Orange audited 967 place names and found 63 men and 10 women. The table behind the summary marks four women

How it got onto the agenda

On 15 September Cr Marea Ruddy moved a notice of motion titled Put Her Name On It, after hearing about the Victorian initiative of that name at the Australian Local Government Women’s Association conference in August. The motion asked for an audit of every council-named place in the LGA to determine Whether the name commemorates an identifiable person, The gender representation of people commemorated, and the share of names that are non-commemorative or of unknown origin. It also asked for a draft naming framework and an Orange Commemorative Names Register, and it was explicit about what it was not: This motion does not propose the wholesale renaming of existing places.

It passed 7 to 5. The minutes, which go to the 6 October meeting for confirmation, record the mayor, Cr Tony Mileto, with Crs Mallard, McDonell, Peterson, Power, Ruddy and Stedman in favour, and the deputy mayor, Cr Tammy Greenhalgh, with Crs Duffy, Judge, Kinghorne and Whitton against. The motion’s own costing was that approximately 10 to 12 hours of staff time will be required to conduct this work.

The audit came back inside three weeks. The report, from the Manager Engineering Services, says Each of the 967 names was assessed using artificial intelligence and placed in one of five categories, from commemorative of an identifiable person to unknown origin. The recommendation to council is only that it note the report. The framework and the register, parts three to six of the motion, are still to come.

What the summary says, and what the table says

The report’s findings run to six dot points: 73 names possibly commemorating identifiable individuals, 63 of the 73 commemorative names appear to be male, 10 appear to be female, 113 names appear to be Indigenous, 33 reserves are currently unnamed, and a large non-commemorative remainder. Its conclusion: These findings indicate a strong gender imbalance in commemorative naming across the LGA.

The table that follows is 31 pages of images, one row per name, with seven columns: the name, its type (street or park), the probability it commemorates a person in bands from 0-10% to 95+, a yes-or-no identifier flag, gender, a category and a certainty rating. We extracted all of it and counted. We get 966 rows, one short of the report’s 967, which is within what our reading of an image table can resolve. The counts that matter are these.

71 rows carry the identifier flag, every one of them in the 95+ probability band. Of those, 62 are marked male, five are battles or campaigns with no gender (Anzac Place, Gallipoli Place, Kokoda Street, Lone Pine Avenue and Tobruk Crescent), and four are marked female: Lady Peel Place, Victoria Street (categorised as commemorating the monarch), Leone Healy Park and Margaret Stevenson Park. The men are the names you would expect in a city laid out in the nineteenth century and filled in through the twentieth: Bligh, Byng, Oxley, Mitchell, Hargraves, Icely, Lawson, Blaxland and Governor Phillip, then Churchill, Hawke, Namatjira and Banjo Paterson, then Sir Neville Howse, Sir Jack Brabham, Max Stewart and a run of local names with a first name attached, from Alan Ridley Place to Thomas Brosnan Way.

Our 71 is two short of the summary’s 73, and our four women are six short of its ten. The report does not show how the summary figures were reached from the table, and we could not find ten rows marked female in it by any reading. That is worth the council reconciling before a naming framework is built on the numbers, because the framework is the point of the exercise.

The bucket in the middle is where the real answer lives

The row that changes how you read the headline figures is not any of the 71. It is the 326 names the audit puts in the 40-70% band, marked Unknown for gender and, almost without exception, Low for certainty. By our count 246 of them are surnames (Kearneys Drive, Peisley Street, Moulder Park) and 57 are given names (Alice Place, Charlotte Street, Kylie Circuit, Yvonne Crescent). Overall the audit rates 399 of its own 966 calls as low certainty, more than the 95+ and Moderate bands put together.

This is the honest heart of the document, and it is also what explains the swing from the motion to the audit. Cr Ruddy’s notice of motion described a very rough initial desktop exercise done with the chief executive before the meeting, covering around 752 street names, in which around 37 appeared identifiable as female, 36 as male, with about 180 surnames unattributed. She flagged it plainly: This work was preliminary only and should not be considered a formal or definitive audit. Three weeks later the formal audit found two female street names in the whole LGA, and a 63-to-10 split overall.

Neither document says why the two counts differ, so what follows is our reading. The table puts every given-name street, Alice Place to Yvonne Crescent, in the Unknown bucket, on the reasonable ground that a street called Jeanette Close may or may not honour a Jeanette. Around 30 of the 57 given names are ones conventionally given to women. A quick count that took those names at face value would land close to 37 women; an audit that refuses to guess lands at four. Both are defensible. They are answers to different questions, and the council’s summary presents only one of them, without the caveat that the table itself carries in its certainty column.

Rows are not places, and 33 of them have no name at all

Two smaller things a reader checking the 967 should know. The table lists some places more than once, because the parks inventory it was built from records separate parcels: Anzac Park, Max Stewart Park, Brendon Sturgeon Oval, Moulder Park and Jaeger Reserve each appear twice, and by our count 17 names are duplicated. So 967 is rows, not distinct places. And 33 reserves are listed as Unnamed, which the motion’s logic treats as the useful part: the register is for future naming opportunities, and these are 33 of them sitting on the inventory already.

The policy frame, which points away from streets

The report is clear that streets are the wrong place to look for commemoration anyway. It quotes the NSW Address Policy and User Manual: The main goal of naming roads is to create clear addresses, rather than to honour people. First names with surnames are not allowed on roads, and the manual lists recreational facilities, buildings, rooms, car parks and parks as the structures suited to commemorative naming. Council’s own Subdivision and Development Code says Council encourages the use of flora, fauna, aboriginal and or names with historical links to Orange, and the audit bears that out: a hundred flora names, a hundred geographic ones, and the 113 Indigenous names the report counts.

In new subdivisions the developer proposes the names, the Geographical Names Board gives in-principle approval and council advertises and gazettes them. Asked on 15 September how often the public nomination process set up in May 2022 had been used, staff reported to the 6 October meeting that 61 submissions have been lodged through this process since May 2022, and that There are limited avenues to confirm the number of those submissions which may relate to deceased individuals or correlation with new street names. Sixty-one names in, and no record of how many came out the other end as a street.

That register is the mechanism the motion wants to expand, and the report agrees: The register is a live document and open to future suggestions. The one use the report names is one readers of this masthead will recognise: suggesting Wiradjuri names at the Redleaf subdivision. It also named the Mary Turner Recital Hall in July, which is the kind of facility the state manual says commemoration belongs on.

Our view

The audit is a useful first pass and an honest one, in the sense that its table tells you what it does not know. A 10-to-12-hour exercise with an AI classifier cannot establish who Kearneys Drive or Peisley Street honours, and it does not pretend to. The number that should drive the framework is therefore not 63 to 10. It is 326: the third of the LGA’s names that nobody has yet researched. The 7-5 vote was about whether this work is council’s business; the table shows the work is mostly still to do, and that it is historical research, not classification. Before that starts, the summary’s ten women need to be found in its own table or the figure corrected.