Indigenous group proposes renaming Sydney’s Cooks River to Goolay’yari

A major Aussie river could be stripped of its association with Captain James Cook and given the Indigenous name “Goolay’yari”.

A major river in Sydney could be stripped of its association with Captain James Cook and given the Indigenous name “Goolay’yari”, which is said to mean “place of pelican dreaming” in the local language.

Cooks River, which runs from Bankstown in Sydney’s southwest, through Strathfield and Tempe before entering Botany Bay, is the latest Australian landmark facing calls to be given an Aboriginal name, after Queensland’s Fraser Island was renamed K’gari and Goat Island in Sydney Harbour as Me-Mel, among many others.

The proposal to rename the river Goolay’yari is part of an Aboriginal partnership strategy from the Cooks River Alliance, which includes Indigenous groups connected to the river as well as the Bayside, Inner West, Strathfield and Canterbury-Bankstown councils, and Sydney Water.

Dharawal man Gregory Andrews, who held consultations for the proposal, told the ABC on Tuesday it would be like the renaming of the Northern Territory’s iconic Ayers Rock landmark to Uluru in 1993.

Cooks River seen from Wolli Creek. Picture: Google Maps

“It’s not really renaming, it’s giving back the name that it’s always had,” Mr Andrews told ABC Radio Sydney.

“It doesn’t detract from James Cook and all of his achievements as a great explorer of his time. If he had ‘discovered’ it today, he wouldn’t call it after himself. He probably would ask what it was called.”

According to Mr Andrews, an island on the river, known as Fatima Island, looks like the foot of a pelican.

“If you look at it from Google Earth, that looks like the foot of the pelican,” he said. “So we say that’s the foot of the pelican.”

Any potential renaming is a long way off, however, as the name Goolay’yari has not been fully endorsed by the Cooks River Alliance, said Andrew Thomas, from the organisation’s secretariat.

“The [Aboriginal partnership strategy] plan is [endorsed], but not necessarily the renaming,” he told ABC Radio.

“It’s something the community would have to agree on first before going any further.”

The renaming would also need to be passed by the NSW Geographical Names Board, which has not received any proposal to rename or dual-name Cooks River.

Fatima Island looks like the ‘foot of a pelican’. Picture: Google Maps

Mr Andrews told ABC Radio the river was an important escape route for Aboriginal people who were fighting against British settlers, including the famous Bidjigal warrior Pemulwuy.

“It’s really important for Aboriginal people and increasingly important, I think, for non-Aboriginal people as a little sort of haven,” he said.

Kel Richards from Ozwords, a journalist and author who previously hosted the popular Wordwatch segment on ABC Radio, slammed the proposed name change as “unwanted, unnecessary and unhelpful”.

“You need to bear in mind that there were three different clan or tribal groupings around the river, one on the south side, one on the north side and one further to the west,” he told 2GB on Wednesday.

“We have no evidence they all had the same name for the place because they had no written language. So someone’s dreamt this up. I think this has been dreamt up from one of those languages, from one of those names, and they’ve said, ‘That’s it, we’ll go with that one.’ But in fact I don’t think we really know what the locals 1000 years ago actually called it.”

Richards argued “we don’t need” places being given dual names.

“The purpose of language is to communicate — we all know the established names,” he said.

The Captain Cook statue in Hyde Park was vandalised last month. Picture: Damian Shaw

“I don’t think it achieves anything except as part of a political campaign. These kinds of renamings have got nothing to do with culture, nothing to do with history, nothing to do with geography, they are just political. They are just saying, ‘Australia doesn’t really belong to you, you don’t belong here, this is actually our place.’ I’m sorry, it belongs to all of us.”

According to Richards, of the four million place names across Australia, three quarters were already Indigenous.

“By and large when settlers arrived in an area they said to the locals, ‘What do you call this place?’, and the locals told them,” he said.

“So from Gunnedah to Gundagai, from Kurri Kurri to Oodnadatta, the place is filled with Indigenous names. We’ve been doing that respectfully for well over 200 years, we don’t need to change established names now. I suspect part of this is antipathy to James Cook, which is just stupid. In the first place Cook didn’t name it.”

The famous explorer surveyed and reported on the river in 1770. Early settlers then gave the river its name around 1810 based on its mention in Captain Cook’s journals.

“It’s just an antipathy to the fact this bloke arrived and drew accurate maps which no one living here had done for 65,000 years, so we need to bad mouth him all the time,” Richards said. “I’m sorry, I’m really strongly against this one.”

Captain Cook, along with other figures from colonial history, has long been the target of left-wing activists.

A statue of Captain Cook in Melbourne was cut down and defaced by vandals earlier this year in the run-up to Australia Day.

The statue in St Kilda’s Catani Gardens was sawed off from its stone base, which was spray-painted in red with the words, “The colony will fall.”

Last month, the statue of Captain Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park was also attacked, when two people allegedly took an angle grinder to the 145-year-old monument and nearly chopped off its feet.

Originally published as Indigenous group proposes renaming Sydney’s Cooks River to Goolay’yari