The logo on the side of the bus shelter
Latin at the bus stop
Recently, I was out for a walk when it started to rain. Seeking shelter in a nearby bus stop, I had time to look around, and I noticed something I had never noticed before although I must have seen it often: a Ku-Ring-Gai Council logo.
The logo is a circle of about 20 centimeters in diameter. It depicts two cartoon characters, one sitting, one standing, encircled by the words “KU-RING-GAI COUNCIL” and “SERVIENDO GUBERNO.”
The cartoon characters are presumably intended to depict two Aboriginal men of an earlier period. The drawing is crude, and the image seems retrograde, out of place, and just plain weird. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about some dumb schoolboy graffiti but about a high-quality official logo emblazoned into the plexiglass wall of a bus shelter.
I have been struggling to make sense of it since I first noticed it.
The main council logo (Image credit: Wikipedia)
The context
Ku-Ring-Gai Council is a local government area on Sydney’s North Shore. It has close to 120,000 inhabitants and happens to be Australia’s most socioeconomically privileged area.
The logo I noticed at the bus stop is not the main logo used by Ku-ring-gai Council but an older version. The current main logo depicts a stylized landscape.
However, the logo on the bus stop is not just a historical logo, either: it appears on bus stops of a certain age (less than 10 years old); it appears on signs for bushwalking trails; and it appears on the web.
So, we are dealing with a legacy logo that might be in the process of being phased out but is still imprinted on the landscape.
Indigenous Ku-ring-gai
Ever since I first came to Australia, I’ve liked the romanticism of the name “Ku-ring-gai”. It’s not only the name of a large council area, but also of a suburb where I lived for many years, and a national park I love to explore.
The O’Rourke Family Crest (Image credit: orourkerundle.com)
Like many non-Indigenous Australians, I was, for a long time, under the impression that “Ku-ring-gai” – or a version thereof – was the name of the original inhabitants of northern Sydney. The name made the area more “authentic” for me and seemed to connect the area where I live to its precolonial past.
Inevitably, it turned out to be a naïve fantasy.
A 2015 report by the Aboriginal Heritage Office showed that the term “Ku-ring-gai” was the 19th century invention of a Scottish schoolteacher. The word may – or may not – have been used by some pre-colonial Indigenous people for – well, we don’t know what.
The report concludes:
It is unfortunate that the term Guringai has become widely known in northern Sydney and it is understandable that people wish to use it as it is convenient to have a single word to cover the language, tribe/nation, identity and culture of a region. However, it is based on a nineteenth century fiction and the AHO [Aboriginal Heritage Office] would argue that the use of the term Guringai or any of its various spellings such as Kuringgai is not warranted given its origin and previous use. It is not authentic to the area, it was coined by a non-Aboriginal person and it gives a misleading impression of the connectivity of some original clan boundaries. It is part of the story of this place that there is no certainty over tribal names, language groups or dreaming stories. To project the opposite is to continue this fiction. (p. 40)
On stolen land
Student uniforms get Latin mottos out into the streets (Image credit: Herald Sun)
Today, Indigenous people in the Ku-ring-gai area are most notable by their absence. The 2016 census recorded 0.2% Aboriginal inhabitants for Ku-ring-gai Council, well below the national average of 2.8%, and even well below the Greater Sydney average of 1.5%.
Why this is so can be summed up quickly: the Sydney area is where the British colonization of Australia began and the Sydney people bore the brunt of the initial invasion, including frontier violence, new diseases brought along by Europeans, and dispossession.
We live on stolen land here.
Still, this is not something polite people like to say and the Council website mutters incoherently about the absence of Indigenous people:
The arrival of Lt James Cook in 1770 devastated in what amounts to the blink of an eye an incomparable and ancient people.
Those not lost completely were altered as survivors gathered into new groups. Much of what we do know about Sydney’s clans must be gleaned from archaeological remains.
While there are some families who have identified links to original Sydney clans-people, very few traditional stories remain about the sites and landscapes of the Ku-ring-gai area.
Latin motto on a military honor roll (Image credit: Monuments Australia)
I also take these ramblings to be an interpretation of sorts of the stick figures in the logo: the mythical Indigenous cartoon characters suggest authenticity and belonging for non-Indigenous Australians.
In the same way that the current logo symbolizes nature and the land through stylized trees, the legacy logo does so through the depiction of stylized Aboriginal people.
“By serving, I rule!”
While the imagery projects an idyllic fantasy about belonging, the Latin motto accompanying the two Aboriginal cartoon characters in the logo is about power and possession.
The motto SERVIENDO GUBERNO is not accompanied by a translation. As the study of Latin has become exceedingly rare, I’m guessing that few people will be able to translate for themselves, and likely just ignore the motto.
