Languages and Cultures Week Main Event: Celebrating Place and Belonging

Join us for the main event of LLCL's Languages and Cultures Week.

During this event, we will discuss current issues that involve place, land, and the naming of names.

Place names are never neutral in Australia.

In Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems, naming is not a single external label but something carried through kinship, story, song and art. Country is named, mapped and known from within, by the people who belong to it.

Colonial naming works the opposite way, from the outside in. “Down Under” and “Australia” were coined from a European vantage point before any colonial power had set foot on the land they described. Colonial Australia also ran on a naming system of its own: explorers, governors and monarchs were commemorated by having places named after them, while the names already carried by the land were overwritten.

Elders, musical artist and LLCL scholars will take you through a journey of names, their political weight and the way forward to a better Australia.