Albany

Yarramundi, NSW, Australia, on a low-lying stretch on the banks of the Nepean-Hawkesbury river, which usually floods at the height of the La Nina effect. Like right now. 

Inverness, Scotland (the northernmost city in the UK and capital of the Scottish Highlands)

Street (Maryland, USA)

Tarnow, Poland

Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia.

(Pronounced "Wogga Wogga", for those who didn't know, although I'm sure some here do. )

Alnwick (Northumberland, England)

Kirkland (Washington, USA)

Damnevirk, a town in New Zealand with some history of 19th century Danish immigrants. 

Kirkuk, Iraq, a city with a very long & ancient history of the rise & fall of empires & capital of the Kurdish & Assyrian areas of the country we now call Iraq.

@Courtenay (Pronounced "Wogga Wogga", for those who didn't know, although I'm sure some here do.  )

Nope, I wouldn't know that....  now would I?  

More seriously, on this morning's news it has been proclaimed that the Australian national anthem has undergone a very minor change. Just as the original anthem's reference to Australia's sons let us rejoice, was changed to Australians all, let us rejoice, to include the daughters as well as the sons, today we now sing For we are one & free, instead of For we are young and free. This minor change reflects that Australia's Aborigines have been here for tens of thousands of years, well before even Kirkuk was founded. It also includes old aged pensioners.  

Today is 1/1/2021, so Happy New Year to everyone!

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

More seriously, on this morning's news it has been proclaimed that the Australian national anthem has undergone a very minor change. Just as the original anthem's reference to Australia's sons let us rejoice, was changed to Australians all, let us rejoice, to include the daughters as well as the sons, today we now sing For we are one & free, instead of For we are young and free. This minor change reflects that Australia's Aborigines have been here for tens of thousands of years, well before even Kirkuk was founded. It also includes old aged pensioners.  

Love it! I never stopped to think about that before (and hadn't heard about the new wording till now... not much news from Australia gets picked up in Britain), but that's a very fair change. (EDIT: I tell a lie — it was actually reported on the BBC's website. I'm impressed!)

Back to the game...

Kirkcudbright, a town in Galloway, south-western Scotland. (Pronounced Ker-koo-bree, quite obviously. )

Terrigal, on New South Wales' Central coast, between Sydney & Newcastle, in Australia. 

@Courtenay: Love it!   I never stopped to think about that before (and hadn't heard about the new wording till now... not much news from Australia gets picked up in Britain), but that's a very fair change. (EDIT: I tell a lie — it was actually reported on the BBC's website. I'm impressed!)

It wasn't until I woke up yesterday morning that the Governor General had released the info. Just in time to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Federation, on 1/1/1901, by the way. About the National anthem, there is still talk about singing a verse of Advance Australia Fair, in an Aboriginal language, like the New Zealanders sing their National Anthem in both Maori & English.  Question is, which one? The Wallabies did this late last year, or a month or two ago, but they did so in Dharruk, the language of the Sydney basin & up towards the Hunter Valley. 

Lancaster, a city in north west England.

[re the question of which indigenous Australian language, before we end this discussion, I think it should be decided by a council of elders from all the major language groups, if such a council exists; in New Zealand there are dialects of the same language, but then the first people have only been here about  800 years]

Redonda, a small island in the Caribbean — uninhabited, but nevertheless there seems to be a long tradition of people claiming "kingship" over it! (Interesting article here from Wikipedia.)

Posted by: @coracle

[re the question of which indigenous Australian language, before we end this discussion, I think it should be decided by a council of elders from all the major language groups, if such a council exists; in New Zealand there are dialects of the same language, but then the first people have only been here about  800 years]

I can't think of any particular authority that would be able to decide that officially... the difficulty is that there are or were at least 250 Aboriginal languages in Australia, including some 800 dialects, and each of them associated with a very specific place and people. So there's no one Aboriginal language that could ever stand for the whole of Australia, only individual languages for local areas. Singing Advance Australia Fair in Dharruk is appropriate for the Sydney region, but it would be wrong for Melbourne, where the indigenous languages were Woiwurong and Bunurong. (Neither of which is still spoken as a living language; I think some knowledge of them has been preserved — I'd love to know more about that — but I don't know if it's enough to be able to translate the whole national anthem successfully!) And for Brisbane it would need to be the Yagera language, and for Perth the Nyungar language, and so on. So while I love the idea of our anthem being sung in an Aboriginal language, it's not such an easy thing to implement in practice...  

(Maybe we could shift this discussion to the languages thread? I know there's one somewhere in the Spare Oom.)

Akure [Nigeria]

@waggawerewolf27, @coracle, and @Courtenay - yes, please remove your conversation to the Spare Oom (I think the Languages thread is a good option, as Courtenay mentioned). Occasional small comments are okay in the G&B threads, but discussions (and, really, asides longer than the game components) need to take place elsewhere. Thank you!