PLACE NAMES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 224, 21 September 1932, Page 6

PLACE NAMES.

SHOULD ZEALAND" BE CHAHGJJ)} (To the Editor.) "Australia" is one of the most and inspiring: names in the gazetteer of- ft, world, but if Matthew Flinders had not bees a student of nomenclature as well eg ardent and intrepid navigator we might he sending a letter to an address something lit« "Mr. Wombat Walleroo, Dead Horse Gull» New England, New South Wales, New Hoi land." Shakespeare's dictum about the w, fume of the rose was inspired by poetic fan™ and the lover's impulsive fears for the safety of her knight, but history denotes that pl»I names and traditions play an important wit in the culture and. national sentiment of * people. The designation of Young Hicks Head and Poverty Bay by Captain Cook Werft result of chance or incident, but he made a more appropriate choice of Botany Bay, where he'went ashore in Australia, and if he had known the aboriginal term for the first human habitation he saw there, it is probable that the incongruity of' New South Wales mieht have been avoided. There is no more simi larity between the east coast of Australia and the west coast of Britain than there is in New Zealand, which Tasman chanced to name as the result of some fancied rcsemblauce to a piece of coast lino on the North Sea Van Diemen's Land was changed to Tasmania at the popular request, of the colonist* to commemmorate the jubilee of the settlement at Hobart in 1853. The term "Australasia" is confusing and the name "New Zealand" is primitive and incongruous, and our national identity would be enhanced if it was changed to the Dominion of Oceania, which, as Matthew Flinders wrote in suggesting the clmngo from New Holland to Australia, would be more agreeable to the car, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of 'the earth. The North Island' should be known as Aotearoa and the South Island as Aoramri names Which are appropriate to the and legends of the raco which inhabited these islands before the white man trod their shores and headlands. The national sentiment of the people of this Dominion, and, indeed, of the whole Empire, would be gratified to inaugurate the change of name on the centenary of the arrival of James Busby as the first accredited representative of the British Crown,in these islands at the historic 6ite on which the Treaty of Waitangi was consummated. FORREST BROWN.