no:menclature of south Australia. 471 



Very few ])ersons have a genius for hitting on a really good 

 name, and not many possess the faculty or gift thai characterised 

 Flinders when he suggested, in a modest footnote to his journal, 

 the name Australia as preferable to New Holland or Terra Aus- 

 tralis. 



His Excellency Colonel-Governor Gawler, K.H., evidently had 

 not this faculty, consequently the names he suggested have never 

 become popular ; but the practice he urged has not fallen into 

 disuse so far as the Survey Department is concerned, for the 

 present Surveyor-General has caused several thousand native 

 names to be collected and officially recorded. But what use can 

 these names be put to, we may be excused for asking, if, as tiie 

 outlying country becomes settled, other names are substituted ? 



OUR OWN NAMES. 



The coastal names of South Australia, with but few exceptions, 

 are surnames bestowed by Flinders when mapping our shores in 

 1802. They perpetuate the names of the officers and crew of his 

 ship Investigator, also of the Lords of the Admiralty, and other 

 friends of his. A majority of the inland names have been 

 introduced by settlers, dating from 1836, who made use of familiar 

 names — English, Scotch, and German, according to their nationality ; 

 and associated them with the sites they selected for occupation. 



Next to Flinders, we owe the greater number of names to 

 Colonel Light, E. J. Eyre, Governor Gawler, and early explorers, 

 all names of importance given by them having been confirmed by 

 notices published in the Government Gazette, or by communications 

 to the Home Government ; also by being recorded upon official 

 maps in the office of the Surveyor-General. 



We find that names of places in South Australia frequently 

 stand connected with circumstances in which individuals were 

 placed, so that the events of a jjassing hour have thus left their 

 impress in such names as Memory Cove, Cold and Wet, Happy 

 Valley, Birthday Creek, and so on. They are often descriptive, 

 either in a literal sense, as Mount Lofty, Holdfast Bay, Bald Hill, 

 Brown Hill Creek, Ironstone Lagoon, Rocky River, or in a 

 figurative sense, as the Sugarloaf, Tent Hill, Three Sisters, Biscuit 

 Flat, Leg of Mutton Lake, the Punch Bowl, and the Devil's 

 Elbow ; whilst pei'sonal names have been generally applied to 

 prominent natural features, as Mount Biown, Lake Albeit, River 

 Torrens, &c. 



We have clearly, therefore, several sets of names, representing 

 different classes of ideas — historical, descriptive, commemorative, 

 and imaginative — having much in common with the classification 

 of native names previously referred to ; and it would be quite as 

 difficult for us to explain to the aborigines the literal meaning of 

 some of our best known names — as, for instance. North Adelaide, 



