Before the first map, there were names

Every place in Queensland had a name long before anyone drew a line around it. Long before survey pegs were hammered into the soil, before rivers were catalogued and ranges numbered and coastlines traced onto parchment — the land was already spoken. For more than 65,000 years, Aboriginal place names carried knowledge passed down through generations. They were not decorative labels. They were living information. They told you where water was, where food could be found, where the land changed character, where ceremony took place, and what had happened here in the time before memory became history.

Aboriginal place names are symbolic of the Indigenous relationships to, and appreciation for, the land and water. Akin to a story map, they link and identify natural resources and landmarks essential for safe navigation, hunting, and foraging. They are not simply translations of English concepts into older sounds. They are a different kind of knowledge altogether — a form of cartography that had no need for paper, ink, or institutions to survive, because it was encoded into language itself and spoken into the landscape for thousands of generations.

Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have inhabited the land for over 65,000 years, developing a profound relationship with the environment and naming the landscape based on stories, landmarks, and connections to the Dreamtime. These names are more than simple labels; they are expressions of cultural identity, and they offer insight into the values, traditions, and beliefs of Indigenous communities.

We think about this a lot. We built a namespace for Queensland — a permanent, onchain address infrastructure — and the question of what names belong in that namespace is not a bureaucratic one. It is a deeply human one. And it keeps drawing us back to the same answer: the oldest names on this land belong here. Not as a gesture. Not as a footnote. As full members of the namespace, held with the same permanence we hold everything else.

What a namespace actually is

Let’s be clear about what we’re talking about before we go further, because the word “namespace” can sound technical in a way that obscures what it actually means.

A namespace is simply the universe of all possible names within a given system. When we built the Queensland namespace — the six permanent onchain TLDs that form its foundation: .queensland, .qld, .brisbane, .surfersparadise, .gold-coast, and .brisbane2032 — we were defining a space in which names could exist, be owned, and endure. The names registered within this infrastructure are immutable, transferable, and permanent. There are no renewals. Once a name is registered, it exists for as long as the chain does. The address is yours.

That permanence is not incidental. It is the entire point. In a world of annual-fee domain systems, expiry dates, and centralised registries that can revoke access at the whim of a regulator or a company policy, permanence is a radical act. What you register, you keep. What you claim, endures.

And when you understand that, you begin to see why the question of Aboriginal place names in this namespace is not an afterthought. It is, in many ways, the most important question the namespace can ask of itself.

The names that were already there

The landscape of South-East Queensland had traditional names prior to the settlement of Moreton Bay. Some have been maintained in place names or landmarks, others have been lost and replaced by introduced names or anglicised versions.

That sentence is quietly devastating if you let it sit with you. The names were there first. The landscape already had its own language. And then, systematically, those names were overlaid — sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately — by the vocabulary of a different civilisation arriving from the other side of the world.

We know the shape of what survived. Many Australian destinations have always been known by names derived from Aboriginal language words — the Queensland Sunshine Coast town of Noosa, for example, is thought to have gained its name from a Gubbi Gubbi language word meaning ‘shady place.’ Toowoomba means swamp. Maroochydore means place of black swans. In 2021, the spectacular Queensland sand island long known as Fraser Island had its name officially restored to K’gari, meaning ‘paradise’ in the Butchulla language.

These are the names that slipped through. The names that sounded interesting enough to a surveyor, or familiar enough to a settlement, or persistent enough that they could not be dislodged. But for every name that survived, there are many that did not. Over time, important local Aboriginal place names often became generalised to refer to wider areas. As knowledge of local place names decreased through the death of knowledge holders and cultural change impacts, place names became associated with larger areas. The granularity collapsed. The fine-grained map of lived landscape — the one that tracked seasonal change and ecological specificity — was replaced by a coarser grid.

Place names don’t just identify a location or geographical feature. They also give people a sense of community or promote a tourist destination. A place name can reveal a great deal about a location’s history, geography, culture and language. But the reverse is also true: when place names are lost, that history, that geography, that culture, and that language all become harder to reach. The name was the entry point.

