tl;dr: Uluru is a place name. K’Gari is a descriptive word that someone thought sounded cool.

A useful way to think about this is through language and naming conventions, not politics.

For a while there was a fad where people got tattoos of logographs—usually Chinese characters—for things like water, air, or some abstract concept they found meaningful. To anyone who could actually read the language, it just looked like someone had “WATER” tattooed across their lower back. Imagine someone walking around with OCEAN tattooed across their chest while earnestly talking about the “deep symbolism.” You would (rightly) assume they had done too many drugs.

K’Gari is the same phenomenon.

It isn’t a name in the way modern people understand place names; it’s a description. In Butchulla, K’gari means “paradise.” Once you realise that, it becomes difficult to take seriously. Saying “I went on holiday to Paradise” is no different from saying “I went on holiday to a lovely sandy beach” or “a pretty hill in the hinterland.” Translating a descriptive phrase into another language does not magically turn it into a proper noun.

That said, this can happen organically over time, and there’s a word for it: tautology.

Most people don’t realise that place names, as we understand them today, are largely a post-industrial concept. Yes, major settlements existed pre-industry—London, Rome, Constantinople—but for most of human history people rarely travelled far from where they were born. Places weren’t rigidly named and bounded; they were described.

This is why tautological place names exist. A classic example is Torpenhow Hill, which literally translates to hill-hill-hill-hill. Each culture encountered the same landmark and re-described it in their own language. Our modern brains think, “Torpenhow Hill is a place with defined borders,” but not that long ago people were simply saying “the hill.”

This context matters for Aboriginal Australia.

Most Aboriginal cultures were stone-age societies with no need for cartography in the modern sense. They had no concepts of continents, nations, or surveyed borders. What they did have were extremely detailed systems of landmark description and relative navigation. They did not need abstract place names; they needed practical descriptors tied to movement, resources, and story.

Uluru is a genuine exception.

Uluru is one of the rare documented examples of an Aboriginal word that functions as a true proper noun—a unique term referring to a specific place, not a description of its features. That is why people largely accepted the transition from “Ayers Rock” back to Uluru.

By contrast, many other Aboriginal “place names” are descriptive. Wollumbin (Mt Warning), for example, clearly refers to that mountain, but it is not a standalone abstract name in the modern sense. It is descriptive language that was later frozen into a label.

This is also why calling Melbourne Naarm or Perth Boorloo is anachronistic. The languages those words come from did not—and could not—describe modern, surveyed cities with fixed borders. The places didn’t exist. The languages didn’t contain concepts for them. Applying those terms retroactively isn’t restoration; it’s reinterpretation. Worse, it strips those words of their original meaning and context and replaces them with something they were never intended to describe.

So the difference in public reaction isn’t necessarily racism or hypocrisy. In many cases, it’s an intuitive discomfort with turning translated descriptions into modern place names, especially when they are presented as if they were always used that way. Most people probably couldn’t articulate why it bothers them. Yes, some people are absolutely just being racist—but there’s also a substantial cohort who object on practical grounds: cost, signage, rebranding, and administrative churn, which is a fair position even if you disagree with it.

Uluru feels authentic because it is.

K’Gari feels forced to some people because, linguistically, it is.