Southern Kaurna Placenames

Background

Kaurna Aboriginal people are the Traditional Owners of the Adelaide plains in South Australia. Prior to European settlement they named places using their own language. Some places, e.g. Willunga, are still known by their Kaurna name, but most are not.

The Kaurna Place Names Project began by creating its own separate website, in a collaboration between four southern Adelaide councils, the SA Geographical Names Unit (GNU) and Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi (KWP). This ongoing project aims to identify and map places with Kaurna names and to encourage the use and increase knowledge of these names. It begins with names in the southern Kaurna Country.

Research

On behalf of Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi and in the interests of the whole Aboriginal community of this region, Chester Schultz is engaging in detailed research into the meaning and local context of Kaurna place names at particular locations. His study results are being published here successively as pdf files. Many of these have been confirmed at previous KWP committee meetings. Others are marked ‘Draft’.

These writings do not necessarily reflect the views of KWP, KWK or any other group. They are addressed in the first place to the Aboriginal community via their own serious researchers and those collaborating with them in the retrieval of Aboriginal history and culture. Our hope is that they will absorb the information here, correct it from new evidence and better interpretations, add to it from their own perspectives, and spread it around for the nourishment and strengthening of their community.

If you are a Kaurna person, or a researcher, and are interested in further detailed information not disclosed in these public documents, please contact us for access to the password-protected files.

The documents on this page are presented in an order which approximates north to south in the southern councils around Metropolitan Adelaide.

Each document is organised in five parts. The general reader may concentrate on Parts 1-2 or 1-3:

ABSTRACT: A short summary of the main conclusions about the name and the place.
LANGUAGE INFORMATION: A summary of the linguistic reasoning about the name.
MAIN SOURCE EVIDENCE: Dated and listed chronologically to give a historical perspective.
The rest is the main body of the essay:
DISCUSSION: A detailed examination of the historical evidence and reasoning which lead to the conclusions outlined in the Abstract.* This part often includes stories and other information which will be new to most readers and interesting or historically important in their own right.
*Some of the Discussions are unavoidably long and technical because they involve primary research in language, history, geography, and culture. They often include new material and new reasoning, and sometimes have to question old data and interpretations.
FOOTNOTES: There are usually many of them, to make it clear where each item of information comes from and so enable further research. Some long footnotes explain technical details or reasoning. You do not need to read the footnotes in order to understand the main text.

The author regrets being unable to produce a second set of easy-to-read popular versions. However, he continues to write new place-name essays and has just released his book on the history of first contact in the area, Feet On the Fleurieu, Language On the Land, which is now available as a free PDF download from our resources store.

Readers may be interested in two further essays written to accompany the book: Adelaide as a Battleground (the wars in the 1840s against invaders from the mid-Murray) and a Biography of Tamuruwi (Encounter Bay Bob).