That little known quango, the Geographical Names Board based at Bathurst, has been getting lots of Sydney media exposure because of its opposition to the government’s choice of Royal Randwick as the name for a new light rail stop.
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The board says it won’t approve the name because it’s too commercial but the premier won’t budge and intends to use her powers to overturn the decision.
Skirmishes over names is nothing new for the pushy Bathurst board. It got tough with councils naming roads and streets to ensure they weren’t confusing, racist, derogatory or demeaning, too hard to pronounce or likely to offend.
No doubt names like Curly Dick Road at Meadow Flat and Dog Rocks Road at Oberon, both historical names, Titswobble Road at Tuncurry, Satan's Toe Swamp, north west of Ivanhoe, and Who'da Thought It Hill, a lookout at Quirindi, helped to stir up the board.
Then there was the extended local kerfuffle over the Aboriginal name Wahluu proposed for Mt Panorama that was put up by the Bathurst Land Council as Wiradjuri meaning ‘sacred place’.
The names board believed it meant ‘to watch over’ while Bathurst elder Dinawan Gerribang reckoned Wahluu was the name of a young Wiradjuri man killed by his older brother in a fight over a girl.
The web’s urban dictionary said wahluu meant a ‘hairy ugly mean creature’, while Wahluu was the name of a Starcraft 11 game on the web that’s played around the world.
People had mixed feelings about a plan by the names board to correct the spelling of Mt Kosciusko by putting back the ‘z.’
Polish explorer Paul Strzelecki in March 1840 climbed and named Australia's highest mountain after Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish national hero, soldier and liberal statesman.
The board said the only available documents relating to Strzelecki's naming of the mountain left out the ‘z’ and it had always been spelt that way on every map produced since 1841.
Snowy Mountains Council supported the change but a university professor said the name had been on maps all this time and to change its spelling would sever local connections and provoke historical discontinuity.
He said Kosciusko without the ‘z’ had widespread common usage and geographical significance and was mentioned frequently in reference books, tourism and Australian literature, including Banjo Paterson's The Man from Snowy River.
To change the spelling would dilute the future impact of these works.
Orange has been pretty safe from any names board intervention although it rejected ‘Paterson’ as a suburb name because of the similar-named town.
Levelling the Track
The Railways has always had a lopsided say on traffic matters in Orange.
In the early 70s a new overhead bridge being built in Anson Street near James Sheahan school had to be raised several metres higher than planned at great expense to the council because the Railways said it would be running double-decker passenger trains out here ‘within five years’.
Tee hee, tee hee.
Then several years later the council wanted to build a subway under the line at March Street but the Railways again put the kybosh on things and said it would only agree if the Byng Street crossing was closed.
Imagine the chaos that would have caused.
The Railways also refused to contribute to flashing lights and bells to reopen the Margaret Street crossing which is still closed and hampering access to new subdivisions and the university.
