Insular Toponymies: Place-naming on Norfolk Island, South Pacific and Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island.

Insular Toponymies: Place-naming on Norfolk Island, South Pacific and Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island. By JOSHUA NASH. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2013. Pp. xiv þ 302. $149.00. ISBN 978-9027202925. With his book Insular Toponymies: Place-naming on Norfolk Island, South Pacific and Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, Joshua Nash opens up a new area for placename studies, pointing to “the need to develop the scope of Australian and international toponymy beyond mere place name listings and to expand related folk etymologies” (3). Although there have been no follow-up studies to Nash’s research, he has stirred the interest created by Charles Nordhoff and James Hall in their Bounty trilogy, the account of the actual mutiny in 1789 and its aftermath. As an echo of the dramatic ways in which the lives of the Bounty crew changed, Nash explores the changes that took place in language as the descendants of Alex Smith and Ned Young, mutineers who survived the bloodletting, moved from Pitcairn Island to Norfolk Island.