For those who can be bothered, a now-defunct council website provides this explanation:
The Ku-ring-gai Council motto, ‘serviendo guberno’, means ‘I govern by serving’ and has been used by Council since 1928. It is included in the logo to reaffirm Council’s fundamental commitment to serving the community. (quoted from Friends of Ku-ring-gai Environment)
The logo of private boys’ school Scots College (Image credit: Wikipedia)
Mottos are notoriously ambiguous, and this is one possible interpretation. But it is not the full story. My translation is “By serving, I rule.”
What kind of service?
Let’s start with serviendo. The etymological connection with “service” is obvious but what kind of service? Just friendly customer service? Probably not.
The motto serviendo guberno has long been used in the coat-of-arms of a knightly Irish clan, the O’Rourkes, and is clearly associated with military service there. From armed service, the idea of service inherent in the motto later seems to have become broadened a bit to all forms of service that men render to the nation:
Since the demise of the Gaelic order O’Rourkes have continued to follow the proud tradition of serving their nation as soldiers, priests, teachers, civil servants and firefighters. (Another O’Rourke website)
The martial interpretation of serviendo is also backed up by its use in war memorials such as the Sandakan Memorial dedicated to members of the Australian and British armed forces who served in World War II in Borneo.
Who rules?
The Latin verb gubernare has obvious associations with “govern.” It can also mean “to direct, rule, guide.”
“Serviendo guberno” on a war memorial (Image credit: NSW War Memorial Register)
It is here used in the simple present first person singular: “I rule.”
Why would council identify as “I”? Surely, “we” or some agentless form would make much more sense.
One way to interpret the first-person singular is to put the motto into the mouth of the individual colonist, a white male subject. Alternatively, the “I” might be read as that of the sovereign; not the democratic sovereign of the people, of course, but the individual sovereign of the monarch – the Crown as the legitimizing force of colonization.
Why Latin?
Non-English monolingual signage is exceedingly rare in Australia. Where such signage appears, the language in question is often Latin.
In addition to Ku-ring-gai Council, many institutions have Latin mottos and slogans. All the following examples appear in Latin only, without translation. The translations in brackets are mine.
The Monuments Australia database shows many war memorials that include slogans such as “Quo fas et gloria ducunt” (“Where right and glory lead”) or “Pro patria” (“For the fatherland”).
“Masculinity is being enacted” says this school logo (my translation) (Image credit: Wikipedia)
School often have Latin mottos. And they really get Latin out into the street as school children sport the mottos on their backpacks, uniforms, and caps.
Examples include “Virile agitur” (“Masculinity is being enacted”), “Utinam patribus nostris digni simus” (“May we were worthy of our fathers”), or “vi et animo” (“with force and courage”).
Australian universities also have a thing for Latin phrases, from ANU’s “Naturam primum cognoscere rerum” (“To know the nature of things first”) to Sydney’s notoriously confusing “Sidere mens eadem mutato” (“The same spirit under different stars”).
Latin is supposedly a dead language. But there is probably more Latin signage in the Australian linguistic landscape than there is signage in any Indigenous language.
Like the cartoon characters in the center of the logo, the function of Latin in these mottos is symbolic. The Latin phrases emblazoned on Australia’s institutional linguistic landscape do not per see mean much: too few people know Latin for this to be the case; and some of the explanations, translations and interpretations provided on institutional websites are – linguistically speaking – pure fantasy.
The use of Latin is another way to anchor Australia’s whiteness in history. Latin symbolically links Australian institutions to European deep history, to a history that happened long before the colonization of Australia: classical antiquity, the Roman Empire, and medieval Christianity.
Marking white possession and belonging
Together, the Aboriginal cartoon characters and the incomprehensible Latin motto do two things in a place where both the presence of actual Indigenous people and any meaningful use of the Latin language is negligible. First, the mythical – in contrast to physical, material, or real – presence of Indigenous people offers non-Indigenous Australians a fantasy of belonging. Second, Latin provides the same illusion but in starker terms: not as a fuzzy feeling but as the legitimacy of possession. Together, they mask unbelonging and erase dispossession.
My thinking about the logo and Latin in the Australian linguistic landscape has greatly benefitted from Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. The author argues that the national belonging of non-Indigenous Australians is predicated on their willful forgetting of the fundamentals of their residence in this land: colonial conquest, racism, and the dispossession of Indigenous Australians.
Indigenous Australians can never forget or overlook the evidence of their dispossession. For non-Indigenous Australians it is easy to forget and not to notice – we have built a world that provides a fantasy of belonging while hiding the original theft.
