Naming places and their fauna after their colonial conquerors is the most naked expression of dominance and ownership. Common names are a historic reflection of the power structures of society. In a recent paper for the ornithological journal Emu, the environmental scientist Stephen Garnett argued that bird names should be culturally and socially inclusive. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads It’s part of a push by the organisation to examine the utility of eponymous names more generally. It’s due mainly to this incident – Mitchell’s starring contribution to Australia’s frontier wars, for which he only ever received a mild rebuke – that BirdLife Australia has recently reverted to using the old name pink cockatoo in official correspondence. Numbers were shot swimming across the Murray, and some ever after they had reached the opposite shore.” “It was difficult to come at such enemies hovering in our rear with the lynx-eyed vigilance of savages … Attacked simultaneously by both parties, the whole betook themselves to the river, my men pursuing them and shooting as many as they could. His account of what happened there, unsparing in its brutality, stands in stark contrast to his rhapsodic description of the cockatoo: In 1836, at the euphemistically named Mount Dispersion, Mitchell encountered the Indigenous Kureinji and Barkindji people on the banks of the Murray River. It was certainly unfortunate to name such a beautiful bird after a mass killer. It was for this lavish description that the pink cockatoo, now officially classified as endangered, was renamed Major Mitchell’s cockatoo in 1977, after a survey of members of the Royal Australian Ornithologists Union (now BirdLife Australia) – a vote which the organisation’s public affairs manager, Sean Dooley, describes ruefully as “a bit of a Boaty McBoatface moment”.
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