Long TextExercise 66 of 81

In the summer of 1978, a committee of linguists, anthropologists, and government officials convened in a windowless conference room in Canberra to deliberate upon a question that might, to the uninitiated, have seemed trivially administrative: what to call the places of Australia. The committee's task was to…

• What made the 1978 naming committee's task more than a routine administrative exercise?
• How does the writer characterise the European tradition of place-naming in Australia?