We rarely pay attention to the names of places where we live and work, less so the names of the various roads, paths and lanes we use to get around. It’s easy to forget that the naming of every street, station, church and library was carefully weighed and measured, capturing a moment in time. Our ever-expanding constellation of placenames, street names and locales reflects the prevailing culture of the era in which that decision was made, more often than not under the direct influence of money, political power or patronage. It’s also important to remember that, in some instances, the act of naming (or re-naming) can be a conscious intervention in history, language and culture.
By Finn Butler, Director
August 2025
Part of a series of articles on place, space and customer, drawing on the diverse experience of Erebus co-founders George and Finn.
We rarely pay attention to the names of places where we live and work, less so the names of the various roads, paths and lanes we use to get around. It’s easy to forget that the naming of every street, station, church and library was carefully weighed and measured, capturing a moment in time. Our ever-expanding constellation of placenames, street names and locales reflects the prevailing culture of the era in which that decision was made, more often than not under the direct influence of money, political power or patronage. It’s also important to remember that, in some instances, the act of naming (or re-naming) can be a conscious intervention in history, language and culture.
August 2025
Part of a series of articles on place, space and customer, drawing on the diverse experience of Erebus co-founders George and Finn.
...only 17% of stations on the current network bear a First Nations derived place name.
Over the past three decades working in the field of wayfinding, I have often been struck by the effect that naming can have on our ability to navigate spaces and access services, especially for our culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) population. This impact has been well recorded in linguistic research, especially within healthcare environments, where naming can influence clinical outcomes for patients and families with limited proficiency in English.
With a wide vocabulary encompassing technical language, neologisms, archaic Greek or Latin based medical terminology, and an entire lexicon of confusing acronyms, the hospital environment is often crowded with unfamiliar language. Clinical and administrative staff are generally fluent in the use of these terms; from ‘allied health’ to ‘outpatient’ or ‘phlebotomy’. But for patients, these terms can be altogether baffling. Comprehension testing conducted at a number of Australian hospitals, reveals that fewer than twenty percent of patients understand these terms. As expected, this comprehension level is significantly lower among those with limited English proficiency.
Naming within our towns and cities can have a similarly significant effect, and understanding how place and route naming can modify behaviour is an important tool in wayfinding. For example, imagine standing at the intersection of two roads in an unfamiliar city, looking for a train station. The odds of picking the correct direction is just one in four. But if one of the roads passing through that intersection is named ‘Station Road’, the probability of finding the station immediately doubles. This is the power of naming in the field of wayfinding. Studies have shown that place and route naming is hardwired into how we navigate. Without realising it, names such as ‘Main Street’, ‘Exhibition Street’ and ‘Bridge Road’ provide vital clues to determine both where we are and where we’re heading.
Recently, while working with one of Australia’s public transport agencies, I undertook a study at a major new rail interchange. This piece of work revealed that 41% of navigational errors being made by passengers were due to confusion over place naming. With rail networks expanding rapidly across the eastern capitals, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane all face a new challenge – how to help people navigate metro stations that often extend across multiple city blocks, with entrances up to 250m apart. In such cases, a number of different entrances might be named for a singular landmark or building that, in reality, might be a quarter of a kilometre away. The confusion this can create for passengers and pedestrians is real and (of course) measurable.
The science of place names – toponymy – is in many ways an archaeology of language, revealing cumulative layers of meaning and proving time and again that our towns and cities (and the spaces between them) are plastic and ever-evolving. While place names connect us to each other with a shared meaning, they also connect us to our past and to generations that came before us.
In researching this article, I visited the State Library in Melbourne and discovered an obscure document titled ‘Names of Victorian Railway Stations’ published in 1918 by Thomas O’Callaghan. Among its pages, the name origin of every operating station within the network of the time is detailed – an astonishing 997 stations in total. (It is noteworthy that 106 years later, Victorians now travel to and from just 300 stations across the network.) In his catalogue, O’Callaghan documents the etymology of each station name – to my surprise, 32% of the station names in 1918 were of First Nations origin (or an anglicised version of the same). By comparison, only 17% of stations on the current network bear a First Nations derived place name.
The names of current stations across the Victorian rail network sit within two broad camps. Firstly, British place names transposed from that distant land, creating a dissonance where geographical references like ‘vale’, ‘dale’ and ‘ford’ seem oddly out of place, displaced as they are from their original British topography by some 17,000 kilometres. Secondly, a group of names that reads like either a roll call of middle ranking members of the British Admiralty and wealthy patrons of the 1800s, or generic references to civic landmarks whose contemporary relevance may be less than current.
All in all, I’m left with a strong sense that our major infrastructure projects, both planned and currently under construction, present an amazing opportunity to make our own mark on towns and cities, reflecting our society in the same way our predecessors did, albeit for a more progressive and inclusive time.
The Victorian Geographic Places Names Act 1998 provides a framework for the naming of places, roads and landmarks, and while the principles are sound, the naming of recent landmarks in our cities is hard to reconcile against it. As Australians, I believe we have much to celebrate and place naming is a perfect opportunity to demonstrate this. For example, Australia is well known as a world leader in medical research, a fact which should be lauded. To this point, my personal favourite street name in Melbourne is ‘Bionic Ear Lane’, which celebrates the work of Professor Graeme Clark.
In addition to recognising our achievements, we need to reckon with our past, which means making good on our broad commitment to engage with First Nations stakeholders during the earliest stages of development in major infrastructure projects. For example, by exploring opportunities for the restoration of original place names – a process that should always be led by the Traditional Owners of the land, not just for the cultural and social knowledge they can contribute, but to ensure our cities and public spaces function effectively by creating unique and distinct naming that is meaningful and memorable.
These ideas can be contentious for some, but growing up in the UK as I did, the idea of indigenous language road signs and place names doesn’t seem so strange, especially having spent much of my childhood in Wales, where all signs and road markings are dual language (i.e. signs with both Welsh place names and the English translation). Interestingly, while some claim that local language or dual language signs might somehow impact the clarity of information or impede safety, the research does not support this, with studies in the UK clearly showing that dual language signs have no measurable impact on road safety.
Here in Victoria, current and future infrastructure projects such as the North East Link and major healthcare precincts such as Footscray Hospital are set to create a wealth of new public spaces, buildings, roads and pathways, all of which will need to be named, if only so that people can find them. On reflection, I believe we need to resist the temptation to take the path of least resistance in applying derivative naming – that is, names derived from existing names, existing conventions and old ways of thinking – not just for their cultural or sociolinguistic impact, but also for the impact that naming will have on our ability to navigate and engage with services in our cities.
Wherever you live, the next time you’re out for a walk, give some thought to the language used to describe the parks, buildings and streets around you. Chances are the names will tell the story of who lived there before you, how they lived and what they valued. I wonder what our new spaces, roads and pathways will say about us?
