The name of the world’s largest sand island is changing. So it should

The guy on stage meant no harm. He was just doing his job as an MC, introducing a presentation about Sri Lanka, trying to give the crowd down at Darling Harbour in Sydney some context, get them excited.

“So,” he said to his first guest, “Sri Lanka has more than 10,000 years of history. That’s amazing isn’t it? Pretty hard for someone from Australia to even understand that.”

Fraser Island is officially reverting its name to K’gari.Credit: Tourism and Events Queensland

Blink, and you’ll miss it. A long history? Hard to understand? It struck me then, and it’s stayed with me since, just easily and how casually we in Australia tend to erase Indigenous history.

The MC wasn’t doing anything malicious. He was just repeating what people my age and probably his age had been taught at school; the story we tell ourselves as Australians; the myth that so many of us benefit from propagating. Australia is a new country. We are young and free.

Never mind that there have been people living on this wide, brown land for more than 60,000 years. Never mind that this country is home to the oldest continuously living culture on Earth. Never mind that 10,000 years is nothing.

I thought of this again last week when the Queensland government made a big announcement: the island we have come to know as Fraser, the world’s largest sand island, will revert to its original name, K’gari (pronounced “Gurri”).

The phrasing of the announcement is important. Fraser Island isn’t being renamed. It’s having its original moniker reinstated, the moniker bestowed upon it by the Butchulla People during their estimated 20,000 years on the island, a name that has deep ties to the stories and spirituality of the place.

I’m sure that wording was partly to head off the inevitable criticism from conservative corners of the internet, views you could see in the comments sections of stories last week on the change: people moaning about “wokeness” and political correctness gone mad. Predictable outrage at an island reverting to its original name, rather than one made in honour of an English woman who was marooned on K’gari and whose fanciful tales of the Butchulla people there led to their massacre and dispossession.

For the Butchulla, this is a historic achievement.

“K’gari is one of those places that is incredibly well known, not just nationally but internationally,” says Dr Rose Barrowcliffe, a postdoctoral research fellow and Butchulla woman.

Lake McKenzie on K’gari.

“We have a huge amount of international visitors that come to see K’gari every year. So, what we are doing when we are respecting Indigenous place names, is we are respecting Indigenous culture.”

And this, to me, is the key triumph of the reinstatement of K’gari. Because if Australians, those of us born here and who have lived here our entire lives, are so quick to erase Indigenous history – I grew up just near Hervey Bay, but had never even heard words like K’gari or Butchulla until a few years ago – then consider how international visitors would not even be aware of it.

Name changes like this are vital for the way we as Australians see our country, but also the way the rest of the world sees us. The names of our premier international tourism destinations are the first impressions visitors have of Australia, the first thing they think about.

How much more appropriate and important is it that that impression is K’gari, and not Fraser Island?

I suppose I can understand why some of the more conservative types might push back against this. Names imply ownership. They might feel that they’re losing something. But really, Australia gains hugely from this. We gain 20,000 years of history. We gain stories and culture. And maybe even a step towards reconciliation.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. Famously, the rock that for tens of thousands of years had been Uluru was, for just 120 years, known as Ayers Rock. Its reversion has been a worldwide success, to the point now that it’s hard to believe white colonists were ever brazen enough to give it their own moniker, to bestow upon something so stunning and so spiritual the name of a guy who was forced to resign as Chief Minister of South Australia five times in 10 years.

Surely the more natural attractions in Australia that can revert to their original names, the better. It’s not like white settlers gave them good names, anyway. How much better is Colomatta than the Blue Mountains? Or Yurong than Mrs Macquarie’s Point? Or Gariwerd than the Grampians? Or Julaymba than the Daintree?

Now is the perfect time, too, for righting historic wrongs. The Sydney Morning Herald is wrestling with its own history, and last week formally apologised for its support of the stockmen who massacred 28 Kamilaroi people at Myall Creek Station in 1838. This year all Australians have the chance to finally enshrine an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament in our Constitution.

The opportunity to reinstate the original names of the places we so proudly show off to the outside world is one we should embrace wholeheartedly. This is our history. All of it.