Nathan Davies: What’s in a name? Lots when things go wrong

Since the dawn of time we’ve been naming things after people, and since the dawn of time it’s been backfiring on us, Nathan Davies writes — the Jack Bobridge Bike Track is just the most recent example.

Human like to name things after other humans.

Did you know that the sandwich was named after the Earl of Sandwich? Or that the saxophone was named after Adolphe Sax, nachos are actually named in honour of a Mexican waiter named Nacho, and that William Russell Frisbie was a pie tin maker forever immortalised by the Frisbee flying disc? No? Me neither, but Google is a wonderful thing.

However it’s a dangerous thing naming a piece of infrastructure after famous people. Times change. Attitudes change. People change.

I’m sure that those in charge of nomenclature in Liverpool thought it was a great idea to name Penny Lane in honour of industrialist James Penny.

The fact that Penny was a notorious slave trader who made a living from human misery and fought hard against British abolitionists casts a certain pall over this quintessentially English street.

There was a push to rename the street, and other Liverpool streets named after those with links to the slave trade in 2006, but it was defeated.

Was behind-the-scenes pressure applied by hosts of Beatles-themed walking tours? Who knows?

A street sign for Penny Lane in Liverpool. Picture: Getty

As my colleague Miles Kemp recently pointed out, SA would be a very different place if we erased the names of everyone who’d been associated with or whose family profited from the slave trade.

Changing place names has a long history in SA (even ignoring the fact that European settlers changed almost all the place names upon arrival in 1836).

Thanks to the rather sinister-sounding Nomenclature Committees Report On Enemy Place Names a total of 69 place names were changed to rid them of their German “taint” during the World War I, effectively erasing the history of one of our most successful and important immigrant groups.

An editorial in the Adelaide Mail from 1916 didn’t pull any punches.

“Judging by this map, which we reproduce from the Adelaide ‘Mail’, there is plenty of work for a Government Christener in South Australia. The plan shows a wide area of South Australia in which German named places abound – in fact, the whole of the district is so full of Hun nomenclature that it must be difficult for residents to feel certain whether they are dwelling in Australia or Germany.”

Jack Bobridge is now serving time for drug dealing. Picture by Matt Turner.

The latest naming controversy in SA revolves around talented cyclist Jack Bobridge and the 27km Barossa Valley bike track that was named in his honour.

Bobridge was jailed last week after he was found guilty of supplying dozens of ecstasy tablets to a friend, who then onsold them to an undercover police officer.

The Barossa Council will make its decision next week, but it looks extremely likely that the Australian champion and dual Olympic silver medallist’s name will be dumped from the track. Probably rightly so.

Drug trafficking and family bike rides don’t make good bedfellows.

So what do we do, going forward? There are, in my estimation, three options. None of them perfect.

One, we could just stop naming places after people – a tricky, but foolproof, plan.

Two, we could impose a 50-year moratorium on all new place names involving people. Win a gold medal? Great! You can have a stadium named after you. In 50 years’ time. Provided you don’t do anything illegal, stupid or embarrassing.

The third option, my favourite, is to only name things after rock stars. Rock stars, in general, don’t pretend to be upstanding, clean-living bastions of polite society.

No, they tend to be hard-drinking, drug abusing brawlers and we generally know this because they’re quite fond of writing about such topics in their best-selling biographies.

If you name a road Jimmy Barnes St it’s highly unlikely that it’s ever going to come back and bite you on the bum. Barnes has laid out all his secrets on the page in two best-selling memoirs, and we lapped them up.

And it’d be fun! “Yeah mate, you just come down the Glenn Shorrock Highway, turn right on to Doc Neeson Ave, then it’s a right on to Jim Keays Rd, left on to Mark Holden St, another right on to the Mark of Cain Court and there it is – the Hilltop Hoods Home for the Elderly. You can’t miss it.”