By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
IF you happen to be in Adelaide and your wife or child becomes sick, you should promptly take them to Ngankiku Ngartuku Kukuwardli! Who? What? Where? you ask, wondering if your auditory senses temporarily failed you.
“Oh, we forgot to tell you, that’s the name of what used to be known as the Adelaide Women’s and Children’s Hospital,” you might be told.
When Cory Bernardi, who is running for a seat in South Australia’s Upper House for One Nation, questioned the name of the “Niina Marni” Centre at Adelaide University he faced a backlash from the woke left. How dare he question an Indigenous name, they screamed.
However, Bernardi says he’s determined to highlight the absurdity of the name-changing revolution that has taken hold across the state, facilitated by the Liberal-Labor Uniparty.
It’s apparently part of the “Indigenisation” process going on in South Australia where the 43,000 people who identify as Indigenous have been given the right to vote for 14 representatives of seven areas of mostly desert bordering the NT-SA border in the north called the APY electorates.
The SA Electoral Commission says the Anangu Pitjantjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Executive Board “handles roads, buildings, mining, and other important matters for the community.”
However the Kaurna elders in Adelaide have been working with Adelaide City Council and various state governments since the early 2000s on dual naming of significant sites, in addition to identifying and shutting off various “sacred” or archaeologically-significant sites under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988.
“Nobody knows what these names mean. It is not only tokenistic, but also dangerous,” says Bernardi. “I’ve been approached by paramedics, police officers and truck drivers telling me they don’t understand and can’t read the new place names with ease, let alone pronounce them.
“The latest example is the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, which is also now referred to as “Ngangkiku Ngartuki, Kukuwardli”. Do you know what that means? We certainly don’t,” he says.
Local media has pointed out that the Kaurna dialect, the words translate into “a place of health that cares for women during pregnancy and birthing, babies, children and young people”.
The Guardian also highlighted the absurdity of words being invented for “First Nations language” to cover things that never existed in pre-European Aboriginal culture. For instance, Adelaide University is translated as Tirkangkaku – a name the university administrators say they are “proud to share, honour and promote”.
“Why are we doing this to ourselves? This is virtue signalling on steroids. We need to end it.” Bernardi continued. “In Australia, English is our language and it should be the only language displayed on our shared public buildings.
“Don’t let anyone tell you this stuff doesn’t matter. It does. It’s deeply insidious and ideological. In the sights of this pernicious agenda is our shared Anglo heritage, history and values.
“There are two choices. You either stand up against this agenda and push back, or accept defeat and watch piece by piece as our heritage risks being dismantled.”
Bernardi’s comments have created quite an cultural war, with opinion sharply divided between supporters and detractors. His other video questioned the Niina Marni sign outside Adelaide University. It apparently means “Hello, how are you?” Both videos attracted 100,000 likes.
Whether it will help his campaign is another issue, as he is just one of 48 candidates running for 11 of the 22 seats in the SA Legislative Council. There are 47 Lower House seats.
The SA election will be held on March 21st and will be seen as a test of the accuracy of recent national opinion polls showing One Nation surging ahead of the combined vote of the Liberal-National Coalition and the Greens.
