Australia’s national anthem begins, ‘Australians all let us rejoice,/ for we are one and free’. Few now reflect on the Enlightenment presumption of a racial ‘oneness’ that led to the first colonial naming of the people inhabiting this land, the ‘Australians’. That the name was given to the land’s first inhabitants, and not its recently arrived colonists, now seems an unspoken irony. For contemporary Australians, the very name stands as a symbol of colonial appropriation. In Australia’s name lies a perennial legacy of race, colonisation and Europe’s Enlightenment.

‘Had I permitted myself any innovation’, wrote Captain Matthew Flinders in the preface to his last life’s labour, A Voyage to Terra Australis, ‘it would have been’ to name the land ‘Australia; as being more agreeable to the ear, and as an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth’ (Voyage, vol. 1, introduction).