The ‘Kaurna Cultural Heritage Survey’ (Wood, V., 2007) provides an important overview of Aboriginal cultural and social heritage in the Port, as described by local Aboriginal Elders.
The project has described the relationship between the local Kaurna people and ‘country’ - spanning from Crystal Brook and Port Wakefield across the Adelaide Plain to the southern tip of Cape Jervis.
Family relationships extended to neighbouring Indigenous nations - in particular the Narungga of Point Pearce Mission on Yorke Peninsula and the Ngarrindjeri at Point McLeay Mission/Raukkan on the Coorong.
The Port area contains a range of landscape types and each of these landscapes has been occupied historically by local Kaurna people. The Wirra Kaurna, a northern tribe, occupied land on the eastern bank of the Port River, while the Port River tribe resided on the western bank of the river, with their territory stretching from West Lakes to the tip of the Lefevre Peninsula, and from Glanville to the sea.
The Port River tribe’s totem was Kudlyo, the Black Swan. The river provided flax, rushes, reed covered dunes, mangrove forests and marshes and swamps, which offered fish, crabs and oysters as food sources. Flax was used to make nets to catch fish and hunt game animals such as kangaroo. Reeds were made into mats, baskets and clothing, and trees and plant life, including the gum and honeysuckle, provided shelter and could be used to make tools.
The Port Adelaide tribe lived in camps around the Port waterways and beaches during the summer time, and in the winter they moved east into the foothills.
Ityamiitpinna, also known as King Rodney, reported to be the first Kaurna man encountered by the Europeans when they arrived at Port Adelaide in 1836, lived in a summer camp with his wife Tangkaira and their daughter Ivaritji and other members of their family group, in the area near the lighthouse near Commercial Road.
The Kaurna Cultural Heritage project recognised that amongst Indigenous people - family relationships, cultural practices, spiritual rituals and beliefs, and social constructs and teachings – have been intimately tied and connected to land, not only to a place of birth and its environs but also to the ‘dreaming’ places and tracks of ancestral spirits.
The dreamtime story most strongly connected to the coastal area of the Fleurieu Peninsula and Lefevre Peninsula relates to Tjilbruke, a Kaurna ancestral being who taught lessons about survival and respect for life and whose tears for his slain nephew created the fresh water springs along the coast from Kingston Park (south of Adelaide) to Cape Jervis.
CLICK HERE for further information contained in the Survey
References:
Kaurna Cultural Heritage Survey, July 2007. Vivienne Wood, Heritage Consultant, for the City of Port Adelaide Enfield. https://www.cityofpae.sa.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/Document_KaurnaCulturalHeritageSurvey.pdf
Port Adelaide: Tales from a ‘commodious harbour’. John Couper-Smartt (2003).
Friends of the South Australian Maritime Museum Inc.
Kudlyo the Black Swam Dreaming: Veronica Brodie and the continuity of Kaurna history at Glanville and Le Fevre peninsula. Sheridah Melvin (1994). Research report prepared for the Lartelare Homeland Association.