A map of the human tongue: A review article

The land is a map: Placenames of Indigenous origin in Australia, edited by Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges, and Jane Simpson. Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, in association with Pacific Linguistics, 2002, xxiv, 304pp., maps, figures, tables, contributors, references, appendices, index of places and placenames, index of languages and language groups. ISBN 1-74076-020-4 (paperback). Hornet Bank, Wave Hill, Noonkanbah, Hindmarsh Island: these names and a great many others are the mental and imaginal way-markers for the course and content of Aboriginal-settler history in Australia (as Gallipoli, Tobruk, Kokoda, and others are for another stream of Australian historical self-consciousness). They are important precisely because they are able to evoke and elicit, for Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal people alike, complex acts of personal and historical reconstruction. Place names serve a mnemonic purpose, as the Introduction to this volume acknowledges (p. 11), focusing attention on the significant events of community history. As such, they would seem to play a vital role in the maintenance and protection of indigenous history and presence in a situation such as that in Australia, where the Indigenous population was displaced by settlers who brought with them their own attachments to places and remembered place names.