Relating Country: Some Recent Noongar Place Naming Projects

Chapter 2 discusses three place naming projects in which the author was involved. The projects were government initiatives in and around Perth, Western Australia. Commissions to replace English (colonial) names for new urban infrastructure, as well as landscape features, with Aboriginal (Noongar) names, serve to introduce themes in postcolonial toponymy developed in the following chapters. These themes are toponymic politics, Indigenous place naming cultures and practices (notably the role of yarning in consensus-building) and the question of the placename’s referent (inside or outside language). The chapter reviews current approaches to decolonising Western Australia’s colonial toponymy and concludes with provisional findings arising from the three case studies: places are made after their stories—they are related in a double sense—and a coherent decolonising strategy thinks in terms of connected regions rather than separate places. In a decolonising context the symbolic value of the name in asserting identity is a function of linguistic (or poetic) resonance, not descriptive accuracy.