Talk:Home Hill, Queensland

Crimean War

If you check the Wikipedia article on Battle_of_Inkerman, you'll find that "Home Hill" in the Crimean War was spelt exactly like that. This puts a dint into one of the theories about how Home Hill got its name.

203.151.232.114 (talk) 07:44, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. I will do something about it. Kerry (talk) 23:53, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

I went through looking for sources of the various name origins with particular emphasis on the early sources. And it seems there is some truth in all of them. The town is variously called Home Hill and Holme Hill in the 1910-1919 period when you look at the old newspapers. There is a 1912 confirmation of a link between the name Holme Hill to the Battle of Inkerman but not specifically to the British position called Home Hill. I cannot find any evidence of a Colonel Home or Holme from the district who served in the Crimean War (but I am not a military historian); the first mention of the colonel story that I can find comes from the 1930s which is within the living memory of the town name being established, so it is difficult to completely discredit that theory. I cannot find any early source telling of a signwriter getting the name wrong but it was being called both Holme Hill and Home Hill so clearly there was some source of confusion about the name that was somehow resolved into the present-day name of Home Hill. Google searches reveal a lot of content that is clearly directly copied from Wikipedia but there is at least one other site that doesn't appear to be direct copy (but may have been informed by the Wikipedia article of course) that mentions a signwriter at the railway station making a mistake (the Wikipedia article did not mention the railway station). So I think it's one of those situations where we can't say what's right and what's wrong but just put the theories to the reader with citations and let them make up their own mind, so that's what I did. Kerry (talk) 01:33, 7 September 2015 (UTC)