Australia Post to allow traditional aboriginal place names in addresses after campaign

Activists say move is important step to ‘decolonise’ Australia

Mail can now be addressed including the traditional aboriginal name above the normal street address, city and state (Australia Post)

Australia’s postal service has said people can include the traditional Aboriginal place names in addresses when sending mail, following a campaign.  

After a petition calling for the change quickly gathered more than 14,000 signatures, Australia Post rewrote its guidance on how to address letters and parcels on its website.  

Now, anyone can include the Aboriginal place name before writing the designated street, city and state address, and it will still be delivered.  

The change would “acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land your item is being delivered on”, Australia Post said, although the guidance is totally optional and post without Aboriginal place names will still be delivered.  

Prior to the arrival of European settlers, Australia was roughly divided into hundreds of communities of indigenous people.  

Each gave their locale its own name in their native tongue. For instance, the modern city of Melbourne was built in Woiworung, while the area around Sydney was known by Aboriginals as Eora. The nation’s capital, Canberra, lies in Ngunawal.  

“Acknowledging the traditional custodians of this land, their ancestors, elders and the commitment to reconciliation with Indigenous Australians is very important to us,” Australia Post said in a statement.

“That’s why we’ve worked on how you can include traditional place names when sending and receiving your parcel.”

The announcement was made during NAIDOC Week, an annual event in Australia that celebrates the history and culture of indigenous peoples.  

The online petition which sparked the move was started by Rachael McPhail, who herself hails from the Gomeroi (or Gamilaraay) Aboriginal community, whose ancestral lands stretch across New South Wales and Queensland.  

Australia Post acknowledged Ms McPhail’s role in the campaign by including her name in its examples of how to correctly use traditional place names.  

But as well as her successful call for Australia Post to include indigenous place names, her petition also calls for the postal service to collate a database of all such names, in consultation with elders from aboriginal communities.  

In a message posted online, she said: “The public support from Australia Post in regards to using the traditional place names in addresses is heartening. This is an important first step towards decolonisation in Australia.  

Some of the hundreds of indigenous place names have been collected in a map created by the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies (AIATSIS)

“However, the campaign isn’t over — we still need to push Australia Post to create the national database of traditional place names.”

However, Australia Post has not created such a database, instead pointing customers towards the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, a national body which explores the history of the country’s first nations and whose website includes a map of the hundreds of groups and their names which made up indigenous Australia.