This beautiful bird’s former name represented colonial dominance – and told us nothing about the species
, the environmental scientist Stephen Garnett argued that bird names should be culturally and socially inclusive. Common names are a historic reflection of the power structures of society. Naming places and their fauna after their colonial conquerors is the most naked expression of dominance and ownership.
If you’ll forgive the phrase, the reversion to pink cockatoo represents the tip of the spear in the wider revision of Australian bird names. “It’s the easy one, because it’s the most contentious,” Dooley says. There has been very little pushback. “A few people have harrumphed and said that this decolonising of names is political correctness gone mad. But that’s only one or two voices.”
He points out that pink cockatoo has been the predominant white Australian epithet given to the species anyway, starting with the RAOU’s first official checklist in 1926, and Australia’s first field guide, Neville Cayley’s What Bird is That . There are many First Nations names for the cockatoo, the best known being the Wiradjuri wijugla, whimsically anglicised as “wee juggler”.
The more practical problem with eponymous names is their lack of utility. They tell us nothing about the species. Even the multihued Gouldian finch – an iconic species named not after John, but his wife, Elizabeth – is better described by the alternative, rainbow finch.
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