AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL PLACENAMES SURVEY
Signposting Australia’s Heritage
www.anps.mq.edu.au
The task of the Australian National Placenames Survey is to investigate the history, meaning,
and motivation for use of each name ever current for a geographic feature or inhabited locality
in Australia, and to make public the results of these investigations. The cultural aspects of
placename study have never formed an area of systematic research in Australia, and the
Survey aims to remedy this deficiency.
The roots of the project extend back to the earliest days of the Australian Academy of the
Humanities, under the patronage of its Foundation President, Sir Keith Hancock. An earlier
pilot phase took place at the University of New England between 1971 and 1974, when Dr
John Atchison acted as research fellow. However, the political and economic climate toward
the end of that period meant that the project was then rested, and the intention lay fallow for
the subsequent quarter-century.
Ironically, it was in 1974 that K.S. Inglis commented (in the introduction to The Australian
Colonists) that with the imminent publication of the final volume of the initial sequence of the
Australian Dictionary of Biography two further definitive reference works were needed in
order for Australians to achieve a full understanding of their cultural heritage: a dictionary of
Australian English, and a survey of placenames. With the publication of the first edition of
the Macquarie Dictionary in 1981 and the Australian National Dictionary in 1988, only the
last remains to be fulfilled.
In the meantime the technical aspects of toponymy received a great boost with the formation
in 1984 of the Committee for Geographical Names in Australia (since 1998, with the joining
of New Zealand, the Committee for Geographical Names in Australasia). The related cultural
aspects are addressed by the ANPS, and close collaboration with state/territory nomenclature
bodies through this forum is crucial: in November 1998 Macquarie University, as the host
institution of the Survey, was admitted to full membership of the Committee. The CGNA has
recently been working to develop a National Placenames Data Model, which will form one
element of the Australian Spatial Data Directory being created by the Australia New Zealand
Land Information Council.
In 1996 the Australian Academy of the Humanities was successful in obtaining funding under
the Australian Research Council's Learned Academies Program to relaunch the scholarly
study of cultural aspects of Australian toponymy. The initial pilot phase, the National
Placenames Project (1998-99), involved the employment of a full-time Research Fellow,
Flavia Hodges, with extensive experience in the fields of onomastics, lexicography, and
publishing management, to develop the methodologies and management structures needed to
underpin the Survey as a whole.
An expansion of funding for 2000 allowed the launch of the Australian National Placename
Survey proper and the employment also of Research Associate Susan Poetsch, with
experience in teaching and linguistics, and IT officer Robert Iverach, with expertise in
database development and geographic information systems. A contraction of funding in 2001
saw Research Fellow Flavia Hodges move to part-time involvement and IT Officer Robert
Iverach leave the Survey to complete his PhD in Geographic Information Systems at Curtin
University of Technology, Perth.
Fromr the beginning of 2002 to the end of 2006 the work of the ANPS was carried out under
the umbrella of the Asia-Pacific Institute for Toponymy—it was the principal activity of the
Institute's historical and cultural toponymy section, funded by a grant from the ViceChancellor's Millennium Innovations Fund of Macquarie University. Clair Hill, honours
graduate of Sydney University’s Department of Linguistics, joined as a second Research
Associate with a particular interest in indigenous placenames and placenames of indigenous
origin. By the end of that period, Susan had moved on to work with the NSW Board of
Studies on the indigenous curriculum, and Clair had gone to Europe to work on her PhD.
With the cessation of university funding, supporters of the Survey set up a non-profit
voluntary association to carry on the work. Placenames Australia (Inc), currently chaired by
Professor Colin Yallop, works to provide the necessary means for the completion of the
research. Dr Jan Tent, of the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University, has accepted an
appointment as the first Director of the Survey under the new structure. David Blair and
Flavia Hodges continue their association with ANPS as toponymists.
The ANPS collaborates closely with the state and territory nomenclature authorities
responsible for the technical aspects of toponymy and placenames standardisation, to which
we seek to add cultural information about the history, origin and meaning of placenames.
This practical research work is carried out by a network of volunteer research friends,
coordinated by state/territory committees representing a wide range of interests and expertise,
such as history, geography, Australian languages and archaeology. The results are entered in a
uniform national database which will ultimately be available for browsing and searching on
the Internet.
The ANPS produces a quarterly newsletter, Placenames Australia, which is distributed
without charge to interested parties. We have also arranged a series of day conferences on
Australian placenames of indigenous origin, from which selected papers have been published
in The Land is a Map (ed. Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges & Jane Simpson, Pandanus
Books/Pacific Linguistics 2002). This has been warmly received as a foundational work of
Australian toponymic scholarship, and further conferences and publications are planned.
Last updated July 2007