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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 12 Hansard (14 November) . . Page.. 3662 ..

The following criteria were developed to name streets and public places in Canberra:

Where a name commemorates a person, the name is not generally used until 12 months after the person's death.

Names are not duplicated.

Homonyms should not be used if their use could lead to confusion or difficulty of any kind.

Names which are likely to give offence are avoided.

Where possible, there is a correlation between the length of a street and the length of its name. Additionally, full (or double-barrelled) names are not used for residential streets because they can be difficult to use when addressing correspondence, preparing business documents and the like.

Generally, an arterial road is assigned a more significant name.

In the case of this disallowable instrument, the names originally chosen for Horse Park include only two women: Johanna Tesselaar and Irene Gormly. To be frank, it has been difficult for the Place Names Committee to find sufficient names of women who were industrialists or pioneers, whose names have not been used elsewhere in Canberra and who are deceased.

Discussions between my office and Ms Dundas' office and between PALM and Ms Dundas have highlighted this difficulty. It also needs to be appreciated that considerable time and effort goes into researching suitable names, but the time frames available for finalising instruments for the land release program often prevent a more exhaustive approach. A similar challenge has arisen in naming Gungahlin streets that honour sportsmen and women. The overwhelming majority of our prominent sportswomen are very much alive.

Having acknowledged the difficulty of identifying suitable names of women to commemorate in the Horse Park Estates, I informed Ms Dundas that the Place Names Committee supports the substitution of four female names that have been identified by her and her staff in conjunction with staff from PALM.

This is only possible in the circumstances because four men currently named in the instrument do not have living relatives. All the others included do have relatives who have been notified and who expressed delight at having a family member commemorated in this way. In seeking to change instruments we need to be careful not to cause any offence or embarrassment to relatives. That said, all the names that are removed from the instrument will be used for place names in other estates.

As Ms Dundas has indicated, she is proposing in her motion to substitute four names in the instrument with these names: Adlard Place, after Edith Adlard, one of the first women to own and operate a suburban pharmacy; Birdseye Street, after Sylvia Birdseye, who was involved with family and friends in the operation of the first motorised country bus service in South Australia; Eva West Street, after Evelyn (Eva) West, who was one of the first women in Australia to qualify as an accountant; and Marie Dalley Street, after Marie Dalley OBE, who started a successful scrap metal business in Kewell. She branched out into other businesses, including a butcher's shop, was ultimately appointed a special magistrate of the Victorian Children's Court and became the first female mayor for Kew.

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