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Annual Report 2001
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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. Robert Iverach left the Survey at the beginning of 2001 to complete his PhD in Geographic Information Systems at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, but has continued to advise on database development.
Since the beginning of 2002 the work of the ANPS has been carried out under the umbrella of the Asia-Pacific Institute for Toponymy -- it is the principal activity of the Institute's historical and cultural toponymy section, and funding for the core directorate is assured until 2006 by a grant from the Vice Chancellor's Millennium Innovations Fund of Macquarie University.
The ANPS collaborates closely with the state and territory nomenclature authorities who are 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 will be carried out by a network of volunteer Research Friends, coordinated by state/territory ANPS committees representing a wide range of interests and expertise, such as history, geography, Australian languages and archaeology. The results will entered in a uniform national database available for browsing and searching on the Internet.
The ANPS has arranged a series of day conferences on placenames of Indigenous origin, from which selected papers are to be published in The Land is a Map (ed. Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges and Jane Simpson, Pandanus Press 2002). We also undertake theoretical and practical training in cultural toponymic research through university seminars, continuing education courses and self-access study programs, and supervise candidates undertaking Masters and PhD research in the area.
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