What the idea of renaming Australia “Alcheringa” reveals about Country, colonialism and the limits of symbolic change
IBefore Australia was a nation, this continent was home to hundreds of sovereign peoples, languages and names.
As another NAIDOC Month draws to a close, I found myself thinking about the name 'Australia'.
This is my birthland, though not my ancestral land. I was born here and feel bound to this place, but I also understand that my relationship to it is not the same as that of the peoples whose cultures, laws and memories have grown from Country over tens of thousands of years. That distinction matters, particularly when discussing something as intimate and politically charged as naming.
The word Australia is so familiar that it can seem inevitable. We inherit it before we are old enough to question it. It appears on maps, passports, coins, schoolbooks and sporting uniforms until the name and the continent become almost impossible to separate.
But names are not neutral. They tell us who possessed the authority to describe a place and whose understanding of that place became official. They can preserve memory, but they can also bury it.
Public discussion about using Aotearoa alongside, or instead of, New Zealand prompted me to wonder whether Australia might one day undergo a similar reconsideration. Could this continent carry a name grounded not in European geography, but in the cultures that have belonged to it since time immemorial?
The name that initially captured my imagination was Alcheringa, often translated into English as “the Dreaming.”
There is something undeniably evocative about it. It suggests a land that is alive with memory, ancestry and meaning. It offers a radically different image of the continent from the distant “southern land” imagined and labelled by Europeans. Australia describes a location on a map. Alcheringa seems to describe a relationship with existence itself.
My first instinct was to make a straightforward case for the change. The longer I considered it, however, the more complicated—and more revealing—the idea became.
Alcheringa is not a single, universally shared Aboriginal name for Australia. It is an Anglicised rendering associated with Arrernte language and culture in Central Australia. Related terms such as Altyerre refer to ancestral beings, creation, law and the formative period in which Country took shape. These ideas are living parts of particular cultural and spiritual traditions, not poetic resources freely available for a settler nation to repurpose. The Central Land Council’s account of Eastern Arrernte Country offers important context for this meaning.
That distinction changes the question. Renaming Australia “Alcheringa” without the authority of the people to whom the word belongs could repeat the very pattern the change was supposed to challenge: taking something Indigenous, removing it from its Country and declaring it national property.
There is no single Aboriginal culture, language or name that can stand effortlessly for the whole continent. At the time of European colonisation, approximately 250 distinct Indigenous language groups existed here, many with multiple dialects. Each language was—and remains—connected to particular lands, waters, histories and systems of knowledge. The National NAIDOC Committee describes Indigenous languages as inseparable from land, ancestors, law and cultural identity.
This plurality is not an obstacle to be solved. It is one of the fundamental truths any honest national identity must learn to hold.
The continent now called Australia was never culturally nameless, waiting for Europeans to describe it. It was already comprehended in extraordinary detail. Country was named through languages, songlines, kinship, ceremony and law. Mountains, rivers, coastlines, waterholes and paths carried their own identities and relationships. The land was not a blank continental object but a vast network of sovereign Countries.
Australia’s history therefore did not begin when Europeans entered it into their maps. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived with and cared for this continent for more than 65,000 years. Hundreds of Nations existed here, maintaining distinctive cultures while trading, negotiating and sharing knowledge across immense distances. This deeper national history is recognised in the NAIDOC theme “Always Was, Always Will Be”.
Renaming can help bring suppressed histories into public view. Restoring Indigenous place names—or using them alongside colonial names—can change how people understand where they live. A name such as Uluru does more than replace Ayers Rock on a sign. It directs attention towards the people, language and cultural authority already belonging to that place.
Yet changing the name of an entire country is different. Who would choose it? Which Nation’s language would be used? Would one Indigenous word be asked to represent hundreds of distinct peoples? Would the change return any actual authority to First Nations communities, or would it allow the rest of the country to congratulate itself for adopting a beautiful new symbol?
A nation can learn to pronounce an Indigenous name while continuing to ignore Indigenous voices.
That is the danger of treating renaming as reconciliation in itself. Symbolic recognition matters, but it cannot substitute for truth-telling, land rights, protection of sacred sites, language revitalisation, political representation or agreements that recognise the enduring sovereignty of First Nations peoples. As NAIDOC’s “Heal Country” statement makes clear, recognising Country requires changes to political, historical and administrative realities, not merely alterations to national language.
Perhaps, then, the value of imagining “Alcheringa” is not that it gives us an immediate answer. Its value is that it unsettles the apparent inevitability of “Australia.”
It reminds us that the current name is also a cultural choice, even if centuries of use have made it feel natural. It invites us to ask what kind of history the name Australia centres, what it leaves outside the frame and whether a nation created through colonisation can ever rename itself without confronting the structures that colonisation produced.
If this country were ever to receive a new name, the process could not begin with a non-Indigenous writer discovering a resonant word and proposing it on behalf of everyone else. It would need to emerge through First Nations leadership, widespread consultation and respect for the sovereignty of the many peoples whose Countries compose this continent. The conversation would matter as much as the eventual name.
It may be that no single replacement could adequately represent such diversity. Australia might instead deepen the return of local names, allowing people to understand themselves as living first on Gadigal Country, Kaurna Country, Noongar Country, Arrernte Country or one of the many other Countries across the continent. A more truthful national consciousness may come not from finding one Indigenous word for everything, but from learning the many names that colonisation taught us to forget.
I remain moved by the word Alcheringa and by the worldview it gestures towards. But admiration does not confer ownership. If the word is ever proposed as a name for the continent, that proposal must belong first to the people whose language and knowledge give it meaning.
The real task is larger than replacing one word with another. It is to transform our relationship with the place beneath the word: to recognise that Country is not scenery, property or an empty stage for the Australian nation. It is living, storied and inseparable from the peoples who have cared for it across thousands of generations.
Perhaps the question is not simply what Australia should be called.
Perhaps it is whether we are prepared to become a country worthy of being renamed.
Picture: Uluṟu at sunrise, Aṉangu Country. Photograph: Michelle Corcoran, “Sunrise at Uluru,” via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
