Indigenous names

Didn’t things already have Indigenous names?

Yes of course! Aboriginal peoples had names for animals, plants, landforms and many other things. In most cases, Europeans took the Aboriginal names of animals.

But Aboriginal peoples did not read or write the same way the British did. They recorded the past by passing down stories through generations, in paintings, rock drawings and so on.
Therefore, Europeans would only have heard words like ‘kangaroo’. Having not seen it written down, they often spelt a word as it sounded. This is one reason why there are different spellings of many Aboriginal words.