Meet the people behind ANPS
Meet the people who have helped shape and sustain the work of the Australian National Placenames Survey through research, leadership, publication, and long-standing service to toponymy.
Stuart Duncan
Director, ANPS
director@anps.org.au
Stuart Duncan has been involved in toponymy since 1991, when he was appointed the first full-time Secretary of the Northern Territory’s Place Names Committee. He remained in that role until his retirement in 2011.
Before that, he worked for 17 years as a Government Survey Technician, travelling widely across the Top End of the Northern Territory. His long experience in both fieldwork and placenames administration has given him a deep knowledge of Northern Territory toponymy.
Now based in south-east Queensland, Stuart continues to pursue historical placenames research when not travelling, volunteering with the SES, or working on his classic MG cars.
He specialises in Northern Territory placenames, with a particular interest in archived toponymic material found in old charts, maps, and the journals of early explorers such as Philip Parker King and John McDouall Stuart.
Since 2024, Stuart has served as Director of the Australian National Placenames Survey.
David Blair
David Blair is a linguist and lexicographer who taught and researched at Macquarie University in Sydney from 1968 until his retirement as Dean of Humanities in 2003.
He was one of the founding editors of the Macquarie Dictionary and served as Director of the University’s Dictionary Research Centre. From the establishment of the Australian National Placenames Survey in 2000 until 2006, he served as its Director.
Since then, he has continued to work closely with the Survey and with its sponsoring body, Placenames Australia. He now manages the Survey’s database and edits the quarterly publication Placenames Australia. He also serves as General Editor of several of the Survey’s other regular publications.
Jan Tent
Jan Tent is a retired academic and past Director of the Australian National Placenames Survey. He is also an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University and an Honorary Research Fellow at Macquarie University.
His tertiary teaching career spans some 40 years, including appointments at Macquarie University (1976–77; 2002–15), the University of Sydney (1977–1990), and the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji (1991–1998).
During his time in Fiji, he conducted research into the use, users, and features of Fiji English, later obtaining his PhD on the topic from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
He has published on a wide range of topics, including slips of the tongue, general linguistics, Fiji English, Dutch loanwords in Oceanic languages, lexicography, early European and contemporary place-naming in Australasia, theoretical toponymy, and onomastics more broadly.
Since retiring in 2015 and moving to Khancoban, he has continued to research and publish while enjoying the mountain environment that now surrounds him.
Dale Lehner
qld@anps.org.au
Dale Lehner has been an ANPS Research Associate since 2001, shortly before she submitted her PhD thesis on the history of a farming district on Queensland’s Darling Downs. Her family had settled there in the 1860s and she had always been curious about the history of that part of the world.
Dale had used early place names to help understand the mindset of the first European settlers in the area, and became particularly interested in what our place names can tell us about the past. Since then Dale has been involved with researching mostly Queensland place names and entering them into our Database. She has also been a member of the Placenames Australia committee since it was established, and has written several articles for the Newsletter.