Bunbury, WA – just one of Australia’s many places named after the killers of Indigenous people

The British army’s Colonel Bunbury arrived in a WA colony in 1836 and quickly ‘earned a reputation as one of the harshest proponents of colonial ‘justice’ – a genteel euphemism for ‘killing’ – in the history of the place’. Photograph: James Worsfold/Getty Images

Just who is remembered, even eulogised, in the nomenclature of place is becoming one of the most burning questions at the heart of 21st-century public history.

No less vexed than the so-called “statue” wars that flare up intermittently across the world (not least in the United States over confederate “heroes”, in the UK over slavers and here, in Australia, over murdering colonisers) are place names given to towns and other landmarks.