Life In Australia

For some reason, the apostrophe indicating possession is sometimes left out in Australian English. This was brought home to me the other day when I was re-reading my previous blog entry on Hargraves Lookout. I realized that I had reproduced the name exactly as I had seen it on the signpost. In British English (and perhaps also American English), it would have read “Hargrave’s Lookout.”

A while ago, whilst I was doing our online grocery shopping from Coles Online, I had tried searching for a baby food brand that my son loves to eat. I was a bit puzzled when there were no hits, as I knew that this range is stocked by Coles. Today, I had a brainwave: instead of searching for the grammatically correct ‘Rafferty’s Garden,’ as it appears on the packaging, I typed in “Raffertys Garden,” and lo and behold, the whole list of products appeared!

As mentioned before, apostrophes often seem to be missing from place names - another example is  Watsons Bay. I wondered if there was a historical reason for this, so I had a look on the Internet. In actual fact, there is a contemporary reason. Australian place names were standarised in 2001 by the Committee for Geographical Names in Australia. The reason for dropping the apostrophe from all place names was:

“In all cases of place names containing an element that has historically been written with a final - ’s or -s’, the apostrophe is to be deleted, e.g. Howes Valley, Rushcutters Bay, Ladys Pass. This is to facilitate the consistent matching and retrieval of place names in database systems such as those used by the emergency services.” 

So, there is a modern rather than a historical reason for dropping the apostrophe from place names! If you are interested in reading more about the standardization of Australian place names, you can do so here.

That doesn’t explain why the apostrophe indicating possession has been removed in many other instances. I’m not sure whether it is the incorrect usage of English or if it is the fact that Australian English has evolved differently in its own little corner of the world. Another possible reason could be that a high proportion of immigrants are unsure of correct English usage.

Can anyone else shed some light on this subject?