Place Names in Australia
by Ira Maine

I think Australia should grow up into the 21st C by being more sophisticated.

Take ‘Uluru’ for instance.  Patently some Frenchwoman was ascending that rock in the middle of Australia, spotted a kangaroo and ejaculated, ‘Oooh, La Roo!’.  Some red-necked oaf, overhearing this, who’d never been past Bourke in his life, obviously thought this ejaculation the very pinnacle of sophistication and promptly used it by way of a name for the aforesaid and nearby large boulder.

And if that wasn’t enough why on earth are the ‘Bungle Bungles’ so called?  Isn’t one Bungle enough?  And, if you must have two why do it in this idiotic manner?  Why not call it ‘Two Mistakes’ and be done with it?  Infinitely more sophisticated, I reckon…Tell you what, it might stop Pommy tourists taking the piss.

When the Italians, God bless them arrived in Oz, our kids would stand on the side of the road as they drove past and shout out ‘a wog! a wog! a wog!’.  With a lamentable lack of imagination and absolute lack of taste the city fathers picked up this catch-cry and used it to name the town Wagga Wagga.  OK it’s spelled differently, but any idiot can see they were having their joke whilst covering their arses.  It is a constant embarrassment to us more sophisticated Australians and ought, in the interest of Advancing Australia Fair, to be changed.

There’s a town in NE Victoria called Benalla.  Now clearly this commemorates some important North African personage who did some great service for the town and needed remembering, but Ben Allah?  Anytime now, when the residents are, in good conscience,  fast asleep, the parachutes and the black ops helicopters, led by Bruce Willis, will descend in the dead of night, seize the Benalla diamond mines, oil wells and Council chambers, then nothing will ever be the same again.  Puppet governments, parking laws, enforced pedestrian crossings and all the horrifying paraphernalia of small town suburban Iowa writ large in NE Victoria.  I would suggest armed citizens’ uprisngs as a consequence; civil unrest and all that.  Not at all good for our sophisticated image abroad.

Fluffy Meadows might serve as an alternative name for Benalla, deliberately calculated to attract a more louche, a more fragile type of resident.  This might both raise the tone and keep the troops at a distance (but not too far).  The shops might  take on a more risque air, there might be Gentlemens’ Clubs, Mardi Gras, and people might, in a certain sense, begin to see that there’s more ways than one to have your assets seized.

There will be more on this anon…
promises Ira