Vignette 133: Kaurna children's letters

The Kaurna Children’s Letters are three manuscript items written in the Kaurna language in the early 1840s in South Australia. They were written in beautiful copperplate script by Kaurna children, who attended the first school for Aboriginal children in Australia to be taught in their mother tongue we now call Kaurna. This school was established in December 1839 by German Lutheran missionaries and Kaurna Elders at Piltawodli Pirltawardli, on the banks of Karrawirra Pari and what we now call the River Torrens. 

The letters include pages from a copy book written by a girl, Kartanya, in 1840, and letters by two boys, Pitpauwe and Wailtyi, written in 1843. These letters were sent from South Australia to Dresden, Germany, where they were retained in the archival collections of today’s Leipzig Mission. Having survived the Second World War in the archives of Leipzig Mission during Nazi and Communist periods in Germany, they were located in Leipzig in the 1990s and returned to Australia in 2014.

These historical items are now kept on permanent loan in the Barr Smith Library, on behalf of the Kaurna community. They are a testament to the resilience of the Kaurna people and the Kaurna language, over two centuries of colonisation, appropriation, conflict and change. Comprising just three of five known such documents written by Kaurna people in the Kaurna Language from this time, the grammar and vocabulary preserved in these letters were integral to the reclamation of the Kaurna language since the early 1990s. In the shared history of First Nations peoples and the settlers who invaded their country, they are a rare instance of the hand of identifiable First Nations individuals.

The University of Adelaide: 150 Years of Making History.  Preserving a legacy.  p.180