Making Place: Yarning and the Protocols of Poetic Geography

Chapter 6 considers the implications of GPS locational technologies for a decolonised toponymy. In a post-name geo-spatial navigational era, the pressure to find equivalent, commensurable postcolonial toponyms is relieved. Placenames may be liberated to acknowledge (and reflect) the emotional attachments they channel. They may tell stories of place making in new ways. In this context, two place making schemata are introduced. They represent two myths of place, two desire terrains. One, relational, mobile, horizontal, illustrates Indigenous naming practices and is associated with protocols of meeting. The other, separatist, static, hierarchical, lays out a plan of non-meeting. It shows that the descriptor ‘street’, usually treated as a neutral term in critical toponomy, is, in fact, a metonomy of colonialist place myth making. A decolonised toponymy goes off-grid; its geography is poetic, improvising places in language that reconceptualise place. A practical outcome of such processes occurs in a place renaming project already discussed in Chapter 2, where a regional development plan is reconfigured as a territory of holes.