German Missionaries in Australia

The ‘Native Location’, known to the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains as Piltawodli ‘brushtail possum home’ (now spelt Pirltawardli in revised spelling) was a site, on the north side of the River Torrens, set aside by the South Australian colonial administration for the settlement, ‘civilising’ and Christianisation of Aboriginal people.

Location of Piltawodli Native Location in Kingston's 1842 map of Adelaide		Piltawodli on a modern map of Adelaide
Source: With kind permission from Rhondda Harris 1999 Archaeology and Post-Contact Indigenous Adelaide. Unpublished honours thesis for Flinders University of South Australia Archaeology Department, January 1999:5-60. Original source Kingston, G.S. 1842, Map of Adelaide South Australia, J.C. Hailes, London, State Library of South Australia, no. 831.51P, Adelaide.		Source: With kind permission from Rhondda Harris 1999:56-57

The Piltawodli ‘Native Location’ Site

Capt. Walter Bromley, appointed as South Australia’s second interim Protector of Aborigines, initially pitched his tent in early 1837 on the south side of the River Torrens in the vicinity of the old Adelaide Gaol. After a few weeks, Bromley moved camp to the north side of the Torrens at the urging of the local Kaurna people to the site known as Piltawodli. The ‘Native Location’ was a 14-acre area stretching in an arc centred near the weir and extending across War Memorial Drive.¹

Most of what we know of the Kaurna people, their culture and their language was recorded by European observers who lived at or frequented Piltawodli interacting with Kaurna people who lived there during the early years of the colony of South Australia. Foremost amongst these European observers were the Dresden missionaries Teichelmann, Schürmann, Meyer and Klose, but other frequent visitors to Piltawodli include William Wyatt, William Williams, William Cawthorne, Matthew Moorhouse and no doubt others who wrote about the ‘Adelaide Tribe’ in their memoirs. Wyatt, South Australia’s third interim Protector of Aborigines (1837-1839) produced a paper detailing Kaurna cultural practices and beliefs and a wordlist with 651 entries.² Williams was keeper of the Colonial Store located in the Parklands at nearby Tininyawardli (Tinninyawodli), located just south of Strangways Terrace, North Adelaide. He published a Kaurna wordlist of 377 items in the Southern Australian on 15 May 1839, republished in the South Australian Colonist in July 1840. Young William Cawthorne was also a frequent visitor to Piltawodli. He was a close friend of Kadlitpina (Captain Jack) making the introduction to George French Angus for a now famous painting of Kadlitpina in South Australia Illustrated.³ Cawthorne had a particular passion for the Kaurna Palti ‘corroboree’ and Aboriginal material culture and recorded many names for Kaurna artefacts.⁴ Moorhouse served as Protector of Aborigines from 1839 until 1857. He lived at Piltawodli and worked closely with the Dresden missionaries. Moorhouse’s diary has gone missing, but mysteriously a page torn from the diary contains several Kaurna songlines that have not been recorded elsewhere.⁵ Much useful information can be gleaned from Moorhouse’s reports and official correspondence.⁶

Following the closure of the Piltawodli mission in July 1845, the Native Location site was occupied by sappers and miners. The Piltawodli site was largely abandoned by the Kaurna for want of suitable trees for constructing wurlies or shelters. However brick sheds for Aboriginal people were constructed late in 1846, with three on the south side of the river reserved for the Kaurna people (then know as the Adelaide Tribe). They were occasionally used, especially when it rained. A request by missionary Klose in October 1846 for 'a piece of ground at the old Native Location' where he could employ Aborigines was turned down because the old Native Location was already occupied and cropped by sappers and miners.⁷ The last mention of the Native Location being used by Aboriginal people was in 1851.⁸

Detail of Freeling's 1849 map of Adelaide	Sketch map of Native Location 1845-51 showing Klose's residence
Source: With kind permission from Rhondda Harris 1999:58-59. Original source: GRG35/585 Freeling, A.H. Plan of the city of Adelaide, drawn by Counsel and Young, signed by Captain Freeling Surveyor General, Lands and Survey Department Unit 5 Item 41.	Source: With kind permission of Rhondda Harris 1999:88-89

The Piltawodli Mission

The Piltawodli mission commenced in October 1838 with the arrival of missionaries Christian Gottlieb Teichelmann and Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann who were sent to South Australia by the Dresden Mission Society (DMS). With their passage sponsored by George Fife Angas, Teichelmann and Schürmann were the very first missionaries to be sent overseas by the DMS. Upon arrival they immediately set about learning and documenting the local Adelaide language, now known as Kaurna, publishing a 24-page sketch grammar, vocabulary of approximately 2,000 words and some 200 Kaurna sentences with English translations after just 18 months. Teichelmann continued efforts to document the Kaurna language compiling a sizable 99-page compendium manuscript with richer entries documenting extended and abstract meanings, derivations and ample phrase and sentence examples. In 1857, he finally sent this manuscript to Sir George Grey (South Australia’s third Governor), then in Cape Town, South Africa.

