mermaids gilyirringgilyirri. The ridge of ground above Roper Bar is not simply a local geological inclination, but is also the point where the Plains Kangaroo mob left themselves as mutjju, a coolibah tree which grows there. It is the fact that topographic features are meaningful in the Roper cosmology which makes sense of the fact that they tend to have names reflecting cosmological events and manifestations.

The NT Place Names Register lists a number of “Blackfellow Creeks,” bores, hills and waterholes, a couple of references to “Lubras” and a single “Nigger Creek.” Many of these places are insignificant blips on the NT landscape that would rarely be visited by anyone other than local station workers or countrymen travelling through the large areas of pastoral and Aboriginal land across the NT.

But, as important as it is to remove gratuitous and inappropriate place names, for mine the greater task, less obvious than the concerns mentioned by Chief Minister Gunner, are raised by the street names and locations that recognise notorious characters from NT history.

Most notable of these are the frequent references to Paul Heinrich Matthias Foelsche, Inspector in Charge in the NT Police Force from 1870 to 1904. The NT Place Names register lists seven locations—streets, headlands and a river among other places—named in his memory.

For some, Foelsche is regarded with respect and regard, not least because of his extensive photographic record of early life in the NT.

In other quarters, however, he is less well-regarded. Tony Roberts documented the early days of cross-border inter-racial conflict in the NT-Queensland Gulf district during the late 1800s in his 2005 book, Frontier Justice: A history of the Gulf Country to 1900.

Writing about Foelsche, Roberts concludes that he was:

The man who masterminded more massacres in the Territory than anyone else … A former soldier, he was cunning, devious and merciless with Aboriginals … Some considered him an expert on Aboriginals, not knowing that the skulls he studied were not merely collected by him (Roberts 2009).

Others similarly—and notoriously—commemorated in the NT include Sir John Downer, Constable Albert Stewart McColl and Mounted Constable 1st Class William Henry Willshire.

And while the NT Place Names committee has its work cut out for it for the next little while, a few simple searches of the national record of place names—the wonderful Gazetteer of Australian Place Names—shows that nationally there is a lot more work to be done. Whether much of that is possible, given the current fervid “debate” about race relations in this country, remains to be seen.

================================

* For those interested in further reading on this topic see the recent very useful collection of papers on the practice and philosophy behind Australian place naming is the 2014 publication by the ANU Press, Indigenous and Minority Placenames: Australian and International Perspectives, edited by Ian Clark, Luise Hercus and Laura Kostanski. See also the essay by Tony Roberts in The Monthly, December 2009: The Brutal Truth: What happened in the gulf country.