Bragg Park/Ngampa Yarta name for Adelaide city's Park 5 link to Bragg home on LeFevre Terrace, North Adelaide
A link with the nearby home on LeFevre Terrace, North Adelaide (top and bottom right) of the Bragg family and future father-and-son 1915 Nobel Prize for physics winners William and Lawrence Bragg inspired the naming of Bragg Park/Ngampa Yarta, Park 5 (see map inset), in the northern Adelaide city parklands, with North Adelaide Dog Park among its features.
Images courtesy John Jennings, City of Adelaide, Adelaide Park Land Association and Google maps.
Bragg Park/Ngampa Yarta, Park 5 in the belt of park lands surrounding Adelaide city centre and North Adelaide, was given its European name in 2017 to honour the family of 1915 Nobel Prize-winning physics pioneers William Henry Bragg and son William Lawrence Bragg, who lived at nearby Lefevre Terrace in the late 1800s.
Ngampa Yarta was the five-hectare northern park’s Kaurna language name, also from 2017. It meant “Ngampa root ground”, referring to the yam daisy important deit of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide plains. The park’s area would have been a campsite for the Kaurna people as it lay on movement and trade routes and had abundant game.
As part of the city of Adelaide parklands belt, Bragg Park/Ngampa Yarta’s five hectares became a venue for picnics, outdoor games and nature walks. North Adelaide Dog Park (from an idea by Year 7 North Adelaide Primary student Erin O'Brien, then 13, in 2009) became Park 5’s most popular feature. Another feature was the Canary Island palm trees planted along Robe Terrace in 1928. They survived road widening in 2000 by being transplanted a few metres south.
Childhood memories of the house at 60 Lefevre Terrace, North Adelaide, near what became Park 5, from 1889, remained strong for (William) Lawrence Bragg. In Crystal Clear: The Autobiographies of Sir Lawrence and Lady Bragg, Lawrence recalled the semi-detached house in Lefevre Terrace where the family lived when he was born in March 1890. A low fence separated the two front gardens and “there was sometimes friction with the widowed lady who lived next door, as she used to snip the stems of our nasturtiums if they wandered through to her side.” But “my mother … used to share with our neighbour in buying half a lamb, a whole lamb at that time costing seven shillings.”
Next door again lived the Gills: “Harry Gill was the leading artist in Adelaide, and my mother attended his classes. His boy, Eric Gill, was just my age and my great crony.” Lawrence’s mother Gwendoline mother was very ill from second son Robert’s birth: “While in bed in her convalescence, she used to tell me stories and I can remember my fury and tears when a visitor interrupted one.”
Lawrence was wheeled out in a pram with baby Bob: “I dreaded these excursions because the larrikins, the rough boys of the neighbourhood, would shout gibes on seeing so large a boy in a pram. The indignity was heightened by my mother's artistic taste, which led to our long hair being done in sausage curls formed around the nurse's wet finger. We later had, for best wear, blue tunics with red belts and broad-brimmed straw hats, when I felt my dignity demanded trousers and coat like other small boys of my age.”
Lawrence recalled “great affection” for the cook Tilly and housemaid Naomi before the Danish Charlotte who stayed with the family for nearly 30 years. Lawrence’s playground at LeFevre Terrace was a gravelled backyard “with outhouses along one side and a huge woodpile in one corner.”
At five, Lawrence walked to a convent school on the other side of North Adelaide. As “a very conventional and timid small boy”, he attracted some “mild bullying by the larger boys and girls. Next day the whole school chanted: 'Tell tale tit' at me.” The local butcher had reported the incident to Lawrence’s parents, who’d taken the matter up with the nuns: “How powerless the young are when dealt injustice!”
He also remembered his mother having a fierce argument with one of the nuns about the way a mirror worked. Gwendoline Bragg’s father was Charles Todd, South Australia’s astronomer, meteorologist and postmaster general. Lawrence recalled that on Sundays "we traditionally paid a visit to our grandparents at the observatory" on West Terrace, Adelaide city: “We went in a four-wheeler with two horses which had a rich smell; partly horse, partly cab, and I suspect partly driver.”
