‘Tis the season for rebranding, with news that two well-known Canberra cultural spaces will have new names.

Emails have been circulating around the ANU that the Kambri Cultural Centre will be renamed the Lowitja O’Donoghue Cultural Centre in the first quarter of 2025, along with three other buildings to be named after “remarkable and inspiring women who have shaped the university”.

Then, days after the announcement that Canberra Contemporary Art Space chief Jan Falsone was stepping down to take up a job in Bega, the organisation has announced the rebranding of the lakeside gallery from Canberra Contemporary Art Space to simply Canberra Contemporary and its Manuka gallery to simply Platform.

Rebranding is an expensive pastime beloved of Canberra arts organisations and we have a long history of it.

The community music organisation Gaudeamus (meaning “let us rejoice”) was changed, first to Music For Everyone, then Music for Canberra, its present name.

CCAS itself was an amalgamation of the Bitumen River Gallery and the Arts Council Gallery.

Muse, the long-running Canberra arts and entertainment magazine, was renamed Artslook when it went glossy, but only lasted a short while after that.

The Crafts Association of the ACT, Craft ACT, has seen several iterations but is now Craft + Design Canberra.

Some of the changes are so hard to remember that emails often go straight into the delete basket and, apart from the expense involved in paying graphic designers and printers, there is the question of dropping bankable, recognisable names, seen when the ACT Writers’ Centre became Marion Ink, leaving the wider public out of the insiders knowledge that it was named after two Marions, Halligan and Mahony Griffin.

But CCAS has an explanation: “It’s about more than just elevating our brand; it’s about empowering artists, attracting diverse audiences, and establishing a powerful presence.”