Every Map Is a Lie

Lyrics

[Intro]
(tyres on a two-lane road, a signpost passing)
Toponymy. Place-names. What the land remembers and what it was made to forget.

[Verse 1]
You drive through a town called Massacre Creek and nobody blinks.
You drive through a county whose name is a word in a language
that no living person on that county's soil can speak,
kept by the people who took the ground and liked the sound of it.
The name is the receipt. The name is the only thing left standing.
It's on the sign. It's on your licence. You say it to buy petrol.

[Chorus]
Every map is a lie about who was already there.
Not a wrong lie — a LATE one. A map is the last edit.
Every river with two names is a fight that somebody lost,
and the winner's version is the one the satnav says out loud.
Every map is a lie. Say the old name anyway.
Somebody studies this. Somebody writes them down.

[Verse 2]
There are places that were renamed three times in ninety years,
each time by an army, each time with a ceremony and a stone,
and the people who live there use a fourth name, the real one,
which appears on no document and is never said to strangers.
The toponymist collects all four and refuses to rank them.
That is the entire ethic of the discipline, right there.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And some names are just a joke that outlived everyone who laughed.
A hill called Great Snoring. A road called Bell End.
A creek named for a man's dog, in 1861, and the dog is the only
thing about that entire settlement that anybody now remembers.
So the land keeps the dog and loses the man.
That's the deal. Nobody chose it. That's just the deal.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the road, going on)
Say the old one.
Under your breath is fine. Just say it.