What language loss actually means

The story of Aboriginal place names cannot be told apart from the story of Aboriginal languages. The names did not exist in isolation — they were part of living languages, spoken daily, embedded in conversation, story, and ceremony. When a language weakens, the names weaken with it. When a language goes silent, the names become archaeological artefacts rather than living speech.

Prior to colonisation, more than 250 First Nations languages were spoken, and multilingualism was the norm. Now, only 40 languages are still spoken and just 12 are being learnt by children.

Throughout history, colonial systems have repeatedly attempted to eliminate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. That is not rhetoric. It is documented, specific, and not ancient history. The policies that suppressed Indigenous language use were active within living memory. They were enforced. What was seen as a civilising process was actually the traumatic death of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, and the associated destruction of intellectually sophisticated cultural beliefs, practices, and activities that had been transferred from one generation to the next for more than 50,000 years.

Australia has the dubious distinction of having one of the highest rates of language loss worldwide. Prior to colonisation, more than 250 First Nations languages were spoken, but now 40 languages are still spoken and just 12 are being learnt by children.

Those are not abstract figures. Each number is a universe of names, stories, and ways of understanding the world that either persists, teeters on the edge, or is gone. And a namespace — a system designed to hold names permanently — is not indifferent to this reality. If we are going to build something that endures, we should ask: what do we want to endure within it?

Why the onchain infrastructure changes the equation

Here is where the technical and the cultural converge in a way we find genuinely compelling.

Traditional domain name systems — the ones that underpin the internet we all use — were built with a narrow character set in mind. ASCII: the letters and numbers of the English alphabet, plus a handful of punctuation marks. The internet’s naming infrastructure was designed by people using one language, for purposes that did not imagine the depth and diversity of human expression that would eventually want to live online.

That constraint has consequences. Aboriginal languages contain phonemes, letter combinations, and orthographic conventions that do not map cleanly onto ASCII. The apostrophe in K’gari is not a decorative flourish — it is a meaningful phonological marker. The specific combinations of consonants in Turrbal, Yugarapul, Jagera, Wulgurukaba, Butchulla — these are not approximations of English. They are their own systems, with their own internal logic, their own sounds, and their own spelling conventions developed by linguists and communities working carefully to preserve them.

Onchain naming infrastructure, built on blockchain, operates at a different level. An ENS name is a UTF-8 compatible string of text. UTF-8 is the character encoding standard that can represent virtually every character in every writing system on earth. What this means, practically, is that the underlying infrastructure of onchain naming does not inherently exclude any character. It does not have an opinion about which letters are legitimate.

ENS names are generally encoded using UTS-46. This means there is partial support for Unicode characters, including emoji. Known as Unicode Technical Standard 46, UTS-46 provides guidelines for implementing domain names with special characters, ensuring proper display and functionality across different languages and writing systems on the internet.

That matters. It matters enormously. The traditional web domain system was built with gates that, by design or default, excluded non-ASCII characters from functioning reliably. The onchain namespace does not have those same gates. It is built on an infrastructure that can, in principle, hold names from any language on earth — including the languages that were here before any other system of naming arrived.

We are not claiming that the technical is the same as the cultural — it obviously isn’t. Having infrastructure that can hold a name is not the same as having a name that deserves to be held. But the technical question matters because it has historically been used as an excuse. “We can’t support those characters.” “The system doesn’t allow it.” “It would break things.” Those excuses don’t apply here.

The problem with impermanence

One of the cruelest things that has happened to Aboriginal place names over the past two centuries is not simply that they were replaced. It is that they were replaced by a system that treated naming as a bureaucratic act — something done by committees, recorded in gazetteers, subject to revision, amendment, and political pressure.

