The decision last Sunday by Melbourne’s Moreland City Council to change its name to Merri-bek is but another example of confected outrage and ratepayer-funded revisionism.
But in the council’s haste to act, its members have created a bigger problem in chambers, one that could put the fight for decolonisation back decades, The Mocker tells the mayor in this open letter:
Dear Mayor Mark Riley,
As one of the many Australians who is blinded by white privilege, I did not at first recognise that the name of an eighteenth-century Jamaican sugar plantation which used slave labour was detrimental to the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of Victoria.
Maybe my ignorance was due to irrelevant considerations such as Jamaica being over 15,000km from Melbourne. Or the fact that Dr Farquhar McCrae, who in 1839 named his newly purchased lands ‘Moreland’ after his grandfather’s plantation, was not a slaveholder but a surgeon. Silly me thought the Jamaican lands in question had as much to do with the plight of Indigenous Australians as you do with reality.
And never mind that slavery had ended in Jamaica by the time McCrae named his estate. Even a lengthy academic report you commissioned concluded that “No historical record identifies Farquhar’s motivations or intentions for naming his colonial Melbourne property”.
That was your basis for surmising there was a “very strong link” between slavery and the name of the council. “We really couldn’t just sit on this for too long,” you said in December soon after you were appointed mayor. “We needed to act fairly quickly.”
Exactly why you and your fellow Greens councillors had to act quickly is not clear. Perhaps you feared the less enlightened elements of Moreland, having discovered this most tenuous of connections, would abduct Africans and enslave them. Thus began your tokenistic and expensive charade otherwise known as a “community engagement process”.
Instead of asking Moreland residents if they wanted to change the city title, you told them to choose from a list of three names nominated by the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation. Would it be Wa-dam-buk, Jerrang, or Merri-bek? Presumably you would have no objections if in a few years a conservative-dominated council presents residents with a similar fait accompli. Guess what everyone: we are changing the name of Merri-bek, and your choices are Cook, Phillip and Macquarie.
And this is where it becomes truly farcical. As the minutes of your last meeting note, “Children were consulted about the options for names at five early years centres across Moreland”. Early years centres? Yes, I’m sure that age category could readily and objectively assess the merits of this proposal. Of the 164 children ‘consulted,’ all of them were in favour of replacing Moreland with an Indigenous name. Funny that.
Expensive as this pretence was, it is a pittance compared to the cost of implementing the name change. You have already set aside half a million dollars for the work to be carried out in the next two years, but that is just the start. The council concedes it will take a minimum of 10 years to make the necessary changes in an area covering 58 square kms.
One of the dissenting councillors, Oscar Yildiz, estimates the full cost to be around nine million dollars. As the Herald Sun reported in March, you yourself allegedly intervened to stop independent councillor Helen Pavlidis from questioning chief executive Cathy Henderson about the cost of the name change.
This logistical upheaval for the sake of semantics makes for one enormous carbon footprint. What was it you said last year upon being elected? “A warming planet is a risk to everything we hold dear here at Moreland: our environment, our health, our wellbeing, and our vibrant local economy. This is a critical priority for us.”
Turn it up. Your critical priority is usurping the resources of local government to advance your undemocratic, militant, and pervasive ideology. And as this case shows, you see the ratepayer not as a constituent but as someone to sponge off to fund your self-indulgence.
In February, ABC Melbourne reported that school children in Moreland were using pedestrian crossings unmanned by supervisors. Your excuse was you could not find enough people to fill vacancies. When asked by host Raf Epstein how much they were paid you had no idea. After all, that is a local government issue. You are too busy leading the life of Riley.
Incidentally, you and your fellow councillors might want to consider the ramifications of this decision. For example, when speaking in December in support of a name change, Moreland deputy mayor Lambros Tapinos cited his Greek heritage to empathise with Indigenous Australians. “I understand the pains of past dispossession and I understand that this pain is cross-generational,” he said.
Evidently Tapinos’s cross-generational pain is such he has forgotten that Ancient Greece was built on slavery. Next time he is invited to the Spartan Community of Brunswick, he might want to consider how helots fared in the society from which it took its name. Should Greek-Australians be forced to relinquish aspects of their heritage on this basis or does that apply only to Anglo-Australians?
As for you, Mayor Riley, have you ever heard of Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery? They have a very interesting website. I just discovered that one Samuel Riley owned a plantation in Hanover, Jamaica between 1778 and 1823. And guess what? He also owned around 130 slaves.
I know this revelation about your heritage must be devastating. But by your own measure, you cannot deny your surname has a very strong link with slavery. As the self-appointed commissar for correct names, you must act quickly and change it. I appreciate this is an obliteration of your identity, but as you constantly remind us, the priority is appeasing Indigenous activists.
Admittedly there is much inconvenience involved, not to mention considerable expense. You would have to stick your hand in your own pocket, and I know how upsetting that must be for a carefree spender of other people’s money. You will be receiving as much compensation as the many Moreland businesses that have to cater to your folly. In other words, nothing.
If you have trouble coming up with a new surname, give me a yell. Trust me, I already have a few in mind.
Taking left lunacy out of USAID
Elon Musk may have a point when he claims USAID is ‘a viper’s nest of radical left Marxists who hate America’.
Hate speech law review no excuse to criminalise 18C
Mandatory sentencing laws introduced by Tony Burke as an amendment to the government’s hate crimes bill have helped to ensure bipartisan support for the changes.