Not by any other name: The onomastics of government schools in New South Wales, Australia

The names of schools are a common enough feature of the "linguistic landscape", yet their character, structure and organisation, unlike that of other contemporary names, have not attracted much scholarly attention, something this paper endeavours to redress.It examines the names and onomastic properties of government schools in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, and the way their structures reveal much that is telling about the organisation of education across the state, both now and in the past.In so doing, school names provide both a means to identify a school and a means to project its identity, to flag its academic orientation, and as well 252 COLIN SYMES as a semantic mechanism for their educational constituencies to identify with a school.Through their utilisation of a range of toponyms and anthroponyms that commemorate historical figures, school names reveal much about NSW's colonial origins.