Hiya!

A great number of our seemingly strange place names have their origins in regional aboriginal languages. Many of these names have been bastardized and adapted (such as the town of Humpybong, originally Oompie Bong or 'abandoned/dead house' by the local aboriginals), but many still draw directly from local aboriginal linguistic roots.

Citing Wikipedia isn't encouraged, but there's a list of Australian place names of Aboriginal origin that quite nicely demonstrates this.

Of course, many of our non-aboriginal place names have interesting stories behind them, too. For instance, one of my favourites, Mount Disappointment, was named by the Hume and Hovell expedition. They'd hoped to have a good view of the coast from the summit, but found the heavy vegetation blocked their view.

In another example, Batman's swamp, in what is now in the docklands of Greater Melbourne, was so named after one of its pioneering settlers, John Batman. Again, what is a perfectly normal name with a sensible story seems somewhat comical when viewed out of context.

Point Danger near Tweed Heads was so named by the Cook Expedition because of the dangerous reefs off its shores. The nearby mountain? Mount Warning, of course!

Many of Australia's place names have fascinating stories behind them. There's no one naming convention to be applied here, nor any one reason that they're so varied, and often so exotic. But it's an extremely interesting part of our history!

Place names, or toponyms, are windows into the past in much the same way as other historical objects. In a colonial, settler society like Australia they serves as inscriptions on the landscape marked out by the various people who have made it their home—but it especially reflects the imperial reality of conquest.

There were several waves of place naming in Australian history. First and most importantly, of course, is 50,000 years or more of aboriginal occupation that is in a meaningful cultural sense timeless. All other the remaining history of the continent is the blink of an eye in comparison. More on aboriginal toponomy in a moment.

Second was the arrival of European explorers. The Pacific saw considerable exploration during the era of enlightenment. Many of these explorers regarded themselves as scientists on a mission to catalogue the flora, fauna, people, and places of the globe and it was a mission they pursued methodically. During Cook’s expeditions to the pacific, thousands of place names were established on European maps and they are with us to this day. Cook was so desperate for names as he filled in the vast spaces on the map that small instances or petty inspirations became forever etched into Australian cartography. Botany Bay, for example, was named after the large quantity of plants found by the expedition’s botanist, Joseph Banks. Some were descriptive, like Broken Bay. Many were named for friends and patrons in Britain, Cape How and Port Jackson, for instance.

Another wave came with European Settlement. As was the case across the globe, these settlers named new places after old. Newcastle, for example, or New South Wales. They named places after monarchs and leaders, like Victoria.

Many places, however, were also named for their aboriginal names, or English approximations of them. Walla Walla is a favorite. Why would European settlers choose to name settlements and places for Aboriginal rather than European referents? The answer is complicated. There is the simple matter of convenience – everyone needs to agree on what a space is called, and with so many new spaces to name the ‘real,’ existing names served useful – especially to inland explorers. Most compelling to me, however, is Paul Carter’s beautiful argument about the poetics of cartography. In his “spatial history” of Australia’s mapping, he suggest that imperial history demands the creation of a stage setting on which its events and characters can be played out. The naming of places, including borrowing from Aboriginal languages, brings the place to be conquered and settled into being.

Finally, it’s worth pointing to renamings and efforts to reinscribe the landscape as aboriginal. Ayers Rock is Uluru again on most maps. The reversion to aboriginal names reflects serious shifts in Australia’s politics and a reassessment of its settler past. The change suggests the historicity and instability of place names. They are meant to convey permanence—this is the place—but their meanings and significations shift with time.