German missionaries set up school in 1839 and preserve language of disappearing culture of Adelaide's Kaurna
German missionary Christian Teichelmann and a letter in the Kaurna language written by a boy at the Piltawodli school on the banks of Adelaide's River Torrens in 1840.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia and Evangelish Lutherisches Missionswerk Leipzig.
Kaurna language of the Adelaide plains Aboriginal nation was almost obliterated from being used within decades of European settlement of South Australia from 1836.
Two of the first colonists, William Williams of the colonial store and James Cronk, learnt the language and Williams published his wordlist in 1840. But the most concerted effort to record it in written form was by German missionaries, Klamor Schurmann and Christian Teichelmann, who arrived in South Australia on the same ship in 1838 as governor George Gawler, and promoted the use of Aboriginal place names. (Morialta Street and Medindie Road are among examples.)
The missionaries learnt and documented the Kaurna language to “civilise” and “Christianise the natives”. In 1839, they opened a school at Piltawodli (in the west parklands, north of the River Torrens) teaching Aboriginal children to read and write in Kaurna. Letters written in Kaurna by children at the school were sent to Germany.
South Australia's third governor George Grey forbad them from preaching in Kaurna but Schurmann and Teichelmann translated the Ten Commandments and some German hymns into Kaurna. They never translated the entire Bible, but their 2,000 words made up the largest list recorded; pivotal in the modern revival of the language. The Kaurna wordlist was preserved in the missionaries' book Outlines of a Grammar: Vocabulary and Phraseology of the Aboriginal Language of South Australia, Spoken by the Natives in and for Some Distance around Adelaide in 1840.
William Wyatt, third part-time protector of Aborigines (1837-39), also recorded valuable information on the Kaurna (and Ramindjeri) language.
The 2011 Australian census showed nearly 7% of the state’s Indigenous population spoke Pitjantjatjara; 82.2% only spoke English, with others using undefined Aboriginal languages (1.3%), Ngarrindjeri (0.8%) Yankunytjatjara (0.6%) and Adnymathanha (0.5%).
Indigenous leader Stephen Gadlabarti Goldsmith, who died in 2017, was a fierce fighter for his language and culture at Adelaide University, as the director of the Kaurna language organisation. Goldsmith presenting many welcomes to country across Adelaide.
Items of Kaurna culture (spears, boomerangs, nets etc.) are rare. Interest in Kaurna culture was slight until hundreds of objects were sent to the 1887 Paris exhibition (and never returned). The South Australia Museum’s collection has only 48 Kaurna items in its Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery collection – the world’s most comprehensive.
