My copy of "Imagining Australia" winged its way across the Pacific last week. A detailed book review of it will be published here shortly. One of the recommendations in the book was for the Australian and State capitals to have an Anglo and an Aboriginal name. I think this is a wonderful idea that would add a level of mysticism and timeless history to the capitals. Another anglospheric country which, like Australia, had seen its policies rife with racism and inequity is South Africa. It recently changed the name of Pretoria to Tshwane - which means; "We are all the same".

Pretoria

The Dutch who founded Pretoria named it after Andreis Pretorious. He was a settler and explorer in South Africa that helped white settlers get established deep in the heart of Africa. During the apartheid era it was another place of racist government policy and inequality coerced through the government monopoly on violence.

On Monday, when the metropolitan council voted to replace the capital's name with an African one, Tshwane, the change brought a feeling of mild vindication to Moses Skhosana. As a teenager looking for work nearly 30 years ago, he was thrown in jail and viciously beaten for the simple act of being an unemployed black man in a city legally reserved for whites, he said.

"Pretoria is now in another nation," said Skhosana, 47, a slim, soft-spoken repairman for a government ministry, speaking a few blocks from where he was arrested in 1977.

Australia already carries dual names for some landmarks. The best know being Uluru, which is also known by the anglo name of Ayers Rock. Another is Tar-ra which carries the anglo name of Dawes Point. In South Australia the Torrens is also known as Karrawirraparri. From Imagining Australia;

This process [of dual-names] should not be limited to geographic landmarks alone. What a wonderful symbol it would be if we also assigned dual names to our capital cities - supplementing, not replacing, the familiar European names. It would simply mean that our cities have two names, both appropriate and understood, just as New Zealand is also known by its Maori name, Aotearoa.

Obviously this would require extensive consultation with Indigenous groups, given the difficulty in identifying precise Aboriginal names because our cities are so spread out.

Nonetheless, Sydney might be known as Werrong or Cadi; Melbourne also as Narloke or Narrm; Brisbane also as Nianjin; Perth also as Mooro; and Adelaide also as Tandanya. This would be in our opinion, a beautiful and powerful statement.

I am in favour of this. One of the issues of reconciliation is the disconnect between Aboriginal history and Anglo-Australian history. It will have to become common and mainstream that Australia has one history of one hundred thousand years. Our history did not begin with the colonisation of the land by the fleets from England, but rather with the colonisation of the mariners and settlers who came from Indonesia in several waves many tens of thousands years ago.

Like the South Africans searching for a means to entwine their country and culture with powerful symbols of co-habitation and shared culture - Australia can do the same. Giving dual-names to Australian cities is an excellent means to display a shared culture and a deep and timeless history that stretches back to when this continent was still being shaped by natural forces.

It will root all of us into a shared narrative that reaches back tens of thousands of years and reminds us how we all share the land, the country and communal aspirations. We are all the same.

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