This story is edited by Mununjali author Ellen van Neerven for SBS Voices and is part of a NAIDOC Week essay series inspired by the 2021 theme 'Heal Country’, elevating the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers.
When you take away someone’s name you don’t just take away a word. You take away spirit – heart and soul. When you change language from one that names all things as living to one that makes all things, things only, it causes diseases, chronic illnesses, ongoing injures and sometimes even kills the things that were once living through their names.
That’s what happened here when the invaders came permanently to our shores in 1788. They stole lots of things – our lands, our waters, our languages, our children, our dignity, our freedom, our birthrights to live on the Countries our Creator Spirits made for us.
They also stole names from Country. Sometimes they named over things. Sometimes they took names from one place – that was their place and put them somewhere else where they don’t belong. Like when they took a name on the Country I belong to – Wiradjuri Country on the Murrumbidgee River near Gundagai called Willi Ploma – a place of big possums and moved the name to a farm where they ran sheep and cut down the trees of the possums. Mostly they just changed names to their own language, like Australia – the name that erases all our Countries.
They also stole names from Country. Sometimes they named over things. Sometimes they took names from one place – that was their place and put them somewhere else where they don’t belong.
Our countries – Wiradjuri Country where I was born; Ngunnawal/Ngambri where I lived and worked, raised my children for thirty years; Wurrundjeri Country where I now live and work, are all living bodies. They have blood, arteries, veins, pulses, bones, limbs – arms, legs, elbows, knees, shoulders, feet, hands, fingers, toes that flex, bend and move as one like a body. And organs – like hearts, bellies, hips, wombs, breasts. Countries have souls and minds.
When you change something from a living subject of conversation constantly in dialogue with their surrounds – the animate landscape and their children, the people living on Country, and make it an object of information you are starving it slowly of cultural nourishment. You incarcerate and isolate it from its family and relations and of the life it once had. You make it sick, in spirit and in self.
In 1820, colonial governor Lachlan Macquarie, renamed a vast body of water spanning Ngunnawal Ngambri Country to the border of Wiradjuri Country called Weereewa – meaning hard water or salty water— after a sick, philandering, laudanum addicted British monarch called George IV. In renaming Weereewa Lake George, Macquarie forced the masculine gender and contamination on a living body of water.
Once brimming with water that lapped against the side of what is now the highway, Weereewa is now completely dry, and has according to the short history of place written by invader-settlers ‘misbehaved’ ever since.
Once brimming with water that lapped against the side of what is now the highway, Weereewa is now completely dry, and has according to the short history of place written by invader-settlers ‘misbehaved’ ever since. It has claimed the lives of several settlers who trespassed on the waters it once had leaving many people wondering why. It is reported by white scientists to have vicious waters, that turn in on people unpredictably. Now it is seen mainly through settler eyes as a useless dry bed.
But it is not ‘misbehaving’. It is remembering. It is grieving. They cannot understand that its waters may have seeped from one world – the one they have invaded to another. They cannot understand this because they can only live in one world. They can only exist on one plane.
The psychogeography of our Countries remember who they were. Before Nation.
The Nation is a masculine myth that makes all our countries sick.
The Nation is a masculine myth that makes all our countries sick. There are many examples of this. The Kalari – the living water in the central west on Wiradjuri Country was renamed the Lachlan River. To the north of the freshwater cradle of Wiradjuri Country the Wambool was renamed the Macquarie. The modern nation is full of this name-calling. Most cities – Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Darwin, Perth all bear the names of dead white foreign aristocrats; the highways and byways that dissect, desecrate and mutilate living Countries bear names such as Hume, Macquarie, Mitchell, Newell, Brockman, Stuart, Sturt – all white men with dubious reputations.
Australia is sick with loss of self. This nation is not ours and was and always will be a myth to us until the toxic naming practices are erased from its body.
Our Countries cannot heal until their names are given back.
Associate Professor Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, teacher and academic from southwest New South Wales. She is the recipient of two Discovery Indigenous Awards through the Australian Research Council, ‘The David Unaipon Award: Shaping the literary and history of Aboriginal Writing in Australia’ (2014-2017) and; Indigenous Storytelling and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Knowledge (2020 -2024). In 2020 Jeanine edited Guwayu – for all times – a collection of First Nations Poetry commissioned by Red Room Poetry and published by Magabala Books.
The illustration for this piece is by Tori-Jay Mordey, an established Indigenous Australian illustrator and artist based in Brisbane. Growing up she openly shared both her Torres Strait Islander and English heritage, which is often reflected in her contemporary Indigenous art practice - producing work based around her family and siblings as a way of understanding herself, her appearance and racial identity.
National NAIDOC Week (4 – 11 July 2021) celebrates the history, cultures and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Join SBS and NITV for a full slate of , and follow NITV on and to be part of the conversation. For more information about NAIDOC Week or this year’s theme, head to the .
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