Names, in that system, are not permanent. They are approved. They can be unapproved. A community can fight for decades to restore a traditional name, win that fight, and then find that a change in political climate, a different minister, a different committee, can unwind the work. The impermanence of official naming systems is a structural vulnerability for communities whose cultural continuity depends on the permanence of their connection to the landscape.

In recent years, efforts to restore or dual-designate Aboriginal place names in Australia have accelerated, particularly since 2020, as part of broader reconciliation initiatives. These changes often involve collaboration between Traditional Owners, governments, and mapping services to reinstate names in original languages, reflecting cultural significance and addressing historical erasure.

This work is genuinely important. But it operates entirely within systems that are, by nature, mutable. A gazetteer is a government document. It can be updated. A road sign can be removed. A dual naming policy can be reversed. These are not hypothetical risks — they are the lived reality of communities who have watched names come and go within formal systems.

The onchain namespace works differently. Once a name is registered on the chain, it is registered. There is no committee that can revoke it. There is no annual fee that, if unpaid, allows someone else to claim it. There is no expiry date, no renewal process, no government portal where a decision-maker can decide that this name is no longer approved.

Permanence, in this context, is not a technical feature. It is a form of respect.

What a name actually carries

To understand why this matters, you need to understand what a place name actually carries — what is encoded within it that would be lost if it disappeared.

Place names were an important part of Aboriginal culture. If you knew the place names and how they connected, you could walk the country and orientate yourself. This is not metaphorical. Aboriginal place names were — and in many communities remain — a navigational system of extraordinary precision and sophistication. The names of places formed a network, a web of information that connected geography to knowledge, knowledge to story, story to ceremony, ceremony to Country. Walking the names was literally walking the land.

Aboriginal place names demonstrate a deep connection with Country, and an affinity for understanding Australia’s seasonal rhythms. A name like “place where the home fires burn” or “meeting of the waters” or “place of the bandicoot” is not romantic decoration. It is ecological knowledge, encoded into language and passed on. The name was a record of what the land offered — what grew there, what ran there, what water moved through there, what season you were in when you found it.

One significant challenge is the historical transcription of Aboriginal names into European languages, which has often led to a loss of original meanings and cultural significance. Mispronunciations and changes in spelling can obscure the rich cultural heritage embedded in these names.

The anglicisation of Aboriginal place names — the smoothing, shortening, mis-transcription, and phonetic approximation that happened as settlers tried to write down sounds they didn’t have the training to hear — stripped much of this information out. What survived in anglicised form was often a hollow echo of what the original name contained. “Toowoomba” gestures vaguely toward a swampy origin. But the original name, in its original form, within its original language, held far more than that one word can convey.

Recovering Aboriginal place names is also a vital ingredient to revive Aboriginal languages because in daily conversation places are spoken about quite often, and the Aboriginal word can easily come back into use. Language revival and place name revival are not separate projects. They are the same project. When you speak a place by its traditional name, you practise the language. When you register it in a permanent, accessible namespace, you create an infrastructure where that practice can happen naturally, at scale, for anyone who wants to engage with it.

The namespace as cultural infrastructure

We’ve been careful throughout the development of the Queensland namespace not to make it something only legible to one kind of Queenslander. Queensland is vast. It is not simply coastal. It is not simply Brisbane. It is the Gulf, the Peninsula, the Tablelands, the Channel Country, the ranges, the river systems that the First Peoples named and knew in extraordinary detail before any European ship rounded Moreton Island.

To describe your country, you really have to have your language — because without language you cannot describe your culture, or your language or your country. You use your language for everything about your culture. And the sad thing is we only use the English language to describe our country at the moment.

That observation strikes us every time we think about what the Queensland namespace could be. If a namespace is only legible in one language, it reflects only one understanding of the land. It flattens Queensland into its most recent layer of settlement and ignores the fifty-plus thousand years of named, known, inhabited landscape that existed before it.

