Mapping And Naming

Abstract

One of the most persistent beliefs about that part of the world colonised by Europeans since the sixteenth century is expressed in the name most commonly given to it: the New World. As several of the items in the previous Section exemplified, one of the key images of that ‘newness’ was its silence, its emptiness of language. And, as the Introduction to that Section, together with the remarks of Dr Mulhaus in the extract there from The Recollections of Geo f fry Hamlyn, suggested, it was a crucial part of the imperial enterprise to overlook the ‘oldness’ of the existing inhabitants and the validity of their naming of the place. Naming is a potent and contentious strategy because it confers ownership. And, as John Dunmore Lang pointedly observes in ‘Colonial Nomenclature’, as early as 1823, it is ideologically loaded as well. Lang, who wrote this poem in the year of his arrival in the colony as its first Presbyterian minister, was to have a long and controversial career as a radical reformer: for him, to name the land was to invest it with political significance. As a republican he preferred the names of democrats (like Hampden) and Aboriginal names (stanza 2) to those of Governors (like Macquarie) and imperial officials (like Goulburn).