Introduction: Practising Toponymic Decolonisation

Chapter 1 introduces the themes of Naming No Man’s Land. It explains the author’s personal involvement in decolonising Australian placenames and outlines some of the key issues in toponymic revisionism. One question concerns the status of place in place naming; a provisional case is made for defining this topically, as a place in discourse. This implies a toponymic poetics, one that includes cartographic semiotics, the way placenames appear on maps. This short opening chapter concludes with a summary of the content of the following seven chapters.