Blockades, Blockheads and the Naming of Australia
Blockade Australia - the group responsible for massive traffic jams in Sydney when one of its members chained herself to her car’s steering wheel in the Harbour tunnel - is demanding the country change its name.
‘Australia is not the name of this continent,’ the group declared via social media this week.
If true it would seem to represent something of a crisis for the activist group since it would mean half their own name is redundant.
‘Australia doesn’t refer to this land, these waters, or the many communities that call this place home,’ they continued.
All of which raised the question, what should we call this land? More on that later.
‘Australia is the name of the economic and political systems which work to oppress and exploit this continent and its peoples. These systems are complex, corrupt and have been designed to maximise extraction and hierarchies of power. They have been in place since invasion.’
Or, in layman’s terms, ‘blah blah blah’.
Like I said, Blockade Australia first came to public attention when one of its members locked herself in her car.
I think there’s a great argument to be made here that when you find your special talent in life, stick with it.
Don’t go branching out into history, or geography, or language, or trying to articulate intelligible thoughts. And I think that’s where Blockade Whatever have gone wrong.
They should have stayed in their lane (while chained to the steering wheel).
It will come as a shock for Blockheads Australia to learn that the so-called colonisers didn’t come up with the name Australia. For many centuries Europeans believed there must be a vast land in the southern hemisphere, variously called ‘Terra Australis Incognita’ or ‘Unknown South Land’.
The name comes from the latin and simply means south land.
It’s not a right wing conspiracy.
It’s a describing word.
It wasn’t stuffy white Brits denying Indigenous people naming rights. Far from it. The Indigenous inhabitants of Australia hadn’t conceived of themselves as a people, or conceived of the land as a continent.
They dwelt in tribes, located in regions.
According to the National Library of Australia the first recorded use of the name Australia was on a map drawn in 1545.
And then in the early 1600s a Portuguese explorer, with backing from the Spanish government, went looking for Australia del Espiritu Santos – the Great Southland of the Holy Spirit.
It was the English explorer Mathew Flinders, the first man to circumnavigate the continent in 1803, used the name ‘Australia’ to describe the continent on a hand drawn map in 1804.
So what would Blockade Australia like to be called?
Blockade Gondwana?
Gondwana was the name given to the super continent - an enormous land mass combining what is now Africa, South America and Australia - thought to have existed before the Jurassic era, a time when members of Blockade Australia would have been considered only slightly intellectually inferior to the stegosaurus.
The discovery of ‘the Great Southland’ is a fascinating history.
In 1606 Portuguese explorer Pedro Ferdinand de Quiros secured sponsorship from Pope Clement VIII and King Philip III of Spain to seek out the southern continent – Terra Australis Incognito (Unknown South Land). A letter to de Quiros from King Phillip read: "That no time be lost in discovering that Australia region so far unknown, so these people may have knowledge of the Gospel and be brought into Spiritual obedience."
We need the ‘knowledge of the Gospel and be brought into Spiritual obedience’ now as much as we did 400 years ago!
My goodness, one could be excused for suspecting the "whatevers" have been inhaling too much of the "good stuff" commonly found growing up in the hills around Nimbin. On a serious note, regular Aussies have got to start fighting back against the imbeciles peddling this crap.