We are not claiming that we have the answers to how Aboriginal place names should be incorporated. We are not the right voices to determine what names are appropriate, which communities have authority over which names, what spellings are correct, or how registration rights should be governed in relation to traditional ownership. These are questions for communities, Elders, language custodians, and linguists — people who carry the knowledge and the authority to speak to it.

What we are saying is that the infrastructure we have built does not prevent any of that from happening. In fact, it is better suited to it than any naming system that came before it. The onchain namespace is permanent, character-set agnostic, not owned by any government, not subject to ministerial decisions, and not dependent on annual fees that a community might not be able to sustain. It is, in structural terms, a better home for these names than a government gazetteer.

Traditional names can be officially recognised and recorded, which enables the story and culture of the local Aboriginal community to be shared. We believe the same is true — perhaps more durably true — in the onchain namespace. A name registered here can be shared. It can be pointed to. It can anchor a website, a wallet address, a community portal, a digital resource about the language it comes from. It is not just a label. It is a location in the digital world, owned permanently, by whoever holds the key.

Place naming is a recognised way of reawakening and preserving languages. If that is true in stone-and-signpost official systems, it is at least as true in onchain infrastructure — and arguably more so, because the permanence is structural rather than political.

The weight of what was lost

We want to sit with the difficulty here, rather than rush past it.

Obscure historical records are continually being uncovered by modern researchers and more place names are likely to be found. But some are not coming back. Some were lost before anyone thought to record them. Some were deliberately suppressed. Some disappeared when the last speaker of a language died without having had the chance — or the safety — to pass on what they knew.

Some meanings have been lost forever. That is a fact that no infrastructure project changes. The onchain namespace does not recover what colonisation destroyed. Nothing does. The names that were lost are lost. The languages that went extinct are extinct. The knowledge that was encoded in them — the navigational precision, the ecological detail, the ceremonial geography — much of it is simply gone.

What the namespace offers is not restoration. It is a different kind of commitment: to not lose any more. To make a space where what remains can be held with the seriousness it deserves — not in a government form that can be revised, not on a website that will expire, not in a DNS record with an annual fee — but in a permanent onchain address that endures as long as the infrastructure itself endures.

Traditional languages are a key element of Indigenous peoples’ identity, cultural expression, autonomy, spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and wellbeing. We take that seriously. A namespace that honours this is not performing sensitivity. It is recognising that the names of places are not neutral administrative tokens. They are expressions of sovereignty, knowledge systems, and cultural identity that belong to the communities who created them and have spoken them for longer than any recorded human history.

On the question of who registers what

We want to be honest about a tension we carry.

The onchain namespace is open. Anyone can register a name within it. That openness is part of its strength — it is not curated by a committee with ideological preferences, it is not gatekept by a government deciding who has legitimate claim to an address. The permissionless nature of it is inseparable from its power.

But openness, in the context of Indigenous cultural property, is not automatically good. There is a real and documented history of non-Indigenous people claiming Aboriginal names, places, stories, and symbols for their own purposes — commercial, artistic, or simply careless. Openness without respect is just a different form of appropriation.

We do not have a clean answer to this. What we can say is that we think the right approach is not to restrict the namespace from above — not to designate certain names as off-limits to registration except by certain people, which is a bureaucratic solution that reintroduces the problems of centralised control. What we think is right is something more like social understanding: the recognition, held by everyone who participates in the Queensland namespace, that some names carry a weight that demands care. That registering a traditional Aboriginal place name carries a responsibility. That it should be done in relationship with the communities whose language the name belongs to.

Dual naming is the practice of recognising both original Aboriginal names and European names for places. It is important because it validates Aboriginal connections to the land, encourages learning and respect among diverse populations, and helps preserve and revitalise traditional names and their meanings for future generations.

The dual naming model that governments have begun to adopt — officially recognising traditional names alongside their colonial counterparts — is a step toward that kind of recognition. The restoration of an Aboriginal name to be used officially provides recognition to the Aboriginal name and assists in reawakening the language of that area. What we are building is not a government naming system, but it can hold both. A permanent onchain address for the traditional name, and a permanent onchain address for the colonial name, can coexist without either cancelling the other out.

