Naming and Renaming Places: Politics, Poetics and Psychology

Chapter 4 further broadens the discussion of toponymic decolonisation challenges in Chapters 2 and 3. The contemporary Australian experience is contextualised by reference to selected readings in recent critical toponomy scholarship. The case is made that the focus on the shifting power relations evident in official place renaming overlooks toponymy’s geographical unconscious, the way its poetic economy may resist and ironise ideological literalism. The author gives a personal example, a toponymic trail linking Kerang in northern Victoria to an estate in England familiar to the author as a child. Attention is drawn to studies of toponymic performativity that loosen the Foucauldian hold on critical toponymy theory. Developing a critical cartography is important in resisting the identification of place naming with planning. A renaming context is described that does not conform to ideologically driven top-down change or bottom-up resistance. This is where the act of yarning, creative language usage, embodies non-hegemonic framings of place attachment.