Insular toponymies: Pristine place-naming on Norfolk Island, South Pacific and Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, South Australia

Abstract

Documenting patterns of pristine toponymy, or toponymic knowledge in locations where people remember the locations and histories of people and events associated with extant placenames, is a worthwhile endeavour in linguistically pristine island environments, i.e. isolated, small island situations that have witnessed recent human habitation and that were uninhabited prior to colonisation. This study used the toponymy of Norfolk Island, South Pacific, an external territory of Australia as a main study and compared it to the toponymy of Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, South Australia. The principal research question for the study sought to establish whether the difference between official and unofficial toponyms and processes of toponymy in the two island environments was a consequence of the degree of linguistic, cultural and ecological embeddedness of these toponyms and toponymic processes.