A racist place name in a small New South Wales coastal community is set to be changed after a council vote on Monday night.
C n Island, a nature reserve in the Lake Macquarie suburb of Swansea, will be given the name ‘Pirrita’ Island - an Awabakal word for oysters from the mangrove tree.
The island was originally named after Herbert Heaney, the first permanent resident.
Heaney was a miner who would come home covered with coal dust and was referred to as ‘c n’ because of his blackface.
Councillors voted 8-5 in favour of the change, with the name expected to be passed by the Geographical Names Board of New South Wales.
Australia’s Colonial Names Are Being Replaced by Aboriginal Ones
The Economist, April 24, 2021
You cannot go far in Australia without stumbling on a spot named after an act of colonial violence. The continent is dotted with Massacre Bays, Deadman’s Creeks and Murdering Gullies. Suicide Bay, in Tasmania, commemorates an especially grizzly slaughter. In 1828, a party of white shepherd-convicts cornered an indigenous clan on a clifftop and murdered 30 men as punishment for slaughtering the settlers’ sheep. They threw the bodies into the water.
Aboriginals have long said that the bay’s name was upsetting. This month it was wiped from the map. It is now called Taneneryouer, meaning “trauma” in a native tongue. More than a dozen other places in Tasmania have new or second names drawn from indigenous history.
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