Teichelmann published a short ten-page ethnography of the Kaurna⁹ and the three German missionaries (Teichelmann, Schürmann and Klose) recorded many observations of Kaurna cultural practices and beliefs in their correspondence and diaries.¹⁰ The Dresden missionaries gained the trust of Kaurna people, so much so that they divulged secret insider knowledge to them. The Dresdners had great respect for the Kaurna language and many aspects of Kaurna culture, but they could not accept a different set of religious beliefs to their own. For the missionaries, there was only one way to salvation. They record many heated conversations where they tried without success to convince Kaurna people to abandon their long-held beliefs.

Schürmann opened a school at Piltawodli on 23 December 1839. He used Kaurna as the medium of instruction and taught the Kaurna children to read and write their own language. Within weeks he was assisted by Ityamaiitpina (King Rodney) who quickly became interested in the notion of literacy. In August 1840 Klose took over the running of the school until its closure in July 1845. Five documents written by Kaurna children in their own language survive from this period. A group letter written to Governor Gawler on his impending departure is kept in the South Australian State Library, a note accompanying two melons grown by the children and presented to Governor Grey in 1845 is kept in the South African Public Library Cape Town, whilst a page from Kartanya’s copybook was sent to Dresden accompanying a letter dated 29 December, 1840. In January 1843 Klose also conveyed to Dresden two letters requesting some more toys that were written by 12 or 13 year old boys, Pitpauwi and Wailtyi. These, and the page from Kartanya’s copybook, were returned by the Leipzig Mission to the Kaurna people on permanent loan in 2014 and are now kept in the Special Collections of the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide.

The school house at Piltawodli, from the diary of W. A. Cawthorne in 1843	A page from Kartanya's copybook, 1840
Source:Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Ref. CYA 103, part 3, p.254	Source: The University of Adelaide Library and Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi, reproduced with the permission of the Evangelisch-Lutherisches Missionswerk Leipzig e.V.

Letter from Pitpauwi requesting some more toys, 1843	Letter from Wailtyi requesting some more toys, 1843
Source: The University of Adelaide Library and Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi, reproduced with the permission of the Evangelisch-Lutherisches Missionswerk Leipzig e.V.	Source: The University of Adelaide Library and Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi, reproduced with the permission of the Evangelisch-Lutherisches Missionswerk Leipzig e.V.

Schürmann is known to have translated two German hymns into Kaurna whilst Teichelmann translated another four, including a Christmas and an Easter hymn. These hymns were sent to Dresden by Klose in a letter dated 4 January, 1843. The Dresden missionaries also translated the Ten Commandments which were published in the South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, 20 May 1840, along with Schürmann's translation of Governor Gawler’s speech to the Aboriginal people assembled for the Queen’s Birthday celebrations in May 1840.

Missionary efforts ceased at Piltawodli in July 1845 when Governor George Grey effectively closed the Native Location and the Piltawodli mission school. Grey sent sappers to occupy the schoolhouse and ordered that the Aboriginal houses be torn down, whilst the children were sent to live in dormitories at the Native School Establishment on Kintore Avenue, where instructions were only in English.

The Dresden Mission Society considered Piltawodli mission a failure because no converts were secured. However, it laid the foundation for subsequent education efforts at the Native School Establishment and Archbishop Hale’s mission at Poonindie.¹¹ The real success of the German missionaries lay in their linguistic work. Teichelmann and Schürmann’s linguistic work at Piltawodli had far-reaching effects. It informed Schürmann’s later linguistic work on Barngarla (Parnkalla) at Port Lincoln and fellow Dresden missionary Heinrich August Eduard Meyer’s work on Ramindjeri at Encounter Bay. Others, including Protector Matthew Moorhouse and John Weatherstone, adopted their methods in their documentation of Ngayawang spoken at Moorundie on the River Murray. Jane Simpson¹² refers to the “Adelaide School of language researchers”, who shared their materials and learned from each other. Included in this group are governors George Gawler and George Grey and explorer Edward John Eyre. When the Hermannsburg and Neuendettelsau missionaries commenced work on Diyari (Dieri at Lake Kilallpaninna they did so in the knowledge of previous linguistic work conducted by the Dresdners in Kaurna, Barngarla and Ramindjeri. Comparisons of their grammars show direct influence in at least two areas of grammar.¹³

We now see language revival efforts Barngarla based on Schürmann’s work, in Ngarrindjeri based, at least in part, on Meyer’s work, and in Dieri based in part on the work of the Hermannsburg and Neuendettelsau missionaries. But more directly, the work that Teichelmann and Schürmann carried out at Piltawodli laid the foundation for current Kaurna language reclamation.¹⁴ A sustained language revival effort over the last 25 years has resulted in the reintroduction of the Kaurna language into public life in Adelaide.¹⁵ We now see the emergence of fluent speakers of the language and several children being raised as semi-native speakers of Kaurna. In the 2011 Census, 58 people claimed to speak Kaurna at home. All this would be quite impossible without the efforts of the Dresden missionaries who documented and preserved the language in the 1830s and 1840s.¹⁶

The Kaurna language movement now serves as something of a model and inspiration for others intending to reclaim their languages. It features in a 'massive open online course (MOOC)¹⁷ and has had some international exposure at international conferences and in media via the BBC, Der Spiegel and Swiss National Radio.¹⁸