Discussion: Surrey Hills? That's where ...

Surrey Hills? That's where I grew up (guess you aren't in SE England though...)

( and Richmond is in Surrey too)

but Blackburn is much further north in England - can't they come up with original names?

Sydney's got one too, but they can't spell it.

Richmond is particularly popular - in fact a question I asked in a quiz I organised a year or two back was "which is the only Australian state which doesn't have a town or suburb called Richmond?".

The most incongruous contrast between an Australian placename and its British namesake is undoubtedly St. Kilda, whose name is shared by the most remote island of the Outer Hebrides and a very non-remote suburb which is Melbourne's traditional home of sex, drugs and rock n' roll (although it's a bit tamer than it once was).

I could have sworn St Kilda was a mangrove swamp north of Adelaide with an adventure playground.

> can't they come up with original names?
Waanyarra is the start of an event this weekend. Access from Bendigo via Tarnagulla.

Nah, St Kilda's a beach in Dunedin (which in a half decent southerly probably feels like it's in the Outer Hebrides...)

Most place names in Australia fall into one of 4 categories;
- Home sick names from the UK; such as Richmond, New South Wales
- named after important people; Queensland, Victoria
- descriptive; Forest Hill, Park Orchards, Black Rock
- Indiginous; Yarra River, Uluru, Birrarung Marr

V informative Bruce.

Indeed. As a sidetrack from a meeting I was in this morning, I went through a bit of a placename sample - the 112 places in my long-term temperature data set, and came up with the approximate breakdown:

(a) Names from other places - 16 (including two Richmonds)
(b) Descriptive/geographic - 8
(c) Named after people or things - 43
(d) Aboriginal - 45

(a) and (c) get a bit blurred because quite a few places were named after assorted British aristocrats (e.g. Carnarvon was named after the Earl of Carnarvon, not Carnarvon itself). The most unusual entry in category (c) is Tarcoola, which was named after a horse that won a Melbourne Cup in the 1890s.

One oddity - not in my list of 112 - is Bendigo (which sounds Aboriginal but was actually the nickname of a 19th-century British boxer), which was originally Castleton and then Sandhurst (both placenames drawn from Britain).

Never heard of Bendigo as Castleton - you learn something every day (by reading Blair's log).

I read it on Wikipedia so it must be true :-). Sounds like it only had that name for a few years as an agricultural district before much of a town developed.