A quiet street will have its name changed after an Uber driver found it and alerted locals to its racist background.
Byron Shire Council announced last Thursday that Hottentot Crescent in Mullumbimby, just west of Brunswick Heads, will soon be renamed “Moonlight Close”.
The council determined that Hottentot, a racist term for indigenous South Africans, was no longer appropriate and needed to be changed.
The insult comes from the Hottentot bean, a South African tree that grows in the crescent, but was used as a derogatory term by Dutch colonizers.
A quiet street in Mullumbimby, just west of Brunswick Heads, is to change its name from Hottentot Crescent to Moonlight Close (pictured) due to the racist undertones of the name.
Jonny Simons, a local man who moved to Australia from South Africa in the 1980s, sparked calls for the name change last year after a South African Uber driver tipped him off.
The street is home to 23 residences that are part of a development developed in 1993, and the surrounding streets also have botanical-themed names.
An overwhelming majority of residents, 12 to 5, opposed the name change when asked for their opinion during the council’s consultation phase.
A local dissident, Daisy Sturm, said the change was made “for no reason at all” and added that it would be difficult to update her address in legal documents.
“When I moved here 25 years ago, they told me that was the name of a tree, and I thought, ‘That’s beautiful,'” he said, Sydney Morning Herald reports.
“Suddenly it’s unacceptable because, as I understand it, a person who doesn’t even live here objected.”
Other names for the street were also proposed to the council before going ahead with Moonlight Close.
Other shortlisted names included Drunken Parrot Place, named after a nearby tree that “every spring and summer is full of parrots getting drunk,” Sydney Botanic Gardens chief scientist Brett Summerell told the publication.
Jonny Simons (pictured) told Byron Shire Council that Hottentot is a derogatory term for indigenous South Africans.
Simons wrote to Byron Shire Council last year to ask for the name change and cried while leading a council meeting in February.
He told councilors that, having grown up in apartheid South Africa, he was “very aware of what that name means because it was the name they called my people”.
‘It was reduced to hot-tots… to make you feel inferior.
“Only if you or your family were called that would you be able to fully understand what it means.”
The local also added that it has nothing against the residents who opposed the name change because “they didn’t know what it meant.”
“They thought it was the name of a tree, but that tree got that name because the Khoisan people of South Africa ate the fruit of that tree,” he said.