Short Stories

#48—On finding inspiration by reading the signs, quite literally.

Welcome to Mind Flexing, your fortnightly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.

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A warm welcome to those who found me over my January break. I’m excited you’re here and you’ve given me a cheery start to my Substack year. And to all those who’ve journeyed with me on my first year on Substack, thank you for travelling this road together. It’s an honour. Let’s see where 2025 takes us. And so, let us begin…

Whoever named Big Flat Track was surely having a laugh. From its very start it climbs as if it’s aimed at the heavens. At times it’s so steep dirt will not cling to it, having eroded to bedrock long ago to reveal a vein of quartz cutting a striking sight. Clearly, it’s not flat, nor does it lead anywhere that one could imagine, even in the slightest, to resemble something flat. At its base in the valley are the remains of an old sawmill easily hidden by the summer grass, and I wonder if the old miller had anything to do with the name. Did he joke with the little voice inside his head about this very not-flat track as he death defyingly carted logs down the mountainside? What’s its story? A story lost in time and left to marinate in our imaginations.

Short stories are everywhere, sometimes remembered, often forgotten, but always inspiring our curiosity. One or two words long, or in the instance of Tumbledown Dick Hill, three. Stories that survive in street signs and place names all over the world. It’s said this particular hill—which, if ever you pass has a lovely outlook over Sydney’s Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park—was so called because of a rather narky bullock that, if having decided his load was too heavy, would plonk himself down and refuse to pull his dray up the said hill. It’s quite a clever refusal strategy perfected by labradors and toddlers worldwide, and because of this habit, the bullock’s master, William Oliver, called him Tumbledown Dick. Naturally, the hill became Dick’s. There’s more to this story, however, and for that we need to travel across the world to the home of weird place names—the United Kingdom. Tumbledown Dick Hill in Cumnor, UK is one of a few places that satirically honour the original Tumbledown Dick, who was nonother than Richard Cromwell—the failed heir of Oliver Cromwell. For a whole nine months in 1658, Richard ruled as Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland (in essence, a monarchy by a different name), but Richard was not his father and, failing to maintain control of just about everything, he resigned from power and handed control back to the monarchy, an abrupt and spectacular fall that earned him the Tumbledown Dick moniker.

Tomato In The Dray, By Alia Parker.

Place names are intriguing short story tellers. There’s Doganabuganaram Road in NSW (supposedly a man once stayed there with a dog and a bug and a ram), Mount Buggery in Victoria (and it is a bugger to get over when all you want to do is get down), Mount Disappointment, conveniently located in the same range, (and describes how the explorers Hume and Hovell felt when they encountered it), and the town of Nowhere Else in Tasmania (because there was nowhere else at the end of that road).

Recently, while driving a road that cut a nervous line between a steep embankment and the river rapids below, we rounded a corner called £1000 Bend. One would have to imagine something rather unfortunate and very expensive happened there quite some time ago. Soon after, while passing through a state forest, there was Castor Oil Track shortly followed by Tomato Track and given that neither occur naturally in the Australian bush, one can only assume a fortunate soul once stumbled upon someone’s lost groceries in that precise location.

There are always stories in the names originating from our First Nations’ languages, like Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya Hill, which happens to be the longest place name in Australia and means ‘where the devil urinates’ in the local Pitjantjatjara language. Don’t drink the water there! There’s Coogee, which despite being home to million-dollar beachfront houses, means ‘stinking place’ in the local Dharug language because the seaweed that washes up there to this day really does stink. There’s Marayong, where I grew up, also Dharug for ‘the place of emus’, at least it was, long, long ago, it’s the ‘Australian Dream’ of urban sprawl these days; and there’s Katoomba, where the ‘shiny, falling water’ in Gundungurra describes a most beautiful place.

There are also place names that tell us stories about a history Australia struggles to acknowledge—where thousands of First Nations people died in ‘silenced’ massacres and battles. Places like Murdering Creek, Massacre Lake, Valley of the Dead, Skull Hole, Slaughterhouse Gully, Butchers Creek. There are far too many horrific and heartbreaking stories like these.

Some place names have deep stories to tell, others less so, but even a seemingly benign street name usually has a story behind it. I once overheard a local town planner say he could never live on a new allotment he was naming because the sun didn’t shine there until almost noon. He, however, always tried to look on the bright side of life, so he called the new street Sundown Crescent. And I think about that town planner and those whose job it is to officially name geographic places and how little pieces of their personalities are written into the world.

So many of these stories fade with us unless we tell them. Like the story of Parker Peak, a triangular spike that soars above a glacial lake high in Canada’s remote Kootenay Ranges. It was named after a lively young Australian called John Parker who’s believed to have been the first to summit the peak with his friend Kevin Root in April 1977. The following year, while working underwater clearing the bed of British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake, John became caught below the surface. His spotter in the boat above had drifted. By the time someone realised something was wrong, John was gone. An Australian far from home, the brother-in-law I never met, and a story far too short, written into a place name for as long as place names exist.

I’d love to know what place names inspire your imagination. What stories do they tell, real or imagined? Jump in the comments and share them with us below.

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Etymology Monday

For those who are new, Etymology Monday is a very short field trip into the origins of an interesting word that I post to Substack Notes each fortnight and reshare here in the newsletter.

This week, I look at the connection between salt and your monthly salary. Click here to read it:

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