Governor George Grey sees end to Adelaide's Pirltawodli Native Location and school teaching in Kaurna

South Australian governor George Grey (1841-45) and the Pirltawodli school, run by German missionaries and using the Kaurna language. 
Images courtesy Rhondda Harris and State Library of South Australia

George Grey already had close experience and definite ideas about Aboriginal people when he became South Australia’s third governor in 1841.

The former British army officer had led an expedition in 1837 seeking a site for a settlement in north-western Australia. Grey was speared by Aboriginal warriors in one of the many disasters for the expedition that struggled back to Perth. From it, Grey published Vocabulary of the Dialects spoken by the Aboriginal Races of South-Western Australia and his “report on the best means of promoting the civilization of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Australia” was circulated by the British colonial office to the governors of other colonies.

Grey argued that the only way to save native peoples from extinction was to wean them from their tribal customs by bringing them under British law, making them Christian, educating their children in boarding schools and employing the adults among the white settlers.

In dealings with South Australian Aboriginal people, Grey tried to prevent racial friction on the River Murray by organising police escorts for the livestock overlanders and he ordered that Aboriginal defendants be brought to trial before punishment. But Grey aligned with his assimilation beliefs when he effectively closed the Native Location and mission school, at Pirltawodli on the northern banks of the Torrens river.

Grey sent sappers (army engineers) to occupy the schoolhouse and ordered that the Aboriginal houses be torn down, while the children were sent to live in dormitories at the Native School Establishment off North Terrace, Adelaide city, where instructions were only in English, under government instruction, from 1844. Another native school had opened at Walkerville and both schools were amalgamated and relocated to North Terrace, Adelaide city, in 1845.

The Piltawodli site had been largely abandoned by the Kaurna for lack of suitable trees to build wurlies or shelters.

Brick sheds for Aboriginal people were constructed late in 1846, with three on the south side of the river reserved for the Kaurna people They were occasionally used, especially when it rained. The last mention of the Native Location being used by Aboriginal people was in 1851.

The German missionaries, who employed the Kaurna language at their mission, considered it a failure because they didn't make any child converts to Christianity from the Aboriginal beliefs of their elders. 

Aboriginal children performed competently at school but the constant problem that continued at the school (near the future Kintore Avenue in Adelaide city) and another at Walkerville was the drift back to their tribes as adolescents. Some students from the Adelaide school, that closed in 1852, were sent to the Church of England mission at Poonindie near Port Lincoln on Eyre Peninsula.