I’ve only lived here 4 years but I could predict top 10. I hear a lot of [name]Jack[/name], [name]Oliver[/name], [name]Lachlan[/name] and [name]Cooper[/name], [name]Olivia[/name], [name]Emily[/name] and [name]Isabelle[/name].
I am surprised to see so many classics - [name]Matthew[/name], [name]Luke[/name], [name]Michael[/name], [name]Sarah[/name] and [name]Elizabeth[/name].
A few unexpected ones too - [name]Braxton[/name] for boys and [name]Audrey[/name] and [name]Chelsea[/name] for girls.
Is it me or does every top baby name list look almost the same? Does the world seem to be getting smaller? What happened to the cultural pride in choosing names that are quintessentially Australian or Maori? Shame really.
[name]Do[/name] you mean Aboriginal Australian? Because other than that… traditional Australian names would be British ones. What would you consider quintessentially Australian?
The top ten girls list especially is almost identical in content to ours.
In some of my baby name books, these girls names are defined as “Australian” or Australian Aboriginal". I don’t hear these names in any other country.
For example, there are lots of “K” names like…
Kumberlin
Kareela
Kolora
Koleyn
Kamballa
Kirilee/Kirianne
Kindilan
Killara
Others
Lakkari
Lalirra
Leewan
Taleebin
Rewuri
Oldina
Narelle
Nandalia
Lutana
Lorikeet
Jannali
Gurley
I’m Australian and I think it would be /weird/ if you weren’t Aboriginal but gave your kid a strongly Aboriginal name. And even if you were, I’d probably think it was a better idea not to just because of all the discrimination. There are certainly names that could serve as a nod to Australian heritage - [name]Matilda[/name], [name]Kylie[/name] etc - but I mean… for the majority of Australians, the dominant cultural influence is British, so…? I mean, if you’re picking a name from your family tree or whatever, that’s probably going to be the exact same set of names as [name]Joe[/name] Q British picking names from his family tree. (And as for the world ‘getting smaller’ - Australia has had very similar naming trends to [name]Britain[/name] for at least a century, so it’s not exactly a new thing.) These days Australia’s pretty multicultural, so it doesn’t make sense to me to think that it should have its own set of names. Instead, it draws from its cultural influences, just like everywhere else (for e.g, your profile says you’re in [name]Canada[/name], which draws its lovely baby naming taste from both [name]Britain[/name] and [name]France[/name])