Page 5006 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 28 November 2018
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History may or may not have truths and facts; that could be a whole motion in itself. But it is very clear that how we view history changes with how we view our community: whether we think that various things that happened in the past were good or bad.
Let me return to the theme of more information being a good solution. When I was discussing this with my colleague Minister Rattenbury, he noted that when he was minister for TAMS, these issues about Haig Park came up. What he did was talk to the War Memorial. The War Memorial provided some extra text. If you go and look at the plaque in Haig Park about who General Haig was, it has some additional text from the War Memorial to give a more balanced view about General Haig’s contributions, positive or negative.
And if we are going to go down this route, with a bit of digging, there could be many place names that are worth review. Wendouree Drive, which is near the carillon, for example, is named after Lake Wendouree in Ballarat. The name comes from a Wathaurong word. I have been told the direct translation, but it involves the use of unparliamentary language; Wikipedia reports that it means “go away”. It was reportedly the response given to the settler William Cross Yuille when he asked a local the name of a nearby swamp, which was later dammed and converted into what is now known as Lake Wendouree, a shallow urban lake. Was permission given by Wathaurong elders to use this name “Wendouree”? Do we really want a name in an area that many tourists go to that means “go away”? Should we reflect on whether this even matters?
There are numerous other examples of street and place names in Canberra that have been named after “villains”, to use one of Ms Cody’s original words, or have been named insensitively. I suspect local residents and Canberrans more broadly would not feel very strongly about changing those.
Batman Street in Braddon is named after John Batman, who is credited with founding the settlement that is now known as Melbourne. He is also known for dispossessing the local Aboriginal people of their land to do this.
The ACT government states that Wybalena Grove in Cook, a townhouse development containing a street of the same name, is named after an Aboriginal word meaning home or resting place. It is quite possible that it might not have been so named had the people who named the development and street been aware of the terrible connotations the word Wybalena has for Aboriginal people from Tasmania, whose forebears were rounded up and taken to a settlement of the same name on the western point of Flinders Island. Yes, it was a meeting place of sorts, but maybe not one we want to commemorate.
I do not think that there is a big community uprising to suggest that we should change these names. But in spite of the many villainous things that people who have had places named after them may have done, or may have not done, and in spite of the connotations or contexts of particular places or things that a street or suburb is named after, it is important that we acknowledge history. This should include the fact that the
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