The oldest names in the namespace

There is something we keep returning to when we think about this. The names that were here before any other names — the names spoken for tens of thousands of years before the first map was drawn — are precisely the names most at risk of not having a permanent home in the digital world.

The only place names unique to Australia are Indigenous names. They are both beautiful and inspirational. They are also, in the context of global digital infrastructure, among the most underrepresented. The internet’s naming systems were built for English first, for other European languages next, and for everything else as a complicated afterthought. Aboriginal languages were never considered.

The Queensland namespace was not built to repeat that mistake. We built it with permanence as its core value, and permanence applies to all the names that belong here — not just the English ones, not just the ones that fit neatly into a twelve-letter alphanumeric string, not just the names that arrived with the last two hundred years of settlement.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages can play a significant role in ensuring connection to land, culture, Songlines, kinship, history, and stories. Language attrition in communities is a result of colonisation and past adverse government policies which rendered Indigenous languages as obsolete and unnecessary. Redressing that loss is a vital step in reconciliation and social justice.

We are not reconciliation professionals. We are not linguists. We are not cultural advisors. We are people who built a piece of digital infrastructure, and we are thinking carefully about what it means for that infrastructure to be genuinely of Queensland — all of Queensland, not a postcard version of it.

All of Queensland means the Turrbal and Jagera peoples of Meanjin. It means the Butchulla of K’gari. It means the Gubbi Gubbi of the Sunshine Coast and the Kombumerri of the Gold Coast and the Yugarapul of the valley country and every language group across this vast, extraordinary piece of country. It means the names those peoples gave the rivers, the ranges, the waterholes, the headlands, the plains, and the places where ceremony happened. It means those names belong in the namespace — not as curiosities, not as heritage items, but as first-class members of the address space.

What permanence means for a name

The philosophers and linguists sometimes talk about names as if they are just labels — arbitrary strings of sound attached to things for convenience. But anyone who has grown up hearing a place called by its true name — by the name that carries its history and its meaning — knows that names are not arbitrary. They are claims. They are knowledge. They are the way a community says: we were here, we knew this place, and this is what it meant to us.

This brings an understanding of who we are and why it’s important to continue documenting and celebrating more than 65,000 years of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture.

The Queensland namespace offers, for the first time, infrastructure that can hold these names with the permanence they have always deserved. Not in a book that can be pulped. Not in a policy that can be repealed. Not in a gazetteer that a future government can revise. On the chain, where immutability is not a promise made by a person but a property of the system itself.

These changes involve collaboration between Traditional Owners, governments, and mapping services to reinstate names in original languages, reflecting cultural significance and addressing historical erasure. We see the Queensland onchain namespace as a place where a different kind of collaboration is possible — one not dependent on government approval, committee votes, or bureaucratic timelines. One where a community or a language custodian or a cultural organisation can register a traditional name, hold it permanently, and build from it whatever they want to build.

That is not nothing. In fact, given the history, it might be something quite significant.

Closing thought: a namespace that knows where it is

When we think about what we want the Queensland namespace to be — what kind of thing it should be in twenty years, in fifty, in a hundred — we keep coming back to the same answer. We want it to be a namespace that knows where it is.

It is in Queensland. It is on Country. It sits on top of tens of thousands of years of named, known, inhabited landscape. The addresses that exist within it are not floating in the digital void — they are attached to a specific place in the world, a place with a specific history, a specific culture, and a specific set of names that predate every other name in the system by an immense margin of time.

A namespace that ignores that is a namespace that doesn’t know where it is. A namespace that holds those names — that makes space for them, that treats them as legitimate, permanent, and full members of the address space — is a namespace that is genuinely of this place. Not just named after it. Of it.

That is what we want to build. And we think the oldest names on this land are part of what makes that possible.